#and the plot is just spinning its wheels until the LAST episode where everything is figured out in one go

[immaturityofthomasastruc]

IOTA Reviews: Evolution

Well, here we are again. Season 5, originally meant to be the last season of the show before the network decided to pull a Kim Possible and give it two more seasons. Although to be fair, this season will mark the end of an era, as Astruc won't be as involved in future seasons. Either way, this season has a lot to live up to, mainly the fact that it has to actually wrap up the plot after spinning its wheels for the past six years.

But for those who have just discovered my blog (in that case, welcome, stranger), or haven't caught up on the show yet, allow me to provide a brief recap of the fourth season. After being made Guardian thanks to Master Fu's incompetence, Marinette reveals her identity as Ladybug to Alya in order to have help dealing with the stress of her new responsibilities, eventually giving her the Fox Miraculous full-time. Of course, Cat Noir isn't happy that Ladybug is starting to rely on other heroes for help, and whines about it for the entire season because he's an idiot. On the villain front, Gabriel begins to use the newly repaired Peacock Miraculous with the Butterfly Miraculous, adopting the new alias Shadowmoth. Aside from the introductions of new heroes and a few minor identity reveals across the season, not much really happens until the season finale. After revealing she's working undercover when she supposedly stopped being a superhero to Nino, Alya loses her Miraculous because she's an idiot. Felix, Adrien's cousin and walking middle finger to anyone who was interested in one of the show's earlier drafts, manages to trick Ladybug into giving him the Dog Miraculous, which he uses to steal her yo-yo with a connection to where she stores her other Miraculous, but decides to trade all fifteen Miraculous to Gabriel in exchange for the Peacock Miraculous (which he may or may not be an artificial creation of) instead of beating his uncle up himself because he's an idiot. After nabbing all the Miraculous from Ladybug's yo-yo, Gabriel acts like this was his plan the entire time, even though he just lost again, because he's an idiot. And even though Ladybug was literally under the influence of an Akuma that made her take more risks, she gets blamed for everything going wrong because the writers want us to believe she's an idiot. The season ended on a cliffhanger where Cat Noir decided to actually help Ladybug without complaining because he actually has to do his job now.

So now that we're caught up, let's get into the first (chronologically the first) episode of Miraculous Ladybug's fifth season: Evolution

We start off right where the previous season ended, with Ladybug and Cat Noir staring down an illusion created by Hawkmoth, now calling himself Monarch. Not even the civilians really fear him anymore, as they just boo him while still supporting Ladybug, even though she's supposedly the reason why Monarch is like this in the first place. Sure, we could have had the public start to turn on Ladybug while she desperately tries to stop Monarch to signify how dire the situation is, but that would actually imply the writers know how to write serious story arcs.

Ladybug and Cat Noir easily get rid of the illusion and reaffirm their trust in each other.

Aw, isn't that sweet? Cat Noir spent most of the last season complaining about the other temp heroes, and now Ladybug has literally no other choice but to rely on him now. This really is one of the best superhero teams of all time.

We cut to Gabriel, wearing all the Miraculous (which are all now gray to remind the audience that he's evil), doing what he does best, monologuing to his wife's comatose body about how he stole most of the Miraculous from Ladybug, neglecting to bring up that Felix did most of the work for him. What's really weird about this scene is how it goes back and forth between Gabriel and the two heroes. When Gabriel says his victory is almost complete, Ladybug tells the public that Monarch's victory will never be complete. When Gabriel orders a concerned Sass to stay silent, Cat Noir tells the public not to be silenced. When Ladybug says that they won't be prisoners of Monarch, Gabriel makes it clear that the Kwamis are in fact, his prisoners/slaves. Is this meant to be funny? Is this meant to set up the conflict of this season? The tone is very vague here.

For once, Gabriel decides to do the obvious and use the Rabbit Miraculous to try and travel through time first, giving us a good look at his new form.

Monarch's design is... his design is... Oh my fucking God... It really looks like the animators have some kind of bet for who can make the worst unification design going on. The purple skin looks ridiculous, the vest has a really weird design, and I don't get why the Rabbit Miraculous' umbrella the and Turtle Miraculous' shield are purple while the other Miraculous are the same colors as when they're used by their normal wielders. I just... I just can't even begin to describe how utterly atrocious this form looks. And this is supposed to be the most menacing form Gabriel has taken to date! I had all kinds of jokes written as soon as I got a glimpse of this design, but wasn't sure which ones to go with. So I decided to put down all of them. Enjoy!

He looks like a fusion of Joe Biden and Grimace.

I've seen better designs from video game character creators... which were intentionally made to look ridiculous as a joke.

So are you supposed to be a supervillain or a cartoon character meant to teach kids about colors?

This is exactly why Pretty Patties didn't last too long.

Ivan Ooze called, he wants his look back.

So I take it you're a Poison-type Gym Leader?

Tonight, the role of Gabriel Agreste will be played by Henry the Octopus.

How did Gabriel even get his hands on some of Kaos' Petrified Darkness?

I think Gabriel heard about how cool Mayura looked, so he thought changing his skin color would help his new design. It really didn't help at all.

We've heard of Ursula's crazy sister, but how about Ursula's crazy brother?

Gabriel's Lotor cosplay could really use some work.

“Fun isn't something one considers when trying to get Ladybug and Cat Noir's Miraculous, but this does put a smile on my face.”

Is this a character from that Rainbow High show I've heard so much about?

“What the hell is that?” “Well it ain't a well designed character model!”

I'm pretty sure even the Ginyu Force has better fashion sense.

This is a weird sequel to Home.

Gabriel didn't take his rejection from the Abomination Coven well.

You know, when I started watching Star Trek: Prodigy, I was curious to learn just what Dal's species was like. I really should have been more specific there.

So would this be considered blackface among Sinestro's people?

Man, Ebon really let himself go since Static Shock ended.

🎵I love you, you love me, how did this get on TV?🎵

Oh hey, here's something Monarch and my dad's Captain America costume have in common: The masks are both made of duct tape.

I'm starting to think the consequences for using multiple Miraculous at once are just really poor-looking suits.

See, this is what happens when you eat stuff without Willy Wonka's permission.

“Uh, Pim? What the... uh.. what the hell are you doing?” “Don't worry, Charlie. All I have to do is get Ladybug and Cat Noir's Miraculous, and our latest client will have a big smile on his face!”

Man, has Gabriel really gotten this many bruises from all the losses he's had?

I remember when the suit designs for Kamen Rider Revice were first revealed, I thought the color scheme looked ridiculous, but I slowly warmed up to it. I don't think that's going to apply to Monarch's design here.

Gabriel, your new form, woof!

I didn't know Gabriel was really a Moonshadow Elf. It certainly explains his poor impression of a human.

Who wore it better: Gabriel, or Percy in that one episode of Thomas the Tank Engine where his face was covered in jam?

Man, I know people have problems with Lightyear's animation, but I didn't know their version of Evil Emperor Zurg looked this bad.

You know, some historians say that the reason Gothic churches like the Notre Dame Cathedral had stained glass windows was to emphasize the beauty of these places and to teach the illiterate about stories from the Bible. What kind of message is Gabriel is trying to get across with the stained glass pattern on his vest?

Feel free to pick your favorites from this list, or even make your own. Although, let's be honest here. The fact that Gabriel thought he would look badass in this form is funnier than anything else we could come up with.

Just as Ladybug starts to tell Cat Noir about how she lost the other Miraculous, Monarch conveniently stumbles through a time portal, with another version of her and Cat Noir in tow, the latter unified with another Miraculous. Bunnix, the wielder of the Rabbit Miraculous in the future, AKA, Marinette's friend, Alix, comes to warn the present day Ladybug and Cat Noir about Monarch planning to screw up the timeline more than the average episode of Kamen Rider Zi-O. Seriously, Monarch didn't even think about being subtle and just barged into the events of Season 1's “Lady Wifi” where the titular Akuma had Ladybug at her mercy. He didn't even think to use the Fox Miraculous to disguise himself as someone who could have tricked Ladybug into a false sense of security. For a butterfly-themed villain, Monarch really doesn't get the idea of the Butterfly Effect. As for the how the present day Ladybug and Hawkmoth factor into this? Don't worry, the writers didn't care enough to add that in, not even a throwaway line expressing their confusion.

Having the power of time travel on their side, Bunnix obviously takes Ladybug and Cat Noir back to where Felix was about to steal Ladybug's yo-yo and make sure Gabriel never gets the Miraculous—I mean, she takes them to stop Monarch from stealing back Ladybug's Miraculous instead. Ladybug ties up Monarch with her yo-yo, and the three heroes take back every Miraculous in Monarch's possession—I mean, they just explain how Bunnix's powers work and say they're going to take back their Miraculous... which gives Monarch the opportunity to unify with the Bee, Fox, and Turtle Miraculous so he can escape, distract the heroes with an army of Mirage copies, stun Bunnix with Venom and trap her in a Shelter. Cat Noir uses his Cataclysm to break through the barrier while Ladybug ties up Monarch again, but Monarch uses the Dragon Miraculous' Wind Dragon power to escape again.

This scene is supposed to convey how powerful Monarch is with seventeen Miraculous, but when the heroes had a lot of chances to undo all of this with time travel and nab all the Miraculous obviously on display on Monarch's jacket, it makes them look more inept than anything else. I can't believe I have to use this clip again, but...

Seeing how Future Alix isn't able to travel through time on account of having an unhealthy amount of magical neurotoxin flowing through her bloodstream at the moment, Cat Noir takes the other Rabbit Miraculous that Monarch failed to steal for some reason and offers it to Ladybug.

I'm... very mixed on this scene. On the one hand, as much as I hated Ladybug being forced to admit she screwed up through no fault of her own, I do like the idea of her actually trusting Cat Noir with something as big as this. This, as well as their partnership in general this episode, is a sign the two are far more in sync and bickering less than last season. On the other hand, it's pretty out of left field for Ladybug to trust Cat Noir with the Rabbit Miraculous when she herself was shown to use it no problem last season. Out of the three times Cat Noir has used other Miraculous (Reflekdoll, Desperada, Miracle Queen), he was only able to use it right one time, and that was a unification. 

Yes, Snake Noir was able to turn the tide of the battle in “Miracle Queen”, but it wasn't really this triumphant moment of the pinnacle of a character arc for him. Because there was so much focus on the conflict with Hawkmoth and Miracle Queen as a whole, it just kind of... happened, and didn't really get acknowledged much. It's kind of weird how the first step Ladybug is taking to trusting Cat Noir with more responsibilities is to trust Cat Noir with the most dangerous individual Miraculous during a tense situation when she could have easily used it herself. It's a weird time to give him a new power like this when she could unify with the Rabbit herself, and after the conflict ends, then she could start to train Cat Noir to use other Miraculous like the Rabbit.

As for Rabbit Noir, Cat Noir's new form unifying with the Rabbit Miraculous... THANK GOD WE HAVE A UNIFICATION DESIGN THAT DOESN'T SUCK! It's simple, but it honestly looks amazing. The neon blue lights along Cat Noir's suit go perfectly with it, and it evokes a futuristic aesthetic, and those, along with the rabbit ears and cottontail, don't feel as intrusive as other unification designs which try to blend two hero suits together. This is what most of the unifications should be like: simple aesthetic changes that don't compromise the design of the suit while still reminding the audience that another Miraculous' power is being used. In general, Rabbit Noir does a good job with these powers and understands the severity of the situation, taking the conflict with Monarch very seriously. He's honestly the highlight of the episode for me.

Rabbit Noir uses Burrow to follow Monarch to the events of the Season 2 episode, “Riposte”, specifically, the scene where Cat Noir is helplessly watching Ladybug duel the titular Akuma. Monarch's plans to ambush the past Cat Noir are thwarted by the writers FINALLY remembering the danger that comes with using multiple Miraculous, giving the present day Ladybug and Rabbit Noir the chance to catch up. And once again, the present day Ladybug, Cat Noir, Riposte, and Hawkmoth are too oblivious to what's going on when he's right behind them. Monarch attempts to head to the events of “Heroes' Day” and ambush Ladybug and Cat Noir when they try to recover after escaping from the Scarlet Army, but the present day Ladybug and Rabbit Noir knock him out and through the events of “Animan” where Alya and Nino are kissing, and the two lovebirds can't even hear all the commotion going on behind them. Back at the events of the first act of this episode, Ladybug and Cat Noir notice the chase from earlier was actually the chase they were about to take part in.

Monarch travels to an unknown time, and even though he's visibly exhausted, Ladybug and Rabbit Noir once again fail to think beating the crap out of him right then and there is a viable option, thinking that if they tell him to return the Miraculous, he'll just listen. Monarch unifies with the Dog Miraculous in an attempt to tag the Rabbit Miraculous he has with the ball, intending to use Fetch if they ever get it, but because he's currently using seven Miraculous at the same time, his body starts to collapse.

HOW THE HELL DO YOU NOT KNOW THAT?! You were literally told about the dangers of using multiple Miraculous all the way back in “Kwamibuster”! Did the writers seriously forget that happened, and that this kind of negative reaction is a brand-new rule they just made up?!

Okay, whatever. Monarch is clearly unconscious, he's exhausted from the long chase through time, and his body is probably a wreck after using seven Miraculous, so the other Miraculous are ripe for the taking... How do they screw it up now? Well, my dear reader, rather than take the chance to steal as many Miraculous as possible, they only get back the Rabbit until they're distracted by the past versions of Master Fu and Marianne being targeted by the vague Nazi-esque military, revealing that they're currently in the prologue of “Backwarder”, so Monarch has the chance to use Fetch to get the Rabbit Miraculous back and escape.

Okay, I gave Ladybug flak for blaming herself during the Season 4 when nobody could have predicted Felix's plan, but this entire episode has been nothing but her and Cat Noir screwing up and failing to take back the Miraculous Monarch is wearing when he's gotten weaker and weaker. They're clearly trying to establish how powerful he is, but he's only getting this far because the plot is forcing Ladybug to not do the simple thing and take back the damn Miraculous. Hell, Cat Noir points out the obvious fact that even if he can use Fetch to get back the Rabbit Miraculous, Monarch will eventually detransform, yet this episode still insists that this buffoon I spent two pages making jokes about is untouchable right now.

Ladybug finally wises up and uses her Lucky Charm and gets a box meant to contain a single Miraculous in. This was the same Lucky Charm that Ladybug got during “Heroes' Day”, with the plan being to peacefully get Hawkmoth's Miraculous back. While thinking about what she can do, Ladybug's vision centers on the Miracle Box the past version of Master Fu has, and gets an idea.

Meanwhile, Monarch accidentally travels to the events of “Reverser”, right after Ladybug and Cat Noir took a taxi to the Eiffel Tower while under the effects of the titular Akuma. Of course, even though the taxi driver sees Monarch in his mirror, he just ignores him. Monarch tries to attack them, but is forced to retreat, with Sass revealing that because none of the Kwamis have gotten food through the Monarch's use of their powers, so Gabriel is forced to travel to right before he started his little mission through time by walking up to Nathalie, who was on the phone with him while still on the Startrain with Lila and Felix, demanding she give him food for the Kwamis. Yeah, that's the reason why Gabriel is having a hard time, because the writers really forgot the rule they established in “Kwamibuster”.

Ladybug and Rabbit Noir walk up to the past version of Master Fu right after he and Marianne went their separate ways and explains what happened, saying she needs to borrow a Miraculous. Even though the whole point of “Backwarder”'s opening was to show how paranoid he was to use the Miraculous in such a dire situation, Master Fu just goes along with this and lets her have the Dog Miraculous on the condition that she return it to him so the timeline doesn't get more screwed up than it already is.

Okay, so... doesn't this mean that Ladybug and Cat Noir don't have to worry about not having any other Miraculous now? Yeah, they still need to get back the Miraculous from Monarch, but if the timeline wasn't bashed over the head after introducing themselves to Master Fu before they actually meet him in their time, and he's completely fine with letting them borrow some of the Miraculous, why the hell can't they just do that now? If they need the help of someone like Carapace or Vesperia, all either of them has to do now is use the Rabbit Miraculous, travel back to a period in time where Master Fu wasn't busy, ask for a Miraculous, get back to the present, beat whatever threat they're facing with the help of said Miraculous, travel back to the past and give Master Fu back the Miraculous, all while history mostly remains intact. If the original temp hero system where Ladybug had to haul ass to get a Miraculous from Master Fu worked before the Season 3 finale, why can't they just go back to doing that again, but with time travel? You could even argue that it's more efficient this way because they can travel back and forth from the Akuma fight to wherever they decide to get Master Fu's help. It's honestly unbelievable. The entire premise of this season is that Ladybug and Cat Noir are fighting an uphill battle since they don't have any of the temp heroes on their side, and how is the first episode of Season 5 going to be resolved? By using another temp hero for help. Seriously. The writers really didn't think this through, did they?

Back in the present day Louvre, Alix and her father are talking until Ladybug and Rabbit Noir show up, the former handing her the Dog Miraculous. Because screw Sabrina, am I right? The difference is that once Alix gets the Rabbit Miraculous back, it's full-time, and she'll have to leave her friends and family to watch over the timeline until Monarch is defeated. Alix's father is surprisingly cool with all this because it turns out future Alix wrote letters to him to make sure he wouldn't be worried. After a quick embrace between the two Kubdels, Alix takes the Dog Miraculous and transforms into Canigirl.

Compared to Miss Hound and Flairmidable, I think Canigirl's design is a nice step up. There's a good balance of black, white, and brown, and it's a nice touch that her hair looks like Bunnix's, which makes sense given how eager Alix is to get the Rabbit. The only major problem I have is the beret. It honestly looks like it's about to fall off at any second.

Rabbit Noir opens a Burrow to the past for Canigirl to tag Monarch's Rabbit Miraculous with before Monarch himself can do it. Ladybug leaves the Miraculous box in the burrow while the three heroes decide to travel to the frozen Eiffel Tower in the climax of “Heroes' Day”. While all the Kwamis are recharging, Nathalie brings up the obvious fact that Gabriel could easily travel to before Emilie used the damaged Peacock Miraculous. Gabriel transforms into Monarch again and plans to travel back to the night he gave Emilie the Peacock Miraculous in the first place and give his past self a flash drive with the information needed to repair it. However, he gets distracted by the box Ladybug left in the Burrow.

This is supposed to be framed as a tough decision, but it really isn't. He's just trying to drop a flash drive onto the picnic blanket where his past self was eating at. Like with Ladybug, the only reason he's hesitating is to make sure we get a full season. Failing to realize fixing the Peacock Miraculous means Ladybug and Cat Noir won't “ruin” his future, he travels to when Ladybug first used the Lucky Charm, planning to ambush their past selves yet again, only for Canigirl to use Fetch and get back his Rabbit Miraculous, immediately unifying the two into... Canix? Bunnigirl? I don't think she ever got a name.

Whatever the case may be, the suit design is okay. It's pretty much the Canigirl model with bits of Bunnix's color scheme, but like with Rabbit Noir, the simplicity makes it work.

Monarch tries to get back the Rabbit Miraculous, but Canigirl/Bunnix uses Burrow to escape, and even though he collapses at the realization he screwed up his one chance to save Emilie via time travel, Ladybug and Rabbit Noir STILL don't think to take any of Monarch's damn Miraculous while he's distracted. They aren't even distracted by outside circumstances. They willingly leave Monarch in the past and don't think about how he could screw up the future with his knowledge. Yeah, they bring him back to the present in the next scene, but it's only because he doesn't move from the spot they left him in.

Ladybug uses Miraculous Ladybug to heal Future Alix, Rabbit Noir gives her back the future Rabbit Miraculous for her to use to transform into Bunnix again, while Present Alix plans to give Ladybug back the present day Rabbit Miraculous, but Ladybug tells her it's time, so she transforms into Bunnix herself.

Like her future counterpart, Past Bunnix's design is... decent. It's got a nice balance of blue and white, but it doesn't really feel like something Alix would wear. Both versions of Alix are snarky athletes with a lot of spunk, so seeing this form-fitting jumpsuit on either of them is kind of jarring. I still like both designs, but I still think they should have been changed a little to match their personalities more, because Canigirl looks more like it fits Alix’s personality.

Present Bunnix gives Past Master Fu the Dog Miraculous back, while Future Bunnix brings Monarch back to the present. Ladybug and Cat Noir capture him again, and for the fifth time this episode, fail to consider taking any of his Miraculous in favor of once again telling him what they're going to do, giving him the chance to escape via Wind Dragon again. Ladybug isn't happy at her own incompetence costing them the victory.

AT NO COST, DUMBASS! YOU CAN TRAVEL THROUGH TIME NOW! WHAT'S STOPPING EITHER OF YOU FROM PREVENTING MONARCH FROM GETTING ANY OF THE MIRACULOUS IN THE FIRST PLACE?!

So, surprise, surprise, the last scene of the episode has Gabriel talking to Emilie's body about how he failed, and how it's Ladybug's fault he couldn't drop a flash drive onto a picnic blanket. Even Nathalie has it up to here with the plot—I mean, Gabriel's behavior.

Okay, while this isn't nearly as bad as the speech Plagg gave chewing Ladybug out in “Kuro Neko”, this still has a lot of problems. While Nathalie has every right to call out Gabriel for his stupidity, the show never made it clear that his problem was his obsession with beating Ladybug and Cat Noir. If anything, it's his determination to save Emilie, no matter how many innocent lives have to go. Pretty much every focus episode he gets highlights his dedication to his wife (Queen Wasp, Cat Blanc, Gabriel Agreste, Ephemeral, Risk), not his Captain Ahab/Moby Dick relationship with Ladybug and Cat Noir. If this was meant to set up more of a decline showing how his tenure as a supervillain had slowly been driving him insane, the show really didn't do a good job at it.

Also, it's pretty rich that Nathalie is the one calling out Gabriel for doing stupid things in the name of achieving his goal when she's just as bad. The whole reason she even needs those robotic leg braces in the first place is because she kept using the damaged Peacock Miraculous even when Gabriel told her not to. In general, she's one of the only people willing to help him without a question She's really not the bigger person this scene is making her out to be. If this partnership was more like a villainous version of Oliver and Diggle's relationship in Arrow, where the latter only went along with some of the former's schemes so he could act as more of an advisor and make sure he didn't do anything too stupid, this scene would work a lot more.

So Nathalie cuts off all ties with Gabriel out of frustraton, and let's hope unlike Kagami, this moment sticks. However, just as she breaks into a coughing fit, Lila approaches her. You remember how she was at the end of the previous season, right? She saw Nathalie starting to collapse and gave a devious grin, hinting she had something planned.

What did this moment end up leading to?

That. Just... that. Lila just offers to help Nathalie back to her seat, and that's her only line in the episode. What a payoff, am I right?

What was even the point of setting Lila up like that at the end of “Strikeback” just to have that amount to nothing? Was this even Lila genuinely showing concern for Nathalie's health, or is this just part of a plan she has? If it was the latter, kudos to the writers for actually writing a convincing lie for Lila.

After that, the episode ends with Gabriel letting out the wimpiest scream you will ever hear in your life. He's clearly supposed to be angry at Ladybug because he refuses to take responsibility for his actions (like father, like son, am I right?), but the scream just sounds so whiny, it's impossible to take seriously. The best way I can describe it is like that one McBain clip from The Simpsons where he screams someone's name, but even McBain manages to have more dignity there, and it's a parody of these kind of dramatic screams.

This episode was pretty mediocre, but as a season premiere? Honestly not that bad. The writers do a decent job setting up how unpredictable Monarch is now that he has more than a dozen Miraculous while also explaining why he can't head into the field and needs to go back to sending Akumas to fight Ladybug and Cat Noir. Granted, not once is the Rooster Miraculous' god-like power mentioned, even after Gabriel loses the Rabbit, but it still shows off all the powers he has now. As flawed as the execution was, the decision to remove the Rabbit Miraculous from the plot first was a great idea, as it answered the obvious question of why Gabriel couldn't time travel to save Emilie after failing to do so. Ladybug and Cat Noir are also shown to be on more equal terms now, which is good. Granted, the road to get there in Season 4 was bumpy as all hell, but hey, hopefully there's going to be less bickering between the two.

As for the episode itself, it's still a very convoluted mess. The idea of a race through time to stop Monarch sounds cool, and the action here is very fluid, but a big part of why the conflict fell flat was because both Ladybug and Monarch didn't think to use their respective Rabbit Miraculous to travel and undo the events that put them in their current predicament. The circumstances behind how Ladybug lost all of the extra Miraculous aren't mentioned at all, which is really weird, considering this takes place right after where Season 4 ended. Felix isn't mentioned once, and it's not explained why Nathalie and Lila are still on the Startrain if Gabriel canceled the commercial Lila and Adrien were going to be a part of. Hell, where was Alya in all of this? I get she isn't a key player, but you would think Ladybug would at least mention she's still in danger after her cover was blown in the previous episode.

So yeah, as far as this episode goes, it's passable at best, but not the worst way to start the fifth season. I'd say it's somewhere between “The Collector” and “Truth”, though it's closer to the latter than the former. And before I wrap this review up, I'm going to introduce a new segment on these reviews: The Biggest Idiot Award.

This is something that internet reviewer Phelous did during his retrospective on Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation, where at the end of every episode, he would judge which character was the biggest idiot of the episode based on their actions, and I figured that since this show is no stranger to characters acting like morons, this formula could easily apply to this season. Let's just hope I don't get sued for doing this gag. For now...

THE BIGGEST IDIOT OF THE EPISODE IS: LADYBUG

I get Ladybug was still shocked from everything that happened during the previous two episodes, but she and Cat Noir had five opportunities to at least try and take some of Monarch's Miraculous. Instead, they kept telling him that they won and that they were going to take his Miraculous and gave him plenty of chances to escape. It's kind of hard to take the show's claims that Monarch is this super powerful villain when the only reason he got as far as he did while suffering from the drawbacks of his new form was because Ladybug failed to do the simple thing and nab any of the Miraculous he had all over his body.

#immaturity of thomas astruc #iota #miraculous ladybug #miraculous ladybug salt #ml salt #marinette dupain cheng #ladybug #adrien agreste #cat noir #chat noir #alix kubdel #canigirl #bunnix #bunnyx #gabriel agreste #hawkmoth #hawk moth #monarch #monarch miraculous #nathalie sancoeur #mayura #lila rossi

[theriverdalereviewer]

the way society would just come together every tuesday night to just hate on pretty little liars it was so beautiful

#I don’t know why so many people live tweeted pretty little liars but there was a certain point where it was all anyone could talk about #and then that poor show let us all down with those terrible reveals and the way they dragged the plot and just lack of answers #pretty little liars really is one of the worst shows ever GODDD #and the reason why is cause it started off so strong #like it had great potential and it followed through with it in the first 2 seasons #and then in season 3 they just started adding plots and characters and literally nothing for s3 and 4 mattered #you could literally skip those seasons cause no progress was made whatsoever #and then the cece reveal oh that was just disappointing #like the disappointment WHEN I DIDN’T EVEN RECOGNIZE A’S FACE??? #not to mention how transphobic it was and all of the plot holes #and then we’re back to TWO MORE SEASONS OF QUESTIONING WHO A IS #and the plot is just spinning its wheels until the LAST episode where everything is figured out in one go #and it turns out to be... spencer’s british fucking evil twin #like who the hell came up with that idea #and why #everyone was so angry when I tell you the whole world was live tweeting that episode #and yet pretty little liars was so successful and it feels like freeform can’t move on from it #but judging from the descriptions of cruel summer this show is actually more mature and better written so im curious!

[fly-pow-bye]

DuckTales 2017 - “The Lost Cargo of Kit Cloudkicker!”

Story by: Francisco Angones, Madison Bateman, Colleen Evanson, Christian Magalhaes, Ben Siemon, Bob Snow, Tanner Johnson

Written by: Colleen Evanson & Tanner Johnson

Storyboard by: Vince Aparo, Kristen Gish, Victoria Harris, Ben Holm

Directed by: Tanner Johnson

Spin it!

Before doing research when Don Karnage first came to the series, my knowledge of TaleSpin began and ended with me having that awful Genesis game as a kid. I do know that the show took place long before the modern day, which is when DuckTales 2017 takes place, and it appears that the events of TaleSpin in this universe still goes with that. Why do I know this? Because this episode does not start with Baloo piloting the Sea Duck...

...but a grown-up version of his surrogate son, Kit Cloudkicker, who is now running Higher for Hire by himself. However, while things have definitely changed for Higher for Hire since Baloo's apparent retirement, mostly for the worse, some things remained the same. Namely, he is still being tormented by the nefarious Sky Pirate of the Skies, the corsair of the air, Don Karnage. Or Dan, as he calls him much to Karnage's annoyance. The good news is that Kit is now an ace pilot who can easily fight off sky pirates like he did back in the glory days. The bad news is that he can still do what he did as a kid with a giant cargo plane. He even says it, and with most of his dialogue in this cold opening suggests this is going to make him look foolish.

Even worse news for the business is that the fragile box addressed to F.O.W.L. is just sitting in the center of the cargo bay with no security whatsoever aside from a caged chicken and a goat. After rocking back and forth due to Kit fending off against Don Karnage, the box breaks to reveal a rock with a blue lion carved into it, and when that aforementioned chicken and goat touch it, they both turn into some sort of chicken-goat hybrid that Kit has to fight. How is able to fight this goat-chicken while piloting the plane? Simple: he puts a crowbar in the steering wheel, just like Baloo did in the original. Here, the idea is played as silly as it would be to someone who had never heard of TaleSpin. It is doubly sad when one considers Kit treats this crowbar like his only crewmate, because it is.

I do like that this first scene introduces this show's version of Kit very well. He's obviously an incompetent pilot, and not one that is lovably incompetent like Launchpad, and this incompetence is pretty well known among his customers judging by this line:

Kit Cloudkicker: Who's the terrible pilot now, everyone?

He's surprisingly cheerful about that, which, again, makes him look foolish. Despite all of this foolishness, he does appear to still be competent at coming up with plans to defeat his enemies, whether they be sky pirates or mutated goat-chickens, even if those plans end up putting the cargo he was supposed to deliver into the water. This includes that lion stone. He looks onto this and says "my bad" in a way that shows that his business is definitely going to be in the red in a few years.

A few years later, we see that Della is taking Huey, Dewey, and nobody else to Cape Suzette, and she's even allowing Dewey to fly the plane along with her. It is easy to see why Huey is extra prepared even if Dewey is doing surprisingly well, as Huey is not only using extra seatbelts, but having a Safety Boy helmet as well. Huey's also prepared with the knowledge of that Lion Stone we saw go into the ocean in the previous scene, which, you guessed it, is a Missing Mystery of Isabella Finch. Specifically, it's the Stone Of What Was, which was described with the mysterious phrase "what was once two becomes a-new." Huey does not seem to figure that one out. The good news is that it was found, but the bad news was that it was found by F.O.W.L, but the better news is that they lost it, but the worse news was that the stone was made of potassium benzoate. Okay, that last one was made up. There's a few throwaway lines to fill in how Huey even knows F.O.W.L. had the stone in other scenes, and those plot holes are really not that important.

After nearing their destination, which we learn was based on a clue from an intercepted F.O.W.L. transmission from a throwaway line from Huey slightly later in the episode, Della has the bright idea to let Dewey land the plane. Letting a little kid fly a plane? Not a good idea. Letting a little kid land a plane? Also not a good idea. Telling that little kid that there's nothing wrong with a basic landing? May be a good idea in the off chance it could even come up, but definitely not a good idea when it comes to Dewey. To Della's credit, at least it was Huey that did that last one.

After the crash landing, and not a Launchpad-type one, they arrive at Higher for Hire, which shows an advertisement showing its legacy playing on a television screen with plenty of TaleSpin references. This includes one shot of Baloo and another shot of a younger Kit and Molly Cunningham riding on an airfoil done in the style of the original show. This is great for people who were not aware of TaleSpin, which the target audience for this show may not have seen unless they have Disney Plus. Kit, still shown to be the sole employee years later, assumes anyone knocking at his door is the bank demanding payments, but he's delighted to see one of his former classmates at pilot school. He constantly has to tell Della that he is an ace pilot now. Most likely, he's telling that to himself too, as we'll see in the next scene. He at least has reason to believe he's a better pilot than his former classmate, as it doesn't look like her plane is in good shape. Della could have explained that this state was because she let one of her less competent sons fly the plane...and that would have probably made her case about a thousand times worse.

That television commercial also inspires a sort of B-plot that also ties into Kit's character arc, as seeing young Kit cloudkicking makes him want to do it, too. Despite his failure at even mimicking it, Kit is happy to see a fellow cloudkicker and would be glad to teach him the ropes. Della is not too excited by this prospect, but ends up allowing it, because she doesn't want to be the mother that does not support her kid. They aboard the plane, which ends up being a very bumpy ride, and Della goes to investigate, only to find that Kit was in the bathroom, letting his only other employee, the crowbar, be his substitute.

Kit tries to stop what he calls "mutiny" by saying that he's the only one who knows where the cargo could be, only for the crowbar to slip and reveal that he's been keeping a map in the glove compartment. The map actually has some Xs and a circle on it, which suggests that Kit may have been trying to correct his previous mistake, but either never getting the motivation to go through with it, or, more likely, he isn't competent enough to deal with whatever is on that island he circled. Maybe I am thinking about this too hard, but I would say it would be fitting.

Kit decides to distract everyone from him getting kicked out of the pilot's chair by giving Dewey his airfoil and the cloudkicking rope for him to hold onto, and a shot of Dewey's excitement instantly cuts to Dewey screaming for his life, holding on for dear life as he can't seem to. The parallel between a former cloudkicking guy who isn't really a good pilot, and a kid who can actually fly a plane who isn't really a good cloudkicker is easy to notice, and the episode plays around with this. For starters, similar to Kit and his not-so-ace piloting skills, Dewey also tries his hardest to hide how terrified he is at the cool new thing he wanted to do. Of course, it is very possible that Kit is acting the way he does because he's in a certain someone's shadow. Dewey just does it because that's how he is.

Despite that difference, this parallel is enhanced even more when they get attacked by the Sky Pirates, and Kit has to intervene and show that he, at the very least, can get Dewey out of the danger that Kit himself has caused. And yes, Don Karnage's Sky Pirates are now working for the very organization that they indirectly harmed years before by attacking that cargo plane and making them lose that precious stone. That does not come up at all, not even as a throwaway line. What does come up is that Don Karnage is delighted that one of the people after the Stone of What Was is his new arch-nemesis, Dewey. It's a long story that started all the way back in Don's debut in Season 1. It's neat to see these old references. After they all make a landing on the circled island, some more safe than others, they get to meet the wildlife of the island. Let's say there's a good reason why this island was circled, and why Kit could not handle it by himself.

It's a rhino and a gorilla crossed together, either a rhinosorilla or a gorillanoceros depending on whether one likes Dewey's word for it or Kit's. Clearly, this is the result of the Stone of What Was...what was...Wuz...Wuzzles! Admittedly, the Wuzzle was also not a show I grew up with, though that could be because it lasted only a season. In fact, I just now notice the lion carved into the Stone of What Was happens to have bumblebee wings. These animals are a little more realistic here, as they don't talk, and they're not cute or fuzzy like the original Wuzzles were. In fact, the character this gorillanoceros was based on was actually a monkey-rhino. There is a difference, even if they are very similar species genetically!

They eventually get to the stone, only to see that Don Karnage and his crewmates have found the stone first. Hiding, they see Don Karnage command Hardtack Hattie, his strongest crewmember, to lift it up. Unfortunately, she happened to lift it as a bunch of ants were crawling on it, turning her into an ant centaur to her and Don's horror. Despite that horror, and fitting for someone who just wants to finish his mission, he tries to get some of the other crew members to lift it...

...leading to these freaks of nature, which is what Don Karnage actually calls them. DuckTales 2017 isn't too afraid to show the horrifying nature of some of these fusions, continuing with the theme of how they portray the Wuzzles as these monstrous beasts. I would not call it nightmare fuel, but I would not be surprised if it already has an entry on TV Tropes. What makes these even worse is that there is no way for these guys to revert back to their normal forms. There's no "if the stone feels like it, it'll separate you" clause here, that snail-dog is permanently a snail-dog, and that pirate will have to live with a hand for his head for the rest of his days. These guys just end up getting forgotten.

Della tries to sneak by climbing around this horrific scene, only to be caught on some sort of sticky rock. Dewey decides to try to save her with his airfoil-riding skills, much to Huey's disagreement. Dewey's got to Dewey it! Oh yeah, I forgot, Dewey ends up doing "Dewey" puns for most of the episode. It's not funny, but I have a feeling it wasn't meant to be funny, and it's certainly not funny when he ends up falling down near the pirates. Face to face with someone who considers him his arch-nemesis, he tries to save face when he notices Kit stole Don Karnage's plane...which he immediately crashes into a rock.

As for the rock that Della was stuck on, it turns out it wasn't a rock. Nor was it a rock lobster, either!

It hatches into another classic Wuzzle character: the Butterbear, or the Bear-terfly as Don Karnage calls it. They never quite match the original Wuzzle names, and it is not like they would know them. There is one part of this where Kit and the Bear-terfly cross paths, and it almost seems like they're going to bond because they happen to be a similar race. Then, it instantly cuts to Kit running away from a rampaging Bear-terfly. How are they going to continue from this? Have the Bear-terfly get caught in some rope, and have it run in a way that ties up the stone, and have it fly away with Della still on its back. It is a bit convoluted, but it works in the end as it is a way for the stone to travel without it mutating even more people. Whether any of these fusions can use the stone to combine into other fusions is left unanswered, which is for the best.

One may notice I didn't talk a whole lot about what Huey did, and that's because he really didn't do much for most of the episode. He delivered the exposition, he tries to stop Dewey from "Deweying it", and that's about it. However, he does have a major part in the episode: he gets to take part in the scene where the two bumbling fools realize what they have been doing was foolish. Namely, they needed to realize that they should do what they were good at: Kit should cloudkick and Dewey should fly the plane. It is a good lesson that had some good buildup. Sure, they were pretty much failing throughout the episode, but there were scenes where they were surprisingly competent, like the scene where Kit rescued Dewey with his Cloudkicking skills, and Dewey managing to fly the plane in the beginning before he decided to "Dewey it" and crash it. It does not come out of nowhere. Speaking of which...

Dewey: Okay, let's do it.

What would be an unremarkable line actually works really well here, mainly because he decided not to make a pun on his own name, which he did way too much. It does show development, as if this fun-loving showboater is actually learning his lesson throughout the episode. I expect this from DuckTales 2017, and there are certainly cartoons where I don't.

Fittingly for a TaleSpin episode, this all ends with a flight chase scene. No, not the usual DuckTales 2017 fight scene, though there are some fights here and there, especially with Kit and Don Karnage, armed with that crow bar and sword, respectively. The scene actually manages to make Dewey keeping the plane steady an action packed scene, as he has to save his Mom while trying not to let the stone fall into the ocean and make an octopus-fish-squid hybrid that would rival the Eldritch horrors. Again, whether any of these fusions can use the stone to combine into other fusions is left unanswered, which is for the best.

It's not really a spoiler to say the good guys win, but I will say the TaleSpin part of the plot is very much all tied up in the end. If Kit only makes a minor appearance in the finale, and I'd actually be surprised if he didn't appear considering how packed the clips were, it would be completely understandable. Also, there's a cliffhanger and we finally get to hear Don Karnage sing another song, if a very short one. It seemed like he just couldn't do it in his other appearances.

How does it stack up?

With the genius way of using not just one Disney show's legacy, but another Disney show as well, there's a lot to love about this episode, though I wouldn't say it's among the absolute best. Four Scrooges.

Next, Scrooge gets indicted.

← Beaks In The Shell! 🦆 The Life and Crimes of Scrooge McDuck! →

#fpb dt 2017 #ducktales 2017 #ducktales #disney #fpb reviews

[destiny-smasher]

I used to be close friends with one of the composers for Steven Universe. I watched them rise from a YouTube remixer living in a cramped bedroom in a shared apartment with nothing but a mattress on the floor and a keyboard beside it to owning a house, happily married with a whole backyard garden and a cat because they found success working on one of the biggest cartoon shows I’ve known. But they broke off that friendship earlier this year and it’s made my biased love for Steven Universe become very difficult to grasp with. Understanding how and why we weren’t friends anymore was likewise difficult to grasp, even after hours of us trying to hash things out and resolve it. And while we DID resolve things amicably (I hope) and peacefully, it wasn’t until Steven Universe: The Movie that I was really able to feel like I could see the forest from the trees and ‘get’ what happened. This will be a kind of review of the movie, but mostly it became more of a personal ramble relating my real life experiences with Aivi to those of characters within SU, especially the antagonist of the Movie. This is lifted from this Twitter thread, so it was originally written stream of consciousness and I’m sharing it here to keep it more readable and archived. This is a bit of a read so tucking it behind a ‘read more.’

--

"You keep on turning pages for people who don't care about you And still it takes you ages to see that no one's there Everyone's gone on without you"

Time to finally talk about the #StevenUniverse Movie. Strap in 'cause this gon' get personal.

It should go without saying BUT I am gonna be talking about the movie! Dunno how in detail per se but I can't properly say what I wanna say without diving into some of the important plotty stuff. So yea.

Don't read this thread if ya don't want #spoilers #sumovie 

First off, I wanna talk about what this movie does well. Going in, I had heard it was framed like a musical. And I wasn't sure how I felt about that idea, though it wasn't surprising. After all, the 'musical' style episodes tend to resonate quite a lot. 

I think they work great when it's one song in a 10 minute episode, but an hour and a half of songs? I wasn't sure how well that would go. Turns out, pretty well. This is due to many factors but primarily the variety of song styles and art styles used throughout. Basically every scene has a primary song that drives it home, and basically all of them have a different genre/tone as well as visual presentation style. A lot of work went into getting it all to work together and feel cohesive. TBH for me personally the main highlight of the movie was honestly the animation. Average TV goers might just see "yup sure looks like a cartoon" but on the whole, on average, the movie is CLEARLY animated and framed with much more dynamism and detail than the majority of SU. Getting to see these characters we've gotten to know over the past few years a couple years in the future, generally at peace with things, but animated with more detail than ever, THAT is the true highlight of the film for me. Naturally, there was a lot of bits of comedy, often relying on knowledge of what the characters have been through, and I felt a lot of bittersweet smiles throughout as this felt like a good send off for Steven and his Space Moms. It managed to work in cameos from basically everyone you'd expect, some of which...didn't work out as well as others (specifically, the Diamonds bookending the movie was a bit forced and weird IMO but they ARE important to the lore even if I find them boring tbh) It was nice getting to 'catch up' with everyone, and the plot itself uses a generic 'gotta save the world again' thing (bleh) in a creative way, at least -- it all becomes an excuse to "re-live" the four primary heroes' stories through song. Cool enough. Something the movie inadvertently highlights, however, is the fact that SU as a series really started spinning its wheels a lot for its second half, in particular. Much has been said about how and why and why or not this doesn't matter, etc. etc. I was just along for the ride. I've repeatedly expressed my personal bias in the series' favor for a long time, and now? I kinda don't really have that personal bias anymore. I still love the show, I still think it's one of the best cartoons I've ever seen. But those rose-tinted glasses are off now. Taking said glasses off and actually listening to and looking up what critics of the show had to say kind of unearthed a bunch of things I had kept sweeping under the rug for the sake of personal bias/support of someone I loved and cared for a lot. We'll get back to that. I say all of this because the movie ironically failed to do much of anything NEW, something the series itself kind of struggled with for a while until it finally got around to the conclusion of Steven's story arc. The film ultimately kind of ends with "yeah Steven can change!" Which, um yea? Obviously. He's a completely different person than he was in S1. But he's kiiiiinda been the same person for....some while now. The weird irony of SU as a series is that about halfway through the narrative, the protag has essentially grown up, done. The last half or third or so of SU's narrative was basically Steven having to cheer everyone around him up and help them deal with their shit, and...kinda just going about that essentially the same way every time. The power of love, the friends we made along the way, etc. To be clear, there's nothing BAD about this, and in fact it's what sets Steven apart from most every other narrative of this type. The protag is almost always forced to change in ways they don't want, do things they don't want to do, etc. But when you put it side by side with something like Avatar or Gravity Falls, those series saw everyone growing alongside each other. There are clear arcs for everyone, almost all of which get resolved in ways fitting each character. It's imperfect but it's varied. SU has a tendency to just...hammer everyone's character flaws and arcs with ONE option: just love yourself and be nice, and everyyyyyyythinggggg 'll work out in the end! Which is fine, but when a story does it for so long, over and over, always the same, it gets a bit weird. I specifically LIKED in the film, at the end, that Steven actually does have to fight, because THAT is what Spinel needed to do. She needed to let out all of that anger, and that violence was her own way of doing it. 'you can't just sing a song to make everything go away' etc. It's typical, perhaps, for protagonists to have to tackle problems in different ways because that's LIFE. The fact is, Steven's approach will NOT save everyone. Lapis stilllll kinda stands as an example of this but an as of yet unresolved one. I liked that at the end of things, Spinel still doesn't come into the same fold as everyone else. Basically "sorry, I already fucked this up too much, I can't really deal with this," and that is IMPORTANT and I really liked it. Before really digging into the personal angle, I want to bring up how fascinating it is that the movie essentially had a real BUDGET and so they deliberately seemed to design an antagonist that would take full advantage of that animation budget. EASILY, by far, Spinel is the most interesting-to-watch antag in the whole series imo, in terms of how she moves and fights, etc. They really just wanted to flex and they did it, but like any SU antag there's (somewhat predictable) motives. This gets back at what I was saying before -- how the series spins its wheels a lot -- but Spinel's motivation/back story isssss kiiiinnndaaaa a lot like many many characters' issues and, like, I get it. We get it. Steven's Mom was Not The Best does that have to be the basis behind kinda EVERYONE who goes against Steven? Or the Gems? Lapis, Bismuth, and Peridot all offered more varied motivations, and even THEN, Bismuth was still essentially in the same boat? Anyway, I digress. I DO appreciate the way the series set up Rose as this wondrous lovely lady and has severely dissected and broken that down to the point where I really do not like Rose, in any of her ID's, as a character or a fictional person, and it did so gradually. A lot of what the movie did was kind of expected. Right? Songs, singing, check. Steven going about things the same way, check. Re-living/celebrating how far he and his moms have come, check. What I didn't expect was -- OK, well, there WAS that one fusion...which, um

But the actual thing that really latched onto me was how much I conncted with Spinel. As is the case with any story that has well presented characters, you can attach to SOME part of just about all of them. I associate most closely with Pearl overall but can relate with just about anyone prominent. I see parts of me and Jenny in Steven/Connie, in Ruby/Sapphire, in Peridot/Lapis. I see what kind of woman I might've become in Amethyst (and sometimes am). Spinel, though, is a really weird case because I see my adolescent self in her SO MUCH and yet fairly recent events in my life -- directly tied TO the show itself, mind you -- make that connection weirdly poignant and present. For some context, I used to be good friends with Aivi, one of the musicians who works on the series with their husband. Spring 2018, Aivi and I vocalized to each other that we considered one another one of the closest friends in each other's lives. We're no longer friends. To make sure this is clear, I think Aivi is a wonderful person, and our breaking apart wasn't violent or dramatic or anything, Aivi just...decided they weren't interested in the relationship anymore. And neglected to tell me this until like a year later. The context is of course not at ALL as severe or dramatic as Spinel/Pink, so please don't assume there's some one-to-one there. But OOF are there some harsh similarities and it really made Spinel's backstory sting in a very confusing way. I say 'confusing' because, as I mentioned, I see my adolescent self in Spinel. The way I was going about making friends matches her 'happy' self. The way I acted in my senior year of college matches her 'angry' self. There was no single person that created any of that, though. In high school, I was like Starfire, in college, I tried to nurture that, play to my strengths. I failed miserably. And what I feel is a big part of why is inherently tied to my transitioning (which is, still, something I feel I am failing miserably at). By the end of college I was more like Raven, and there I remained through the duration of my first long-term romance, into a very weird and atypical marriage and breakup, and then I moved to CA and started changing. Fittingly, my current self can't quite ID with any single Teen Titan. I'm not a teen anymore, after all. Throughout a lot of my friendship with Aivi, they really seemed to fixate on comparing me to Pearl. It sometimes made me uncomfortable the particular ways they did, though. I strongly identified with Pearl's flaws and strengths in personality (though we're obviously different people), and so seeing Pearl go through redemption via self-love and self-acceptance meant a lot to me. "It's Over, Isn't It?" I was IN THE ROOM listening to Aivi and their husband work on the chorus to that song. Obviously they couldn't talk about it but I knew damn well what it was about, and anticipated that piece for a long time. Now it's even more weirdly painful. I met Aivi because they made Mario arrangements they put on YouTube and they happened to live a few blocks away when I was subletting my first summer in CA. They seemed very kind and caring and eager to Be Nice and at the time I really needed that at a very vulnerable and fragile time in my life so I latched onto that. -In The Garden- The week when the LiS terfs freaked out on me and that Bad Spinel side of me lashed back, and I found myself suffering from being gaslit and facing the fact that the worst part of myself that Trigon in Raven's mind that Angry Spinel was still THERE was still ME It was too much For the first (and thankfully, only) time in my life, I experienced suicidal thoughts. And Aivi REACTED to that shit. Strongly. In a way no one ever had for me before, ever. They drove across the Bay to my house, picked me up, had me over, and helped me process it. And in the months to come, as I was healing and coming to terms with how That Worst Part of Me That I Wanted to BE RID OF was still THERE and apparently could just fucking show up, through all of that, Aivi helped me work through things, and we really bonded. In retrospect, though, it's SO damned hard for me to tell if Aivi and I became so close because of mutual respect or pity or just conditioned behavior to Be Nice and Keep Up Appearances. I dunno. What I know NOW is that apparently Cost More than I would've thought. I'm not Aivi so I don't want to really dig into 'dirt' (again, Aivi is a great person who works very hard and that's WHY their work is so good) but looking back, it's wild to see their progression into SUCCESS and fame while I just stood by, floundering The thing is, Aivi was a super busy person. We barely got to spend time together -- when we DID, it was a multi-hour affair and apart from like, Jenny, Aivi is prolly the person I've had the deepest, most vulnerable conversations with. They were next to me when I realized 'oh huh I'm maybe trans??' because they were there when I was at one of the lowest points in my life. I never ASKED them to be there, to Be So Nice and as it turns out, Being So Nice is harder than it looks. So to kind of loop this back to the movie, I wasn't some Skullgirls Peacock Cuphead grinny goof or anything like that but I AM WILLING to bet that from Aivi's POV the way Happy Spinel acts toward Steven is prolly how I felt in Aivi's life at points, at the least. The irony is that we would go weeks, months, barely interacting. But looking back, the way Aivi talked about things, the same phrase keeps dominating my mind: Aivi got bored of me. I wasn't 'useful' to them anymore. Aivi said that day in spring 2018 was like 'the climax' of our friendship, or something like that. Way they talked about it was like...the finale of a season of TV. Our character arc together was over. Even though we TALKED about it, came to mutual understandimng of The Logic behind Aivi's decision to cut ties, I don't think it ever REALLY made sense to me, how Aivi must've felt about our friendship, until Spinel. By spring of 2019, my role in Aivi's life -- from what they have told me, from what I can perceive -- was more like I existed in a separate space from the rest of their life. I was that one interesting person always waiting in The Garden for them to visit when they felt like it Because while Aivi had gotten BIG, gotten MARRIED, gotten a HOUSE, found legitimate SUCCESS in their creative field I was still poor still stuck in retail still unable to find an audience still unable to understand the pressures of Success And OOOOFFF in those last couple years, interacting became more and more strained for both of us, from opposite ends of things. Aivi had responsibilities, PEOPLE vying for their attention, people wanting to hire them, projects to complete, a house, a spouse, etc etc My life was (and kiiiinda still is?) nothing like that, and as our Mutual Creatives Struggling to MAKE THINGS and Get By transforming into Yep I Am Still Here but you are SUCCESSFUL I think that really put a lot of strain on things I never accepted until Spinel. After Aivi hit it big with SU, in particular, they gradually started...acting differently. Acting in ways that made less and less sense to me. They were a Diamond now. And I was still just what I was. When drawing comparisons to characters on the show, Aivi persistently compared me to Pearl. A fact I once took pride in. They repeatedly compared themself to Garnet. Which...always kind of didn't make sense to me. Aivi wasn't really like Garnet. They are more NOW, though? In the sense of how they act, I suppose. Specifically, one of the last things Aivi said to me was that trying to be friends with me had started feeling like Pearl trying to force Garnet to fuse with her. This was problematic because from my POV nothing of the sort was happening. All I was looking for was occasionally hanging out a few times a year. Like. Ya know. Actually a lot less than what I was looking for with basically all of my other friends. And that was still Too Much? But when I start looking at things like Pink Diamond and Spinel instead of Pearl and Garnet, somehow things make a lot more sense. I was probably too clingy, too exciteable, and what amusement or relief I could provide eventually stopped being useful. Aivi eventually didn't even want to spend time with friends to just...spend time with them. Everything had to have some kind of practical Purpose to it, it had to be contributing to a Goal. I still don't get that, tbh. But I'm also not A Diamond. I'm not Successful. The most responsibility I have right now is fucking hanging up the laundry to dry. I have college loans that have and continue to feel pointless to try and repay. I have severe dental problems I haven't been able to fix. My body fell out of shape because of retail hell, and what energy I’ve had to spare from that always ends up going into the people I love, and trying to keep Making Things. Let's not forget The Complications of coming out and wanting to transition but not possessing the resources to do so. (Aivi was actually super supportive of this btw and was the first person to make me feel comfortable wearing feminine things so yea) Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that MY LIFE is not together. My personality is? I feel like I am finally Myself in terms of mental/emotional stability. And that is largely because Jenny helped me get there. But Aivi helped a lot with that, too. But I think Aivi got to a point where Success was more of a measure of how Grown Up and Healthy one was because despite my behavior, my personality, my mood, what I was asking for, and what I was giving, all changing DRASTICALLY after being with Jenny, I think Aivi still...looked at me the way Pink Diamond looked at Spinel during that song. Like, "yeeeaaaa ok kiddo it's time for me to go now, kinda done here" This is what's so confusing about all of this metaphor/etc. I'm not...like Spinel anymore? My current, post-coming-out self doesn't really relate with Happy OR Angry Spinel. It's almost like Aivi couldn't see me for who I became, and could only see me for who I had been. And maybe that's like why Spinel can't be friends with Steven at the end. It's too painful. I used to take pride in being associated with Pearl because "I'm enough" and "being strong in the REAL way" but now it's more like "oh you just think I'm still hung up and needy and clingy?" which uh don't feel so great a comparison. I can't help but wonder if while working on the movie, Aivi saw some of themself in Pink. Because I'm not the only person who apparently wasn't 'useful' to them anymore. And I'm not saying we should've kept forcing something that wasn't working. Not at all. What we had was good for both us, but it also entailed a lot of patience on my part and effort on theirs. And unlike any of my other long term friends, I often ended up waiting weeks, months, "Happily wondering night after night, Is this how it works? Am I doing it right?"

Years and years of broken friendships, one after the other, most lasting merely 6 months, MAYBE a year at most, with a handful that have lasted since middle school (but which are so much harder to maintain) took a toll on my Adult Self until Jenny, anyway. For quite a long time - the majority of my life, currently - I assumed I just was Too Different and that was why my friendships didn't seem to last, didn't seem to extend to the depths I was looking for. That's perhaps one critical difference between Spinel and I: she's looking for FUN, for smiling faces, for attention, for creating smiles, I just want some fucking consistency. At this point, I'm not even sure WHY I still reach out to people. I don't NEED friendships in that desperate way I used to, back in the Happy/Angry Spinel times. And I've come to terms with that Other Max part of myself and integrated it, accepted it. My worst parts are still me and instead of suppressing them (often by relying on bids of deep friendship with others) I just have to let them EXIST and let them do their thing once in a while. This is ALL why Celeste hit me as hard as it did. Because even if I'm not actually much like Spinel anymore, and Aivi's not really like Pink Diamond, even if I don't actually share much in common with Madeline (other than the subtle 'I drink sometimes to deal with my problems' thing, which I don't anymore) I still comprehend and resonate so much with that concept of just needing to accept the worst parts of yourself and work with them rather than trying to keep them caged up and then they escape and rampage every 5-10 years or so and ruin your life As I felt myself coming to all of these Good Feelings I FINALLY felt like I could help Aivi in the ways they had helped me. That I finally had something to offer I didn't before. Turns out, I didn't, apparently. Aivi had More Important Things to do than visit me in The Garden. And I couldn't blame them. Not a bit. Especially if they had gotten bored of visiting me. I didn't like feeling like a burden on them, either. Can't really argue with that. During the last time we talked, Aivi didn't use the WORDS, didn't literally say them, but I finally could see it: I wasn't Useful anymore. I couldn't Understand, either, because I wasn't Successful. Our friendship was rewarding, but because it required effort. And that effort was still worth it to me, but no longer to them. I was no longer worth it. And despite that, despite starting to feel those hunches, I spent those final months -- as had been the case before, they were afraid to hurt me so avoided actually confronting the problem -- I remained "Happy to listen, Happy to stay Happily watching her drift away" I have no idea if any aspect of our friendship impacted anything Aivi had worked on creatively. TBH Aivi seemed to approach even relationships themselves with more of a logical, pragmatic style -- it was entirely unique compared to anyone I had ever connected with. But if you've read @lis-allwounds then it might not surprise you to know that a lot of what I expressed through Stella and Max, as well as Other Max and Another Stella, channels a lot of these things. I even quoted Aivi directly in the story's end (perhaps foolishly optimistic) And yes, that epilogue moment of sorts is gonna be entirely different if I ever do finish the visual novel. The fact is that we were ALWAYS very different people and our friendship was weird and complicated and hard for one or both of us throughout its, what, 8 year duration? Ironically, I think I took away the opposite 'Character Arc Lesson' they did from all this. But that's just the thing, nothing is permanent for a Human Being. We aren't Gems, we don't actually fuse, we can't just change our appearances when we feel like it, or project ourselves to look how we want to look, or exist for thousands of years. But we DO all have different needs, different ways of understanding those needs, and different ways of needing to adjust or change ourselves or our environments in order to pursue what we want to pursue with the limited time we have here. We tried, hard, and it lasted long enough. If I'm not useful, I'm not useful, I guess? I don't have any ill will toward Aivi, I loved them as a friend and I know they loved me, too, and were better at showing it than most any friends I ever have had. If I'd been better at reciprocating in ways that were actually useful, that would've been good -- but then maybe we wouldn't have become friends in the first place if I hadn't needed 'saving' in the first place, I don't fuckin' know. And I hope my saying all of these things doesn't make anyone think any less of Aivi because your relationship with them is, very likely, not at all personal like mine is. And you know as well as I do how good they are at what they do. Aivi took the time to ease me out of things. Aivi did NOT suddenly up and vanish for thousands of years. While the dynamics of the situation might bare sharp points of similarity, Aivi is not like Pink Diamond and I'm not like Spinel -- not in the present, anyway. Stories help us because they share THREADS with reality but it's always important to recognize those threads for what they are and not confuse them for ropes. And me ranting and tossing all of this out there is something part of me has wanted to do for months but needed to take the time to grieve and process and accept. And maybe it's selfish to be posting all of this, I don't know. But it helps me accept myself and them a lot more. "Finally something finally news about how the story ends" Aivi likely has brand new friends, better ones than me, and I'm willing to bet some of them worked on this movie. And it turned out pretty good, all things considered, probably in part because Aivi was able to focus on it That person I became friends with, she doesn't exist anymore. Just like how who I used to be when Aivi first me, he doesn't exist anymore, either. We both changed, and grew in opposite directions, I guess. We've found happiness and growth and relief in different ways. In the end the Movie helped me come to terms with all of this in a way Angry Spinel younger me couldn't have still hurts yo

"Isn't that lovely?

Isn't that cool?

Isn't that cruel?

And aren't I a fool

to have happily listened,

happy to stay,

happily watching her drift away"

#Steven Universe The Movie #Spinel #Personal #SU #SU Spinel

[overthinkingkdrama]

Exit Rant: Mr. Sunshine

[This is intended to be a spoiler free review of Mr. Sunshine but it may include a few minor spoilers throughout. It’s also long as all hell. Enjoy.]

Wow, here I am with my Mr. Sunshine review and it's only...*looks at wrist despite not wearing a watch* nearly three months after the final episode aired. Totally in keeping with this blog's commitment to publishing consistent and relevant content *manic laughter*.

The truth is, even if it hadn't been bad timing schedule-wise, Mr. Sunshine was going to be a difficult drama for me to review. This drama has so much to recommend it in terms of beautiful production, epic scope, unique period setting and blockbuster cast. There is something conceptually mesmerizing about Mr. Sunshine that engaged my basest fangirl and aesthetic sensibilities, but the actual experience of watching the episodes does not live up all the premise promises. What Mr. Sunshine delivers as a drama is, paradoxically, less than the sum of it's parts.

Let's focus on the positive first.

The cast in this drama is god-tier. You're rarely going to find an ensemble cast like this outside of Chungmuro. Your first, second and third leads all can and have headlined films and dramas of their own, and a lot of the stars here (like Kim Tae Ri of The Handmaiden fame) have critically acclaimed film pedigrees.

There's a lot to say about the actors and the performances, and there's no way I'm going to get to all of it. The extended cast is large and exceptionally great, and I'm not going to be able to remember and talk about everyone by name, so I'm going to have to limit myself to the main cast.

It's really the cast that moves heaven and earth to make this script work. To the degree that sometimes it felt that each actor lived in their character and lent flesh and texture where the writing let us down. Kim Tae Ri, played Ae Shin with so much fierceness and unshakable dignity that I couldn't stop cheering for her, even when the plot sidelined her character for what felt like episodes at a time.

For many people, the rousing showstopper performance of the drama was Yoo Yeon Seok as Gu Dong Mae. Early in the life cycle of the drama I recall hearing that Kim Eun Sook got herself embroiled in some controversy because people felt that the Japanese-sympathizer Dong Mae was far too likable considering his political ideology. Some hasty shuffling was done and rather than being characterized as a bald-faced fascist, Dong Mae became more of a freewheeling mercenary gangster-type. This was a positive change in my opinion. I don't want to retread what has already been said (a lot of it by me) about Dong Mae, but YYS has never been and may never be as interesting or as sexy as he was in Mr. Sunshine, in my opinion. He plays the morally grey character with edge and blazing charisma and, if nothing else does, makes the drama worth checking out.

Information broker and enigmatic owner of the Glory Hotel, Kudo Hina, as portrayed by Kim Min Jung and (my personal favorite) and the soulful Hui Seong, born into a blood-soaked privilege he can't escape, played by Byun Yo Han, wonderfully round out the cast and are, if anything, tragic underutilized by the plot. The only person here who perhaps underwhelms is Lee Byung Hun as the titular main character. I don't have strong feelings about him as an actor or as a person one way or the other. I've enjoyed some movies he's been a part of. I do feel that visually he looks too old for baby-faced Kim Tae Ri, but I'm almost used to that kind of thing in Dramaland. His performance is perhaps meant to be restrained--nigh on repressed--but it comes off as a bit bland and wooden. Which isn’t to say he’s bad, and I feel Eugene had a lot of potential to be a very interesting character just...decidedly less interesting than everyone else.

A lot of praise has been heaped on the way this drama looks, and I will agree, it’s a very pretty show. Personally, I disliked how heavily color graded certain scenes, especially outdoor scenes were. I found it a bit distracting and it took away from how otherwise gorgeous some of the scenery in this is when the sky is tan or everything in a scene is tinted blue for some reason. But the production deserves a lot of credit for creating a full and lived in feeling world, for the beauty of the sets and the costumes, the sheer attention to detail, and the way they used all four seasons to set the tone and give you a sense of the passage of time.

And let me just state that during Mr. Sunshine’s run I was decidedly obsessed with it. I posted about it, I talked about it to my friends, I talked several of those friends into watching it with me...and a few of those people still speak to me to this day. When I start criticizing it here in a few seconds, know that doesn’t mean I didn’t get a lot of hours of enjoyment out of this drama or that I think I’m too good for this show. I’ve seen 4 of Kim Eun Sook’s dramas so far and this is easily the best one. It’s not just better than Goblin, DOTS and Heirs, it’s miles better. Is that everything? I think that about covers it.

Now for the bad stuff...

I’ve said this in the past in relation to Goblin, but it bears repeating: Kim Eun Sook is good--possibly even great--at creating singular, iconic story moments and absolute rubbish at developing a cohesive plot that builds tension over multiple episodes and pays off in a logical way. At the time I said it I was basing it off of relatively little experience with her writing, but I’ve seen the pattern repeat itself two more times since then and I’m increasingly convinced that I’m a genius.

I do believe there are extenuating factors that account for the poor pacing of her dramas. The number of episodes and the episode length might not be within Kim Eun Sook’s control and she’s not responsible for poor editing either. Both Goblin and Mr. Sunshine suffer a lot because of bloated run time, and maybe that’s the network’s fault but it leaves plot feeling thin in places, even like it’s futilely spinning it’s wheels waiting for the next important event to come along.

With Mr. Sunshine the issue wasn’t even that there wasn’t enough interesting plot or character backstories to fill 24, hour plus episodes, possibly even more, it was that at times it felt like the drama flatly refused to delve into the interesting details, preferring to leave us miserably treading water in the doldrums of the story. It felt like we had to beg and wait for even morsels of backstory about certain characters--the drama was especially mum regarding Kuda Hina’s history--while the two leads endlessly mooned over one another. How many scenes did we need to watch Eugene and Ae Shin soulfully stare at one another?

Mr. Sunshine never successfully builds momentum until the last 2 or 3 episodes of the run. And while there is a lot of lip service paid to guns and glory and sad endings, but much of the drama feels like it's milling around with hands in pockets waiting for the tragic curtain call. Even the badass sniper heroine is frequently sidelined. It feels like the story remains stubbornly in the set up phase, one step forward and two steps back. It's as though Kim Eun Sook has all of these wonderful toys--great characters, huge budget, interesting time period/setting--and she simply doesn't know what to do with them.

Consistently my frustration with Mr. Sunshine was its inability to effectively incorporate the extended cast into the plot. It feels like all characters exist in separate bubbles waiting for their turn to have a scene. Those scenes are interesting but maddeningly brief, and then they are shuffled backstage once again until it's once again time for their requisite 5-10 minutes of screen time per episode. 

This problem is especially present in the main cast with Dong Mae, Hina and Hui Seong. And that is what is so deeply exasperating about this drama, because there is just enough good peppered in to keep me invested, so many great elements poorly employed. It makes one want to take KES's script away from her and take it home and fix it yourself, because you just know she's not treating it right.

When calamity comes, and it does, it feels disproportionate and somewhat unsatisfying, because the build up didn’t do it justice. The drama ends with a rousing crescendo, but it feels that the individual character arcs were never allowed to reach their full potential. I’m not one to shy away from tragedy, but it left me feeling rather empty.

I wish I could a finer point on it than that, but it’s a murky issue to me. I know I’m not connecting with the story as much as I want to, but it’s hard to put my finger on the exact reason and that just adds to my frustration with it.

I stand by my assertion that this is still the best KES drama I have watched. Thought admittedly I’ve still only seen 4 of them, this one shows the most promise and, I think, the most growth. But it’s not there yet. I don’t know if I could ever watch it again, but I’m glad I watched it once. If for nothing else for the fantastic performances of several old and new favorites. I give Mr. Sunshine an 8.5/10, which is probably too high considering everything I’ve said about it up to this point. However, it’s just too strong in terms of overall production and cast for me to feel good about rating it any lower.

#Mr. Sunshine #mister sunshine #kim tae ri #byun yo han #yoo yeon seok #exit rant #exit rave #kdrama review

[kcwcommentary]

VLD2x11 – “Stayin’ Alive”

2x11 – “Stayin’ Alive”

Allura’s playing a Hunk-suggested “Earth road-trip game” to pass time. This isn’t just Allura playing charades with the mice, it’s a small moment that reveals an exchange between Hunk and Allura, even if that exchange happened offscreen. Little moments like this help establish and affirm that these are people who are living with one another. Allura is taking the Castle Ship and travelling to the Balmera, and it’s taking her some time to get there. Given that the other parts of this mission included her creating a wormhole for the Paladins to go where they were going, I don’t understand why she hasn’t used a wormhole for herself.

We finally get information on where Coran went for his part of the greater mission: Olkari. There, he and the Olkari engineers have been working on the teludav necessary for the plan. He says they’ve been working on it “day and night,” which suggests a timeframe for what all has been going on. Allura has heard from Shiro, Lance, and Pidge, who’ve located Slav, so that puts this scene sometime before the last chronologically. She also says she hasn’t heard anything from Keith and Hunk. If Coran has been on Olkarion long enough for them to have been working “day and night,” then he has to have been there at least several days. Realistically, it would take a substantial amount of time for a major construction project. This all makes me feel like I don’t know what the timeframe of everything everyone’s doing though. This makes it seem like they are taking some time for everything to come together, but “The Belly of the Weblum,” and to a lesser extent “Escape from Beta Traz,” made me think they were working in a much faster timeframe than they apparently are. It’s not a huge issue, but it makes me feel a bit off.

Allura becomes pensive, saying she’s been thinking about her father and his sacrifice and how Team Voltron is closer than they’ve ever been to stopping Zarkon. She also expresses some apprehension about potential failure. She really does have to deal with a lot of stress and pressure from the responsibility she feels. Coran reassures her, citing their progress. Allura reaffirms his statement, saying that their success will come because they have allies (currently the Balmerans and the Olkari). This is the first instance in which I feel the show demonstrates the value of the coalition. It’s just Team Voltron, the Balmerans, and the Olkari, but they together feel more significant than later in the series when supposedly a lot more join the coalition.

I love the music during the Castle Ship’s decent and landing on the Balmera. This series has significant flaws, but the music is excellent. Allura informs the Balmerans – including Shay! it’s great to see her again – that she needs a crystal that’s even bigger than the one they needed for the Castle Ship last time. The music turns ominous as the camera shifts to the Robeast that the Balmera had trapped in crystal back in 1x10 “Rebirth.” There has been a substantial amount of screentime since the show last dealt with that Robeast, but it was unresolved. I’m of two minds about it. One, I like that the show hasn’t forgotten about it and is going to resolve that thread; however, I also kind of feel that dealing with this Robeast again is a bit of a retread of a past plot.

Two Druids report to Haggar that they found Thace’s chip that he’s been using to hack systems. She instructs them to put the chip back and wait to see who comes to get it. I’ve thought the show has been sort of spinning its wheels with this part of the plot, but this scene adds some movement to it finally. I’m kind of tiring of Haggar’s creepy space witch vibe though, or at least I’m feeling tired of it right now in this specific moment of my rewatch of the show.

The Balmerans take Allura to a huge crystal. She touches it and the hand-glowing thing happens, the Balmerans kneel and do the hand-glowing thing on the ground. The crystal begins to rise. The cavern rumbles, Shay wonders if it’s because of how big the crystal is, but the old Balmeran woman says it’s “something different” and says they should let Allura finish the ceremony. Then cut to back at the Castle Ship, where the crystal’s been loaded. Clearly some time has passed since the ceremony in the cavern. Everyone’s still calm. The way the old woman spoke though, it seemed she sensed something being a problem, and Shay seemed to register the old woman’s comment that way in the moment, but there’s no sense that they’ve followed up on that disturbance. This feels narratively dissonant. Did they forget to say anything after Allura was done? Wouldn’t the Balmerans, in sensing something off, have assigned someone to investigate further?

Everyone’s standing around for an unbothered goodbye when there’s a quake, everyone seems shocked (so no one followed up on what Shay and the old woman sensed before), and they watch as the Robeast breaks out of the crystal it’s been encased in. Allura sends the Balmerans to take shelter and plans to face the Robeast with the Castle Ship. The Robeast, once freed from the crystal, levitates and turns purple two big chunks of the crystal. It also has several large crystal shards embeded in its body. Allura directs the Castle’s weapons to shoot the Robeast, but its crystals shield it and it returns fire. Allura pilots the Castle to take off in hopes of luring the Robeast from the Balmera, and it follows her.

The music during this sequence is again excellent! The distance shot of the Castle Ship launching from the surface of the Balmera and the Robeast in pursuit is beautifully animated, having a wide sense of planetary-level scale.

Cut to Keith and Hunk leaving the Weblum, with a repeat of Keith’s frustrated yell from the end of 2x09 “The Belly of the Weblum” that he “didn’t just turn Galra.” Keith suspects that Hunk’s glaring at him is because he’s trying to tell if Keith’s skin is purple. Allura’s communication comes in with her telling them to return immediately. Shiro, Lance, and Pidge are on their return trip from their mission. Slav freaks over the idea that they’re going to travel via teludav, and Shiro’s frustration with Slav results in him giving a bit of a rant. Yet still, even though he’s fussing with Slav, he’s still not condemning Slav for having OCD, and instead tells him to just do whatever he needs to, whether it be counting hair follicles or fluffing a pillow. Slav, it turns out, wasn’t freaking out because of his OCD but because he likes the idea of travelling via teludav. Allura contacts them and calls them home.

Once returned, Lance sees that the Robeast is actually operating without a head. This makes the Robeast now relying upon the show’s not defining how much of anything works; without a head, the purple crystals have to be what’s directing it, but why are they purple/villainous? The Robeast sends a blast toward the Blue and Yellow Lions, which dodge out of the way. The blasts hits two moons above the Balmera. Since when does this Balmera have moons? I’m not saying that it couldn’t; in fact, it very much could. It’s large enough to generate enough gravity that it could very much pick up two moons in tow. I just don’t remember ever seeing them until now. The blast destroys both moons. The shot of the explosion and the next shot of the Castle and the two Lions silhouetted by the explosions are beautifully animated. Shiro says they have to have Voltron to deal with this, so Hunk has to cover them all while Blue drops Shiro and Pidge off on the Castle Ship to get their Lions. I feel for Hunk in his expression of being overwhelmed.

Back on Zarkon’s ship, Thace captured when he retrieves the chip.

A blast from the Robeast knocks out the Castle’s shields. Hunk maneuvers Yellow to ram into the Robeast. The distance shot of the two after he hits it, like the earlier distance shot, gives a great sense of scale. The Robeast starts chasing Yellow. The Paladins head to rejoin Hunk, and Shiro asks Slav to help Allura (though nothing really comes of Slav doing so). Lance provides cover in Blue for Hunk to take Keith to get Red. The shuffling that has to occur to get all the Paladins their respective Lions could have felt cumbersome, but the show actually pulls it off nicely without the sequence creating a pacing problem.

The Robeast blasts Yellow, which loses power and falls toward the Balmera. Lance and Pidge move to engage the Robeast while Shiro takes Black to get Yellow. Shiro has to abandon taking Yellow back to the Castle so that he can engage the Robeast. Keith leaves Yellow and jetpacks to the Castle. A stray blast from the Robeast nearly hits Keith and sends him careening away. The Red Lion senses Keith in trouble. Yellow regains power only to be grabbed by the Robeast. Everyone else blasts the Robeast, including Keith in Red.

I love that Red’s sensing Keith in trouble comes into play again here. The bond between him and Red is given a lot of significance through this. It also infuriates me that the show then eventually puts Keith in Black and Lance in Red without dealing with the fact that the show has spent so much time showing us the bond between Keith and Red.

The distance shot of the Lions circling around the Robeast, blasting it in unison is excellent. Keith says they don’t have the time needed to form Voltron. With the way the show usually handwaves that it would take time for the Lions to convert, usually pausing the plot to allow it to happen, it’s interesting that this time it’s an issue. Timing should be an issue, so this episode is doing it right. Pidge hits the purple crystal in the Robeast’s chest with Green’s plant cannon, buying them time to transform into Voltron. I think the plant cannon is inherently silly, but I do like the way it buys relief from the tension of the narrative and its use here has actual weight of a minor victory.

The Robeast finally shrugs off the plant, only for Voltron to stab it with Voltron’s sword, doing enough damage that the Robeast explodes.

The team is ready to meet up with Coran. Allura thanks Hunk for getting the scultrite, and Hunk responds that Keith was part of that mission too. Allura glares at him and walks away. The way she’s treating Keith is not okay!

They arrive at Olkarion, where the teludav is nearly complete. Coran privately talks to Allura about their plan, the risks, and how she might not survive how much energy is necessary for her to operate the teludav. He says her father “would be proud of the leader [she’s] become.” There’s a setting/rising sun shot, with the light over the five Paladins. Pidge asks what everyone’s thinking about. Zarkon is a popular answer, but Hunk is thinking of calzones. I actually don’t mind this food joke for him right now. They all reflect back on some of what’s happened over the past two seasons. It gives weight to the coming conflict. Shiro, however, is notably quiet during the whole conversation, only to point out that once Zarkon’s defeated, the universe won’t need Voltron. I can’t say I agree with that statement. They might won’t be facing an immediate threat, but that doesn’t mean that there won’t be anything for Voltron to do in the universe. Defeat Zarkon/the Galra and Voltron’s finished is a very narrow perspective.

After Shiro speaks, heightening the tension, they all stand quiet, the music builds into a dramatic group shot. It would have made an excellent end to the episode. That energy however is ruined by having another scene afterward of Haggar threatening Thace.

This episode was very action heavy, and yet, unlike with episodes later in the series that are action heavy, it doesn’t feel unwieldly here. It’s easy to track what’s happening at each stage of the action. As I said several times throughout this, there are some beautifully animated shots in this episode. This episode concludes the sequence of the past several episodes in setting up for the end of the season. It’s like a period at the end of a sentence, with the next sentence getting ready to start.

#voltron legendary defender #voltron #vld #voltron criticism #vld criticism #voltron critical #vld critical #vld season 2 #vld 2x11 #commentary

[samdukewieland]

Stuck Inside Media Diary Week 5

I realized the last movie I saw in theaters was Little Women for the third time. Then that got me thinking about how I ranked my Top whatever movies from last year and inconsequential ranking things is. It was probably the movie that makes me feel the best; it and Knives Out were the two movies I saw the most in a theater last year and they were both the ones that I get excited talking about with people. Good flicks, you should check ‘em out. (I also re-learned recently that Emma Stone was originally supposed to play Meg who was played by Emma Watson. Had this happened, my brain would’ve collapsed due to trying to figure out how to balance crushes on Greta Gerwig, Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Laura Dern and Emma Stone all in the same thing).

Sunday, April 19

Deliverance, Boorman 1972

On the one hand there is no real way to prepare you for how awful the assault on Ned Beatty and John Voight scene is as well as having me wonder if this was actually a Vietnam movie masked in something about the destruction of the natural world (maybe it’s both or just one). On the other hand, I thought it’d be funny to compare the characters to this to the characters in American Pie, but there’s no Stiffler or Jim’s Dad in this movie, so it doesn’t completely work.

Mad Men, “Long Weekend”, “Indian Summer”, “Nixon Vs. Kennedy”, “The Wheel” [season 1 finale]

There’s two things I’ll never forget the first time I ran through the first season of Mad Men: 1. Thinking “is Don even good at his job? I don’t think we’ve even seen this guy even really do his job yet, how did he become partner?” and then “The Wheel happens”. 2. I had let one of my favorite History teachers borrow my DVDs (this would happen again in my life when I later lent my English teacher The Wire when I was a senior two years later) and when he finished the first season he and I talked about what dumb-dumb idiots we were because we hadn’t figured out that Peggy was definitely pregnant and were surprised by this revelation, while his girlfriend at the time figured it out instantly.

Parks And Rec, “Greg Pikitis”, “Ron And Tammy”

That these two episodes were on back-to-back was probably the moment in the public consciousness that Parks was the real deal. How could you not; I watch “Greg Pikitis” every Halloween.

The Last Dance, Parts 1 & 2

I can’t remember the last thing I watched in real time on the tv. It’s very possible, though I don’t think so, that The Last Dance might be quarantine great and in real life very, very good. It doesn’t really matter, because this thing is just crazy fun to watch, as a person who was not able to watch Jordan basketball and sometimes thinks that Gen Xers gets way too [whatever that Spongebob meme is where you capitalize every other letter in a sentence] about Michael Jordan. The music cues are God-tier.

Joe Pera Talks With You, “Joe Pera Shows You Iron”, “Joe Pera Takes You To Breakfast”, “Joe Pera Takes You On A Fall Drive”

“Joe Pera Takes You To Breakfast” might be one of the funniest episodes of television I’ve seen in a long time. As someone who takes too much enjoyment in stream of consciousness humor, I might be too in the bag for this show. I certainly don’t know how to sell it to any of you, other than it might be the perfect counterpart to Review. That could just be that Joe Pera looks like an alt-universe Andy Daly or it could be that Forrest MacNeil could’ve, desperately, used a friend like Joe Pera if only just to see how they’d interact with each other.

Monday, April 20

Under The Silver Lake, Mitchell 2018 [as of now this is available on Prime]

I’m embarrassed that I caved into watching a stoner movie on 4/20, but I’m glad it was this. This weird, gross and beautifully shot weird little movie that really did some good work in reminding me that Andrew Garfield is good. People will argue that this broke his brain, when in reality it was those two embarrassing Spider-Man movies.

Joe Pera Talks With You, “Joe Pera Shows You How To Dance”, “Joe Pera Talks You Back To Sleep”, “Joe Pera Reads You The Church Announcements”

So “Church Announcements” was the first episode of this show that I had ever seen, because I had three different friends recommend it to me because I had posted something about “Baba O’Riley” very off-handedly, not even knowing this episode existed. It’s probably the purest expression of joy and one of the most sincerely happy things I might have ever seen. I love this show so much.

Tuesday, April 21

The Birdcage, Nichols 1996 [as of now this is available on Prime]

This is a good reminder that Nathan Lane is insanely talented and easily one of the most undervalued performers alive. I wanted to watch a Gene Hackman movie and this was available and it’s pretty good. Sometimes plays shouldn’t be turned into movies, that’s my take here-what do you want from me.

Better Call Saul, “Something Unforgivable”

Safe to say Saul’s got the belt. I was listening to Greenwald and Ryan the other night and someone had throughout a hypothetical to them that if they could would they want Gilligan and the gang to to remake Breaking Bad now, and have that (essentially) be the spin-off from Saul instead of vice-versa. That then got me thinking about if there’s ever been a property that’s taken place within the same universe that waited almost a season and a half to introduce the character (or thing) that connected the two things? There’s probably some kind of sci-fi or fantasy story that nerds would be eager to inform me of and it’s called 2une or something like that. Cool if so! If not, then no one steal my idea, this could be huge.

Joe Pera Talks With You, “Joe Pera Lights Up The Night with You”, “Joe Pera Talks to You About the Rat Wars of Alberta, Canada (1950–Present Day)”, “Joe Pera Answers Your Questions About Cold Weather” [Season 1 finale]

“Can you believe those jag-offs through a New Year’s Eve party with just one bottle of Disarooney” is something I just say out loud when I’m frustrated now. I stayed up until like 3AM last Tuesday wrapping up the first season.

Wednesday, April 22

The Stranger, Welles 1946 [as of now this is available on Netflix]

First Orson Welles movie. It was fine! I don’t really think it should’ve been an hour-and-a-half long, but I was also surprised that they were already making movies about Nazis escaping to the US in 1946, but I’m definitely not a historian and I’m sure a lot of things would surprise me about 1946. It’s also a public domain movie which is just kinda....weird and would probably piss off Orson Welles or maybe he’d be thrilled.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Hughes 1986 [as of now this is available on Netflix]

Maybe the best use of a Beatles song in a movie that doesn’t star The Beatles? I used to go back and forth on whether or not I like this movie, because so many people do like it and I used to be loathe to conform to non-controversial opinions. But something I think that gets really overlooked is how well this movie is shot-Hughes had a real eye for framing and blocking. Or maybe people talk about this all the time and I just haven’t cared to ever listen or seek it out.

The Plot Against America, “Part 2″

Mad Men,  [Season 2 premier] “For Those Who Think Young”, “Flight 1″

I had forgotten how GD disorienting this show can be when it goes out of its way to not tell you how much time has passed between each season (it’s like 15 months this time). That’s all I’ve got now, that and Duck Phillips: welcome back into my life, you sick son of a bitch.

Joe Pera Talks With You, [Season 2 premier] “Joe Pera Talks With You About Beans”, “Joe Pera Takes You On A Hike”

Thursday, April 23

Harold And Maude, Ashby 1971 [as of now this is available on Prime]

Another entry in the “I didn’t realize how many movies try to be this one” book. Really funny, and so shockingly dark, I can’t imagine how much people hated this when it first came out and how hard of a sell it would be to try and talk someone into seeing it. Probably what I liked most about it was how earned the sense of finding joy in life is in this movie, considering how cynical it is in depicting the fetishization guys tend to do with the notion of suicide. It’s quirky without being twee (if you want that, I guess go to Rushmore, a movie I adore, but definitely borrows heavily from this, something Anderson wouldn’t ever deny).

Mad Men, “The Benefactor”, “Three Sundays”

Harry Crane’s campaign to be the least liked person in Mad Men, you could argue, starts more-so here than it did in the finale of S1 when he cheats on his wife.

The Plot Against America, “Part 3″

I don’t think anything, Television-wise, has benefited less from the pandemic than TPAA. Of course it would happen to a David Simon show and maybe it’s a good thing, considering how the number of bad takes would greatly outweigh the number of good takes that would come about if there was some more attention on it. 

Joe Pera Talks With You, “Joe Pera Waits With You”, “Joe Pera Guides You Through The Dark”

I can’t remember the last time I laughed as hard as I did when they started demonstrating the different hair styles you can get when getting your hair cut. These episodes have somehow gotten goofier than the first season and it’s, uh, really good.

Friday, April 24

Parks And Recreation, “The Camel”

Top Chef, Season 17 episode 6

Brooklyn Nine-Nine, “Lights Out”

Dan Goor & Luke Del Tredici is to Brooklyn Nine-Nine as Michael Schur & Aisha Muharrar was to Parks And Recreation.

The Beastie Boys Story, Jonze 2020 [available on AppleTV+]

As with any kind of retrospective, there’s a fair amount of yadda-yadda-ing and maybe not everything totally works with this live-documentary, but it’s so deeply Beastie Boys that I can’t help but just be so grateful that it exists. While it’s like a vaudeville symposium it is absolutely doubles as a love letter to a departed friend and immense talent. The worst thing that could happen is that it’ll just make you want to re-listen to the gods.

Mad Men, “The New Girl”, “Maidenform”

I just can’t believe that Chauncey exits the series the same episode that he enters.This was and still remains the turning point of Duck Phillips: terrible human (and kind of when he turns a little cartoonish).

Saturday, April 25

Parks And Recreation, “Hunting Trip”

Mad Men, “The Gold Violin”, “A Night To Remember”, “Six Month Leave”, “The Inheritance”, “The Jet Set”

Quite a run of episodes here for ole Mad Men here. Always love when they remind us that everyone really underestimates Ken Cosgrove (even himself). And as I was watching “Six Month Leave” it kind of hit me that this is an outlier episode of Mad Men. It’s so much of a whole that I find it hard to put one episode above another, but if I needed just an episode of Mad Men to watch at random like a year or so from now, this is one that would really stick out to me. A great farewell to a great Murray brother.

Bad Education, Finley 2019 [available on HBO Now/Go]

It sucks that HBO makes more bad movies than it does good, but when they’re good, man they’re really good. It hits some HBO movie bingo squares which are kind of eye-rolley to me, but all-in-all, this is a really outstanding little movie. It feels weird that it’s taken this long for Ray Romano to start carving out a character actor niche for himself, but I’m just happy we’re finally here! I saw someone compare it to or with Wolf Of Wall Street and as someone not from Long Island I feel confident in saying that they’re a helluva Long Island scum-bag (repetitive?) double feature.

The Plot Against America, “Part 4″

Was really hoping this was going to be the thing that made people remember that Winona is incredible and not Stranger Things, but that’d require like a dozen monkey’s paw wishes that I just don’t have. (What a world it’d be if The Plot Against America adaptation somehow eclipsed Stranger Things in terms of cultural significance) However badly I wanted that though, this has really been Zoe Kazan’s show-a quieter role than Anthony Boyle (who I am also just floored by) but more effective in how much internal processing she’s doing with this character.

Joe Pera Talks With You, “Joe Pera Takes You To The Grocery Store”, “Joe Pera Goes To Dave Wojcek’s Bachelor Party With You”

[lunamanar]

What are some of your headcanons on Squall and Rinoa's relationship and how it progresses post-game?

I’m glad you said “some” because the full answer is the biggest reason I write fiction for FFVIII in the first place (I’m just not good at finishing it, eheh). I can do “some,” though.

I suppose the first is simply, “they stay together.” I know, I know, then we can all pack up and go home, right? Nothing more to see, here. 

In seriousness, though, I’ve written plenty of doomed romances. I do not see Squall and Rinoa as one of those. I’m not saying there not huge obstacles for them to overcome, or that there are no possible situations where they would break up or be forced apart, or that there aren’t valid interpretations of them who are simply incompatible. That would be unreasonable, and…I mean, just look at fanfiction.net. Of course they could, and of course there are. But If you’re looking for that sort of drama, you won’t find it in anything I write, and I don’t think it spoils anything to say so. But that’s forced me to tackle all of the “well how do they deal with ____?” questions (and really, that in mind, if you want interpersonal tension and drama, sometimes holding on is the hard option). Those questions in turn have led to a lot of worldbuilding and plot points, which then led to a lot of the other answers I’ve given over the last several days. So to say that the entirety of my headcanon revolves around them wouldn’t be too far off-base. 

I’m a lot more focused on how they grow over time, as individuals and as a unit, how they overcome obstacles both inevitable and inserted in their path by Yours Truly, and how it all affects how they see the world, how they see other people, each other, and themselves. I really like getting into the gritty details of character development for my faves, and they’re some of my favorites of all time, so I love everything I can get from them, whether it feels amazing or hurts like hell. They give me a hearty helping of both, haha. 

With that said, while the game presents a lot of options with Rinoa and Squall as an either/or experience, in most cases I re-envision the scenes so that most of the possible outcomes are true. For instance, my Rinoa initially has a very nice talk with Squall at the FH concert. She says her heartfelt piece, and feels good about it…and then Squall clams up. And Eyes on Me starts playing after the playful jig. That reminds her of her mother, who was quite an example of “we can’t predict the future…” Which saddens her, makes her feel very vulnerable all of a sudden, and when she realizes Squall hasn’t moved toward her or said a damn word for minutes…well, that’s when the other dialogue happens, she gets upset, and leaves. 

I even, surprisingly enough, found a way to make most of the dialogue with everyone reuniting at FH work (whether you sent her to D-district or not, with my end result being that she does not go), so…keep in mind the precise version of the game I’m keeping in my head. It’s already a tiny bit edited, although I really don’t think it’s edited enough to be called AU. Just, my headcanons start inside canon, so it’s probably worth my pointing that out. (Self-plug: you can find a number of these on my DA, AO3 and FFN pages.)

Moving on…immediately post-game, my Squall is a damned mess. He barely survived Time Compression and it takes weeks for him to recover physically. Dealing with the mental trauma will take a great deal longer. He’s having flashbacks, waking nightmares, various sleep disturbances, freezing/staring episodes…the whole experience messed with his head but good. He wants to get back to work, but Dr. Kadowaki refuses to clear him. So, even though Rinoa has stayed with him for the whole thing, he’s pinned in the worst place he can think of being: tearing himself apart on the inside and unable to do anything about anything. 

And Rinoa has her own…situation. Word is spreading that Garden is housing the successor to Adel’s powers (the whole…thing with Ultimecia is not actually that widely known outside of Esthar), and that successor is the daughter of General Caraway, once “involved” with terrorists from Timber. Galbadia doesn’t like this very much and is demanding answers. Although mostly harmless, Odine is being creepy wanting to “observe” her to see how she “handles” what seems must be an oroborousine feedback loop of Hyne’s powers. Meanwhile Dollet is heralding her as some kind of heroine due the version of the story that reached them: that she stopped Adel and broke the back of Galbadia’s army, causing it to cease its assault on their borders indefinitely. Even the people of Esthar, more knowledgeable than most, seem determined to refer to her as “their” sorceress, and are intensely intrigued by the fact she seems to benevolent. So she is at once a villain, a hero, a science project, and a somewhat holy figurehead she never asked to be. She’s barely had any time to learn how to use her powers, so she’s in a dangerously tenuous position with trauma of her own, even without a boyfriend suffering acute PTSD and maybe some other things, too. 

The solution: turn it all off, pack it up, and take a vacation from everything. 

Well, ‘vacation’ might be too idyllic a word, but essentially. Edea has decided she is going to rebuild her house, and repurpose it as both a place for her and Cid to retire, and as a sort of Bed & Breakfast, haha, as the only outpost in Centra, in the hopes that adventurous people will have a starting point to return, explore, and repopulate the fractured continent. The repairs on the main building are already complete, so it’s in livable condition, if only barely.

And, sympathetic to Rinoa’s situation, as well as the only person available to her who has the experience and desire to teach her, Edea agrees to take Rinoa with her, quietly, while Galbadia’s attention is still focused on Garden and Esthar. In turn, Rinoa asks Squall to come with her. He’s doing nothing but spinning his wheels at Garden, not even allowed to arm himself for the Training Center. There are only so many laps and pushups you can do in a day, he needs something to do, a plan of action to focus on. Squall is function-oriented, and denied the freedom to perform that function, he’ll run himself in circles until he starts losing screws and bolts. 

And his new function, alone with Rinoa and Edea at the abandoned house of his childhood: help Rinoa become the best damn sorceress she can be. Be her “Knight,” her partner in coming to understand her magic skills, even perhaps her target, when it comes to it. Use all that strength he’s gained to make sure that by the time they rejoin Garden in six months, she’s ready for anything. 

After some resistance, he agrees. It’s just six months, right? Xu and Quistis can take care of things for that long. 

Turns out to be a long six months. This is where a lot of the domestic problems crop up–among the worst of which is that for some reason, Rinoa always takes the soap out of the shower with her and leaves it in weird places and seriously, what the hell, Rinoa?!–but it’s also where a lot of ground is covered between Squall and Rinoa, because there are no distractions, no one else for thousands of miles in any direction. Just the two of them, to hold each other up or crash and burn together. 

Oh yeah, and there’s a ghost in the woods across the field. It doesn’t seem all that friendly, either. So there’s that. 

But yeah, basically the thing that I think is most important for Rinoa and Squall’s relationship to work is for the both of them to–temporarily–disconnect, focus on themselves and each other. And I think it makes a lot of sense that they both do exactly that. So much has changed for them, so much damage has been done to them and their former lives, even if they weren’t involved with each other, it would be nearly impossible for them to just keep on doing what they’d been doing and recover in any meaningful way at the same time. I’ve seen a lot of fics where Rinoa goes insane because she doesn’t have the support she needs as a very new, very powerful sorceress, and others where Squall regresses and withdraws even worse than he had been while trying to fulfill the demands of being SeeD’s leader immediately after the events of the game. And I think that’s perfectly reasonable. I also think it’s reasonable to just put it all in a box and come back after they’ve done some figuring things out…and maybe having a little adventure on the side. 

I’ve talked in other asks about how my sorceresses have the ability to tap into the life force of other people and even bind themselves permanently to a person for the purpose of augmenting their powers. Edea’s house is where Squall finds out that this is possible…not because Edea tells him, but because he finds it in a very old book that had survived the weathering of the house. It’s the sort of absolute purpose Squall romanticizes, and although Rinoa is afraid of the idea and Edea is flat-out against it, it’s something that holds his attention, an idea that allows him to concentrate and a perspective that helps him work through a lot of the lingering problems even Rinoa can’t seem to touch. 

Even by the time they finally go back to Garden, they’re a ways off from anything like that, but the idea’s been put forth…

A lot of people have already seen the very end of that particular story, because as an Epilogue, it kind of stands on its own: Miles to Go, a comic I did with @skribleskrable a couple years back, caps things off and marks where they are by the time they come back to Garden: uncertain, still a little confused, but hopeful, and ready to face whatever happens next together.

There’s a lot that does happen, a ton of headcanons I could share, but I should probably stop rambling, as this has gone on for quite a bit. I’ve only glanced over so much of it…I hope some point soon here I’m going to have the time and the space I need to stop thinking about this stuff so much and actually get to writing it. 

#ff8 #Anonymous #headcanons #squall and rinoa #squall leonhart #rinoa heartilly #sorcery #succession of witches #story: miles to go #ff8 world #asks

[kalico-to-the-letter]

REVIEW: RWBY – Vol. 5, Ch. 10: “TRUE COLORS”

“Girl, come show me your true colors/paint me a picture with your true colors/these are confessions of a new lover/true colors, true colors…”

Yeah, I love The Weeknd. And these lyrics felt somewhat appropriate after this episode.

Before we get to the review, I just have some housekeeping to take care of. In case you missed my recent update, take note of the following:

“I would like to notify you ahead of time about my reviews for RWBY’s upcoming Chapters 11 & 12. I will be travelling when these two episodes are likely to go to air – that being 12/23 and 12/30 respectively – and my reviews for both are likely going to be delayed. It shouldn’t be too bad – for instance, those of you in the US who currently are getting my reviews on Saturday nights are probably going to have to wait until the next morning – specifically Sunday mornings on the 24th and 31st respectively.”

This week gave us: The kind of common sense that only comes with a cane, lethal robot emotions, and a prize fight.

Spoilers, so:

In “True Colors”, RWBY served us a strong conclusion to the Menagerie storyline, one which opted for positivity and unity.

This could have gone a very different way, and maybe, in some respects, it could have benefited with taking more risks, but in the end, the show took the safe option in how it ended this storyline, and the result is certainly a decent one, especially considering how the story has tended to limp through the season; the fact that the show has been able to salvage what it has out of Menagerie is no small achievement, though how much praise should we really give it, when so much of the damage to this storyline has been self-inflicted?

If the storyline as a whole had been better, then I could look back on this journey with a lot of fondness, but that isn’t the case. This is a storyline which had a lot of problems – particularly this season’s iteration of it – but its endgame has come home strong enough for me to look favourably upon it and want to anticipate the sum that this part will help form at the climax of this season.

This storyline has suffered most of all because of the inaccessibility of its plot. Think the second season of True Detective: If you wanted to break it down, then you could see the logical progression and mount an argument for its worth, but the execution on the show’s part shrouds the better parts in a thick fog and leaves you struggling to stay invested for long periods. It doesn’t help when, across the journey, Menagerie has been fed to us mostly in small chunks across two seasons, short vignettes spent doing a lot of foreshadowing and very little storytelling, and making very little use of Blake, its principal figure. The arcing, fully-fleshed stories in Menagerie have been rare.

And the frustration is that this season has shown us evidence that giving a lot of time to this storyline on a weekly basis can result in good things. In the fifth and eight episodes, Menagerie was given a lot of time, and – importantly – with Blake as its anchor. It’s supposed to be her story, after all. We were given hooks to focus on and meaningful passages to take away, and she was allowed to shine.

But most of the time, we’ve been given drips and drabs that just slipped through the hands.

I appreciate what this storyline tried to do in a macro sense, which was have Blake change the attitudes of her people in their isolated corner of the world, and have them realise that they needed to face the oncoming storm together, rather than wait for it to arrive on their doorstep and tear them apart. And of course, in casting Blake as the anchor of the narrative, the show is trying to make you to feel her desperation and anxiety as she struggles to shine the light on what has been long ignored – and the catharsis of her relative success in this episode.

But if I’m being honest, I can’t say that what we’ve gotten is enough to justify how long we’ve been on this road. Did this have to be wrapped up last season? Not necessarily. There was enough to justify continuing on with this excursion, and Adam’s coup definitely gave it a spark (or at least renewed its potential for a while). But the handling of it has been baffling. Often this season, it has felt like a good Menagerie episode has been immediately followed by a letdown, or just not followed up at all.

The only way to explain the spasmodic plotting of Menagerie this season is that it’s events have probably had to line up with what has been going on in Mistral, but even then, spacing this narrative for that long has just exposed what hasn’t been done with Menagerie, that the show hasn’t capitalised on early potential and has simply been content to spin its wheels here while it devoted its attentions elsewhere.

In talking about Menagerie this season, a word that I’ve used a lot is “stuck”, and it has been frustrating to see the clear potential for narrative arcs just be ignored for the inexplicable sake of stringing out this plot an extra week or two; this whole thing could have been wrapped up two or three weeks ago. The counter to that argument is to say, “What else would the show have done with Blake?” and I have to agree with that, because ultimately, it feels like the show just didn’t have anything else planned for her until the season’s endgame, which would be a frankly stunning waste of Blake’s character and everything the show was building in Menagerie back in Volume 4.

With that said, I know you’re reading this and thinking, “Then why the hell have you given this a high grade if there are so many issues with the storyline?” My answer is that yes, the context of the overall storyline’s weakness hurts its conclusion and this episode overall. I would give the whole Menagerie storyline a C+, and that’s generous. But this conclusion is still strong enough to make this a decent and thoroughly promising episode of RWBY.

Because after everything, the way Menagerie was handled in this episode just felt right. The necessary care was given to it, and it showed. Of course, I never believed that Blake’s parents were in any real danger, but there were enough moments to give you a sense of danger, especially where her father was concerned. Man has zero chill in a fight.

Last week set up Blake’s fight with Ilia, and I was very pleased with how it functioned as the hook of this episode. For one thing, the fight itself was staged in a way that maximised both combatants, and particularly highlighted Blake’s fight intelligence – in the beginning, both women were essentially countering each other with their semblances; Ilia took a brief tactical advantage by turning out the lights and using her active camouflage; but in a swift progression, Blake both removes this advantage by lighting the area with fire and takes her own advantage by neutralising her opponent’s weapon. All throughout this, Ilia is strong in her refusal to go along with Blake’s perspective, but it is clear that this defiance is the result of her own desperation and rationalisations; it is only when Blake is able to score a decisive takedown that Ilia’s resolve cracks and Blake is able to reach her and sway her heart.

I wish that we’d had more of them together, because their relationship and history is so fascinating. Imagine if, from Blake’s arrival  last season, the story had been “Ilia and Blake”, all the way through. In some ways, it has been, but Ilia wasn’t a strong enough character last season, and I’ve already written at length about how this season has wasted Menagerie’s potential. It’s just wishful thinking though, because we’ve still gotten a healthy amount of story between these two.

In any case, the plot proceeds from that point as one would expect: Ghira crashes in, Sun and Kali get drawn into the mess, and Ilia completes her hero turn by helping them end the coup. Though lacking in jeopardy, this fight is a fitting end to the conflict.

And of course I enjoy that, in a moment of great uncertainty, and requiring a firm, poised hand, Blake was able to take the responsibility on her back and speak to the assembled masses. She is done with running and letting others deal with the fallout; after all this, she is ready to come back into the larger fold.

The thing is, we know that Blake has always had the desire within her to be a hero, but that a part of her must have felt like she was holding the rest of her team back – that she wasn’t comfortable being forced to take decisive and significant action. Running became the easy choice, but it took the Fall of Beacon, Yang’s sacrifice, and her conflicts with Ilia, for her to realise the selfish and destructive effect that choice was having on her life and those around her.

Ultimately, it is that conflict with Ilia that gets her to see clearly, because in her old friend, she sees an old version of herself: someone scared and desperate, pushing themselves into a box where the only way out they can see is to be the destroyer. It takes encountering that for Blake to finally pull herself out of the box, and pull Ilia along with her.

Now let’s see how this version of Blake fares back in the company of the partners she arguably wronged the most.

Additional Observations:

- In other storylines, it’s nice to see that Qrow and Ozpin aren’t trusting anything that Leo is selling – a bit of sense is always welcome.

- And according to Leo, Raven is actually capable of demonstrating full-blooded emotions. Cue her response: “I’m not afraid – I’m smart.” Ah. There we are – still a nothing character.

-  I’m not even saying that Menagerie’s contribution to last season was a bad thing; everything to do with Volume 4 should be looked at in context of it being such an anomalous body of work, yet at the same time one which was wholly necessary. The way Menagerie was involved in Volume 4 was fine, because that approach was a fit for what the context demanded. It’s the fact that Volume 5 has struggled so clearly that has been the main problem.

-  I’m so glad that Ilia is still around. She started last season as someone whose name I could never remember, and now she has been one of the most consistent features of this season’s Menagerie storyline. I hope the show takes advantage of her by continuing her story with Blake. And, you know, as much as I will argue that anyone in a story can die, I’m very pleased that we haven’t just killed off the only LGBT representation on the show so far. Much appreciated.

- I haven’t checked, but I’d like to imagine that Ilia/Blake fanfiction has been blowing up these last two weeks. You lovely people.

Grade: B+

Final Thoughts: “True Colors” was given the task of wrapping up RWBY’s most inconsistent storyline in years; the job it does is certainly admirable, a finely-staged fight scene and overall great performances from Blake and Ilia serving as the hook of the story – while the season’s final act is all but spoken into existence. Again, the Menagerie storyline has been a unique problem in the show’s recent history, and the weight of that cannot be easily ignored in assessing its conclusion. But with four episodes remaining, “True Colors” stands as a solid and logical way to bridge Volume 5 into its endgame. – Kallie

#rwby spoilers #rwby reviews #rwby5 #rwby volume 5 #rwby

[atamascolily]

Fanfic Excerpt: Alternate Version of Sinbad 2x21 - “The Guardians“

Okay, I've talked about my plans for two different Virtual Seasons of Adventures of Sinbad - one with Bryn and one with Maeve as a part of the main crew. I watched Sinbad 2x21 "The Guardians" last night and while I plan on eventually writing a review, I couldn't help but think how I would re-write it to fix the plot points that bothered me and potentially incorporate it into the Bryn virtual season. I've done an outline for much of her season, but there are still a few places where I need to fill in the gaps, and this episode might be one of them. This season also features a number of episodes that riff or play with elements from the canon season two, because I'm trying to figure out the show I would have liked to see at times when the actual episodes don't work well for me.

Anyway, here is an excerpt from the opening of a version of 2x21 I started writing, and we'll see where it goes.

Dermott sends Bryn an image of the smoke first, and she reels backward from the disorientation of suddenly finding herself in the air and clenches her fingers into her horse's mane to keep from falling. By the time she's recovered her bearings, Rongar is already pointing in the right direction - the man has keen eyesight, though not as good as a hawk's - and signing to the others. She heard screams in Dermott's sending, the smell of burned flesh, and the laughter of raiders so she knows what Rongar suspects, but cannot know for certain at the distance - that innocent people are dying and it is no accident.

Dermott doesn't communicate often with her like this, but when he does there is always a reason.

When she's able to speak again, her voice is clipped and low, as neutral as she can make it. "Dermott is there. Bandits. Attacking some sort of caravan."

She sees Sinbad shift in his saddle, and she knows from the change in the way he carries himself that their mission has just shifted. Forget the cargo, forget the tide, forget the plan, forget everything: Sinbad won't rest until justice is done, however bloody or complex its work might be. He acts like he doesn't care about much, but it's a facade, and they all know it and play along because he doesn't like it much if they don't. Sinbad might be grim much of the time, but he's easier to live with if you pretend to believe him when he lies.

Doubar says he was different, back when Maeve was around, but he spoke quietly, out of the corner of his mouth, only when he was sure Sinbad wasn't around to hear him. Sinbad didn't like it when you talked about Maeve, either.

So they wheel the horses around and ride towards the smoke. It doesn't take long to get there, but it feels like forever. They don't speak much, but they know the drill. Save who you can. Leave the leader to Sinbad. No mercy to the guilty ones. Fight to kill.

They're lucky, because the bandits are complacent. They aren't expecting an attack from the outside, much less one on horseback, so the crew has a precious few seconds of surprise. Rongar gets a few bandits while still mounted - taking advantage of the distance to throw some of the dirks strapped in the bandolier across his chest - before vaulting to the ground and throwing punches. Big and burly Doubar is a born melee fighter and roars into battle, smashing heads together, his favorite strategy. She winces out of the corner of her eyes as Firouz gets punched in the face and goes down, but she doesn't have time to think about it much because she's caught in the rush of battle and the world is reduced to what is immediately in front of her.

Her mind doesn't remember what happened before she woke on a beach on a godforsaken island, before she met Sinbad and joined the crew of his merchant vessel, the Nomad, but her body remembers how to fight. She takes comfort in those deep muscle memories, that no matter what else happened in that life before she can't remember, that she has always been a fighter. She punches and kicks, blocks and spins, and she moves with a grace that could only come from long hours of practice - practice she doesn't remember, but has saved her life so many times before. It comes in handy when spending time with Sinbad, who seems to attract trouble like one of Firouz's mysterious metal bars - - - what he calls 'magnets' - attracts iron filings.

Sinbad, of course, goes straight for the leader, who is wearing a gaudy purple turban and an even gaudier cape. He's threatening a woman, who is clearly untrained in combat and shaking with terror, but grimly prepared to fight for her life. Bryn is too busy dealing with other bandits to watch the proceedings, but she knows that if anyone can save that poor woman, Sinbad will find a way. She's seen it happen so many times before, it's not something she questions anymore.

The battle is over almost too quickly; it takes her a moment before she realizes the remaining bandits are fleeing, their purple-cloaked leader with them. Horses scream in terror and the smell of smoke is fierce in her lungs. Sinbad is crouched low on the ground, and Firouz is with him, offering what comfort he can to the poor woman he defended, who is clearly dying.

Bryn hears the baby before she sees him - tucked away under a cart, which is not yet on fire. She picks him up, gingerly, not sure how to handle an infant, and carries him over to the dying woman, who cries out in relief to be re-united with her child. "Ajeeb! You're alive! Oh, thank heavens!"

(To be continued at some point, probably. No promises.)

#Adventures of Sinbad #adventures of sinbad live action #adventures of sinbad live action tv #my fanfiction #sinbad 2x21 #virtual season two: bryn #Spleen #fanfic musings #i should get an ao3 #sinbad fanfiction

[theconservativebrief]

Sometimes, TV networks hold back their biggest nights until the fall season has calmed down a bit, the better to have more time to promote them. So it is this year with ABC’s Tuesday night lineup, which pins all of its hopes on the Roseanne spinoff The Conners.

We have thoughts on The Conners elsewhere, but below you’ll find thoughts on the network’s brand new nostalgia comedy The Kids Are Alright, its new cop drama (and Nathan Fillion vehicle) The Rookie, and the premiere of black-ish season five, a.k.a. the series’ return after a weirdly tumultuous fourth season. (Also returning is Splitting Up Together, but we don’t have time to watch everything.)

Finally, we also have thoughts on Netflix’s new Toni Collette series Wanderlust, which has already aired in the United Kingdom. So if you’re from the UK, this will be a retrospective for you. How lucky!

Few of these shows are great, and as critics, we often have limited information on whether they’ll get better. (It’s rare-to-unprecedented for broadcast networks, especially, to send out many episodes for review beyond the first couple.) But there’s something in all of these shows worth checking out, especially if you’re a particular fan of their genres.

(A note: We’ve only given ratings to shows where we feel we’ve seen enough episodes to judge how successful they will be in the long term. This week, that’s Wanderlust, of which we’ve seen the entire first season.)

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On its surface, ABC’s The Kids Are Alright — think The Wonder Years, but set in the ’70s and amid a huge Irish Catholic family living in Los Angeles — doesn’t seem to be breaking any new ground. But not every show needs to break new ground to be a success.

Where The Kids Are Alright sets viewers at ease is in its execution. The pilot has some clunky exposition and forced jokes (a reference to “phony news” might make you groan a bit). But that’s also forgivable in a show that has 10 major characters to introduce, eight of them the family sons, differentiated mainly by their age. When it comes to being able to explain all of these characters in a word or two, The Kids Are Alright succeeds considerably, despite only having 22 minutes to pull off the task.

ABC’s kid-casting department has always been the best in television, but the network has outdone itself here, with every one of these boys, who range in age from a tiny baby to a seminary student, expertly chosen both to fill their role and to feel like they fit together as a family. In particular, Jack Gore, who plays Timmy, the would-be entertainer whose adult memories provide the show’s narration (thanks to creator/showrunner Tim Doyle), is a surprisingly strong center for the show, despite his young age.

The show also boasts strong work from Michael Cudlitz and Mary McCormack as the boys’ parents, who express a kind of exhausted, off-brand dignity. And its ’70s milieu provides a tension between old ways and new that feels of the moment.

This is still very much A Sitcom Pilot, with all the “Oh, hey, I’m going to tell you about our relationship to each other, because we need to get in some exposition” lines that implies. But the casting works, and the writing underscores the bonds among these characters in a way that makes them feel like a real family. It’s not all the way there yet — but it’s at least alright. —Todd VanDerWerff

The Kids Are Alright debuts Tuesday, October 16, at 8:30 pm Eastern. It bears no relation to the film or song of the same name.

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The fourth season of ABC’s wonderful comedy black-ish roiled with an unusual amount of tension. First, the network pulled a completed episode (dealing with the country’s recent political unrest) from the schedule, then announced it would never be aired. Then, a late-season series of episodes putting the show’s central marriage in danger drew mixed critical responses.

And finally, the series’ creator and mastermind, Kenya Barris, exited his deal with ABC Studios in favor of setting up shop at Netflix. He will continue to be involved in black-ish as long as it’s on the air, but he has taken a step back from the show and will otherwise be working for an entirely separate media company.

Add to this all of the typical problems of a family sitcom entering its fifth season — the kids are getting older (and thus less cute), the family dynamics are played out, and it’s hard to figure out how to keep the older kids involved in the story when they might normally be off at college — and you have a recipe for a show that could easily spin its wheels, racking up more episodes for a syndication order but slowly declining during its last few years on the air.

Judging by the first two episodes of season five, however, the show, while more tired than it’s ever felt, is still one of TV’s best family comedies, mixing the sort of lighthearted family stories that are the center of this subgenre with more thoughtful and probing explorations of black life in America.

Episode one, “Gap Year,” investigates why black men who are born into wealth are more likely to fall into poverty than white men born into wealth. Episode two, “Don’t You Be My Neighbor,” takes on the wave of calls to the police complaining about black people doing pretty much anything, like having a block party or hanging out in a Starbucks. The new episodes also lean into the aging of the child cast, doing some fascinating things with the now-teenage Diane in particular.

If you like black-ish, then, you’ll be more than fine with these new episodes. The show has lost a step, sure, but it’s a lost step due not to turmoil but, rather, age. Few shows can make it to 100 episodes — the line black-ish will cross later this fall — without being a little less surprising and audacious. Now an elder statesman, black-ish seems more than happy to step into a more distinguished phase of its life. —TV

black-ish returns Tuesday, October 16, at 9 pm Eastern on ABC.

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Give Nathan Fillion this: When it came time to choose his return to television, the Castle star didn’t latch on to any of the presumably dozens of star vehicles thrown at him. Instead, he grabbed hold of a show that seems like a star vehicle — in that it’s named after his character — but boasts a surprisingly robust ensemble. That makes The Rookie one of the fall’s best new dramas. (A low bar to clear, admittedly.)

Fillion plays the rookie of the title, John Nolan, a man in his 40s who, after stopping a bank robbery, decides to move to Los Angeles from his little Pennsylvania town and join the LAPD. Now, most of this decision-making occurs offscreen, which leads to the first five minutes of the show’s pilot feeling hilariously abrupt. The focus veers wildly from John feeling like his life has had no meaning or adventure, to him stopping the robbery, to him at his first day on the job with the LAPD. You’d be forgiven for turning the pilot off in these moments.

But credit where it’s due: The Rookie is interested in exploring more rookie cops beyond John. In particular, the show adds to its mix of brand new cops Melissa O’Neil as Lucy, a hyper-competent young woman with something to prove, and Titus Makin as Jackson, the son of a cop who’s kind of coasted into the job. Then it pairs all of these rookies with more experienced training officers looking to advance their own careers, which provides a fun blend of motivations and character dynamics.

There’s plenty of stuff in The Rookie that doesn’t work. It doesn’t really try to do anything new with the cop show format, and there’s one big twist around the episode’s midpoint that made me sigh in irritation.

But in a world of cop shows still wedded to the closed-off, more procedural nature of shows like Law & Order and CSI, it’s kind of fun to have a series more interested in building out a large ensemble of characters, where the cases are secondary to the characters bouncing off of each other. And in Fillion, the show has a star who’s refreshingly free of vanity (mostly), willing to portray himself as an over-the-hill guy huffing his way through his first days on the job. —TV

The Rookie debuts Tuesday, October 16, at 10 pm Eastern on ABC.

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There are so many moving parts to Wanderlust that it can be hard to keep track of its narrative flurry — but in a show about the ins, outs, ups, and downs of relationships, that may be inevitable. But aside from the realization that catalyzes the events of the series, the story is maybe the flimsiest part of the whole series anyway.

For any other show, that might be a death knell, but it doesn’t matter so much for Wanderlust. The show’s earnest approach to relationships and sex — there’s no shying away from the awkwardness of any of it — is appealing enough to counteract the way the plot falls into a much more typical (and disappointing) pattern.

The crux of the series, written by Nick Payne and premiering on Netflix in the US, is Joy (Toni Collette) and Alan’s (Steven Mackintosh) mutual decision to have sex with other people. They’ll remain married — they still love each other, and their family — but their sex life has stalled, and this may just be the change that they need.

It’s a bold beginning, given that any kind of infidelity or polyamory tends to be either exoticized or damned in media portrayals, and Wanderlust manages not to present it that way by focusing on the emotional strings tying these people together.

That strength comes through in the patients Joy sees in her day-to-day work as a therapist, who provide micro versions of the crises and changes that the main cast go through. (Andy Nyman and Robin Weaver are particularly great as a couple coming in for counseling.) But of course it’s down to Collette and Mackintosh to hold down the fort.

As proven earlier this year in Hereditary (just the most recent of many examples), Collette is capable of anything. And Mackintosh — whom you may remember from Luther or as any number of weirdos, corporate stooges, and yes-men from the past handful of years — is finally allowed to put his prodigious charm to use. They keep things moving, literally and figuratively, even as the story starts to flag and veer in the most predictable directions.

The other relationships in the series are treated with similar tenderness toward experiences ranging from young love to exploring one’s sexuality to dealing with an age gap. It’s all treated with an eye toward honesty rather than shock value, and ultimately is what makes the show worth watching. —Karen Han

All six episodes of Wanderlust debut on Netflix on Friday, October 19.

ABC’s The Conners (Tuesday at 8) is surprisingly good for something hastily cobbled together from the ashes of the Roseanne revival. You can read more of our thoughts on the spinoff here.

Two streaming docuseries return for their second seasons on Friday — Netflix’s Making a Murderer and Amazon’s Lore. We’ll have more on the former later in the week, but making 10 episodes out of the handful of new developments in the Steven Avery case since season one aired turns out to be a tall order. The latter remains agreeably spooky, if a little unsure how to bridge the gap between the podcast that inspired it and its TV self.

Two new TV movie/miniseries projects of note that debut this weekend: HBO’s My Dinner with Hervé (Saturday at 9 pm) casts Peter Dinklage in the role of Fantasy Island star Hervé Villechaize (he of “The plane! The plane!”). Meanwhile, PBS launches a five-episode adaptation of the Wilkie Collins novel The Woman in White (Sunday at 9 pm) that looks to be a lavish take on a terrific Victorian mystery.

Original Source -> Nathan Fillion is a rookie cop, black-ish is back, and more from the week in fall TV

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

[eridianshores-blog]

The Walking Dead: Season 6 - Revisited

Warning: There be SPOILERS ahead! If you haven't watched Season 6 of The Walking Dead and want to keep all the twists, turns, secrets, and deaths a surprise, stop reading!

(Maybe one day I'll whip up some fancy HTML to hide spoiler text until the area is hovered over, but until then...)

Looking back at my humble collection of around 8 or so zombie DVDs circa 2005, it’s hard to believe the very same subject matter I sought out would, in a few years time, become one of the highest rated TV programs of all time, constantly setting new records (all in an age where traditional TV is dying out, no less).  The proliferation of zombies into the mainstream is largely a very recent phenomenon, both responsible for and spurred on by The Walking Dead.

I will admit that my interest in the show is patchy - some seasons I religiously catch every episode, while others ebb by with barely a thought.  But when a new season does inevitably pop up on Netflix, I do get a little excited to see what’s happened.  I also think it’s fair to say that The Walking Dead can feel like 2 different TV shows depending on whether you’re getting your season in over the course of a few days or actually watching it week-to-week complete with holiday break.  

Watching the show week-to-week really helps those “moments” settle in.  You’ve only got a finite amount of Walking Dead to chew on for a week or more, so it sticks in your head longer and leaves you to ponder over secondary and tertiary plot strings more thoughtfully and completely.  The drawback is that the lulls and the filler are 10x more obvious.  When processing the season as 16 different chunks, drawn out plot lines, tangential episodes, and even shockers and cliffhangers are much more noticeable and memorable simply because we have more time to ruminate before our next narrative dose.

On the other hand, binge watching a season gives us a much clearer view of whatever arc the writers had planned since we’re sort of able to feel the momentum and the progress in “real time.”  Sometimes the week-to-week stuff is like moving in slow motion, and it’s difficult to see “the point.”  Conversely, some degree of detail and nuance is lost with the binge-watching approach because our minds aren’t spending time going over every single detail over and over.  We see an episode, reach back to remember what we need to, and move forward; it’s much different than sitting around for a week and wondering where every plot thread will eventually end up.

That being said, depending on who you are and also depending on what season of The Walking Dead we bring into question, one approach or the other may be a “better” or more optimal (or worse or less optimal) way to watch the episodes.  However, as the years roll on - particularly from the 4th season forward - more and more I think that binge watching is the way to go, mostly because the writers or producers or whoever seem to revel in audience manipulation.  At least you’ve only really got to put up with the season finale when watching it all at once.

Now with all of that being said, I digested the 6th season more or less in one chunk, maybe 5 sessions over the course of 3 and a half days.  As a season I would say it was maybe...75% successful?  It certainly got off to a good start after the rocky road to (and into) Alexandria in the 5th season.  I can see where the quarry situation may have initially come off as contrived and manufactured, but I think the writers actually did a good job of explaining it - these zombies had been falling in and this was one of the biggest reasons why Alexandria had yet to face any serious threats from the dead.  Of course the timing of the trucks that held the bodies at bay was mighty convenient, I’m ok writing that off as the magic of television.

Most criticisms leveled at the first half of Season 6 focus on the plodding nature of the events surrounding the quarry - in case you’ve forgotten, the group was successful at leading half of zombies away but the other half were drawn towards Alexandria due to a simultaneous assault by the Wolves.  Soon the wall gives way and the town is overrun.  I suppose I can somewhat sympathize with these criticisms, but I also feel like there’s a lot that happens over these 3 days (I think) and that it takes a little time to adequately run through all the events, especially since many events overlap and we’re getting multiple perspectives, plus enough information to know how all the events fit together.

Personally, I found the threat of zombies refreshing.  Our heroes have become pretty adept at dispatching these things and it’s been a while since we’ve seen more than a few quick stabs here and there.  Maybe the group was splintered into 1 or 2 too many subgroups for the show’s own good, but I was still glad to see all the running and cornering and eventual evisceration of several lesser characters.  It reminded me a lot of the show’s earlier days when plots revolved around simple supply runs or fortifying a place to sleep.

As for the attack of the Wolves...meh, I could take it or leave it.  It wasn’t entirely original, it was 100% expected (at some point anyway, and what better time than the worst time possible...), and I felt like it was a forced means for the show to get to this whole “kill or not to kill” theme that ends up dominating the season.  Now don’t get me wrong, I think this is a great question to ask - I’ve been asking it myself for the last couple of seasons - I just thought the whole Wolves attack with “Alpha Wolf” and Carol and Morgan was a weird and slightly unnecessary spark for the conversation.

Morgan’s obvious reticence towards killing has always brought with it a tiny air of mystery, but it wasn’t until this season’s 4th episode that we fully understood the breadth of Morgan’s journey from Atlanta to Terminus.  As a sidenote, I have mixed feelings about these flashback episodes.  Usually the information presented within is interesting, informative, and worth the use of an episode, however, no matter how great it is as a standalone piece, it still interrupts the flow of the season.  I guess it can’t be helped (other than to do away with these types of episodes, though I don’t think that’s the answer) but maybe they could place these episodes more strategically, i.e. not following a cliffhanger.  Oh well.  Back to Morgan and his Odyssey.

When I was finally able to get my mind off of Glenn’s fake death and get into the tale of Morgan (who I’ve always been mildly ambivalent towards as a character) and the one-shot Eastman, I thoroughly enjoyed the renewed interest in morality.  Rick & Co. have continually oscillated between “kill fucking everything” and “we’re all a big happy family” but from very early on it’s been established that killing the living is par for the course and must be done. Via Morgan, we’re finally getting around to, “is it really necessary?”  It’s not only interesting but also a vital component of the equation at this point in time and I kinda dig how it’s rippled outwards from Morgan, eventually deeply affecting Carol.  Daryl isn’t so closely associated with all of that, yet he also seems to have developed a renewed appreciation for human life.

It’s a little early to get into the implications of whether or not killing is wrong and if people can truly change, but I hope we’ll move further into this territory.  All of this Negan shit sort of turned the concept on its head and basically gagged and blindfolded us and dropped us smack dab in the middle of everyone-needs-to-die-NOW land.  I hope that the issue resurfaces somehow and wasn’t merely heaped on just to create the jolt that was Negan...I guess we’ll see before long.

And then there was the fake Glenn death which I feel obligated to mention...it was stupid.  Anyone disagree?  Didn’t think so.  Moving on.

Wrapping up the season’s first half, which thematically runs through the 9th episode, I’d like to add that I especially enjoyed the payoff that was the death of the Andersons.  Don’t get me wrong, I was rooting for Rick and Jessie, but what better way to keep us viewers on our toes than by BAM killing the little kid and BAM killing Jessie and then BAM killing that other kid who also shoots Carl’s fucking eye out.  That last part was a little gruesome and perhaps overkill, but I get that it was adapted from the comics.  Still, Carl doesn’t have but so many lives....and at the same time it’s kinda cool to watch him become battle-hardened and world-weary - a true product, both mentally and physically, of this post-apocalyptic existence.

The back half of Season 6 kicks off on a positive note.  I thought it was great that Michonne and Rick finally got together.  Back on the road to Terminus it seemed like there was a spark between the 2, but once that was abandoned I gave up on it.  To see it happen was an interesting moment for the show...as far-fetched as the pairing seemed, it also totally makes sense.  The cherry on top was seeing that Carl was cool with it.  He and Michonne had definitely established a bond, plus I don’t think any of the viewers are in the mood for some “you ain’t my mama” drama.

Of course this is a very minor plot point compared to the flavor of the next few episodes.  For anyone in need of a refresher, we meet “Jesus,” the Hilltop Community, and learn about Negan.  To hell with morality - the citizens of Alexandria make a decision to launch an all out assault on Negan’s crew, albeit somewhat out of desperation for food (which they intend to trade for Hilltop - exterminating Negan in exchange for necessary goods).  

At first the march of war seemed pretty damn interesting.  The assault itself was pretty awesome, and we also see both Glen and Heath (I think?) struggle with their “duty” to kill other humans.  Some of this guilt seems to subside as they study the Polaroids of smashed skulls pasted to the walls.  Then we deal with more Negan as Carol and Maggie are captured, and then the season sort of spins its wheels for a few episodes in anticipation of the long awaited confrontation with Negan.

Watched as a whole, this string of episodes creates some mild exasperation, so I can only imagine that when viewed weekly the show seemed to absolutely slow to a crawl.  We do get the death of lesbian M.D. Denise somewhere in there, which actually kinda pissed me off.  It seems like - lately anyway - secondary and tertiary characters will continually languish in the background, only to be gradually brought into the forefront.  And then, just when you’re starting to settle in with the new addition, they’re unceremoniously killed.  It actually seems pretty tough for secondary characters to make the jump to the front row.  Either they’re given the axe, or they continue to doddle in the background without being given any real significance.

When we finally meet Negan and ultimately put the pieces given to us in the season finale together, we get what I feel is a wildly unrealistic picture of who Negan and his followers are.  First of all, how has any group out there amassed this many members?  There was the motorcycle crew, the crew at the outpost, the reinforcements that were inbound, and then enough members to create several roadblocks, impassable to even Rick and his well-armed and well-trained crew.  To me, this feels like a huge convenience created just to stymy Rick and Co.  No one we’ve ever seen has had this much of a following, and furthermore it seems that this following isn’t confined to a single location either, as evidenced by the “outpost.”  

I guess it is possible that they just happen to be the ones that made it long enough and stayed well enough off to become so large, but there’s a few problems with this.  For one, there’s the tyrannical nature of Negan.  If this show has shown us anything, it’s that violence begets violence and if you rule with a violent hand, all you’re doing is setting yourself up to be overthrown by the next badass under you.  Pretty soon you’ve got a group with poor leadership and in discord and they get eaten by zombies or whatever.  (Shane, the Governor, Alpha Wolf)  The second issue is how predatory Negan’s group is.  To maximize their spoils, they’d need to keep their numbers small.  They’re not the sort of community that can just continue to grow, especially since they’re relying on the exploitation of others.  Too many mouths to feed.  No no, you need servants, not comrades.  There are just some glaring logistical issues with having a group so big yet so dependent on taking what they need by force - eventually they’re going to run out of people to extort.

Finally there’s the common issue of how many people would seriously pledge their loyalty to a guy who beats people to death with a baseball bat and laughs about it, but that’s more of something to discuss with Season 7.

Any damn way, this big climax with Negan was pretty darn disappointing.  I know that Jeffery Dean Morgan garnered a lot of praise for his portrayal, but honestly he just talked too damn much.  (And if you don’t think so, just wait until you get into Season 7...)  Yeah, he was definitely evil and unnerving and made for some serious suspense, the problem was that it was just drawn out too long.  By the end of the finale we know that Negan wasn’t bluffing and that somebody bit the dust, but in true Walking Dead sensationalism, we got no idea who.

Like so many of The Walking Dead’s biggest moments, this one was also polarizing.  Plenty of critics loved the buildup and plenty others were unsatisfied.  Good TV shows will almost always create this sort of division, though I can’t help but notice that many of these “shock” moments are the target of harsher and harsher criticism as time goes on.  My concern is that the show will become something like Jerry Springer or Maury - a once serious show that ostensibly remains so, but in reality is just out for the shock factor.  What it seems like the writers and producers don’t seem to realize is that a) TV is not a comic, and b) it only takes 1 or 2 severe blows to shatter a viewer’s interest and emotional investment in a show.  (Yes, I’m looking your way Season 7...)  Sure, you can keep pulling the rug out from under us and making us gasp and cringe with the very things we thought would never happen, but there’s only so many times you can play that card before unpredictability becomes predictable; where viewers learn to expect the unexpected, and as a result, go into the show with a degree of skepticism that hinders their full enjoyment.  

Furthermore, the number of possible storylines grows ever smaller with many of these moments - whether it be someone minor like Denise or Noah (huge waste of potential in my opinion) or a bigger player like, let’s say, Lori or Dale - and to be honest, the show has had a difficult if not impossible time when it comes to replacing these folks.  Frankly no one has even come close to replace people like Herschel, or Dale, or Shane (ok, Shane had to die), or even smaller roles like Beth.  Looking back on it, Michonne was really the last great character they introduced; I guess Tyrese was alright once he came into his own.  But the other sorta-newcomers - Sasha, Ford, Rosita, Eugene, Father Gabriel - none of them really come close to hitting the highs that much of the Seasons 1 - 3 cast did.  The Walking Dead has all but become “The Rick Show,” and while part of me can get behind that idea, part of me wishes it was a little more balanced.

So for all these reasons I’m giving the season a 75% success rate.  Obviously we had a stronger first half and though some may see it as drawn out, looking back on it I enjoyed the multitude of perspectives and events taking place.  And like I said, it gets a big “thumbs up” from me for once again featuring zombies as the primary threat.  As far as the second half, I don’t have a problem with Negan and I think that - eventually - it’ll create a fun context to explore the morality of killing people within, but as of the season finale, the road was just too damn long and too damn uneventful.

Currently I’m 4 episodes deep into Season 7, and as soon as my cable’s OnDemand is fully functional again I hope to catch up to the mid-season finale.  Hopefully I’ll feel strongly enough about it to follow up...I certainly have some choice words concerning those first 4 episodes already!

Until then...brains?

#walking dead #the walking dead #walking dead season 6