#(and also with many questions about what his actual throughline for the season is going to be)

[sersi]

i’m (mostly????) a mando season three enjoyer, but the creative Choices™ are reaching a level that can only be explained by the decade or more away “this is what it was actually like at lucasfilm during the era of bob chapek, a panini, and g*na c@rano blowing up her own career (and maybe also some narrative plans)” exposé

#as someone who's been locked in a dysfunctional relationship with this franchise for almost a quarter century 🤦🏽‍♀️ #i've been through it ALLLLLLLLLLLLLL #(including the utter brain searing hate that it's last theatrical release induced in me) #and yet i am still extremely ?????? at this show -- which managed to balance main plot and classic sw side questy focused episodes #perfectly fine during the last two seasons #-- somehow crafting a season that feels like when you're playing a video game and only doing side quests because Reasons™ #and that also seemingly doesn't know what to do with its titular character 🤷🏽‍♀️ #(i'm not even mad about the darksaber specifically -- just extremely ?????? over why they even bothered having din keep it for this long) #(if he was in fact just going to hand it over in the end) #(and also with many questions about what his actual throughline for the season is going to be) #elysia says stuff #the mandalorian spoilers #spoilers

[why-this-kolaveri-machi]

i’m an idiot. i screw everything up.

Titans 3.03

still here, still doing this. these reviews take a fair bit of time that i cobble together across days (like, ten minute chunks during breaks, etc) and i tend to struggle to keep up with episodes as they come out. this means that by the time i’m done with one, most of my stuff is jossed (or geoffed in this case? idk) or outdated and the post sinks like a stone into oblivion. so! i’m going to change things up a bit with this one and write as i see the episode rather than collecting my thoughts later. in my experience with spn, that was a faster way to get them done. 

anyway. let’s see how it goes! *shadowboxes*

SPOILERS ahead.

1. an auspicious start with some grave-digging!

digging up a grave and breaking open a coffin is some serious, back-breaking work--that dick did it on his own, likely straight after that fight with red hood, is a testament to the sheer intensity, stamina and discipline that he’s capable of. like, we like to joke about dick cooking cauliflower crust pizzas and making gar and rachel spar and memorise sun tzu--and despair at the obvious consequences of some of bruce’s parenting skills--but imagine crime-fighting almost daily without any superpowers, performing some of the most intense parkour in bulky, uncomfortable armour, doing detective work, pushing through every last barrier of exhaustion and then getting up to repeat it all over again the next day. dick probably thought he was going extra-easy on rachel and gar.

1.5. then again, dick probably had a hundred different easier ways to confirm whether jason was still buried or not, from using equipment to merely asking connor to have a quick look with his x-ray vision. but, no, he’s too caught up in confusion and terror, not really having come to terms with jason’s death in the first place, leave alone the possibility that he could be alive after all. he can’t possibly let the others know until he’s confirmed it himself, even if it means digging all through the night until his arms are jelly, thinking over and over again about jason’s eyes, jason’s voice, from behind that red mask. 

... besides, dick has good reason to believe that he could’ve been hallucinating. wouldn’t be his first psychotic episode, after all.

that just imbues this sweaty, desperate, fingers-scrabbling-in-gravedirt scene with that much more poignancy, and a fair bit of bone-chilling terror. dick is horrified to realise that jason’s grave is empty, but a part of him is also probably relieved.

1.75 (... also it’s curious that we’re never shown any of the team asking to see jason’s grave after they come to wayne manor. i guess it’s because the writers--and the audience--know that jason is actually alive, but these people don’t know that. i don’t know if it’s sad or infuriating or both that they’re barely shown mourning him.)

2. oh GOD the sheer TENSION in kory saying, “i don’t want to say it, but--” and dick quickly interrupting, “it was jason. i saw him,” and hank giving him this loaded sidelong glance. i love how dick’s precarious mental health from last season is still this big elephant in the room but at least nobody’s blowing up in his face and questioning his every decision yet

2.25. i love the relative matter-of-factness with which they’re discussing a possible resurrection. and, of course, ra’s al ghul is brought up and quickly dismissed

(still wouldn’t put it past this show to bring him up at the very last second as the real real mastermind)

2.5. “maybe they can bring donna back” OH KORY

2.75. didn’t they have this same conversation about killing/not killing rose last season? man, the og titans make me tired.

and i don’t know if it’s just hank, but there’s a definite in-group/out-group vibe going on with the og titans, where they’re not only ready to consider killing anybody who threatens the group but makes it difficult for new people to fit in. donna and kory got along well with each other, but the dynamics between hank/donna/dawn and gar/rachel/rose were somewhat strained, and with jason, they were really fucking terrible. it makes sense when you think about how the titans started and how they broke up the first time--both were fairly disruptive events, i’d imagine, in that they probably got together to break away from their mentors and strike out on their own, and when they split up, it was the first time they felt directly responsible for the loss of an innocent life.

but the titans that dick is leading now is explicitly about mentoring a young generation of heroes, about second chances and found family. dick definitely wants to reach out to him first, and i have a feeling he’s going to be forced to make some sort of terrible Choice later on in this episode. 

2.8. (honestly tho, this also seems like hank struggling with his own guilt re: jason; if red hood is not the kid that he failed, it’d be easier to fight him.)

3.

HANK NO

4. honestly this season is already ticking off so many things on my wishlist, but i really wish dick would sit down with the newer members of his team and trust them with important information the same time that he’s telling them to the other members. gar searching for help and reassurance from a man who just dumped all of his responsibilities on his son overnight and went AWOL is a sad sight

4.25. has it only been just 48 hours????? wow! jason’s definitely been planning the red hood gig for a long time now...

5. ezekiel, my man! shady looking guy gets into your cab without a destination in mind... no problem, get right in! said guy gets a call to go to the observatory when he’s barely even looked out of the window so far at gotham... yep, a damn tourist! i want more ezekiel in this show.

5.25. (of course jason has upturned table lamps all along the floor... we have to *gritted teeth* balance the TEAL with the ORANGE don’t we?)

5.5. “dick’s a fucking psycho--he could be following you right now.” hank... has no objection to that lol

5.25. hank, hank... this is bad-decision-palooza. i can’t imagine that hank actually thought that jason was reaching out to him for help, given that the last time hank and jason had any substantial interaction hank had been one of the people accusing jason of sabotaging the team. but for him to go seek out jason and go along with his demands without any backup, weapons or equipment? not the best idea he’s ever come up with.

(add to that getting into the swimming pool of a condemned gym... oh yuck.)

((yes, i have enough self-restraint to not cap his ass.))

(((cap his ass! HA!)))

5.5. do you think jason has bugs/monitoring equipment planted in wayne manor to monitor the titans, or remote access to the cave’s systems? wouldn’t put it past him.

6. oh man, hank came back before dick and the others could meet ezekiel! this is TRAGIC

6.25. i mean, it’s plot-convenient that connor was able to give so much information about the bomb from just looking at it once, but i also like to think it’s the luthor-side of him coming to the fore. it also reminds me of that (in)famous scene from the new52 run of Nightwing comics, where a bomb was attached to nightwing’s heart and luthor disabled it by killing nightwing (temporarily). it’s a neat little callback. 

6.55. “where i come from, you go after family? there’s no mercy.” BUT THAT’S THE PROBLEM ISN’T IT

6.75. i mean, dick’s making sense: this is a game, and they need to get it off playing out on jason’s terms. but having a member of his team in his face, doubting his reasoning and every decision? a very familiar sight. 

6.8. krypto with an a+ sense of humour? also a very familiar sight.

7. wayne enterprises... providing the military with... bombs that can be implanted in humans? a BIIIIG yikes. i guess it’s not too many steps above developing clandestine intra-dermal trackers and implanting them in your own sons, and bruce probably thought they could be used as part of negotiation tactics, but still... YIKES.

7.5. on the other hand, conner being asked to build a deactivation advice seems part of a growth arc that started from last season... he knows so much, but part of growing is learning, and part of learning is using what you know to create something new.

8. oh man, my heart broke at hank going “i’m an idiot... i screw everything up.” like. for him to go like this, after being brought down to such a low last season? struggling with pain and addiction and his relationship with the love of his life? it’s so sad.

9. oh, oh, oh! ronnie from schitt’s creek! i love her!

9.5. “one of jason’s minions” took his body out of the morgue... how deliciously morbid that he planned out his own death like this!

10. TALK TO HANK, DICK

honestly, tho, i’m quite impressed with dick here. trying to think beyond just the most alarming part of the crisis at hand, keeping his cool, delegating tasks, frequently touching base with different members of his team... well done. 

10.25.... whoops, spoke too soon. i’m genuinely confused here, tho. where did the van full of gold bars come from? why did they stop there and get out? how did dawn even know about this?

on the other hand, it’s cool to know dove has bulletproof feathers!

10.5. eh... curran walters isn’t really selling red hood’s menace to me so far. but then again, if titans version of red hood is vulnerable-kid-with-father-issues-trying-to-overcompensate, then yeah! yeah, it makes sense. 

11. “when bats have sex, they gotta have something to hang from” OH GOD HANK

... because i want smiley!gar on my blog :)

11.5. awww. i feel sorry for hank but NONE of these fuckers deserve gar except maybe kory

12. ohhh FUCK! look at jason being exactly one step ahead of the titans at every turn. nice.

no really, i love the building stakes and the building mystery - i feel like the deathstroke arc from last season should’ve been more like this. the flashbacks about jericho and rose came too late and after too much build up, which resulted in a very underwhelming and confusing season throughline.

13. HANK AND DIIIIIICCCKKK

“you’re doing your best by me. always have.” WAILING HERE

it also kills me to think that hank thinks that his imminent death is because of his failure to keep the team together (when he was clearly struggling with his own issues and was spiralling towards rock-bottom) and his fear that he will once again be the cause of the team falling apart. 

also:

14. “i grew up... you can, too. you just have to face your fear.”

yep, got scarecrow’s grubby little fingerprints aaaaalllll over this. 

14.25. nightwing’s got specialised batarangs! yay! (somehow i can’t see this universe’s dick calling them “wingdings”)

15. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

oh man, that was devastating. well done, show. fuck, well done, jason.

this is going to bring up all sorts of “if onlys” for the team. i can’t wait for some fucking aftermath. 

#titans #titans spoilers #dick grayson #hank hall #dawn granger #garfield logan #conner kent #jason todd #a tragic jalebi #meta

[bestworstcase]

We all know that the Gothel twist was terrible and was only there for the sake of having a twist, but if it absolutely have been done, how should it had happened to make it better narratively?

so. i spent a lot of time kind of mulling over and autopsying s3 and my personal conclusion about what went wrong is that tts hamstrung itself with poor narrative structure. and this is going to be one of those posts where i lead with definitions of the terminology i’m going to use, for the sake of clarity and to avoid any misunderstanding. 

to whit: 

story is the sum total of every element of a narrative: character, plot, setting, theme, and structure.  

character is, of course, the people in the story. it’s “who?”

plot is the events that happen in a story. it’s “what?”

setting is the time and place of the story. it’s “where?” and “when?” 

theme is what the story is *about.* it’s “why?”

and then there’s narrative structure, which i think is a little harder to grasp because it’s much more invisible than the other things. but it’s the framework of the story, or the scaffolding. it’s “how?” — how are the characters rendered? how is the setting created? how are the events of the plot strung together along the throughline? how is the story built? 

now… in my opinion, character is the single most important element of a story; compelling characters can salvage an otherwise mediocre story, and nothing kills a story faster than uninteresting characters. 

but the one thing good characters can’t ultimately compensate for is poor structure. if the construction is shoddy, so to speak, sooner or later, the roof is gonna leak. right? and we can see this happen in tts: s1 and s2 are solid, and then bam! we hit s3 and it’s a mess of bizarre pacing and dropped characters, the feelings and motivations of key players get all wonky, the plot loses focus, and things increasingly feel like they’re happening by authorial fiat. the weak structure of the narrative has failed, and it dragged the entire story down with it. 

and we can look back in retrospect and see that, yeah, all of these problems existed before; tts always had odd pacing, always had an issue with maintenance of the supporting cast, always relied more on convenience than a narrative really should. but these things didn’t hit a critical mass until s3. 

so what does this have to do with gothel? well,

in and of itself, “gothel is cassandra’s mother!” is not a terrible plot twist. the problem with it is a problem of execution, which is to say, the flaw is in the structure, not the plot.

#1: set-up

plot twists are kind of difficult to pull off well, because you don’t want to blindside people, but you also don’t want to tip your hand too soon. you want to surprise, or maybe even shock—but you don’t want your audience to go, “wait, WHAT? that makes no sense!”

do you remember the whole “ricky’s quest” thing that went on in s2? we were told that there was an important piece of foreshadowing somewhere in s1 or s2 that no one had picked up on yet and there was this whole thing of people trying to figure out what it was, and then… rapunzel’s return aired, and ricky revealed that the answer was “cassandra briefly glances into the shattered mirror in rapunzel’s tower.” 

and that, + the fact that we know cass is adopted and doesn’t remember her birth parents, + vague visual similarities, is the entirety of the s1-s2 foreshadowing for cassandra being gothel’s daughter.

which isn’t nothing, i’ll grant you, but for something as major as the gothel twist, for something that profoundly changes the worldview and motivations of one of the main characters to such a degree that she completely changes sides because of it, it might as well be nothing.

gothel is afforded zero narrative importance in s1-s2. rapunzel has one nightmare about her, and some lingering trauma connected to the tower that is explored, and of course tromus briefly uses her image to try to control rapunzel in rapunzeltopia. but gothel herself is a non-entity until she abruptly and without warning becomes the emotional lynchpin of the entire conflict in s3. that’s jarring.

cassandra is a complex character whose apparent motivations for turning against rapunzel are meticulously built up over the course of s2… only for s3 to pull a bait-and-switch, sweep all of that set-up under the rug, and replace it with cassandra’s messed up feelings about gothel’s abandonment. even her ruined hand never gets mentioned again—not by her, not by zhan tiri, not by rapunzel, not by anyone. that’s jarring, too. 

to use my own work as a point of comparison here, the bitter snow equivalent of the gothel reveal is cassandra finding out that sirin is her aunt and her parents were innocent. like the gothel twist, learning that information profoundly changes how cassandra sees herself and the world, and it’s intended to be a big shock… but unlike the gothel twist, i did a lot of setting up for it: 

1: sirin has real narrative importance in the first half of the story, pre-reveal. the fic opens with her, her involvement with the separatists is established early, etc. 

2: pieces of cassandra’s backstory are threaded through the first half of the story. by the time we hit the reveal, it’s been established that cass is saporian, that her parents were executed for treason, that this treason involved selling poisoned crops and causing outbreaks of a deadly sickness. 

3: there are many demonstrations of anti-saporian discrimination and prejudice in the first half of the story: the way cass sees herself and the alienation she feels from the rest of corona, past incidents where she was targeted for being saporian, basically every time gilbert opens his mouth, what happened to caine’s dad. 

4: cassandra discovers evidence of the harsh, unjust nature of the crackdown and realizes that at least some of what she’s been taught about coronan law enforcement and recent history is inaccurate… thus planting the seed, for the readers if not for cass herself, that other things might be false too.

5: caine points out that cass is the reason the separatists don’t let parents join up, and though she doesn’t elaborate on that, it’s because cass is proof that corona will steal saporian children if their parents are accused of treason.

and 6: everything sirin says to cass in chapter 14 is wrapped up in her being painfully, painfully aware that a) cass is her niece and b) probably doesn’t know the whole story—while also trying to stick to the plan. so… while she doesn’t spill the beans there, she knows who cass is, she stops andrew from hurting her, she makes a point of not acknowledging the legitimacy of cassandra’s adoption, and obliquely suggests that sir peter is a murderer… and while she tries to stop cass from interfering with what they’re doing, she doesn’t hurt her, even though she very much could.

so… in chapter 15, when sirin comes out with “actually, the blight was a natural disaster no one anticipated and saporians got sick and died too, your parents were just scapegoats because corona wanted someone to blame, and oh, by the way, you’re my niece,” it’s a shock but not one that comes entirely out of left field. cassandra’s parents being innocent victims of an overzealous and prejudiced justice system is a logical extension of all the stuff that has already been set up, and sirin being cass’s aunt helps to clarify motivations that were previously opaque (such as: why does sirin despise corona so much, why didn’t she just kill cass, etc). 

and because all of this stuff is given so much attention in the first half of the story, the way it snaps cassandra’s worldview in half and causes such a massive reorienting of her goals and loyalties feels natural. because it already mattered a great deal to her, and it related to the doubts she was already experiencing. 

which like, that’s the key. setting up a big plot twist isn’t about establishing one basic fact (“cass is adopted”) and tossing in one instance of symbolic foreshadowing (the mirror thing) and nothing else, over the course of two whole seasons of a tv show. it is about priming the audience to be ready to accept the reveal.

how could tts have done this with the gothel reveal? here’s some ideas: 

1: give gothel a greater presence in the narrative. the simplest way to do this would be to really lean in to how fucked up rapunzel is because of her. more nightmares, more overt moments where we see rapunzel still being haunted by her memory. alternatively, lean more into the fact that gothel was a disciple of zhan tiri.

2: give cassandra’s adoption, and the question of her birth parents, even a teeny tiny glimmer of interest. specifically, let “dad found me after my parents abandoned me” be the only thing cass knows about her adoption, and let that hurt her. she doesn’t even have to be curious about who her birth parents were—just have that pain of abandonment more present in the first two seasons. 

3: imply the captain knows more about cassandra’s origins than he lets on. 

4: you know the parallel in RATGT where rapunzel screams at cass the way gothel screamed at rapunzel? more of that. like, how delicious would it be if there were many little instances in s1-s2 of rapunzel lashing out at cass with behaviors she obviously subconsciously learned from gothel, only for s3 to pull the sucker punch of cassandra being gothel’s daughter? like! imagine how that could so EASILY make cassandra recontextualize her entire relationship with rapunzel by linking rapunzel’s toxic behaviors with gothel’s abuse and abandonment in her mind? and then in s3 you can really dig into rapunzel interrogating her own behaviors and struggling to break the cycle of abuse. 

5: if gothel being a former disciple of zhan tiri is narratively important, it can go hand-in-hand with zhan tiri and the other disciples more overtly targeting cass, specifically. even if we don’t know why until the reveal. 

i’ve seen a couple posts from other folks discussing how to “fix” the gothel twist, and many of them involve cass either knowing from the start or finding out much earlier, but while that could work, i don’t think it’s necessary. it’s all about the set up. it’s all about constructing the story in such a way that the audience goes “OH!” instead of “WHAT?!” when the reveal happens, and the specific timing of the reveal doesn’t really… matter.

#2: execution

surprising absolutely no one, i’m going to talk about zhan tiri now. 

based on what chris has said in various interviews, my understanding is this: originally, cass was originally supposed to be a secret antagonist all along and know about her parentage right out of the gate. her characterization softened early on in the process, her knowing about gothel got dropped, and suddenly the creators needed a way for her to learn that gothel was her mom, and thus zhan tiri entered the narrative.

she is a plot device whose whole purpose is to tell cass “gothel was your mom and abandoned you for rapunzel,” and then fuel her downward spiral. the rest of her character exists in service of that, full stop. 

which… like the gothel reveal, having a character whose primary function is to be a plot device isn’t a problem in and of itself. however. “ancient evil demonic sorceress with deep ties to the magical lore of the setting and an entrenched hatred for team hero, whose MO is manipulating people” is a terrible character archetype to use as this kind of plot device, because that kind of character needs to have an agenda in order to function, and as soon as you give them an agenda they develop a gravitational pull on the rest of the story, especially if they’re directly involved with a main character. 

and if you’re willing to roll with that gravitational pull, it can be fine. but if you’re not… you get tts s3. 

chris has pretty much spelled this out in interviews. he said at one point that they debated multiple potential motives for zhan tiri… but found that anything more complex than “wants the drops and to burn corona to the ground, because reasons” sucked oxygen away from the cass vs raps conflict and eventual reconciliation, which… yeah. so they gave zhan tiri the cardboard motives and didn’t really do anything with her other than trotting her out to give cass a good shove in whatever direction the plot needed cass to fall in every so often. 

that zhan tiri is a compelling character in s3 at all is a testament to the strength of her VA and the sheer potential of her established lore, in combination with the fact that she and cassandra are off screen enough to demand that the audience fill in a lot of gaps. but in, like, the actual text, she has all the complex personality of a piece of damp tissue paper and she is, for all intents and purposes, literally just Cassandra’s Brain. every decision, every single decision cass makes in s3 is because of zhan tiri. why take the moonstone? zhan tiri tells her to. why is she so mad at rapunzel? zhan tiri made her that way. why does she attack rapunzel? zhan tiri convinced her she had to. why does she go to gothel’s cabin in TOTS? zhan tiri tipped her off that rapunzel would be there. why does her fragile truce with rapunzel fall apart at the end of TOTS? zhan tiri interfered. why does she try to reconcile again in OAH? she found out zhan tiri was… zhan tiri. why does that reconciliation fail? zhan tiri. why does cass ultimately redeem herself? because zhan tiri stabs her in the back first. 

*deep breath*

this is what happens when you troubleshoot a broken narrative with plot devices instead of opening it up to fix whatever is wrong with the underlying structure. in this case, cassandra not knowing about gothel from the get go broke her planned villain arc… and the creators applied zhan tiri like a bandaid, molding this new character into someone who could railroad cass down the preexisting plan for her villain arc. 

what needed to happen instead was a wholesale reexamination and reconfiguration of cassandra’s villain arc, her reasons for going down that path, and her reasons for coming back. even if finding out the truth about gothel was still the trigger for it, it’s ultimately not about gothel anymore. gothel is just the last straw. 

and in order to work with the characters as-established in s1-s2, the events of s3 would need to be framed that way. if, after all the shit she goes through in s2, cass met zhan tiri, learned that gothel was her mom and abandoned her for rapunzel, and finally just snapped and went after the moonstone because fuck this, fuck you, and then zhan tiri came in with the compassion and emotional validation and the “your mother treated you as a servant and then discarded you for something she thought was better, and so did rapunzel, didn’t she? but i see you, i believe in you, i am your friend, and we can help each other,” and cass bought that because she’s desperate for emotional support and kindness and fuck it, she’s on team demon now, only for her conscience to eat away at her until she couldn’t take it anymore and broke away from zhan tiri for good… then it works, full stop. 

like, you don’t have to change a single plot event for the gothel twist to work. you just have to string those plot events along an emotional throughline that makes sense and feels connected to what happened in s1-s2. you can’t use zhan tiri to graft the s3 arc of evil-all-along proto-cass onto canon s1-s2 and call it a day because that doesn’t work! you have to write for the characters you have, not their early planning-stages iterations. if you make a decision early on that breaks your original plan, you have to commit to redoing the whole plan. 

and if you do that, if you fix the underlying structure, you don’t need a character whose sole purpose is to railroad another character down a predetermined path that no longer fits her characterization; cass and zhan tiri can instead both be characters, acting according to their motivations and goals, and not puppets pantomiming the ghost of a broken plan. 

(you do still have to accept that zhan tiri will pull focus away from the cass+rapunzel friendship, though. them’s the breaks. don’t use zhan tiris if you’re not willing to let them gobble up the spotlight a bit.)

TL;DR: to fix the gothel twist, set it up better in s1-s2 by making the question of cassandra’s parentage, or abandonment by her parentage, important to the narrative at all, or else by focusing more closely on gothel being a disciple of zhan tiri; then execute the s3 villain arc in a way that makes sense for canon cass and what she experiences in s1-s2, rather than using zhan tiri to railroad her down the path evil-all-along proto-cass was supposed to take. 

the problem is a structural one so at the end of the day the solution is to fix the structure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

#rta #thank u anon its been a hot minute since i ranted about sTrUcTuRe #Anonymous

[itsclydebitches]

But imagine tweaking it a bit: Oscar IS made aware of the bomb threat. Tries to escape. Salem shows us how evil she truly is by getting one of her Grimm to target the bomb (or doing it herself with her magic). It blows up, killing the ace ops and a good section of the army around them. Everything seems hopeless. Oscar is now forced to use the Long Memory's power. When asked why he didn't do it before, he explains it was a one use thing and only a temporary fix to buy them time.

Yes! All of which (sadly) requires the writers managing their plot, questions, and expectations. Let’s lay out a few, potential scenarios real quick under the plot “YJR know about the bomb, but Oscar doesn’t.” 

Expectation: YJR will tell Oscar about the bomb 

Question: Is that at all dangerous? 

Answer #1: It is not

Result: They escape without repercussions, successfully rescuing Oscar before the Ace Ops destroy the whale 

***

Expectation: YJR will tell Oscar about the bomb

Question: Is that at all dangerous? 

Answer #2: It is. Salem, with her weird grimm powers, or simply being nearby, is able to find out about the bomb when Oscar does

Result: Salem destroys the bomb with one of her grimm/magic, killing the Ace Ops rather than her whale 

***

Expectation: YJR will tell Oscar about the bomb

Question #2: What if they’re not able to? What if they never find him to tell him this? 

Answer #1: Oscar is forced to make decisions without that input

Result #1: Oscar uses his magic unnecessarily, losing the group a powerful weapon in the process 

***

Expectation: YJR will tell Oscar about the bomb

Question #2: What if they’re not able to? What if they never find him to tell him this?

Answer #2: Oscar, unaware of the danger, is not inclined to move quickly, remaining in his cell, trying to fight Salem, etc. 

Result #2: Oscar dies/is injured like YJR originally worried he would be 

There’s a huge number of combinations here, with multiple more answers/results appearing depending on how characters react. (For example, Salem may decide on a course of action other than attacking the bomb.) But the point is that one thing feeds into the next. There’s a throughline we can follow, a cause and effect that makes sense not only for the characters’ personalities/knowledge, but also for the audience’s knowledge. Right now, we don’t understand why the group wouldn’t mention THE most important info on this mission. We understand when Oscar learned about the cane’s power/how to use it. We don’t understand why this power is different from what was previously established (time). We don’t understand what the consequences of this are. Thus, the scenario we actually got breaks down in multiple places: 

Expectation: YJR will tell Oscar about the bomb

Question(s): Is that at all dangerous? What if they’re not able to? 

Answer(s): There are no answers. The group simply doesn’t tell Oscar for unestablished reasons 

Result: Oscar blows up the whale with an ability no one knew he had, for reasons that were both unnecessary (there was a bomb, he could have been told about it) and confusing in regards to his motivation (did he know the blast would kill the whale/all the grimm? Was that the main objective? What’s the point of slowing Salem down now without a larger plan in place? Especially since this resource is finite. Was he trying to help Hazel somehow? What did Oscar intend to do?) 

Additional expectation, as established by the canon: Using magic will hurry the merge along

Question(s): Does this mean Ozpin will have disappeared after Oscar used so much magic? Or will Oscar no longer sound like Oscar anymore? 

Answer/Result: No... but that’s because the consequence is now “We have less of a power no one knew we had until now” rather than “I’m less myself now that I’ve used magic.” We were given a result entirely independent of the established expectation 

It’s like if Ruby, completely out of the blue, introduced a consequence of using silver eyes too much. “If I use them again I’ll go blind.” Then she uses it again, but instead of going blind she reveals that silver eyes are just in short supply now. None of that makes sense. Your scenario is GREAT, but we’d have to go pretty far back into RWBY to allow it to happen. Establish what the cane does and that Oscar has this information. Show us the scene where he’s informed about the bomb. Explain how Salem found out about it too. Establish that using the cane is now the last-ditch effort to stop the whale/justify using that amount of power now (or establish that Oscar is making a mistake). Explain why other horrifying scenarios (like Beacon) supposedly weren’t horrifying enough for this very convenient, get out of jail free card. 

RWBY re-writers face incredible challenges because so many of the problems aren’t volume-specific, but rather spread across multiple seasons, if not the whole story. Getting Oscar to a place where using the cane feels satisfactory requires revising a good chunk of his time on screen, not just what we’ve seen most recently. 

#rwby #rwby spoilers #rwby volume 8 #mymetas #jadekitty777

[welcometomy20s]

January 10th, 2021

Action Button Review

Review

Tim Rogers reminds me of Hank Green. They are about the same age, they look about the same age which is a combination of young and old that feel eternal. They also have the same length of experience in writing in online spaces, interest in Japanese media, and apparently have Crohn’s disease? In summary, he might be the closest equivalent to Dave Green that exists in the real world. Well, I guess Dave Green is not apt, as Dave Green is not special in a way, while Tim Rogers is special, but his speciality comes from his failures rather than his counterparts' success.

Tim Rogers is a hypothetical Green brother who did not decide to publish that book. He’s a hypothetical Green brother who went to Japan instead of Alabama or Florida. Whose project crashed and burned rather than a surprise success. He’s forged in fire while the Green brothers are eroded by water. Both are wonderful people, but with a different ground of intensity and differing wealth of wisdom.

I encountered this series because I found a twitter post about a six hour review of Tokimeki Memorial, and a white middle-aged man talking about a dating sim for six hours with laudatory blurbs would always pique my interest, but since I didn’t know the guy, I went ahead and looked if he made other videos, and found he has four other review that were all about three hours or more. Now I knew that I had to watch all the reviews to prepare myself for this six hour review of Tokimeki Memorial.

Now, I wasn’t a stranger to three hour reviews of video games. I watched Joseph Anderson, Raycevick, Whitelight, matthewmatosis, and Noah Gervais-Caldwell. In fact, in the comments below Action Button Reviews, many people talked about a comparison to Noah Gervais-Caldwell (and Brian David Gilbert) and that was quite funny since I actually watched a recent Noah Gervais-Caldwell video.

His first two reviews were perfunctory, him opening himself up and trying out new things and polishing his review style, as he went through the Final Fantasy VII remake and The Last of Us. While I watched The Last of Us, I distinctly remembered and contrasted Noah’s The Last of Us Part 2 review with Tim Roger’s The Last of Us review. I liked Tim Roger’s defense of interactive movies (although he denies it!) contrasted with more cynical but ultimately positive connotation in Noah’s review. And Noah’s thesis pairs nicely with Tim’s observation that Ellie was the main protagonist all along. That fact makes Part 2 much more understandable, even the bad parts.

When I finished watch his first two reviews, I went ahead and also watched several of Tim’s videos on Kotaku, which were slightly shorter, the longest being just over an hour, which is a review of the best games in 1994, and does contain a short segment about Tokimeki Memorial, which his six hour review was my destination. To put in context, Tokimeki Memorial was #3. #1 was Earthbound, #2 was Final Fantasy VI, and #4 was Super Metroid. And I just watched a playthrough of Super Metroid basically on a whim, because it’s a monumental and a great game to play and watch.

And while the segment of the games that I knew to be great and monumental in my absorption of knowing video games was deeply personal and rightly claimed its stake that it deserved its spot, his segment of Tokimeki Memorial never got there. It was almost as if he was deliberately hiding behind something. In the end of 1994 review, Tim pitched an idea about a three hour Earthbound review, which probably was Tim’s idea of floating a departure from Kotaku, which would happen two months later, and I wonder if he was trying to deliberately throw a curveball by making a video of Tokimeki Memorial instead of the promised Earthbound review. This may be a far leap, I admit.

I went back and watched the video about Doom. It was much better in quality and in darkness. I was reminded of Film Crit Hulk’s writing of The World’s End and James Bond, another very long essay that was deeply personal and chapter for easier consumption. Few commenters noticed that Tim Rogers was just doing a dramatic reading of his written reviews on Kotaku and Action Button dot net, and how they liked that approach, and I found myself liking that approach as well. You might believe a video review needs more than just reading an essay out loud, but just the act of reading an essay out loud in the correct intonation and inflection adds ton to experience. And Tim Rogers sounds like he has decades worth of experience to present a dramatic reading of his essay very effectively, much like Hank Green.

I continued scaling the mountain to my goal. I went through his review of Pac-Man and was delighted by his reading of Namco games, and was impressed by the opening sequence, and just generally enjoyed it. I was getting excited to set a day aside and let the six hour review of Tokimeki Memorial watch over me and reduce me to dust.

And it sure did. That six hours was a harrowing experience. What Tim Rogers is best at is telling a story, and so to go through a let’s play was a wish I never made, fulfilled. In the end, I was left with nothing and everything. It was like finishing a really good book.

I wanted to watch it again, then again I never wanted to watch it again. It was almost a traumatic experience. Tim talked about there being endless variation of love, and the love Tim Rogers went through was not the fluffy yet melancholic one that I craved, but one akin to a devotion of an eldritch god. Love made in justification for one’s efforts in attending and maintaining a relationship. A love stronger than most kinds of love, but most draining and taxing as well. Tim Roger’s synopsis of Tennis Monster reminded me of Asking for It by Louise O’Neill, which is also about empathizing a quite hateable character because we kind of have to. Apparently one person knows the full plot because Tim Rogers rambled on about it as he was couch surfing in his house, and unbelieve as it usually is, I fully trust that the commenter is telling the truth.

I was like a heroin addict, who really wanted a different hit, like talking to friends or hiking, my mother wanted me to go hiking with her, and I didn’t because, after the pandemic started, all I wanted to be was inside. Outside felt diseased. The air outside felt contaminated to me, hard to breathe. I was stuck in this place.

Tim Rogers is an exceptional figure. He seems to be a movie protagonist, he reminds me of The Librarian, played by Noah Wyle. Tim has eidetic memory, as he has access every single autobiographical memory formed, but not other types of memory. We know that those types of memory are different because of people like Tim and people who are opposite of Tim, someone who has no memories of autobiographical memory but otherwise fine. These people tend to have very few emotions and have a hard time deciding things. Lack of emotions is correlated with difficulty in decision making.

So Tim is the opposite of that, Tim is full of emotions, complex emotions and he can make decisions and carry it out in a snap. He would be good at school, and he was, but he would be too focused on his grandeur to be under some authority, which is how he became who he was. His anti-authoritarian nature rings throughout his reviews, highlight the general Generation X vibe that Tim exudes but also the modern socialistic movement of Generation Z, which adds to this odd mix of old and new.

Not only does Tim have eidetic memory and intense work ethic that he never seems to move away from, therefore making a three hour video masterpiece at a clip that seems unbelievable for a seasoned viewer, he also has exceptional skills in fast math and language, he seems to be at least familiar with dozens of languages, and of course Tim’s experience is bounded by his decade of living in Japan.

I think this is why Tim naturally gravitates towards video games. When Tim says ‘welcome to video games’ there’s a natural supposition that Tim Rogers is the protagonist of video games, and I think he is. Tim wants to be in video games, because he needs to be in video games, instead of some almighty god cruelly deciding to plop him into a real life. He should be an video game adaptation of The Librarian and go on world-spanning adventure and romance impossibly beautiful girls instead of toiling the grime of what real life portends to. His life is dramatic, but impossibly mundane as well. It’s a simulacrum of a movie or a video game, which is pretty cool on its own.

But of course Tim Rogers isn’t the only part of Action Button Reviews. In the ensuing five videos, Tim Rogers tries to do something. Video games are a wide net. There is so much to video games, something like Gone Home and Geometry Dash are included alongside Wolfenstein The New Colossus and Farmville. What makes a video game? Actually, the more interesting question is, why do we have the term ‘video games’? Why do we put all of this mess into a single category, as if there is some throughline.

Tim Rogers starts to do that. Tim Rogers boldly states that things like Doom and Tokimeki Memorial are intimately connected to each other. And that all video games are in conversation with each other, through deep and complex meta-narratives. Tim Rogers is a cartographer, trying to map out how video games are made whole.

I’ve always strived to be that kind of a cartographer, to showcase the weave of reality, of connecting two seemingly unconnected parts, and showing to a profound implication both existing, instead of one or the other. If you don’t know, I have been trying to write something out of my current obsession with Virtual YouTubers, and mostly Hololive, and while I think I stumbled upon the six hour video review of Tokimeki Memorial outside of my interest in virtual YouTubers, this video, as I expected in the back of my head, gave me plenty of thoughts about Hololive. Its rumination of cyberpunk and idol culture is so directly connected with the peculiarities of Hololive that I was quite astounded.

From the very beginning, I wonder how Tim Rogers thinks about Hololive, especially after he has done that six hour review. I’m sure he will have a lot of interesting thoughts about the prospect. I want to get in contact with him, maybe work under him. But then I don’t want to hang out with him. I want to be near him as he talks to a crowd at a party, but I don’t feel safe to be near him when there’s less than ten people nearby. I think below ten, I would be swept in some danger that I won’t be prepared for.

Tim Rogers and Action Button Review is a fascinating review series and if you have the time, I suggest you should take the journey. It’s well worth it, just to get a different perspective on video games and the world around it.

#action button #tim rogers #video games #web video #review

[pynkhues]

Love your analysis on Beth’s playing a role to control Dean—but now I’m curious about your thoughts on the ottoman haha

Oh my gosh, thank you for taking the bait and asking, haha. I’ve been thinking about the ottoman all week, because it felt like such a strange and very specific thing for the writers to bring up again in the context of Dean, Judith and Beth in 3.11 after Beth had made the joke about it to Rio in the bar back in 3.08. And hey! I get a lot of asks about writing and about critical creative theory, and how to develop both those skills, and I always give the advice to start by asking why.

So let’s ask why together, because let me tell you: if something in a story feels strange, and it’s specific, and especially if it’s repeated, it usually means the writers want you to notice. And if they want you to notice, that in turn means it’s either a) an important plot point (which, err, I don’t think the ottoman is, haha, unless somebody stashed some money in the thing), or b) it’s important symbolically (and sometimes both! The flashforwards on Breaking Bad in particular did that really well).

So yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ottoman, and these two, seemingly flippant references to it, and ultimately it’s reminded me of a post I never actually wrote (classic Sophie, haha), about Beth and Judith in 2.09 and 3.02, and that kind of made a feedback loop in my head and - -

Look.

Basically I think it’s a symbolic rejection of Beth’s old life / Judith’s life; an important character beat for Beth, and an indicator that she’s more than what she was with Rio, and that she won’t ever be more than that with Dean, but that’s a lot. So.

Let’s break that down a bit.   

Mommy Dearest

While motherhood is a central theme of this show, I am perpetually fascinated by the fact that the only mother to the main characters we really know is Dean’s mother, Judith, something that does actually feel like a deliberate choice.

After all, I could write a whole fresh essay about how it seems that Beth, Annie and Ruby each function as mothers themselves in ways that reflect a multigenerational trauma, and, ergo, a damaged mother in their own childhoods – we learnt in 2.08 after all that Beth and Annie’s mother was bedridden with depression, if nothing else, and Ruby’s mother was widowed when Ruby was just a young teenager (to say nothing of the trauma Ruby must’ve faced herself losing her father at that age) – but actually…that’s as much as we do know about them.

Dean though.

Well. 

We actually know probably more about his family and his history than we do about any other character on the show. We know his parents were John and Judith. We know that his father created Boland Motors and that Dean inherited the business from him. We know that John cheated on Judith throughout his career, and that Judith briefly tried to go back to work herself as a shop girl before feeling forced back home.

We know that Judith sacrificed everything – her career, her autonomy, her body, her happiness – to give Dean the illusion of a perfect family. While Dean might not know all the details himself, he’s certainly picked some of the expectations of that up through his parents, because ultimately, he expects Beth to do the same. And she did! And still does, in many, many ways.

There are a lot of examples of this, but the biggest one, of course, is the arc across 2.07 through to 2.10, which culminates with Dean holding their children ransom at Judith’s house, blackballing Beth into caving, and then flat out not caring about her inner life at all in 2.10.

That entire arc hinges on a lot of things, but one of the most integral conversations within that is the one Beth and Judith have at Emma’s birthday party in 2.09.

A conversation that’s pretty sublimely paralleled in 3.02.

2.09 vs 3.02

Beth and Judith’s conversations at Emma’s birthday party in 2.09 and then in the Boland kitchen in 3.02 are in fact two scenes that are also in conversation with each other. They’re different, but they’re the same. They’re circling the same information, while offering new takes, bantering old jokes that pivot into new jabs. They’re great, and I know they’re nobody who watches this show’s favourite scenes, but I actually love both of them a lot, and I think they’re really important – not just for Beth as a character, but for the show’s themes overall.

The scene in 2.09 falls on the back of Dean having taken the kids, and Beth’s grief arc around that. She only gets the invite to Emma’s birthday party because Dean’s put her in a position where she has to ask for it, and within the first 20 seconds of Beth and Judith exchange while they’re cutting up Emma’s birthday cake, we get this absolute gem:

Beth: [Dean]’s a good dad.

Judith: So was John. Not much of a husband though.

Judith goes on to confirm  that John cheated (with enough women she “stopped counting”), just like she now knows Dean did, but that’s not the point, and it’s not the thrust of the conversation.

The throughline is that men might cheat, and you can leave them, but as a mother, your responsibility is to them. You have to sacrifice your own needs to give them the best life you can.

In both Ruby and Annie’s cases, these are moral sacrifices to create financial gains for those children. Ruby’s in a loving marriage and needs to pay for her daughter’s medication, so that’s all literal with her. For Annie, it’s not quite as literal, but explores a parallel morality by way of her empathy – she feels no moral guilt about robberies, but she feels moral guilt by way of Marion and Nancy, in order to provide for her son.

Beth’s not like them.

She enjoys crime. She empathises with others, but isn’t a bleeding heart like Annie.

All of Beth’s sacrifices are felt personally.

She dims her own light, her own passions, her personality, her needs, her ambitions, to fuel the light of Dean’s, or for their children.  

It’s a conversation she has again with Judith in 3.02.

Judith’s been helping out more since Beth went to work. It leads to a few confrontations across the episode, but the one between the two of them in the kitchen after dinner is pivotal. I could actually transcribe the whole conversation here, because it’s honestly awesome, revealing dialogue, but instead I’m going to break it down into three little blocks.

a) The first in that it tells us how much Dean diminishes and doesn’t think about his mother.

Beth apologises for the fight which Dean ignores, and Judith asks a simple question:

“Did Dean ever tell you that I worked?”

No, Beth replies, simply, effortlessly.

A telling thing for a couple who have been together for over 20 years.

b) It builds to Judith telling Beth about having Dean, and then –

Judith: Everyone’s fawning over this new baby boy, while I’m just…nothing. Empty. Flesh and hormones over ice.

Beth pours them both a drink.

Confides that she had post-partum depression too.

c) But that’s not what Judith is saying. Judith’s not empathising with Beth, she’s telling her to go home.

Beth: Your happiness was important too.

(beat)

Judith: How much does the card shop pay?

Beth: You shouldn’t have quit.

Judith: And you should be home for dinner if you don’t want the kids saying grace…what a lie, huh? That we can have it all.

This scene is sharp, and it’s designed as a narrative weapon against Beth, who is desperately trying to keep her family above water, and actually gives Beth the triple duty in terms of protective responsibilities.

She’s trying to provide for her children, of course, and trying to justify her own purpose outside of motherhood to her mother-in-law, while also concealing from Judith how much Dean has failed their family in every way.

Judith gave up everything for Dean, so what can Beth do except placate her?

The thing is, these two conversations have very, very different results. 

In 2.09, Judith’s conversation with Beth was a key part of Beth ultimately quitting both crime and Rio, and trying to revert back to the woman she was – the woman Judith would always be. 

3.02 had a very different outcome.

Beth didn’t quit.

She doubled down.

Not only that, it directly pivoted into a scene where Beth, Ruby and Annie were criming, fucked a part of it up, and Beth’s instant response is “What would Rio do?” trying him into that overall arc.

The Ottoman

Which brings us, finally, to the ottoman!

It’s an offhand joke in 3.08, right? Beth’s dressed up, and she and Rio are in one of their games of eternal bargaining after she robbed him and he replied by stealing literally everything she owned. She’s trying to earn it back, he says he has something for her, she jokes, “My ottoman?”

It’s not serious. She’s not serious, which already loads the term, but Rio’s response is equally light, equally dismantling.

No.

The thing he has for her is Boomer.

And sure, there’s a lot to unpack in that, but what’s important here is that Rio treated the ottoman as something as frivolous as Beth treated it. They were on the same page – in maybe one of the few moments they were all season.

He knew as well as she did that the ottoman wasn’t something she needed.

The scene in 3.11 is really different.

Beth’s literally dressed down, on the toilet, in the robe she wore when she broke up with Rio in 2.09. Dean barges in, tells her no one will give him money to buy the hot tub place, then instantly breaks into a diatribe about how his mother wants to give them his ottoman.

Beth: We don’t have a couch!

Dean: I told her that.

Beth: Good.

Dean: The ottoman will be here tomorrow.

[Beth sighs]

Dean: I know, I’m sorry.

[beat]

Dean: I just don’t want [Rio] involved again.

The scene serves the purpose of, once again, emasculating Dean – showing that he can’t get out from under his mother’s thumb in the same narrative beat that it tells us as an audience that Dean can’t wriggle out from beneath Rio’s either – at least not as long as he’s with Beth.

In turn, the ottoman as an object holds a lot of narrative weight.

It’s something Beth and Rio can joke about, and something that labours on Beth and Dean’s marriage.

On a deeper level, the ottoman is something that holds a purpose, yes, but needs other items to be complete.

On its own, an ottoman is a joke. With a couch, it’s a living room.

Beth wants the couch – she wants the career – she wants the functionality and purpose of it. She wants to build her home herself, not scrape around for leftovers, nor rely on superficial or frivolous function in the way that she did before she robbed Fine & Frugal.

Beth is a character bursting with purpose, utility, passion. She wants to build this new life, not accessorise it, and Rio knows it, and Dean can never offer it to her, and that matters to her, particularly as she tries to untangle her future from Judith’s.

What I’m getting at is that I think Beth made a very different decision in 3,02 than she did in 2.09. She decided she was going to do this. She was going to be less of an ornament in her own life, and it would take her away from her children but hopefully give her more function to provide for them, and notably for herself too, and I think the narrative symbol of the ottoman is that the domestic goddess / Judith image isn’t her anymore, at least not exclusively. It’s not what she needs, and Rio knows that, and can laugh with her as she makes a joke of it, while Dean knows it, but will never fully support or empower her in disentangling from it. 

#gg 2.09 #gg 3.02 #gg 3.11 #beth x rio #beth x dean #beth boland #rio #dean boland #judith boland #welcome to my ama #audreydear

[measlyfurball13]

Pacific Rim: Into the Black fucking sucked.

It’s problem isn’t that it’s different from the first movie. Look, I LOVE the first movie, but I agree that more of the same might have been boring. I respect the writers for pushing the boundaries a little and making an original story with an original tone. . . If by original story you mean “make it Attack on Titan but worse” and if by original tone you mean “cheap shock value and needless edge that adds nothing”.

Full rant under the cut. Swear warning, whatever.

This series has so many interesting and creative ideas but they’re buried under loads of blundering edgelord tropes that have been done before in every other anime ever. Taylor the protagonist is a flavorless “older brother” trope. Mei is the tsundere badass who’s been traumatized by daddy. Boy (yes, that’s his name) is the mystical superpowered child. Oh, and he pulls this whole Attack on Titan thing and turns into a Kaiju.

You wanna know why this is a problem? Because holy fucking shit it’s a problem. Because it’s stupid. Because it’s magic handwavy bullshit. Pacific Rim, for all of it’s big robots and big monsters, grounds itself in reality by having consistent internal rules. Kaiju are monsters with some occasional cool unique abilities, but they’re all based in biology. Stuff like acid, extra limbs, flying. Even the EMP pulse ability from the first movie feels plausible, because electricity is used in a biological body in the form nerves. Another consistent rules is that Kaiju are big monsters. Big. Monsters. Big monsters who stay big, because they’re established as having so much mass and bulk and presence that they can’t get rid of because they’re biological creatures. The first movie establishes that they eat and breed and even defecate and have parasites. These rules make the Kaiju feel plausible. These rules allow us, the audience, to suspend our disbelief and immerse ourselves into the universe.

So why the fucking hell did the writers throw all that out the window, pull some magic bullshit out of their ass, and make a human that turns into a Kaiju? They don’t even show us the transformation sequence on screen. Flash of blue, and now the little human boy is a Kaiju. The problem is not that it’s unrealistic, the problem is that it doesn’t fit in with the Pacific Rim universe. It’s disjointed. It’s stupid. Any questions?

Now, where was I? Oh, right, characters. Haley, the younger sister, is. . . okay. She feels like the extroverted younger sister cheerleader trope, but then they also give her this character facet (it’s not an arc because it’s never really addressed) about murder guilt? And she also mothers a lot Boy? And she also makes really stupid decisions for the sake of the plot sometimes? Out of the main three cast members, she’s by far the most interesting and bearable, at least, but she doesn’t feel consistent at all. She also gets damseled a lot, too, which doesn’t add to her likeability or agency.  

Moving on, one of the two even remotely interesting characters was killed for shock value in episode five in the cheapest, most abrupt way possible, so I can’t talk about him very much, other than the fact that I’m still pissed that the writers thought killing him off was a good idea. Nothing narratively was gained by it; his death doesn’t even affect any character’s trajectory! He had so much more to give alive than he did dead. But that’s all I can say, since he is dead. The only other interesting character was the Jaeger AI who gets maybe all of 13 voicelines in the entire season and is barely, barely even a minor character. Nothing much else to say.

Remember the part where I mentioned that this show actually has wonderful creative ideas? I didn’t just say that for flavor, and that’s the most frustrating part of this all. The problem is just that there’s so many ideas, all at once, so in the end none of them end up shining. Here’s a shortened list of the great ideas- you could base an entire show around each one:

Interrogating someone with drift technology

Altering people’s memories through drift technology

Australia gets claimed by the Kaiju and survivors have to duke it out to survive with the remaining Jaeger technology with no help from the outside world

Training Jaegers and what Jaeger academy looked like

Jaegers having sentient AIs inside of them- and what happens when to the AI when a Jaeger takes damage or even loses a pilot? Is the drift in a Jaeger technically a three-way bond?

What happens when you drift too much, with too many people? Inheriting someone else’s memories or even skillsets?

(this one is probably my least favorite, but still has merit:) A Jaeger and Kaiju fusion. How utterly terrifying would that be?

These are all incredible. I probably would have adored Pacific Rim: Into the Black if (magic Kaiju kid notwithstanding) it had focused on maybe one or two of these ideas in its meager 140-minute runtime. However, Into the Black tries to tackle all of these amazing ideas at once along with about a dozen other shitty ideas that fall flat. As a result, nothing gets the time it deserves. Fascinating ideas are quickly glossed over, never to be mentioned again despite being extremely relevant to the plot, just so the show can truck through the next portion with the same lack of thought.

The season feels disjointed. Nothing builds on anything else, and plot points don’t lead into each other. Characters make stupid decisions, take meandering courses of action and are constantly changing their mind, or, most of the time, just stumbling upon their objectives by pure chance. The only throughline that even remotely delivers with proper buildup and payoff is the aforementioned magic Kaiju boy. The one competent plot arc they develop is the one that breaks the believability of the universe. Great.

Finally, to top it all off, I’m going to speedrun my more minor nitpicks with the general plot/continuity holes. Here goes:

Multiple breaches and breaches on land. If the Kaiju have been able to open breaches on land this whole time, then how in the everlasting fuck has humanity survived at all? I mean, really- why would Kaiju waste time coming from the oceans if they can just pop up wherever they please?

Mr. McRandom nobody protagonist decides on a whim to be the fourth person ever who solo pilots a Jaeger after piloting for maybe 3 days, tops, and then succeeds. The show explicitly references Raleigh and Pentacost as it does this, spitting in the face of their achievements by implying that anybody can do it, no big deal.

This show acknowledges that Pacific Rim: Uprising exists and builds a lot of its background conflict off that, which pisses me off because that movie sucks ass. Here was a chance for a fresh start and they wasted it.

The protagonists fuck up so constantly to the point where they should have lost their Jaeger several times over, yet it always survives, because (go figure!) this is a show about protagonists piloting Jaegers. The protagonists do nothing to solve their problems and do nothing to earn their clever escapes or sudden powerups, leaving everything tensionless and contrived.

The villain has no motivation at all and is so cartoonishly evil it’s a miracle that he has any minions that are willing to follow him instead of ditching him the first chance they get.

The protagonists sometimes just kinda forget their goal and wander around until they miraculously stumble upon something that just so happens to connect to it.

A lot of edgy, horrifying, traumatizing shit happens, and it doesn’t seem to ever affect the characters in any meaningful way outside of maybe 1 or 2 throwaway lines after the fact?

The show takes place in Australia but only gives asshole characters an Australian accent. What?

So that’s it. Bad characters. Universe-breaking concept. Needless, meaningless edge. Contrived plot. Rushed to all hell. Pacific Rim: Into the Black is capital “b” Bad. I love this franchise and I want to support it, but I can’t advocate that anyone give this show their time.

#pacific rim #pacific rim into the black #rant #damnit I'm mad!

[beatriceeagle]

Where do you think teen wolf jumped the shark? Also, non-specific, but do you have a favourite (and least favourite) TV finale? Thanks!

I heard a TV writer once discuss shark-jumping in terms of suspension of disbelief. “You get one buy,” is how he put it. On Psych, we’ll buy into the idea that Shawn does wacky hijinks in pursuit of convincing the police that he’s a psychic, because that is the show’s central premise. But if you try to add one more unbelievable thing on top of that (say, werewolves) the high-wire act fails. You’ve asked the audience to believe too many things, and now their faith in the show has collapsed.

But as even that writer acknowledged, it doesn’t usually work that cleanly. Shows rarely jump the shark all at once. Even seemingly obvious cases like, I don’t know, Bones, usually show some cracks in their foundations before they do whatever massive thing it is that completely fucks over their show. And often, it’s not a case of so much doing something that breaks the suspension of disbelief as it is breaking your contract with the audience. We agreed, implicitly, that we were going to be this kind of show—but now we’re this kind of show, instead.

The weird thing about that is that, in theory, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. The Good Place broke its contract with its audience at the end of season one in a pretty major way: A lot of the twist of the first season of that show only works if you assume that it’s the kind of show that doesn’t have twists. (And despite it being one of the best first seasons of a comedy in years and years, I know people who felt betrayed by that twist!) Agents of SHIELD, as I wrote about earlier today, broke its contract with its audience massively at the end of its first season—it spent 18 episodes establishing a world, and character dynamics, and operating procedures, and then not gradually, but all at once, said, “Okay, none of that is what we’re doing anymore”—and became a much better show for it. Sometimes, you just have to say, “Screw the old world order,” and let people come along or not.

So anyway, when I ask, “When did Teen Wolf jump the shark?” I’m asking both, “When did it stop being the show it agreed to be at the outset?” and also, a little bit, “When did it get bad?” And there are two assumptions built into those questions: 1) That Teen Wolf at some point stopped being the show that viewers first signed on for, and 2) That Teen Wolf was ever good.

And, okay, I don’t think that Teen Wolf was a bad show, clearly, because I have watched seasons one through three… a lot. There is something compulsively watchable and fitfully well-observed, about that show. The scenes between Scott and his mom, or Stiles and his dad, or of just Allison, alone, are often shockingly well-observed on a human level. There is some great, almost melodic dialogue, performed by really good actors.

But also, I mean, it’s really silly. The first season is paced atrociously. There are all of these over-the-top cinematic sequences of lacrosse. The mythology is incoherent, even before they start piling stuff onto it. And it doesn’t seem to have a central theme until well into its third season, at which point its central theme is extremely ethically questionable.

But I think the thing is, that’s the show that viewers signed on for! They signed on for this silly, heartfelt, overly cinematic, occasionally weirdly insightful, sometimes very funny werewolf show, that couldn’t pace a 12-episode story arc to save its life. And there was no one moment where that show transitioned into being a different thing. It would be really easy to point to Allison’s death, but honestly, I think her death was fairly in keeping with the kind of show Teen Wolf had been up to that point; one thing that the show had always handled pretty well was teenage heartbreak, and although the ramifications of Allison’s death were handled weirdly, when they did pop up, they tended to be some of the better bits of late-season Teen Wolf.

I will say that season 3B was a huge tonal shift from previous seasons. It’s significantly darker than anything that came before it—not just at the end, but all the way through. It’s not really goofy the way that previous seasons were. On the other hand, 3B is a really good season of Teen Wolf. In many ways it’s the show firing at all cylinders. They’ve got their formula down. (Teen Wolf at its best is a villain + a secondary villain who’s hunting the main villain and making trouble for the good guys in the process + a handful of emotional throughlines.) They’ve got a genuine atmosphere going. They’ve got a tremendous central performance from Dylan O’Brien. And the plot completely tracks!

The problem is that 3B leads into season 4, which maintains the tonal shift—it is literally, physically darker, as all of the ensuing seasons are—but is also bad. There are moments of season 4 that I like, but it’s also the point in time when Teen Wolf gives up on the “two villains” model in favor of the “five hundred villains” model, and also introduces a bunch of new characters, which it is absolutely not capable of dealing with. Also, at around this point, Teen Wolf stopped plotting logically and started plotting thematically. What I mean is that, for instance, in season four, suddenly Lydia, Stiles, and Scott all have massive, encroaching financial issues. Of these, Stiles’ are the only ones that are connected to any previous plot point on the show itself. Lydia’s are, if I’m remembering correctly, introduced mid-season for like two episodes. But more to the point: These financial issues don’t go anywhere. There’s like a running bit with a duffel bag of money from the Hale vault, or whatever, but it’s ultimately meaningless, because the financial issues are not there to either move the plot forward or elucidate character. They’re supposed to be a thematic counterpoint to the hired assassins who have shown up in Beacon Hills.

That kind of theme-based plotting is a) not Teen Wolf, and b) completely outside of Teen Wolf’s skill set, and as soon as the show started working that way, it immediately became an incomprehensible mess. I reviewed every episode of season 5A, and I still could not tell you what the fuck was happening in that season.

But that can all be walked back. I’ve watched shows that got bad—sometimes in ways that made them feel completely unfamiliar to themselves—and then got good again. (For example, Community‘s season four finale is a shark-jumping moment if I’ve ever seen one, and season five, though it had Harmon back at the helm, still didn’t feel like Community in some vital way—but season six is my second-favorite season of the show, and keeps trying to sneak its way into being my favorite.) The moment that I think of as being the point of no return, for Teen Wolf, is when they wrote Kira off. When Allison died, at least it felt meaningful, and like it was part of the natural progression of the show saying something. When Derek and Isaac left, it was due to the actors understandably moving on, and came about in ways that felt like natural exit points for the characters. But Kira’s exit was just Teen Wolf flailing, getting rid of characters who felt like likeable, old-style Teen Wolf (and who the show had put three seasons of development into) while filling up the cast with a bunch of mostly bland next-generation people. After a season with no Danny and no Coach, writing Kira out was really Teen Wolf just intentionally burning its bridges.

And actually, if you go back, it all starts even earlier than 3B. I think the cracks in Teen Wolf’s foundation start in 3A (a season I’m generally fond of!) with the introduction of the capital-M Mythology: the True Alpha stuff, which ended up really fucking with its ethics and the way that Scott functioned on the show long-term; and also Lydia’s banshee stuff and the Nemeton stuff, which ended up just being incredibly confusing. Season 3B is remarkable, in hindsight, for how comparably well it deals with those elements, when they all ended up being a huge drag on the show, in the long run.

So my short answer is that Teen Wolf jumped the shark in season 4, but my longer answer is that it was a process, starting in season 3A, and not really ending until season 5.

My favorite TV finale is, I think, the Lost finale, although the Community finale is certainly high up there. (Controversial, I know, but I will stand by this opinion til the end of time.) My least favorite, though I know it’s practically a cliche, is the How I Met Your Mother finale. When my sister was helping me brainstorm to figure out my answer to this question, she noted that a unifying factor among many terrible series finales is that they undo major aspects of the show that preceded them, and she is completely correct. This is the same reason that, even though it’s unusual for people to stay with their high school sweethearts, Harry/Ginny and Ron/Hermione had to be together in the Harry Potter epilogue; if you want to make that point, you had a whole series to make it. Trying to be clever and pull a fast one with the ending is just irritating.

Send me meta prompts to distract me from my migraine! 

#teen wolf #meta

[toaarcan]

RvB 15-17 Condensed

The working title for this was “RvB 15-17 but not crap”.

Now, this might seem a little presumptuous to include Season 17 in this, which, at time of writing, has yet to be released, buuuut I’m basically mashing S15 and S16 into a single block which would make S17 actually the sixteenth season in this version. So the rewrite is that Season 17 happens a year earlier.

Now, I have my problems with RvB 15-16.

I don’t want to start off on such a negative tone, but I feel like I need to establish that before we go ahead.

While Season 15 was at worst, a mediocre RvB Season with tonal problems and inconsistent characterisation for our leads, Season 16 is all of those problems made worse. Like, it’s not Season 9 bad, but it’s still bad, and while I’ve mostly covered those issues in past posts, I haven’t really covered how much the setup for the climax is just plain stupid.

Like the setup for the finale, and thus Season 17, is as follows:

Atlus: Don’t do the thing.

Wash: Don’t do the thing.

Huggins: Don’t do the thing.

Carolina: ... Alright guys let’s do the thing.

[Time breaks because they did the thing]

It’s a little more complex than that, but not by much.

Now, I ummed and ahhhed over how to make this work for a while, but ultimately, I came to the conclusion that this is how I would do it.

For starters, 90% of Season 16’s plot is getting dumped. If not all of it. Legitimately all I’m keeping is the ending. Sorry, it’s not exactly a big loss.

Second off, I’m not heavily altering Season 15. While there’s definitely a good Season 5-13 tier plot that could be told with a fake BGC, this isn’t it, and attempting to alter that leads into a completely different set of stories. So Season 15 is mostly unchanged, just assume Temple is actually a competent villain and the plot isn’t driven entirely by the BGC being dumber than usual for a week.

So the timeline is now Season 15 -> Paradox -> Season 17.

We’re also scrubbing Wash’s injury from Season 15. It’s going to be an unnecessary complication for the lead-in to the next season anyway. If we’re going straight for the time paradox, then having Wash be injured is kinda pointless. Given that Season 16 ended on a warped Blood Gulch way before Wash ever showed up, there’s nothing to gain by having him out of action. He’s already imperilled enough by time being fucked.

“But wait,” I hear you say. “If Wash and Locus are with the heroes when they take on the Blues and Reds, surely they catch up to Temple quickly enough that the time machine doesn’t get turned on!”

Ah, but that’s the beauty of it. Whether the time machine is turned on or not is not the focus of the paradox here. And because that’s not a vital plot point, we’re free to have the characters just Travel At The Speed Of Plot, and arrive precisely in time for the actual climax.

You see, rather than changing history around Wash’s injury and thus fucking the timeline up, the key to the paradox is Church. Specifically, what happens when Church is removed from their history because someone pulled him into the present before the events of Blood Gulch really happened.

In the actual show, when Church appears in the portal, Tucker tells Caboose to pull him through, and Caboose refuses, instead bidding farewell to an extremely confused Alpha and allowing the portal to close. It’s a big moment for Caboose’s character, and it’s one of the parts of Season 15 which is pretty well-executed.

Obviously, I’m not going to overturn that and have him not have the growth. So, how does Church end up being pulled through?

“Tucker did it!”

Now, I’m not a big fan of Joe’s Tucker. In fact, that’s an understatement. I hate the way Joe writes Tucker, and I’d rather not fall into that same trap, so I’m going to explain in detail why Tucker would make this mistake.

 1) Tucker just had Epsilon die on him. Inside his head. And at the same time, the other remaining pieces of Epsilon all faded away too. And Tucker didn’t even notice it was happening, by the time he realised what was going in, the fragments were gone and he was left in a very empty and very non-functioning suit of power armour. Given how heavy this armour is, with it non-functioning, Tucker was probably unable to move until his friends removed most of the suit, so he was trapped in a coffin that was emptier than it should’ve been.

2) Struggling to cope with his grief, Tucker does something frankly stupid and activates the Temple of Procreation.

3) A while later, Tucker is starting to recover from his friend’s death, when Dylan shows up and he finds out in short order that A) Someone is committing terrorist acts while disguised as him and his friends, B) The planet he sacrificed so much, and Church gave his life for, is being blamed and might be invaded, and C) Church might be alive. This effectively halts Tucker’s recovery.

4) The consequences of his fuckup with the Temple of Procreation come back to haunt him, and suddenly, something Tucker has always been proud of- that he’s a great father to Junior- is called into question because he’s now an absentee dad to a fuckton of Chorus babies, which deals a blow to the poor man’s ego.

5) Shortly after that, the fiasco where Temple manages to manipulate him happens, and it makes things even worse for him. He should’ve seen through it after Felix, but he didn’t. And now, Wash and Carolina are hurt because of him, and the message from Church was a fake.

6) Finally, after all of this, he’s face to face with Church, and he has the chance to save him, and while maybe he could follow Caboose’s example… there’s one key problem. This isn’t Epsilon, it’s Alpha.

Y’see, there’s a big difference between those two. As has been pointed out before, Epsilon was always kind of a total prick to Tucker. A lot of this can be chalked up to Epsilon’s knowledge of the BGC coming entirely from Caboose, who purposefully left Tucker out of his recounts of their many adventures.

But this isn’t Epsilon. It’s Alpha. Tucker’s best friend, Alpha. Alpha, who went off and died without Tucker being there. Without Tucker ever getting a chance to see him once again. They got separated and one year later, Alpha died, in denial about a fact that Tucker had figured out long ago. Maybe Tucker could’ve helped save Alpha if he’d been there. Maybe Alpha wouldn’t have had to leave the safety of Wash’s suit and end up vulnerable to the emp if someone else had been there to hold the Meta’s attention.

 Tucker decides to save his friend. He’s at the end of his rope and after all the crap he’s been through on this journey, which he set out on because he wanted to save Church, he’s going to damn well save Church.

Additionally, by tying Tucker into the portal scene properly, there’s now a proper narrative throughline from the characters receiving Church’s message to the portal. Caboose has been covered, but Tucker hasn’t.

 Time paradox.

Despite his best intentions and hopefully understandable motives, Tucker has just pulled Alpha-Church out of their history before it even got started. And given how much of Seasons 1-13 was motivated by Church in some form or another… well, they’ve just unmade themselves.

The final twist is that time isn’t rewound to Season 1. We don’t need to see that. Season 1 retreads aren’t needed. If they want to remake Season 1, they should just bite the bullet and do a full remaster of the early Seasons to clean up the audio, rather than forcing new Seasons of the show to ape it.

Instead, we see a Blood Gulch wherein the same amount of time has passed since S1E01, but with none of the elements that Church brought in having happened.

Tex never goes to Blood Gulch. She spends her time hiding from Freelancer and desperately trying to find her other half, whom she was ripped away from and now will never be able to reunite with.

Tucker loses his friend, and is left with Caboose, who already doesn’t like him.

Caboose, for his part, doesn’t get brain damaged by Omega, but he still has his air shut off and Church still convinces him to drink Scorpion fuel, so he’s not doing much better.

Kai probably gets deployed to Blood Gulch faster, since Blue team is undermanned. She’s stuck in an empty box canyon with the rest of them.

York lives on, not getting recruited by Tex, until the Meta comes for him. The Meta takes Delta and leaves York to die alone.

Wyoming is not sent after Tucker, and doesn’t get the chance to formulate the plan with Omega.

Junior is never born.

Because Wyoming’s plan doesn’t happen, Wash is left to try and combat the Meta without the aid of the Reds and Blues. He fails.

The Meta remains free to hunt down and murder its former comrades. Like Tex, it ends up searching endlessly for the Alpha, which it will not find.

Without the Project’s downfall, and without Epsilon’s activation, Carolina remains in hiding.

The Director remains in hiding, endlessly repeating his attempts to perfect his remake of Allison. He never finds the answer.

Chorus is destroyed by perpetual civil war, all according to Hargrove’s design.

And as the galaxy darkens, people who would’ve been friends die or are left alone to rot, and the Project that put them there tears itself apart until only Tex, the Meta, Carolina, and the Director remain, scattered to the winds and pursuing impossible tasks, Blood Gulch remains. Its purpose is lost without Alpha, and the Project is gone, but with no new orders, VIC perpetuates the “war” between Red and Blue teams, and so it goes on. Static. Unchanging.

Cue the ending, and the setup for the next season. A Blood Gulch without Church.

#Red vs. Blue #RvB #RvB15 #RvB16 #Leonard L. Church #Leonard Church #Private Church #Alpha-Church #Epsilon-Church #Lavernius Tucker #Michael J. Caboose #Agent Texas #Agent Tex #Beta-Tex #Beta-Church #Allison Church #The Director #Agent Carolina #Agent Washington #Agent Wash #Kaikaina Grif #Sister Grif #Agent Maine #The Meta #Agent York #Agent Wyoming #Junior Tucker #Omega-Church #Delta-Church #Malcolm Hargrove

[puppetmaster55]

Thoughts on s8

Boy, this one got long.

Alright. It’s been like a month, and I feel detached enough from my initial emotional responses that I can finally get this out. My thoughts on the final season of vld. All I can say is, I urge you to read beyond the first sentence, because I will be diving into it and picking it apart as best I can.

So… here it is.

I liked the season.

I know, I’m surprised too. I didn’t go in expecting to like it like I did, I just expected to at most, Not Hate the season.

But I liked it, and perhaps not for the reasons that anyone else could say.

The throughline of the season, the narrative tying all 13 episodes together into one, was very clearly there. I liked that. Compared to season 7, where I still believe that it was written as two separate seasons (the road trip arc, and the earth arc) where season 8 culminated felt like the place that it was leading to when the season began.

I liked maybe two of the episodes, while the rest were middling or passing, and a couple had me staring in confusion trying to understand what was even happening at times.

The best episode of the season, honestly, was Day 47. Kinkade and Rizavi are the most interesting of the MFEs to me, and getting more of them was really nice. Getting a peek into the day-to-day life aboard the atlas was also really nice.

An episode that should have been great, but fell short because of its final lines? Battle Scars (you know, the one with Olkarion? Yeah that one). Up until those final lines, I really did love that episode, because we finally got the answer the unspoken question: why is Voltron necessary to win, to stop the bad guys?

That episode did wonders, to me, in answering that question. We got to see the tragedy and destruction that happens when Voltron isn’t there, when the robeast arrives and attacks and everything that is used to combat it fails to work. Every other time, Voltron swooped in to save the day at the last minute, and while that is excellent storytelling, seeing this, seeing what happens when Voltron isn’t there for that last minute save… that was really powerful.

There was really good lore, some that build upon lore from long ago (the astral plane, anyone? We got more of that), and others that had me staring because who let these writers into my home and into my notes.

And then there’s what I didn’t like.

Lotor had an arc, that much was clear, and he was obviously lingering throughout this season like a ghost. What that means, or what that doesn’t mean, is for another discussion digging up and reconstructing the skeleton by which the series itself was built upon.

Like two paragraphs ago, I talked about Olkarion and how much I really loved that episode. Here, I talk about why I didn’t: because of the handwave at the end. Those final lines, about how these innocent lives died so our heroes could have the information to save others, and that their deaths were noble and not in vain?

I hated that.

I hate when unfair death has all the weight and tragedy removed by saying “they gave us important information that can save the lives of billions” as if they needed to die for that to happen, as if they gladly were soldiers in battle and not civilians safe at home.

So, I would have loved the episode, had it not said that the horrifying and tragic death of Olkarion was, in the end, a Good Thing and that this entire planet, this entire culture, that is dead should not be mourned but celebrated for the death that was forced upon it. That this genocide (and it was genocide, make no mistake) should be celebrated for advancing the knowledge of… yeah.

…….I did not say that this would be without bias. There is no way to speak of this without having some sort of emotional bias.

There are many things I could talk about, from the strangeness of the pacing (Day 47 and Clear Day are about as filler as filler ever gets in this series, and that they’re back to back this season baffles me now as it baffled me when I first watched them) to the ways that characters have their personalities altered (Lance doesn’t feel matured, he feels like he’s had everything that made him a likeable personality stripped away, and y’know what, that’s my next paragraph).

So. Lance. I loved Lance in the early seasons, I loved Lance even as far as season 7. Lance was fun, he had a big personality and made some jokes but was brilliant in his own way and grew despite everything. I didn’t recognize that Lance in this one. Having Allura call him sharpshooter, he should have been preening, and instead he sounded like he didn’t want it, he sounded like someone who was going through the motions. Lance in season 8 was devoid of the personality that he had, stripped away until there was only the ghost of it that appeared maybe three times in all of this season.

Hunk had one moment, when he was making the Altean food and getting the captured Alteans to open up, and that was it. I feel glad, almost, that he didn’t have focus simply because he managed to evade the things that happened to everyone.

Keith… I grew distanced from him in the space between seasons 2 and 3 because of how vibrantly the fandom was chanting for him. I think I grew to become neutral to him from the way he was always centered as The Protagonist. Weirdly, I felt like I recognized the ghost of early seasons Keith (him from the first two seasons, who I actually felt I could grow to like) in this season.

I entered this season resigned to seeing Big Keith Moments, and there were like five in three episodes in a row in the first half, and after that? I didn’t see the season centering itself around Keith as much as I feared it would. This actually made me take a step back and see some good moments for him and remind me that I actually might have grown to like him, that I actually could still.

If there’s one thing that this season let me down on, it’s that Lance did not end up in handcuffs. I’m so let down by that, honestly, it was one of the only things that could be reliably counted upon for each 13-episode set, and he wasn’t in handcuffs at all.

Allura was annexed practically from the start, slated to perform a massive sacrifice that made me hurt even as I watched it happen. She was still in love with Lotor, even as she clung tighter to Lance. For that, among too many other reasons, I cannot say that I enjoyed the romance.

And the romance? If it felt weirdly done in season 7, having it be a throughline in season 8 made it hurt all the more. Lance and Lotor deserved more than to be Allura’s love interests. Lance deserved more than to be stripped away until that was all that he was.

Allura’s end, too, felt awful. I didn’t like it, I still don’t like it, and if this had been the series that was meant to end that way, I would be fine with it. But it wasn’t, and so I didn’t. I figured, though, that she was going to die or something similar when she brought the dead park back to life. I also figured, apparently foolishly, that Lance’s declaration that the team was her family would be something that would stop her from making that sacrifice.

I wanted Allura to live, dammit, and see peace and see the formation of a New Altea.

Pidge was there, too, but she didn’t have any stakes or anything. Pidge was there, and got to taker her whole family (including the dog) out into space. That she got some bonding time with Allura was good, but beyond that there was about as much for her to do in this season as there was for Hunk.

Shiro… honestly? Shiro wasn’t even in this season. I don’t know who that person was that wore Shiro’s face, but the Shiro of the past seven seasons was more of a Shiro than whoever this person was. Yes, even the empty Shiro of season 7 was more Shiro than whoever this Shiro was. He was stripped of his rank of Paladin, stripped of his personality, stripped of everything that made Shiro… Shiro. He even had his status as a main character torn away from him, as he didn’t appear in every episode, and those that he did appear in barely featured him.

God, but Shiro deserved better.

And Kuron, but that’s for another time.

I didn’t expect to get any answers from Operation Kuron, but I at least held out some hope of getting answers regarding the second colony. Dead hope, perhaps, but hope still. I never got the impression that the alteans there were dead, despite all the season 6 dialogue that talking about thousands of Alteans dying by Lotor’s hands.

Looking back, I guess we were supposed to take everything being said at face value. There apparently was no deeper secret, the little stuff that said that we didn’t know everything (even the characters themselves saying that they didn’t know the full picture) meant nothing. Lotor did a bad thing trying to do a good thing, and for that he was sentenced to death.

And even then, after getting shown and told repeatedly that Lotor is an Evil Villain, we’re given his backstory at long last, where he’s shown as a tragic figure who wasn’t an evil villain at all, simply someone who was desperate, and in that desperation turned to methods that were wrong and that he was trying to atone for throughout the entire time he was in the series. So what was it, then, that we’re supposed to feel for Lotor? Are we supposed to feel sympathy for him, or are we supposed to condemn him?

God, but Lotor deserved better.

Everyone deserved better, really.

Two plot threads that I didn’t expect to see closed out, were that of the quintessence monster that Ranveig experimented on, and Zethrid. And honestly? I wasn’t expected Zethrid to make a return. That was a delightful surprise.

The quinessence monster being some late-stage retcon of simply being a monster from the cosmic abyss felt sad, when it could have been simply what it was introduced as: something that was mutated by the quintessence into the monster that it became.

Beyond that, I almost liked the things that Lahn brought up. What right should the Galra have, to submit to Voltron when Voltron is responsible for all that happened was a direct result to Voltron’s actions. They got rid of Lotor, and with his removal there were intense consequences that they cannot simply pretend didn’t happen.

As for Zethrid? The original script was there, with Zethrid’s lines making it clear that Ezor was dead and she was taking revenge on Keith and Acxa. Changing it so that instead it was that Ezor was alive was a good move, since it unkilled a lesbian, but I think it also undercut Zethrid’s arc and made Ezor into some heel-face turn away from violence. I never got the impression that Ezor wanted something different than violence, since she was always one of the bloodthirstier of the generals.

Still, it was a nice enough addition.

And now we reach the yelmore of this season: Curtis.

I love Curtis, honestly, and I love his marriage to Shiro. With how we’ve seen the writers handle romance already, I’m perfectly fine with not getting the tale of how they went from existing on the bridge together to being happily married. I love that we got that, that DreamWorks drew a line in the sand about where they stand on representation and that it was with the first mlm wedding (if not also kiss) in western animated media.

Really, the only thing I can critique is that the original plan had confirmation that Zethrid and Shiro are lesbian and gay, respectively, and they both were originally to end up alone with dead lovers. That is literally all my negative say on the matter.

And all this brings me to… Honerva.

Oh, Honerva. You were, honestly, a more fascinating villain when you were Haggar. You were a scientist, a high priestess, with the backstory of someone who wasn’t afraid to step into the purview of the gods to gain the knowledge you desired. And you ended up as someone who apparently only ever wanted to be a mother. That your whole entire plan, the one that was meant to be the culmination of this entire series, was to destroy all realities until you found the one where you could be a mother to your child, is… quite something.

Under a different approach, I could understand it perfectly.

Under this approach, it was clear with how you commodified Lotor even after regaining your memories that you were going to be the same way with this Perfect Reality Lotor.

I dunno, maybe it was my expectations playing against me, but I expected Honerva to retain her status and desires as a scientist above that of being a mother. Even before she went into the rift, even before it began to affect her, she was more concerned with the science than with much else. Yes, she loved, and yes, she lost, but she and Zarkon both were reduced down to the evils they were deep down: Zarkon, the ruler, and Haggar, the scientist. Learning she was a mother to Lotor didn’t feel like it should have changed her desires for knowledge or caused her to abandon them entirely.

Which isn’t to say that Honerva was a terrible villain here, simply that she became a different kind of villain than who I expected her to be.

As a final season, I didn’t get the impression that we were concluding storylines begun way back in the first season. I didn’t get the impression that we were seeing the end of the journey that we started down. Honerva’s final approach as a villain didn’t feel like the culmination of the path begun at the start.

Quite honestly, season 8 felt like the ending to a different series.

Maybe it isn’t though. Maybe I went into it expected a shonen series but around half a dozen characters instead of one single character, and instead got a weirdly done series with questionable to horrific themes and lessons. Others have written about those better than I ever could.

Or maybe it is, and the series we were sold at the start isn’t the one that we were ultimately given.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

#puppet gets salty

[aion-rsa]

Archer Season 12: Casey Willis On Sterling And Cyril’s Emotional Breakthrough

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This article contains spoilers for Archer season 12 episode 5.

Archer has a fascinating relationship with change. Major elements like the show’s genre have transformed, but a constant through the years are the characters and their relationships with one another. The series has made it clear that these character dynamics are quite toxic in many ways, some of which have left the characters looking for ways to grow. The most recent seasons have prioritized the cause and effect nature of Archer waking up from his coma and returning to work, which has left everyone feeling very raw and vulnerable, including Sterling Archer himself. 

Archer’s latest episode, “Shots,” dresses itself up as a playful night of liquor and laughs, but it becomes a deep look into Archer’s poisonous effect on his friends, specifically Cyril. Archer EP Casey Willis and producer Pierre Cerrato deconstruct the emotional entry and its significance in the season, putting together the glorious “Pampage” sequence, and if those were really the origins of “Sploosh.”

Archer Season 12 Episode 5 – “Shots”

Written by Matt Roller “Sex, drugs, and monster trucks! Archer and the gang celebrate another barely successful mission.”

DEN OF GEEK: With this being the half-way point of the season, were there any sort of goals or expectations in check for this point in the season, or was it not thought about in such a precise way?

PIERRE CERRATO: We are definitely thinking about how we are telling the story across the entire season. It may feel like a standalone episode, but I can’t really slot this episode anywhere else in our season. We needed to feel that the gang had been on a few missions and could use a break. We also needed to expand on Lana and Robert’s relationship a bit. And we really needed to Weekend at Bernie’s two different characters. That was a must.

There’s a bit of a bottle episode mentality with this installment when it begins and a lot of the entry is contained to the bar. What was the agenda in scaling things down here and was it ever smaller in nature?

PIERRE CERRATO: For the first half of the episode it may feel like there isn’t a ton going on narratively and we are just hanging out at a bar, but there are some nuggets in there that will come into play later in the season. While those early scenes may feel small in scale, hanging out in a populated bar comes with its own difficulties. We have to design and layout every individual character that is present at the bar and make sure they are engaged in just enough activity to feel natural, but not enough to take your attention away from our main action. Once we enter the rave, the scale of the episode gets pretty big.

There’s a self-aware nature to this episode as the characters reflect on the rut that they’ve found themselves in and the predictable nature of their dynamics. Why did this feel like the right time to ask these questions?

CASEY WILLIS: This episode was always planned to fall in the middle of the season. It was a great time for the characters to reflect and take stock of their situations. We also planted a lot of seeds for stories that will pay off in the second half of the season. And it was great to have Sandra, with her outside perspective, act as a cheerleader for the team at the start of the episode. However, by the end of the episode she realizes the team is a mess.

The brewing personal drama and stress with Lana and Robert continus to carry over and be present. Talk on that a little and why having that as a throughline through the season rather than them being entirely broken up or on healthy ground?

CASEY WILLIS: We wanted Lana and Robert’s relationship to get more complex and a bit messy this season. Is it because Archer is back in the picture, or is Archer just shining a spotlight on some behaviors Lana ignored in the past? This is a season long storyline and we are very excited for everyone to see how Lana and Robert handle these hiccups.

Lana seems to regress in some ways in this episode while she searches for clarity. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

CASEY WILLIS: We wanted Lana’s story to contrast Archer’s in this episode. We also wanted her and Sandra’s story to connect to the previous episode and just show Lana having some fun. So many times Lana has to play the “wet blanket” role in an episode and it’s nice to see her cut loose. In fact, it’s Pam of all people who tries and fails to stop Lana from partying with the Prince! When Pam is the voice of reason, your party is off the rails.

The most moving material from this episode is Archer’s resolve to “fix” Cyril. This is a major aspect of the previous season, but why did it feel important to readdress it here and go so far as to resolve the problem?

CASEY WILLIS: Last season we saw the decline of Cyril and while Pam tried to rebuild him, Archer and Cyril’s relationship was much more contentious. Archer and Cyril had some great moments though, especially in last season’s Aleister episode. We wanted to show Archer’s growth and him realizing that he does care for Cyril in his own twisted way. Also, we wanted to show Archer having fun in situations we normally don’t see him in, while also showing a glimpse into Cyril’s free time.

Where is Archer’s head at during the end of this, does he actually feel remorse, and will he be closer with Cyril moving forward at all?

CASEY WILLIS: I think he grew a bit, but he isn’t emotionally mature enough to share that with Cyril. We purposefully had Archer undercut all the progress he made when Pam called him. Then we further rubbed salt into the wound when Archer used Cyril as a step-stool. It’s just Archer’s way of showing affection.

The neon visuals during the “Pampage” dance party look gorgeous and are a serious highlight. Was it difficult to construct that scene?

PIERRE CERRATO: Our team went above and beyond to answer the call of the “Pampage.” It was a very complicated sequence. The script outlined four different areas in the warehouse that Pam takes the gang to. We needed to figure out what it would look like if there was a rave, a bare knuckle fight and a punk band playing while a monster truck is crushing cars in the back. Everyone did a fantastic job with that specific scene, and it took us a long time to get through it. If you take a closer look at the whole episode, you’ll realize just how many beautiful set pieces there are throughout. For example, the game store, the planetarium, Ding Dong’s strip club (the logo is my personal favorite), etc. Our artists, designers and animators are pretty incredible across the board.

CASEY WILLIS: Just a quick side note. We never really promote Archer merch because we are so focused on producing the show, however, when creating the “Pampage” shirts that Pam and the gang wore in this episode, we thought it would be great if FX would sell them. For anyone interested, they’re available soon via https://shop.fxnetworks.com/collections/archer.

This episode also seems to provide the origins of “Sploosh.” Did it feel time to provide some context there?

CASEY WILLIS: Is it the origin or did Lana just think it might be the origin? I am of the opinion that “Sploosh” has an organic origin from deep in Pam’s past. Sploosh, the bouncer, was probably bestowed that nickname by Pam, but I doubt he is the origin of the word.

It’s not just specific to this episode, but there’s some really nice staccato jazzy music that’s present throughout the season. How did this season’s sound come about?

PIERRE CERRATO: We can thank our amazing composer, JG Thirwell. He has been working with us since season seven and prior to that, we used needle drop for all our music. It worked well, but you can’t beat having an original score and developing a musical language with someone as talented as JG. 

We had a phone call at the beginning of season 12 to go over our plans and share some musical ideas. We knew that Fabian was going to be a season-long villain, so we made sure to give him his own themes. We usually temp the music in our edit and when JG gets it, he’ll put his spin on it. If we use something that he has composed for another episode, he’ll tweak it to match the new timing, add extra instrumentation or anything else he feels would work for the scene. We don’t really go back and forth too much. We’ll generally do a round of notes and we’re good.

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Our writers’ room walkthrough for Archer’s 12th season will conclude with this season’s eighth and final episode.

Our breakdown of Archer’s 12th season premiere and previous writers’ room walkthroughs on earlier seasons are also available. 

The post Archer Season 12: Casey Willis On Sterling And Cyril’s Emotional Breakthrough appeared first on Den of Geek.

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Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/top-5-supernatural-episodes-might-surprise-spnfamily/

Top 5 'Supernatural' episodes that might surprise SPNFamily

Socially, we’re conditioned to ask the basics when we meet people. You know, the small talk questions: Where are you from? What do you do? How many siblings do you have? Eventually, we progress into the hard-hitting ‘getting to know yous’ of relationships, even if it’s reading someone’s words. Favorite song? Favorite book? Favorite movie? The thing is, people sometimes lie. Whether they mean to or not. No one’s favorite book is Anna Karenina; it’s just not. You can respect the book, but it’s not your favorite; you don’t revisit it regularly, it’s not a comforting blanket you burrito yourself inside. For example, my favorite song, book, and movie, respectively, are: “Just What I Needed” by The Cars, “Death Comes as the End” by Agatha Christie, and “A Few Good Men.” Have I heard better songs? Sure, as one of my best friend’s husband once said: “‘Just What I Needed’ isn’t even Ric Ocasek’s favorite song.” Have I read better books? Absolutely. Are there better movies? No. And I will fight you. My point is: sometimes I think that society, or in this case fandom culture, makes us feel as though we should choose things that we may like a lot but also simultaneously live up to some arbitrary social standard or norm, as our favorite. In Supernatural fandom I often see the same few episodes held up as universal fan favorites; episodes like “Yellow Fever,” “Changing Channels,” “The French Mistake,” “Swan Song,” and “Baby.” Maybe these episodes are your faves, but they aren’t mine; not even close. I’m not even talking about the episodes I think are the all-around best or the most quintessential (we’ll get into that in another article). I mean these don’t even make my top ten, they aren’t my go-to episodes, the ones I’ve watched the most, the ones I’ll watch out of sequence just because I want to relive the entire thing on a random Tuesday afternoon. In fact, one of those example episodes is in my bottom ten. So, which out of over 265 episodes, are my favorites? I’ll tell you not because I’m telling you that I think these are the best episodes and that you should agree (again, that arrogance will come in another article), but because I think this is a fun introduction. A way for you all to get to know me. Sin City - I’ll admit that “Sin City” isn’t the best episode ever penned, the quips are heavy-handed, and the plot is simplistic. Honestly, it’s kinda middle of the road, but that’s what makes it re-watchable without the emotional hangover of “Mystery Spot” or “Fresh Blood” (Besides, we’ll get into those episodes in a later article. What “Sin City” does have is a great supporting cast: we get to see Katie Cassidy finally start to her get bearings playing Ruby 1.0, we get a great scene at the beginning where Sam and Dean are such bratty, yet lovable surrogate children to Bobby, we meet and mourn Richie, the perv with a heart of gold, (I mean, he’s basically Dean (Jensen Ackles) without the suave or skill), and we cozy up in a basement with Casey the bartender demon who is insightful, witty, and deadly, but her quid pro quo with Dean gives us a good dose of classic cocky Dean Winchester who is also a scared little boy underneath it all. Bonus, we also get the rare unicorn that is goofy, chagrinned Sammy as he backs his way out of Trotter’s office. And anyway, if you don’t catch yourself saying “I make a mean hurricane” every time you look at the Red Lobster drink menu you are living your life wrong. Ask Jeeves - now, I’m going to stop you before you tell me that Fan Fiction is the best episode of season 10, because it’s really, REALLY not. It’s arguably in the bottom three of the season. “Ask Jeeves,” however, was a perfect play on the movie that inspired it (which is one of the best movies of all time, again, I will fight you) and was another episode overflowing with a great supporting cast with fantastic comedic timing. For an episode that was primarily a loose tie-in to the release of the Supernatural Clue game it could have gone so wrong, but instead, it went so very right. The soundtrack is stellar, the jokes and pop culture references are on point without being concussion-inducing anvils, and the mystery itself is background to the story without being disappointing. “Ask Jeeves” is a comedic romp with a nice little hit of Winchester family feelings; it’s a bread and butter Supernatural episode. Besides, Dash hunts pheasants. He. Hunts. Pheasants. Caged Heat - This is an ensemble style episode done right. We get one of the best interactions between Sam/Dean and a demon to ever grace the show (props to character actor Conrad Coates for delivering, “I know you're speaking, I see your lips moving, but I can't understand what you're saying 'cause I don't speak little bitch,” because that line is a mouthful) and from that we slide seamlessly into Meg getting the drop on the boys and Sam turning it on her in the blink of an eye because he now understands her calculating nature so well. Speaking of calculating, Sam using the the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark to lure Castiel to him is a perfect segue into their mutually soulless tête-à-tête (full disclosure, season 6 Castiel is my favorite version of Castiel). We also get Meg taking on a pack of hellhounds, Dean threatening Samuel, Sam (Jared Padalecki) biting into his wrist to draw a Devil’s Trap with his own blood (that bloody grin is everything), Dean rescuing Meg from demon Christian. Then we get the brothers and Meg working in tandem against Crowley in perfect harmony, the fake-out Crowley death that we only later find out was all a set up between Crowley and Castiel (Misha Collins) who were working together all along. It’s an episode that works on your first watch, yet is even more brilliant in retrospect. Night Shifter - Okay, I’ll be up front, season 2 is not only my favorite season of Supernatural but one of my favorite seasons of television. Period. Even its weakest episode is still so damn good, but if I have to choose one to go on a list that is based on simple re-watchability, I have to hand it to this one. Meet conspiracy theorist Ronald Resnik; he’s that character that every procedural or genre show needs at least once a season; the one who is wholly unqualified, but still tries to be the hero. Not for the glory, but because lives are at stake and the right thing has to be done. We laugh at Ron and his mandroid ideas; Dean praises him, Sam shuts him down, both do it because he’s so close yet, oh, so far from the truth. And when Ronald gets shot (which while tragic, is gorgeously directed and edited) your heart breaks for both Dean and Ronald. You also get exactly that Sam wanted to keep him deep in the dark because the hunter life is nothing but pain and death. Speaking of impactful characters, we also meet Agent Henriksen in this episode, a character that is a perfect example of an outside POV of the Winchesters. His description of them being “dangerous, smart, and expertly trained” is so important because he doesn’t know what they really do, yet he understands who they are on a fundamental level, and while he wants to lock them up, he fully respects them as adversaries. This episode is cinematic; it literally feels like a complete movie. It’s beautifully shot, every actor brought their A-game (Dean’s little forehead punch when he hangs up with Henriksen is one of those tiny, silent details that makes a moment a moment). We get great dialogue (“I like him, he says okeydokey,” “its robot skin is so lifelike;’ Sam’s long-suffering “we’re not working for the mandroid!;’ Henriksen’s breakdown of the Winchester family that could have been clunky exposition but was instead just a smooth reminder of who they are with bonus (“yeah, I know about Sam, the Bonnie to your Clyde”). But if all that wasn’t enough, there’s also arguably the most iconic Supernatural moment and one of the top three musical cues of the show: Sam and Dean in stolen SWAT gear sneaking to the Impala while “Renegade” plays. I’ve seen this episode more times than I’m willing to admit, and I get chills at that moment every single time. Shadow - Yeah, I know, this is out of left field, but hear me out, because I think this episode is woefully underrated. First of all, we get a tiny peek into the Weechesters by way of Dean reminding Sam of his high school drama years. Not only did Dean remember Sam was in “Our Town,” he clearly went to the play to support his baby brother. We also get smart Sam AND Dean in this episode. Dean by way of visualizing the Daeva pattern in the victim’s blood and Sam using the flare against the Daeva shadow demons. Speaking of the brothers being brothers, there’s a lot to take in during this episode. Starting with them running into Meg and Dean being hurt by Sam telling her about their fight, but as soon as Sam reassures him that he’s with Dean by choice, not force, Dean slips right into teasing, wingman big bro mode. Add to that the subtle nod of trust we can infer by way of Sam taking Baby for his stakeout while Dean researches. This is an episode that on the surface is a basic hunt that ties into the now growing cohesive season throughline, but it’s actually all about family. There’s the brothers’ dynamic and the way their bond has solidified since “Scarecrow”, however, we also get to see Dean’s vulnerability when Sam naively thinks that this could be it, the end of it all, the catalyst back to “normal”, whereas Dean just wants his family together, hell or high water. There’s also the fact that no matter how you as a viewer personally feel about John Winchester, the demons know that he’s never far behind his boys; he’s always watching, always protecting them in his own way. And, of course, we get to see a full Winchester reunion complete with damp eyes, manly hugs and choked up voices. John Winchester saying, “hey boys”, the brothers saying “yes, sir” at the same time (this episode has two instances of Winsync Winspeak); John’s unspoken apologies; Dean’s face while Sam and John hug; Sam being the one who wants them all together, and Dean being the one to understand that they can’t stay with John. John mirroring Sam’s earlier words to Dean about letting go. All of this will always make me emotional. This episode also has one of my favorite horror tropes, one that Supernatural has unfortunately pulled away from in recent years: it’s creepier when you don’t see what’s after you, like the great Steven Spielberg once said about “Jaws,” what’s scariest is the “fear of the unknown.” The mechanical shark forced Spielberg’s hand, and a crazy tight budget forced Eric Kripke’s, but it worked; the shark is terrifying because you don’t see it until the end, it’s the anticipation. It’s the same with the Daeva being shadow demons and later in seasons 2 and 3 with the hellhounds. Unfortunately, in recent seasons we’ve now seen hellhounds, and, well, they were scarier when all we had were torsos shredded by invisible claws and our imaginations. And as much as this episode was packed to the brim with Winchester family fat to chew on, they aren’t the only family. We find out that Meg is doing what she does for family as well. The overarching theme of Supernatural takes form in this episode; human, demon, ghost, or ghoul, it’s always about family in some way. [caption id="attachment_52142" align="aligncenter" width="696"] Source: Home of the Nutty screencaps for all images[/caption] So, like I said when we started this, my intention isn’t to say these are the best episodes of Supernatural, merely that these are my top 5 comfortable sweatpants episodes. So, did any of your favorites make my list? Did I make you want to re-watch an episode you don’t think much about as much? Let me know.

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Love Alarm Season 1 Cliffhanger Ending & 2.0 Feature Explained

MAJOR SPOILERS ahead for Love Alarm season 1.

Netflix's Love Alarm season 1 ending is a cliffhanger; we break down what Love Alarm 2.0 is and what it means for Kim Jojo (Kim So-hyun). Based on the Love Alarm webtoon created by Chon Kye-young, season 1 of the K-drama (Korean drama) introduces Jojo and two boys who are both interested in her: the former model and new kid at her high school Hwang Sun-oh (Song Kang) and his childhood best friend Lee Hye-yeong (Jung Ga-ram). Their love triangle is made all the more complicated by the incredibly popular mobile app Love Alarm, which allows users to know who within a 10 meter radius has romantic feelings for them - and alerts those they have romantic feelings for. Since the app syncs with the user's heart, it's impossible to hide your feelings.

This causes some trouble for Jojo when she's in high school because, while both Sun-oh and Hye-yeong are interested in her, the latter gives her up for his friend when he sees Jojo ring Sun-oh's Love Alarm. Still, Hye-yeong accidentally rings Jojo's Love Alarm and he ends up deleting the app. But though Jojo and Sun-oh are in a relationship, she grows increasingly insecure, confiding in her unpopular classmate Cheong Duk Gu (Lee Jae-eung). He gives her a unique shield for her Love Alarm that makes it so she can't ring anyone's alarm, but the shield can only be removed by the app's developer. Jojo uses the shield to break up with Sun-oh, convincing him she no longer has feelings for him. Four years later, Jojo runs across Sun-oh and Hye-yeong again by accident. Both still have feelings for her, but while Hye-yeong tries courting her without Love Alarm, Sun-oh is resentful of how she dumped him.

Related: What To Expect From Love Alarm Season 2

The Love Alarm season 1 finale revolves around the Love Alarm 2.0 presentation, where a new feature is unveiled and the long mysterious developer is unmasked. Jojo decides to track down the developer of the app and get the shield removed from her Love Alarm so that she can pursue a romantic relationship in which she's open about her feelings. While attending the Love Alarm 2.0 presentation, she runs across both Hye-yeong and Sun-oh - and his new girlfriend Yook-ji (Kim Si-eun), for whom he doesn't ring her Love Alarm. Both men ring her Love Alarm, but she's unable to ring either of theirs. Now, we dive into what this ending means for Jojo and a potential Love Alarm season 2.

Love Alarm's Developer Revealed

At the start of the Love Alarm 2.0 presentation, a woman named Lee Seon-yeong, the CSO of Love Alarm's C&C department, reveals the developer of the app to be someone named Brian Chon. Now, this goes against everything Love Alarm has hinted at in the episodes leading up to the finale. Though never explicitly stated, it's made clear to the viewer that Duk Gu is the developer of Love Alarm. In the first episode, he's shown looking up at the sky before the Love Alarm logo appears in the clouds. He also gives Jojo the one-of-a-kind shield tech for her Love Alarm. But the biggest proof Duk Gu is the developer of Love Alarm is that he's shown in the developer's bedroom, shutting down the computers before jumping out the window. It's this same bedroom that the finale cuts to as Seon-yeong introduces Brian Chon, describing the developer as a shy high school boy.

It's possible that Duk Gu reinvented himself after, as Jojo describes in an earlier episode in voiceover, he disappears without a trace, becoming Brian Chon in order to distance himself from his embarrassing high school experiences. After all, he gets his heart broken by Jojo's cousin Park Gul-mi (Go Min-si), which is how he becomes friends with Jojo and why he gives her the shield. It's possible Brian Chon is Duk Gu, since the director of the series, Lee Na-jung, makes a point of hiding the developer's face in shadow throughout the entire presentation. However, it's much more likely that hiding whether Brian is Duk Gu is setting up for a twist in season 2. Perhaps Brian Chon is not actually the real developer of Love Alarm, he's simply someone chosen to pose as the developer. But if that's the case, the question becomes what happened to the real developer, Duk Gu, and why he wasn't publicly revealed as the creator of Love Alarm.

What Happened To Duk Gu?

There's another key character in the Love Alarm season 1 finale whose identity remains shrouded in mystery, even after the episode ends: the man in the Anti-Love Alarm van. In the four years since Love Alarm launched, it's changed the world, specifically regarding how people confess their feelings for one another. Love Alarm is so integral to Korean culture that there are movies about it, self-help books to get more people to ring your Love Alarm, and it's even become part of wedding ceremonies. But there's a dark side to it, as we see when a group of Koreans who've never had their Love Alarm rung die by suicide in a public park. There's also an Anti-Love Alarm movement that protests the app, and this group shows up to protest outside the Love Alarm 2.0 presentation.

One member of the Anti-Love Alarm movement remains in a van, speaking into a microphone that projects over speakers. Though we only see his lips, they bear a resemblance to Duk Gu. We know Duk Gu didn't die by suicide, even though that's implied in the scene when he disappears. Remember, that story is told from Jojo's perspective and she may have assumed he died by suicide given what he'd gone through. However, if that were actually the case, she'd have said that, rather than say he disappeared.

As for how Duk Gu becomes a member of the Anti-Love Alarm movement, it makes sense for him to grow to hate his own creation, considering the heartbreak it brought him. Gul-mi never returned his feelings, and continually humiliated him after he rang her Love Alarm because it embarrassed her. Considering he also created the shield tech for Jojo, it's not a stretch to see how he might instead put his efforts behind protesting the app he created - especially when it's become so ingratiated in Korean society. (It's also likely Duk Gu is one of the viewers of Gul-mi's webcast and sees how unhappy wanting to get into the Love Alarm Badge Club has made her, prompting him to further resent the app.) However, Duk Gu not being revealed as the real developer of Love Alarm has serious implications for season 2, particularly the viability of Love Alarm 2.0's new feature.

Love Alarm 2.0's New Feature Sets Up Season 2

Since Duk Gu isn't introduced as the developer of Love Alarm at the 2.0 presentation and he's instead leading a protest outside, we can presume he doesn't have anything to do with the new feature and hasn't had anything to do with the app for some time. It's likely he abandoned it just before he disappeared, which is hinted at in that scene when he turns the computers off. It's not yet known who took control of Love Alarm after Duk Gu disappeared, but since he's not involved in 2.0, it's unclear whether it will work as well as Love Alarm. After all, there's a little bit of unexplained science in Love Alarm regarding how the app syncs with a person's heart to tell without a doubt how they feel about someone else. The 2.0 feature is instead based on data that Love Alarm collected in its first four years.

As explained by Brian Chon, Love Alarm 2.0's new feature is "the person you will fall in love with." Specifically, it "will now be able to accurately predict how one’s feelings will develop. It’ll be able to tell you who will ring whose Love Alarm, and who won’t ring whose Love Alarm." So, essentially Love Alarm 2.0 uses data to predict how a person's feelings for someone else will develop, whether or not they'll fall in love with someone. This sets up Love Alarm season 2 in two key ways. First, it's unclear how effective this new feature is. Duk Gu wasn't involved in creating it, and rather than being based on whatever infallible method he created for the app to determine the user's feelings, it's based on data that predicts feelings, but predictions can be wrong.

Secondly, Love Alarm 2.0 could directly impact Jojo's relationships with Sun-oh and Hye-yeong. She may even use the new feature to choose between the two men. But if, like we suspect, Love Alarm 2.0 can be wrong, then Jojo may end up with the wrong man because of the app's fallacy. However, it may not be Jojo who uses Love Alarm 2.0. The new feature could also directly impact Sun-oh's relationship with Yook-ji, since 2.0 would finally be able to tell her whether Sun-oh will ever ring her Love Alarm. Or, Hye-yeong could use it to determine whether Jojo will ever love him - though that seems unlikely considering he's one of the few characters determined to live without Love Alarm's influence. There are many ways the Love Alarm 2.0 new feature could impact the romantic storylines in Love Alarm, especially when it's unclear just how accurate it really is.

Who Will Jojo End Up With?

Ultimately, though, Love Alarm 2.0's new feature and whether it can be trusted serves the main throughline of Love Alarm: Who Jojo will choose in the end. From the start, it's made clear that both Sun-oh and Hye-yeong have feelings for Jojo. At first, they determine to let Jojo choose between them, using her Love Alarm as the deciding factor. But when Jojo rings Sun-oh's Love Alarm, Hye-yeong bows out. Although we later see Hye-yeong accidentally ring Jojo's Love Alarm and hide it from Sun-oh, we don't see Jojo ring Hye-yeong's. Even four years later, viewers don't know how Jojo feels about him as he's courting her, though he repeatedly rings her Love Alarm after re-downloading the app. It's possible she develops feelings for him when they're adults, but it's likely she didn't have any romantic feelings for him when they were in high school because she didn't seem to know who he was prior to him ringing her Love Alarm.

But that still leaves Sun-oh. We know Jojo loved him when they were together in high school and it was her fear of her feelings that caused her to download the shield for her Love Alarm and break up with Sun-oh. Although we don't know whether Jojo would still ring Sun-oh's Love Alarm four years later because of the shield, he's convinced she still has feelings for him - and never stopped. Just like he never stopped having feelings for her and continues to ring her Love Alarm despite having a new girlfriend and resenting Jojo.

In the Love Alarm season 1 finale, Jojo is determined not to hide from her feelings anymore and get the shield removed from her app. It would be easy if Jojo only rang the Love Alarm of either Sun-oh or Hye-yeong, but that doesn't fall in line with the themes of the series thus far. Love Alarm explores the very complicated emotions that the app attempts to simplify, with conflict arising when the messy feelings of people intersect with the cold logic of Love Alarm - like when Jang-go (Z.Hera) rings Il-sik's (Shin Seung-ho) Love Alarm when he's still dating Jojo or when the app outs a gay student. The message of Love Alarm seems to be that technology can only help humans so much, but they shouldn't necessarily rely on it blindly.

As such, it seems likely that whoever Jojo ends up with won't be solely determined by Love Alarm or the Love Alarm 2.0 new feature. Instead, she'll have to sort through her feelings and make the decision on her own. Because human emotion is much less predictable than technology and data would have us believe, it's truly a tossup of whether Jojo will choose Sun-oh or Hye-yeong. In fact, she may ring both their alarms if the shield is ever removed from her Love Alarm. Fans will just have to tune in to Netflix's Love Alarm season 2 to find out.

Next: Fall 2019 TV Premiere Dates: All The New & Returning Shows To Watch

source https://screenrant.com/love-alarm-season-1-ending-feature-jojo-explained/

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[gusticeleague]

With the third season of Rick and Morty on the horizon, and since I don’t think anyone’s done this before, I decided to give my ranking of all the Rick and Morty episodes (from the first two seasons).

My metrics for judgement are as follows: I’m attempting to judge the show purely on its own merits, which each episode being held to the question “is this the show at it’s best?”, which to my mind is a character-driven high concept sci-fi show that actively critiques but never outright condemns the humanist philosophies behind its chosen genre.

I’ve tried to avoid using other shows as a comparison unless it’s to illustrate a point, but in some cases it’s pretty unavoidable when this show unapologetically rips off its plots from movies wholesale. Episodes get more points for good story structure that adds to a good moral, strong critique or parody of an established science fiction trope that is otherwise well explored and strong character development that builds across episodes and firmly establishes a continuity. And when in doubt, it mostly comes down to “which would I rather rewatch if I only had those two competing episodes to choose from?”.

All clear? Alright, without further ado…

The Definitive Objective Extra-Schwifty Ranking of every Rick and Morty Episode

1. Rixty Minutes (S1E8)

Well, what else was it going to be?

What begins as an epilogue to Rick Potion #9 ends up becoming the central thesis for the entire show up to that point, that while the character’s existence isn’t significant on the cosmic scale and Summer’s birth basically creating the entire family was an accident of fate, sometimes seeing things from that perspective makes you realise how miraculous it is that you are here now, and instead of wrestling with your own insignificance and the possibility of “what could have been”, you accept and embrace the life that you have now, for all its faults.  That those revelations are paired with the interdimensional TV both builds the tension for how the conflict happening outside of is progressing and relieves it by providing a reprieve from the revelations that happen from it. This episode is the show at its best, and probably one of the best episodes of television period.

2. Meeseeks and Destroy (S1E5)

One of the smartest writing decisions in the show is that it doesn’t do the old domestic magic/sci-fi show trope of having the main character’s adventures kept a secret from the rest of the family or having a convenient reset button at the end of each episode. Instead, it aims to explore the emotional consequences of interacting with Rick’s world, and Meeseeks and Destroy marks a turning point in the show where all of these adventures start to actually matter to the show’s continuity and to the character’s growth. This is actually my personal favourite episode, but I think it’s just shy of being the best for two reasons: the A-plot relies on a reversal of the normal story structure, with Morty leading the adventure instead of Rick so it’s not the most “typical” of the show overall, and the two plots don’t come together as fluidly as they do in Rixty. Still, it’s a very close call.

3. Auto-Erotic Assimilation (S2E3)

Beyond a few references at Beth’s mother and a few (potentially false) memories, we never really get to see how Rick operates in a romantic relationship. So it’s interesting to see Rick at his most vulnerable and with someone he actually has actually has some love for in Unity, the one-who-is-a-million that got away. An emotionally raw story about two people who are good together but aren’t good for each other, paralleled with a B-plot of Summer and Morty learning that given total freedom, humans (well, blue alien people) will undoubtedly give in to their worst impulses. Also, man, that ending is one of the most gut-wrenchingly depressing endings to a show I’ve ever seen, and it lands perfectly. Maybe a little too perfectly.

4. Morty-Night Run (S2E2)

Probably the show’s best straight-forward adventure episode, which helps set up the Galactic Federation conflict that will eventually pay off at the end of Season 2 and is probably the best demonstration of Morty attempting to apply idealistic Earth morality to a more morally complicated universe to which Rick is perfectly adapted. A plethora of memorable characters like Krombopulous Michael and Jemaine Clement’s crooning sentient gas cloud, some excellent psychedelic animation and art direction, and a consistently funny B-plot of Jerry’s time in a daycare full of alternate versions of himself and confronting just how pathetic he is make this episode a real winner.

5. The Ricks Must Be Crazy (S2E6)

This is the best of what I like to call the “nesting doll” episodes of the show, where the adventure is a continuous descent or ascent through several layers of the sci-fi trope of the week. The first two thirds of the episode are a great slow boil before the “oh, shit” moment of the Mini-Verse scientist killing himself, and the final race out of the teeny/mini/microverses, intercut with Summer in Rick’s car is one of the most expertly paced sequences in the entire show. It’s also the only episode that gives Rick a compelling nemesis in the form of Zeep Zanthorp - a being he unintentionally created who is smart enough to challenge him, which annoys Rick to no end. I really hope they bring him back, since Rick is pretty short on compelling enemies (besides the Council of Ricks). Fingers crossed for some car trouble in Season 3.

6. Close Encounters of the Rick Kind (S1E10)

The idea of Rick being the only person(s) able to challenge him could have served to make Rick a little too smug and perfect for his own good, but the Council of Ricks serve as the perfect synthesis and literalisation of Rick’s self-loathing and his detest for sprawling authoritarian institutional bodies. Every alternate timeline/universe/dimension (do they ever settle on one definition? They’re all used fairly interchangeably) strike a perfect balance between absurdist weirdness and incredibly internal consistency, and every rewatch makes you pick up on new details you didn’t notice before. And look, I’m not made of stone, Jerry and Doofus Rick’s friendship is actually quite sweet, and I hope they get reunited someday.

7. Look Who’s Purging Now (S2E9)

The main character throughline of Season 2 is seeing how Rick and Morty start to rub off on each other over the course of their adventures. This comes to a head in this episode as we see how willing Morty is to emulate Rick in his amorality when he goes “full Purge” and how Rick is taken aback by what his grandson could become following in his footsteps while also confronting the limits of his joy/apathy of the bloodshed that ensues from his adventures. It also has the sharpest piece of social satire the show has ever done, where after the newly freed aliens try to rebuild society after the overthrow of their aristocratic overlords devolve into arguing over the division of labour and wind up reinstating the Purge again anyway from the frustration of having to create a functioning society again. Defeatist? Maybe. Hilarious? Absolutely.

8. Rick Potion #9 (S1E6)

Probably the episode that’s most important to the overall canon of the show. It sets the tone for the adventures to follow, gives a true point of no return for the show as a whole, as well as a great deconstruction of status-quo beholden storytelling and the creepy ethics of love potion plots. Had this just been a ranking of season one episodes, it would probably rank higher, but as you can probably tell by this list, the show has definitely topped this one since. I also want to point out just how incredible the show’s art direction and character creation is when it comes to all the varying designs of the Cronenbergs. I really hope the animators got a raise after this episode.  

9. Total Rickall (S2E4)

The Thing through the lens of a Community clip show turns into a paranoid existential thriller that escalates perfectly, has an excellent twist that probably ended up ruining a load of friendships in real life and revealed a ton about how the Smith family operates and sees each other. It does test the limit for how many wacky characters you’re willing to put up with, and it can’t really escape the insular insubstantial feeling of bottle episodes as a whole, especially if you buy into the theory that this episode and Morty-Night Run take place in another universe and so it doesn’t really matter to the show’s continuity as a whole. But it give us Mr. Poopy Butthole, so I’m willing to forgive it.

10. Big Trouble in Little Sanchez (S2E7)

This is a tough one to rank, because it has the greatest disparity of quality between the A plot and B plot. Beth and Jerry’s “mythologue” oriented marriage counselling is such a perfect science-fiction idea of making a metaphorical conflict real that it probably had enough to be the plot of the whole episode. Unfortunately, it’s paired with a B plot that tries to do the same thing with Tiny Rick. He’s funny as a visual, but the episode has to go to some lengths to inject tension into the proceedings. Why can’t Rick just stay in his young body forever other than some convoluted explanation about how teenagers push all their bad feelings into the back of their minds and therefore Old Rick will be erased (I think?). I felt it could have used an additional conflict where Rick loses some of his scientific brilliance because of his young brain overwriting his old one, or maybe a better acknowledgement that Summer was the one that pushed Rick into a self-described hackneyed high school plot that even he found too simple a pitch. Still, it cracks the top ten on the strength of the Beth and Jerry plot alone, which I plan to go into more depth about later, so stay tuned.

11. Anatomy Park (S1E3)

There are three inevitabilities in this world: death, taxes and sci-fi shows doing a Fantastic Voyage plot. Rick and Morty’s take is to fuse it with Jurassic Park and also have it be the show’s Christmas episode, which gives us a story which is never dull and has a lot of great jokes (“Oh, never mind, I was thinking of the T. rex”) but doesn’t come together in any interesting way other than the blood raining at the end, which also raises the question of whether the show was planning at this point to keep Rick and Morty’s adventures a secret from the rest of the Smiths. Also, I’m of the mind that Christmas episodes tend to work better when they’re placed later in the show’s run, as all the familial conflicts can play out better when you’ve had more time to get to know the characters and how they became the way they are It’s good, Maybe could have been better had it aired later in the show’s run and the writers had a better idea of what the show’s status quo was.

12. Raising Gazorpazorp (S1E7)

Having an adolescent raise a baby warmonger alien is some great application of science fiction to the mundane, and Morty’s relationship to Morty Jr. yields some touching moments. Tthe gender politics of planet Gazorpazorp feel a bit rote and stereotypical and an excuse to make a lot of obvious “battle of the sexes” jokes, and raises a lot of gripes I have regarding how mainstream science fiction comedy approaches and incorporates women and the feminine into its worlds, even if it does a little bit of softball criticism by drawing attention to Rick’s casual misogyny. Good, but could have been better.  

13. The Wedding Squanchers (S2E10)

A great finale that pays off the long-brewing confrontation between Rick and the Galactic Federation, and sets up a lot of interesting developments for Season 3. But as a result of that, it kind of feels a little incomplete in a way that the first season finale didn’t because they knew they were getting renewed.

14. A Rickle In Time (S2E1)

I loved the multiple timeline split-screen bits and Rick explaining at length about how he doesn’t care about Morty and Summer, which sets up what I believe to be Rick’s arc through Season 2 revealing his softer side. But the Beth and Jerry B-plot is basically just trying to give them something to do, doesn’t really contribute any tension to the situation back home and doesn’t tell us anything new about their relationship.

15. Pilot (S1E1)

As pilots go, Rick and Morty’s one is pretty good. It tells you everything you need to know about the scope of the show, its characters and the type of humour you can expect from it. The “Rick and Morty hundred years!” rant is one of the show’s best moments. But it was clearly still finding its voice, and there’s a bit of weirdness in that you think the show is going to pivot the way having the rest of the Smith family not know about Rick and Morty’s adventures, which they thankfully did away with.

16. Ricksy Business (S1E11)

Despite introducing us to Birdperson and Abradolph Lincler, this episode feels kind of unremarkable in retrospect, and ultimately just feels like they threw in all of the ideas they couldn’t fit into the earlier episodes into this one in case they didn’t get renewed.

17. M. Night Shaym-aliens (S1E4)

The second best of the  “nesting doll” episodes. The simulations inside simulations are a great Inception riff, even better than their actual Inception parody (more on that in a second). We really get a good look at Jerry’s insecurity and what drives him as a character, and the first real demonstration of Rick’s cunning and preparedness that also helps lay out the cosmic scope of his reputation. However, I don’t find the Zigerian scammers that funny, despite David Cross’ best efforts as the voice of their leader, and they’re a little too similar to the nudist scammer aliens from the first Futurama movie for my liking - the fact that they’re squeamish about nudity had to be a dig at that, surely?. But the overall set-up is solid and seeing Jerry casually strut through a low-res simulation of his life is pretty hysterical.

18. Lawnmower Dog (S1E2)

The worst (or really, the least good) of the “nesting doll” episodes. The direction the Scary Terry plot goes in is unexpected, clever and genuinely touching, but I don’t find the “dogs take over the world” plot that remarkable in any way, especially in comparison to the rest of the show.

19. Get Schwifty (S2E5)

This episode got a lot of shit when it aired, and it’s easy to see why, seeing that it had to follow a hat-trick of three great episodes. It’s a fairly solid Independence Day/Day The Earth Stood Still parody, but it’s definitely the show’s most lazily conceived plot, not to mention that I’m fairly sure that entire sections of the script appear in the previous episodes. That said, the giant space heads are a great visual (and gave us some great meme fodder), and it sets up the endgame of The Wedding Squanchers by reintroducing us to Birdperson and Tammy, if very inelegantly.

20. Interdimensional Cable II: Tempting Fate (S2E8)

On my first watch of this, I didn’t find this episode that funny, and the only TV bit that really made me laugh out loud was “Man vs Car”. The context for the Interdimensional Cable here, instead of being a distraction from the potential collapse of Beth and Jerry’s marriage is them waiting in a hospital for Jerry to recover from a fatal alien illness, which could be a potentially interesting idea if he hadn’t been immediately cured at the episode’s beginning, which immediately sucks all the tension out of the episode. Where the tension in Rixty Minutes (the episode this is self-plagiarising) lies in whether the Smith family will ultimately be broken up for good, this one ends up hinging on...the fate of Jerry’s penis. It keeps trying to ring some tension out of Jerry wanting to feel significant for having saved the galaxy’s answer to the Dalai Lama, and while I like the ultimate lesson that you can’t make people love you, the journey to get there doesn’t really work as well as it could have. They even make a meta-dig at themselves that they can’t improve on perfection, and at that point you kind of give this episode the ranking it deserves.

21. Something Ricked This Way Comes (S1E9)

At its best, Rick and Morty subverts and deconstructs well-worn science fiction tropes and the plots and lessons that tend to play out when played straight, and works best when it incorporates those proceedings with examinations of the American family dynamic and how we fight the daily battle of finding some kind humanist purpose and meaning in our lives in a universe for which that pursuit is bound to end in failure. While this episode has the best Summer plot and arguably the show’s best joke in the form of the Butter Passing Robot, Ricked is probably the most lazily conceived version of itself possible, picks a lot of very easy targets and ends up feeling very bored with itself as a result. While it aims to be an examination of how science fiction stories have replaced or perhaps better refine the old superstitions and morality lessons that horror stories play off, while actively critiquing how similar the two genres are in execution, the actual plot is basically Rick becoming a mouthpiece for how much the writers hate superstitious thinking and going “haha you brought Stephen King to a Kurt Vonnegut/Stanislaw Lem fight, get riggedy-riggedy-rekt son”. The B-plot of Jerry insisting that Pluto is a planet pokes fun at climate change denialism, and while a great demonstration of how facts and evidence have become summarily rejected in political discourse in favour of dogma and superstition, it doesn’t escalate into anything bigger like the best episodes of the show do. Hell, they can’t even agree on what the moral is at the end, and instead just resolve to literally beat up some political strawmen in lieu of actually finding a cohesive message. While that might be cathartic to some, for a show that isn’t content to give its audience easy answers, it’s punching well below its weight.

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How The Mandalorian Captures the Spirit of the Star Wars Prequel Era

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This Star Wars: The Mandalorian article contains spoilers.

Among The Mandalorian‘s many influences, at the top of the list is the classic Star Wars trilogy which started it all. Showrunner Jon Favreau, executive producer Dave Filoni, and the rest of the team have done a great job of incorporating lore from every era of the Star Wars saga in ways that make sense. Folding in elements fans know from A New Hope, for example, adds to the show’s sense of groundedness, showing us the weathered sci-fi locations that George Lucas made a staple of Star Wars while also picking up several loose threads unresolved after Return of the Jedi. 

The season 2 of the Disney+ series doesn’t forget the Prequel era, though. With Bo-Katan and Ahsoka appearing in season 2, and Grogu revealed to have grown up at the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, more and more direct connections to the Clone Wars are becoming important to Din Djarin’s quest.

The Prequels were characterized by bright colors (see Padmé Amidala or Shaak Ti), cartoonish CGI (Jar Jar Binks), and a mix of high adventure and impending tragedy. The Old Republic, when The Phantom Menace opens, is about to begin its decline. The election of Chancellor Palpatine, who is scheming behind the scenes as the Sith Lord Darth Sidious, heralds the rise of the Empire. Several in-universe decades later, The Mandalorian is still dealing with the fallout from the events set in motion in Lucas’ second trilogy.

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Because the Prequel Trilogy ran from 1999 to 2005, it’s a generation removed from fans of the original films and the sequels. Yet, The Mandalorian manages to blend all of these different eras into a cohesive narrative and setting, while also exploring them with a new lens. With season 2’s focus on beginning of the saga, here are a few things The Mandalorian brings back from the Prequel Trilogy and The Clone Wars: 

Ahsoka Tano

Season 2 is not only interested in the Prequel movies, but in the Expanded Universe stories that fleshed out the galaxy around it, particularly The Clone Wars TV series. And Lucasfilm wasted no time in creating a narrative throughline between the Star Wars animated series and the first live-action series, giving us both Mandalorian warrior Bo-Katan Kryze and former Jedi hero Ahsoka Tano. While both fan-favorite characters act as quest-givers during Mando’s journey, Ahsoka is the one who gives the bounty hunter the most immediate answers about his little companion’s past.

The former Jedi apprentice appears in “The Jedi” after working with the Rebellion for years. Now, she’s chasing the trail of Grand Admiral Thrawn to the planet Corvus, where an Imperial magistrate might have the answers she needs to find both Thrawn and missing Jedi friend Ezra Bridger (see: Star Wars Rebels).

Although Ahsoka left the Jedi Order over disagreements with the Council’s decisions, she now takes the role of a Jedi mentor, guiding Grogu toward the next step in this journey, even if she won’t outright train him. She doesn’t want to train Grogu because the loss of Anakin is still fresh in her mind. Anakin became Darth Vader due to his attachments, and may see the same fate for Grogu if he can’t let go of Mando. Even after Darth Vader’s death and redemption, his fall still affects Ahsoka.

Bo-Katan Kryze & the Darksaber

“The Heiress” brought Bo-Katan Kryze back into focus. Played by Katee Sackhoff, her armor and hair style are a direct translation of her look in The Clone Wars. She even has two Nite Owls, her original group of commandos, with her, and their fast-paced, competent fighting brings some of the shine of the Prequel Trilogy into the more laid-back Western style of action in The Mandalorian.

At this point in the timeline, she is the rightful leader of Mandalore, a planet that changed hands a lot even before the Empire got ahold of it, with the politics there making up a sizable part of the plot of The Clone Wars. Although The Mandalorian takes place after a Great Purge that wiped out most Mandalorians on the planet, Bo-Katan reveals in her live-action debut that she’s determined to get Mandalore back once and for all.

Her mission on Trask is part of that quest. She needs to capture a shipment of stolen Mandalorian weapons in order to arm her growing group of followers. By the end of “The Heiress,” her trajectory is clear. Now that her group is adequately armed, she can go find Moff Gideon and take back the darksaber, which appeared in the villain’s clutches at the end of season 1.

While initially part of the old Legends continuity, the darksaber became a major part of the Mandalorian storyline on The Clone Wars, as the ceremonial weapon wielded by a Mand’alor, the ruler of the race’s warrior clans. Although there doesn’t seem to be many rival Mandalorians left to question her right to rule, it’s still pivotal that Bo-Katan reclaim the darksaber, as it being in Imperial hands is a major insult to her people.

Grogu

“The Jedi” revealed that the Prequel era actually paved the way for another member of Yoda’s species. In reality, Grogu is a puppet, at least in some shots: Werner Herzog famously called it “heartbreakingly beautiful” when he saw two technicians performing the Child’s facial expressions. The character’s slick look combines Original Trilogy puppetry with Prequel Trilogy cartoonishness.

Now that Ahsoka has explained it, we know Grogu has an even more direct connection to the Prequels. He was raised in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant alongside all of the characters we know and love. Ahsoka, Anakin, and Obi-Wan Kenobi might have known him, and Yoda surely did. The fact that someone snuck Grogu out of the temple during the massacre of the Jedi during Order 66 adds a significant new event to the Prequel timeline.

Another way the Prequels paved the way for Baby Yoda is with Yaddle, the third known canon member of the species. Yaddle was developed based on concept art for a younger Yoda, but became her own character. Lucas wanted the origins of Yoda to remain mysterious, but Yaddle changed the mold by confirming there were others like the beloved Jedi Master.

Grogu explores the mystery of Yoda’s species further. Where did he come from? Is there a planet of Yodas? Would the planet of Yodas irreparably break the internet? 

Jango & Boba Fett

Jango Fett’s role in Attack of the Clones led to some confusion as to whether the legendary bounty hunter’s father was technically a Mandalorian. For years, Jango’s origin was a hotly debated topic both in the fandom and in-universe. Members of the New Mandalorian government that ruled Mandalore during the Clone Wars, for example, denounced Jango as a phony, claiming he’d stolen the traditional Mandalorian armor for his own gain. The Mandalorian confirms that the truth can be found somewhere in the middle.

In “The Tragedy,” a resurgent Boba Fett confirms that his father was a foundling like Mando, raised to be a Mandalorian warrior and follow the race’s traditions. The episode even re-canonized a piece of Jango’s Legends backstory. As revealed in the armor chain code that Boba shows Mando, it was a Mandalorian named “Jaste” (very likely a nod to Jango’s adoptive father in Legends, Jaster Mereel) who mentored a young Jango.

Decades later, Boba Fett wears this heritage with pride. While not born on Mandalore (or by natural means), Boba feels every bit as Mandalorian as his father did. “The Tragedy” even confirms that the former Imperial-allied bounty hunter still follows a code of honor among Mandalorians. Indebted to Din due to his actions on Tython, Boba agrees to help his fellow Mandalorian track down Grogu and bring him to safety.

The Cloner

One character operating in the background of The Mandalorian is the mysterious Imperial scientist Dr. Pershing, who briefly appeared in season 1 to run experiments on Grogu and made his return in season 2 episode “The Siege.” Not much is known about Pershing or his twisted experiments except that he needs Grogu’s M-count-heavy blood to accomplish something for the Empire. “The Siege” reveals that he’s been injecting subjects with Grogu’s blood, a process that has resulted in twisted corpses floating inside of lab tanks on Nevarro.

While Pershing’s true motives and mission are yet to be revealed, one theory concerning his identity points to a direct connection to one of the Prequel era’s most important elements: cloning. The biggest clue is the patch on the arm of his lab coat, which matches the one worn by Kaminoan cloners in Attack of the Clones. It’s true that cloning has touched every part of the Star Wars saga, whether it’s a brief reference in A New Hope or Palpatine’s final scheme in The Rise of Skywalker, so it only makes sense that it would also pop up in The Mandalorian.

So far, all of the cloners we’ve seen have been aliens. It’s possible Pershing was trained by the Kaminoans or, judging from the mangled bodies on Nevarro, learned from them in secret and advertised himself as an expert cloner when he in fact is not. But the show is less interested in his back story; the important part is what his skill set might mean for the future of the Empire, the New Republic, and the Jedi. The Kaminoans were never able to replicate Force-sensitivity in their clones. Were Pershing to solve this problem, could this open up a new possibility for Star Wars?

Zabraks 

One popular race on the show are the Zabraks, the same species as Darth Maul and a staple of The Clone Wars. The short, curved horns on their skulls give them a devilish aspect to a human viewer, making them a perfect, unsubtle choice for villain characters. That said, the Armorer’s helmet also features what look like Zabrak horns, although whether this is decoration or a necessity is unclear. 

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In terms of design, the Zabraks on the show are a mix of Original and Prequel sensibilities. Their red skin is drab—after all, these are background characters, not main villains like Darth Maul. Since they are mostly human, there is no reason why this type of alien couldn’t have been created with prosthetics in 1977—and the show imagines what the Prequel race would look like had Lucas put them in the Mos Eisley cantina in A New Hope. 

Bestiary

The Mudhorn of Arvala-7 looks a lot like the Reek, the one-horned, rhinoceros-like creature Obi-Wan and friends fought in the Geonosian arena at the beginning of the Clone Wars in Attack of the Clones. Its lumbering gait and the way it attacks with its swinging head are very similar. The arena battle is a high point in Episode II, perhaps because of the strength of the fight choreography and the way it evokes the creature features classic Star Wars drew from. With better and better CGI technology available to Lucasfilm, The Mandalorian essentially updated the reek for a new era.

Unlike the Mudhorn being a reek look-alike, the blurrgs Mando rides on Arvala-7 are straight from the Prequel era and is unchanged. This species of top-heavy reptilian bipeds has previously appeared in animated form in The Clone Wars. However, they aren’t strictly a Prequel creation, even though many of today’s fans know them from Filoni’s previous work. They first appeared in cartoon form in Ewoks: The Battle for Endor in 1985. 

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