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?

Amok Time!

Oh god oh god this is the greatest thing.

"Amok Time" is the first episode of second season, and is called that not because time has run amok (a common occurence) but because it is the time to BE amok. By which we mean sex. All of the sex.

Since it's the first episode of second season, this means that it introduces Chekhov. The first words out of his mouth are "setting course for Wulcan".

The plot is that Spock is horny. Spock is horny and needs to sex. There are some things, as he tells Kirk, that transcend the line of duty.

The episode breaks down into three parts:

1. Why is Spock so insane right now? (oh, he needs to be sexed)
2. Can we keep a straight face while we get him to Vulcan to be sexed?
3. HILARIOUS INTERCULTURAL MISHAPS.

Part 3 consists of a fight to the death between Kirk and Spock in which Spocks opening move is to gash Kirks chest open like it is filled with delicious candy. Mind you, there isn't a problem in Star Trek that isn't solved by A) deus ex machina or B) Kirk getting into a fight and tearing his shirt, so this one seems resolved already.

Spock is so consumed by the "blood fever" (not enough air quotation marks in the world) that he kills Kirk without batting an eye, a fact that doesn't seem to damage their friendship in the slightest. In fact, this magically removes all of his reproductive urges, which has led wikipedians theorize is because the ritual itself is enough - but those of us who know our quadrants know better.

And then it all turns out all right, by means which I cannot explain without invoking the word "Auspistice" and making several penis jokes. YOU ARE SPARED. LIVE LONG AND PROSPER.

And now, the 60's.

Starting to skip forward a bit on Star Trek. Too much of a time investment for too little gain - the original series is really just mostly bad.

"The Space Seed" introduces Khan for the first time, and while Khan is a charming type of sociopath, that's actually the worrying part of it. Khan comes from the 1990's, when we apparently invented prolonged space travel and cryogenics (agh), and also when a eugenics program created a bunch of perfect men and women who managed to take over most of the world (aaaagh). Khan's one of these, and this makes him an incomparable badass whom the ladies on the ship are instantly infatuated with (aaaaaaaaagh).

He takes a mildly obsessed officer and converts her into a dedicated servant with ridiculous speed - pretty much the most uncomfortable portrayal of gender roles in the 60's possible. It would be enough to make me throw up my hands and move to Next-Gen were it not for the continued presence of Lt. Uhura, who fortunately continues to have a spine and a brain, both in excellent repair.

The final decision of Captain Kirk after the conflict is over is interesting, and pretty morally ambiguous. The more episodes there are like this - where the choices Kirk makes aren't necessarily the right ones, and his morality gets tested without being proven right by divine providence - they're the interesting ones of the batch. Still, I don't much like Khan's existence, as it assumes a lot of stupid things about the nature of the world that shouldn't be assumed, based on bigotry, sexism and general ignorance. I hear "The Wrath of Khan" is quite good though? Hmm.

While Star Trek is still just a constant string of god-creatures who can't be fought by any rational means, the classy aliens are starting to show up at last. "Balance of Terror" introduces the Romulans and makes a good showing of portraying them as a flawed race with some great people in it. "Errand of Mercy" introduces the Klingons and isn't nearly as nice about it, but still shows a little spark of shared character between Kirk and the enemy general. And then they both get fucked by ANOTHER race of god-creatures who can do whatever they want with reality and choose to waste it pissing about with the mortals and both creating and solving all their problems for them. There have been at least ten in one season. Q seems less and less appealing when you consider all of his predecessors.

Time travel is still pretty popular too, and already overplayed, but "City on the Edge of Tomorrow" is still pretty great. Still, there was this unfortunate sequence. Ah, the 60's.

A little more Star Trek has been watched in the last month. The show's got ups and downs but is a lot more respectable than it looks at first. Still I'd agree based on just the few episodes I've seen that Next Generation does the same thing a lot better.

Still, certainly some stuff of merit here.

"Miri" is bad on a couple of different levels, which is a pity because it actually has a number of qualities that would make it a very good episode. The plotline involves the ship finding an exact copy of earth in the 60's-70's, except with an alternate history that makes it post-apocalyptic. This is a really resonant idea and was probably even more so back IN the 60's-70's, but the episode immediately catches a separate plot and then fails to resolve why an alternate earth is floating out in the middle of space. That's, you know, kind of a big deal. That kind of shit rearranges your entire theology.

The other plot is pretty solid but somewhat marred by a pack of feral children who have enacted an entirely dim new society. One of the kids looks a lot like John C Reilly but isn't, and none of the kids can act. Which is really par for the course for child actors, especially when their writing sucks. Still, cool things happen here.

"The Menagerie" is a two-parter, which takes the very interesting concept of Spock hijacking the Enterprise to help a former space captain and mixes it with the extremely dull footage of the pilot episode. I mostly skipped through this, as it's literally that entire episode with mild interjections from the real world and a barely modified ending. The actual interesting bits end with a combination of "it was all a dream" and deliberate ignorance of plot.

"The Conscience of the King" pulls off a neatly complicated plot with a few good turns, and it's the first episode that really kind of hurts emotionally. It feels like an episode where Captain Kirk loses, and those are pretty important to have. He's human in this episode. And this episode is about humans. And that's really why it shines.

It takes until episode 15 or so for Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood to stop being an exceptional recap of the original. This is not terrible, because in the 14 episodes preceding it covers about 30 episodes worth of content. That's a decently fun way to rewatch the series.

The point where the plot starts to twist is also the point where the show suddenly decides to reveal its incredibly ridiculous geography - sort of Wheel of Time meets Europa meets a toddler with a crayon. The show takes place in a pentagonal Germany analogue divided into pretty sectors, bordered by a huge eastern desert that keeps the China analogue with its ninjas and special eastern alchemists at bay. The Russia analogue is to the northeast, and the two other countries bordering are unnamed but I would guess to be British and French. So you've got this very strange WWII vibe going on, with a holocaust having already occurred, and then a militaristic nation led by a Fuhrer-King who's charismatic and pleasant and infinitely terrifying. The implications are a bit vague to me.

In this series you have all seven homunculi, and while none of them have that lovely human backstory they all have a lot of character - the ones that aren't completely mindless psychopaths, that is. The rest all have brilliant personalities, and the whole lot of them are engaged in a conspiracy of pants-wetting grandeur, the kind where the extermination of an entire race is listed as Step 6, Subcolumn C and everything just sort of gets worse from there.

The basic themes of FMA are still there, the execution wholly different. The show is still about human struggle, about seeking truth and the problems of finding it, the horrors of war and how totally sweet-ass personifications of seven deadly sins can be. Also, if you have a taste for magic with weird rules and interesting derivations - which I do - this is pretty much the show for you.

I'm hoping it all comes together - FMA's first ending was messy, but powerful, and if Brotherhoods ends up being the opposite I'll be exceptionally disappointed.

Suddenly, this.

http://video.adultswim.com/fullmetal-alchemist-brotherhood/death-of-the-silver-alchemist.html

That is all.

Sherlock is stunning as always. Second season's first episode picked the best possible story and ran with it, managing to incorporate all the major characters in the process. And it did something else, too, something I didn't quite appreciate as much as I wanted to but which very much made Moffat's Holmes the best of them. Moving on.

Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood is... a little weird.

It's an anime based off a manga, the second one of its kind, only this one was made after the manga finished and therefore it can follow it perfectly because that's what you want to do with film adaptations. Of course, the early episodes are still perfectly in line with the early episodes of the first series because those were perfectly in line with the manga - but knowing this, they don't take their time, rushing to get as much information out as possible so that they can (assumably) get to the meaty bits.

Huh.

This irks me a bit. For one thing, I have the DVD's of Full Metal Alchemist. It's the only anime series I own, and I knew I'd want to watch it again someday. I remember the little private moment of catharsis I had, a somewhat life-changing realization mostly unrelated to the show itself, but which I tend to only get after chewing on something of its caliber for a suitably long period of time. That show means something to me. But I'm somewhat incapable of starting it over when there is a remixed version that I haven't seen - that kind of stodgy tenacity to nostalgia is to say that something told well could never be told better, and that is not how stories work. Our words and pictures have never been immortal - the best a writer can hope for is to be a part of that grand, ever-expanding eidolon of knowledge and imagination. I can't disrespect a second draft by saying the first was 'gud nuff. But I also can't watch it without drawing comparisons.

And in comparison, it's kind of not as good. The storytelling is hasty and haphazard, well aware that we've seen everything before but still willing to intersperse as many short jokes as possible. Characters go chibi at weirdly dramatic moments. The animation is cleaner but not as atmospheric. The voice actors are the same but a little worse. Scenes don't have the same emotional weight, villains are less frightening, narration is constant and overbearing. I'm not sure if the feeling I'm getting here is "please bear with us while we get to the point where we can tell the story the way we want to" or "oh gosh, isn't money delicious?"

I still have high hopes. All the characters are there, all the little defining moments. There's just enough new with the old that I'm interested in seeing where it goes. And it's REALLY QUITE FRUSTRATING THAT I CARE.

At least there will be more Scieszka. Swoon. <3.

Minus

There are some things I will recommend to everyone.

Minus is a painted comic, short and simple and beautiful. It's the story of a girl with a lot of imagination who is magic and can do absolutely anything she puts her mind to.

This one is my favorite. With or without context.

The Enemy Within (the fursuit)

Notes from episode 5, "The Enemy Within":

• This episode is an MST3K masterpiece.  There is nothing about it that isn't amazing.  
• Dog in a fursuit.  With a unicorn horn.  And antennae.

• The third actual alien creature ever on Star Trek.
• This alone kept me in tears through the entire episode.
• William Shatner acts out his good and evil side.  William Shatner forgets anything he may ever have learned about acting.

• By sheer brilliant misfortune, just when you're tired of the dog, the strangest looking man ever to exist is the ships navigator this episode.
• Moralizing made somewhat worse by Shatners good and evil halves being less good and evil and more "torpid" and "fucking batshit".
• Super efficient whiskey bottles.

• Incredibly bizarre rape sequence.
• Spock theorizes that Kirks inner rapist is what makes him an incredible leader.
• Spock berates Kirks non-rapist half and reminds him that if he seems insensitive in doing so, "it's just the way I am".
• Spock tells rape victim that she must have been glad to see all of Kirks "special characteristics".
• Spock is the worst person.
• EVIL dog in a fursuit.
• Evil self groping.
• EVERYTHING ELSE.
  
  I can't hate this show.  When it's good, it's good.  When it's bad, it's horrific.  Sometimes it is both in the same breath.

Gods and Monsters

Caught up to the Walking Dead's seventh episode this season.  The characters improved quite a lot, Rick lost his hat, story coverage was again given to the interesting people, and the less interesting people broke down in fairly charming ways.  Rick and his deputy both have obtuse moral compasses that point only in the direction of one plot rail or another, but the show has dramatically improved, and it was already pretty great.

But when you have no money in Portland, you get to watch a lot of things.  And it just so happens I'm also wending my way through the first episodes of the original Star Trek.

This was an odd choice for me.  It's been somewhat impossible to deny that Star Trek is, at least in many different parts, good.  Its overarching message, which can pretty much be equated to the beauty and triumph of exploring and confronting the unknown, is as powerful today as it was 40 years ago.   Still, it has that nagging little problem of 40 years of continuity that always serves as a rather ominous barrier to entry. And there's a pretty wide variety of other Star Treks to choose from, all of which seem to maintain an at least tenuous grasp on quality.

There's a mood you have to be in to even think of starting from the beginning - which I'm in. But under no circumstances can I make getting to the end even a remote priority. That way lies madness, madness and despair.  Nonetheless, I decided I couldn't go without seeing the pilot and... well, I enjoyed it.  And then I enjoyed the next couple of episodes too.  So I think I'll ride a while with Kirk and his crew, and see how long it takes me to move on.

Notes from episodes 1-4:

• The pilot with Captain Christopher Pike has the most ridiculous aliens ever.

Sup.

• These aliens spend the entire episode trying futilely to convince Pike to have sex with women.

• The new movie did a pretty good job of capturing a lot of the charming little elements from the first show, the ones that slowly introduce the characters:  Uhura openly flirting with Spock; Sulu and his swordsmanship and musketeering, Mccoy and Kirk's friendship, Spock openly crying over his human mother.  The plot writers clearly just scribbled down every endearing moment of character development they could find in the first season and threw them into a cohesive narrative, for which they actually deserve some mad props.  

• These are elements that the shows writers clearly hadn't really discovered just yet - Spock mentions his mother incorrectly as "a human ancestor" in the episode before he has a mental breakdown, a friend of 15 years carves a gravestone for Kirk but screws up his middle initial, and several characters don't really have any distinguishing personality traits until a few episodes in when they develop them so they can have personality problems.  The show in its infancy is just about Kirk, but it expands very quickly and within just a few episodes.

• Funnily enough, one of the only other character who gets an actually charming moment in the pilot is Uhura, who is SUCH A BADASS.  At this point in the shows life span, Star Trek deserves a pretty thorough gender critique but Uhura makes up pretty much all of the exceptions to their generally shitty portrayal of women.  See also.  She's my favorite character in the show right now, and feels more adventurous and clever than Kirk, who might as well have adventurous and clever in his job description.  

• There's some element to Star Trek at this point that involves ship captains getting into fist fights and tearing their suits off with stunning regularity.

• Alien life is for pansies.  The challenges the Enterprise faces in the early days almost entirely consist of fighting omnipotent beings and acts of god.  Two episodes in a row, a human being develops psychic powers capable of tearing starships apart.  The things that Kirk faces are things he has no hope of defeating without reasoning with them, and he has to do that without sacrificing his own ideals, which are pretty straight-laced. Sometimes they're out to replace humanity entirely, and not entirely for the wrong reasons. It's an interesting dynamic, really, one that they clearly run with as Q becomes a part of TNG later on, and it forces some hard questions with skewed, but interesting answers.  

• In the fourth episode, Mr. Scott firmly insists that he cannot break the laws of physics, and then reverses time by three days so that the ships engine will boot up faster.

Even in its early, early days, Star Trek is surprisingly smart.  It doesn't have a budget, so it has to get by on the quality of ideas and discussion it generates, and I'd say it succeeds pretty well at it. Whether it passes or fails with me depends on to what level the show repeats itself, espousing the same ideals over and over again, or constantly asks new questions and (preferably) leaves them unanswered.  It's that part of the show, that venue for discussion and new avenues of thought, that really appeals to me.

Because.  You know.  Neeeeeeeerd.

Wear Many Hats.

Better blog title to come.  Or not.  Let me just start by saying I am so going to regret "righteousbrose.blogspot.com", and I will never change it, ever.

I'm watching the Walking Dead into its second season, and I'm astonished by how much worse it seems.  The first season laid out a pretty grand promise of potential, using the exceptional amount of scope provided by six hours of drama to tell a wide arc of stories in a singular apocalyptic setting.

There's a lot of appeal to that universe, as the current zombie craze helps demonstrate.  It's not hard to guess why: a sparse, desolate setting that makes great cinema, the gore and gloop of the rotting fleshoids, an appealing fantasy of "the last man on earth" or "a ragtag group of survivors" matched by constant conflict and a struggle for survival.  And there's room for some really deep stuff too, the dark mirrors created by these walking shades mimicking their former lives, the behavior of humans when human society breaks down, and the study of meaning in a world where any belief in the greater purpose of humanity or god is broken beyond repair.




So this is great story territory, and it's incredibly well suited to a serial drama. The reason for this is that this genre allows moments of inspired observation and cinema that you cannot make otherwise, and each of these moments has to be created by a separate chain of events.  A lot of good zombie movies follow this line of thought already.  Rather than a connected plot of one greater meaning, there's an intro to the apocalypse which is typically stunning, a travelogue of random happenstances where shit alternately happens and doesn't happen, and a big final conflict leading to what can be a happy ending but is usually a giant fuck you, because the ending doesn't really matter.

What matters are those moments along the way - the point in 28 Days where the protagonist lets out his animal and the zombies cease to recognize him.  The bit in Dawn of the Dead where, having achieved total safety, the survivors become a miserable hollow shell of a family unit.  Francine whispering "what have we done to ourselves?".  Will Smith in I Am Legend going crazy in solitude and triggering one of his own traps - either set by a zombie, or by himself.  Britain, empty.  New York, empty.  Silence, terrible silence.

The zombie genre is, as Hideo Kojima might describe it, a vehicle for great art, though not always an art in itself.  It's a setting with a lot of great things that people can relate to, an easy place to explore with a pen and paper and video camera and copious amount of fake blood.  It's an opportunity to tell great stories, and a call to arms.

From the opening credits you can tell that The Walking Dead answered this call.  Sometimes it's just the simple pieces of beautiful concept art, like, say, the moment where our lead character Rick gets caught on top of a tank, or that great shot of the freeway with all of the broken-down cars leading in one direction.  Other times they're arcs - the journey to the city, Merle Dixon and the handcuffs, the corny CDC plot which was, at least, unique ground to cover.  But yeah.  It's there, whatever "it" is.

And Season Two has it too.  This episode a bunch of zombies went to a church and sat down quietly in the pews, just as they had in their former lives, and stayed there until a batch of survivors beat them to death with hatchets in front of a Catholic crucifix. A better one: a group of survivors stumbled upon a suicide victim with a pin on his shirt emblazoned NO EXCUSE FOR DOMESTIC VIOLENCE.

So I am pleased to report that the Walking Dead is still trying to say something, albeit that it is right now trying to say something about religion, very clumsily.  And while the popular cry seems to be MOAR ZOMBIES, that's not the problem I'm having right now.

It's the characters.

Look - all of the things I mentioned above are pretty damn important, and really the reason to watch the show.  But you can't have a story without interesting, relatable, unique and dynamic characters, especially if it is a serial drama.  And when the Walking Dead opens its second season on a haphazard narrative in a hatefully bad accent by a man who is talking like he swallowed a speechwriting book and choked on it, a man who for no goddamn reason is still wearing that ridiculous Sheriff's hat...

The main character of The Walking Dead is Rick. As you can see from his outfit, he's a caricature, a righteous southern sheriff who only tries to do what is right.  He never deviates from this path.  And because of this, he's eminently forgettable.  I remember his name only because it sounds funny if you say it in a terrible southern accent.

In fact, I couldn't actually name a single other person on the cast.  I could tell you the guy in the Hawaiian floral shirt is probably the most interesting, right alongside the second Dixon brother, and that this character or that is "the mother" or "the sister" or "the rapey deputy".  There are at least two party members who have no skills or talents and who have received no major dialogue or plot arcs since their introduction. They're also the racial minorities in the survivors party.

Not one of these people has either the presence of mind or the strength of character to really surpass the sequences of events that dictate their lives.  They're slow and aimless and unlikeable.  And now that the honeymoon phase is over and the initial burst of gravitas the show rode in on is done, we're spending all of our time getting to know them, just like we should.

And it's terrible.

If the Walking Dead is going to continue in this vein, the ability of any sane human being to care for these people is going to evaporate.  They're currently struggling for the right to exist, but their existence is by and large meaningless if none of them have motivations or desires beyond survival.  If the show wants to reach its potential and show that it can really be good, it needs new cast members, or some serious work on the old ones.

At the start of the second episode, Rick is suddenly forced to run several miles carrying a heavy load in a fit of absolute, complete, utter desperation.  He is still wearing his giant, oversized, gaudy hat.  It looks ridiculous.  It creates tremendous wind resistance and heats up his head.  He should knock it off and leave it in the field - but then it would be gone, and you'd never see it again.  And despite the immense, terrible gravity of the situation, I can't help shake the ridiculous feeling that if a passing gust were to snag the thing off his head, he'd drop what he was carrying, turn around and come back for it.  Because, really: there isn't much of a person beneath that hat.