Countdown to Ambush Bug: Maritime Edition

If Ambush Bug wants to be employed at DC again......he's going to have to make friends...
...with the REAL movers and shakers of the DCU.
I'm just saying.

Aquaman Rocks Week starts... right now!

(For more on Aquaman's undersea language, please read The Comic Treadmill today.)

Star Trek 479: Projections

479. Projections

FORMULA: Ship in a Bottle + Distant Voices + Frame of Mind + bits of Caretaker

WHY WE LIKE IT: Barclay.

WHY WE DON'T: The new holodeck set. None of it happened.

REVIEW: An episode that looks like it was written by Philip K. Dick? Must be Brannon Braga's doing. While I found his reality benders an entertaining change of page on TNG, they seem to come too soon and too frequently on Voyager. Though making everyone real a hologram and the hologram a real person is a fun notion, it seems like every show has now had it's "one character wakes up alone on the ship" brain teaser episode, so it feels very derivative. And for a malfunction in the program, it seems altogether too coherent an "alternate reality".

Despite the "here we go again" nature of the premise, there's some good comedy here. The very notion that Reg Barclay was in charge of the EMH's social skills is subversively funny, and the show has a lot of fun with the Doctor's foreknowledge once the simulation is reset to Caretaker. There's the deletion of key characters that annoy the EMH, Neelix's frying pan fight with a Kazon, and Kes' recasting as the Doctor's wife (she's most responsible for his thinking of himself as a "person", so definitely an important part of this hallucination).

We also learn a little bit about the EMH's early development, and the name Lewis Zimmerman is thrown at us for the first time. The series bible famously has Zimmerman as the EMH's name, but despite the confusion here, that didn't stick any more than Schweitzer did. Barclay probably worked on the program between Generations and First Contact, and his presence is welcome, though it's a case of forcing a cool recurring character into the proceedings despite the distance. I like Barclay, but I do wish Voyager would be a little braver with its concept sometimes.

In the end, we know Voyager can't have been a simulation gone wrong all this time, so it's a matter of watching the Doctor go through the usual hoops until the holoprogram ends. The episode can't quite maintain a sense of suspense. I think it's the first time we see the new holodeck set, and it looks like a step back to me. More manageable as a set, but I liked TNG's yellow-on-black grid a heck of a lot more. The idea of projectors elsewhere on the ship is an interesting one that would give the Doctor more mobility, but it's part of the fantasy, so we'll have to wait a bit longer for that.

LESSON: It's not fun being real.

REWATCHABILITY - Medium: It's entertaining enough, but not quite as involving as it wants to be because "it never happened" (again).

This Week in Geek (24-30/03/08)

Buys

A number of purchases this week, actually, most of them DVDs: No Country for Old Men, coming off its Oscar wins; Gattaca, about time I retired my old tape and this Special Edition is it; Adaptation, because it was cheap and I've given up hope of a better edition; and Dr. Strangelove, another tape I've wanted to retire for a while. As for comics, well, you'll see below, but Jeffrey Brown's Incredible Change-Bots finally made it into my collection.

"Accomplishments"

I never really discuss the single issues I read here, but this was a big week for polishing off trade paperbacks. First up is Uncle Sam & the Freedom Fighters, which sadly didn't star very many of the originals, or even the second person to bear their names. Instead, we have something that wants to be Nextwave, but isn't quite as funny. It's still a perfectly crazy political thriller with glitzy art that grew on me as I flipped the chapters. I'm now looking forward to the second mini-series.

Up next: DMZ volume 3 - Public Works. Vertigo still produces the kind of series I really want to buy in trade and lend to other people, and DMZ is certainly one of their top titles. Public Works isn't quite as affecting as the first two volumes, focusing less on the common man and instead on an Iraq-like rebuilding effort stymied by terrorists. It's still excellent and as ever, harrowing for our protagonist Matty.

As previously mentioned, Incredible Change-Bots fell into my hands, and while I was rather nonplussed by Jeffrey Brown's Clumsy, and am not a Transformers fan by any stretch of the imagination, I loved loved loved this. Like everyone else, apparently. From the roll call of featured robots to the very end, every page has something to recommend it. Sometimes, it's a joke, and sometimes a bit of nostalgia, or often just the charming artwork. Brown's naive style is surprisingly up to the challenge of drawing vehicular transformations, and who'd have thought coloring a book with markers would actually be appealing? My favorite Incredible Change-Bot? Balls.

The big "accomplishment" though is finishing Showcase Presents Aquaman vol.1. At more than 500 pages, this monster was still a joy to read. Nick Cardy's artwork is dynamic and always original, but I still liked Ramona Fradon's cleaner, more cartoony undersea world. But the key to the success and charm of the Silver Age Aquaman is this: Octopi. I'm not kidding. Topo quickly became a favorite and I always liked stories with armies of octopi a lot more fun than those without. Liked it all so much, this week is going to be Aquaman Rocks Week. I'm going to reprint old Aquaman reviews from a previous, now deleted site, but some new material as well, so I hope you'll dive in with me.

Outside of comics, role-played last Monday. I ran a "stone age" that got flipped on its head when white anthropologists showed up at the players' unmapped enclave. I had planned for both peaceful and violent resolutions and was pleasantly surprised that they went for peace. Indeed, the most memorable fight was one for political control of the tribe when the chief showed himself to be less than reasoned.

As for my Unauthorized Doctor Who CCG, only managed a few cards, all from Utopia. I'm hoping to design more throughout the week.

Someone Else's Post of the Week
You know, I could probably put one Absorbascon post in this section every week, but this time, I really have to. Scipio's carefully culled all possible clues from the Martian Manhunter's Showcase Presents to figure out what city he operated in during the Silver Age. I personally love his conclusion. Check out: Where in the World is the Martian Manhunter?

Star Trek 478: Initiations

478. Initiations

FORMULA: Suddenly Human + State of Flux

WHY WE LIKE IT: Meat on those Kazon bones.

WHY WE DON'T: Too much peace pipe for Chakotay.

REVIEW: We finally learn more about the Kazon in this episode, and though their harsh way of life will always seem only a step away from the Klingons', there's a lot more to them here. We find out they were a slave race only 26 years ago (which certainly explains why they've decorated their ships like they were housing), and that their territoriality is linked to a showing of markings (so Starfleet insignia singularly insults them). They don't believe in non-lethal training, and their young men go through a deadly rite of passage to earn their true names (akin to honor). Their ways appear to be ritualistic, but not without empathy.

Our guide through all this is Kar, played by Aaron Eisenberg, and it's excessively difficult not to hear Nog under there. Still a good performance on his part, and I'm kind of sorry we never saw him again (as a foe). While Chakotay's final solution is the usual Starfleet self-sacrificial con, Kar's is a lot more political, revealing a Kazon that's smarter than the norm.

Chakotay is probably the best character to have "discover" the Kazon, because of his anthropological predilections, and he shows himself to be an able diplomat, finding common ground between him and Kar (name vs. uniform). I can't help but wonder, however, if his mild character here will play against him in the long run. He'll become too stable and boring to ever be counted among Voyager's "cool kids". The show is still developing his Amerind heritage as prays to the spirit of his father, but one might question the wisdom of letting someone take off in a precious shuttle for this kind of thing, especially since the shuttle is lost forever. Note this is also the second time Chakotay's medicine bundle mysteriously survives the destruction of a ship.

There's not much happening on Voyager, except a thin subplot in which Neelix wants to be better utilized. Despite being repeatedly ignored, he's still the one that best grasps Kazon psychology. And this also marks a comeback for the Arena planet (Vasquez Rocks) to the show. Though it looks a little more arid here, you just can't mistake that rocky outcropping.

LESSON: If at first you're not baptized, try try again.

REWATCHABILITY - High: The best ever Kazon episode? I think it may be, though Voyager is more of a bystander in it, even Chakotay, who isn't truly responsible for the successful resolution.

5 Things to Like About All-Star Superman #10

Everyone loves this series, right? Grant Morrison's a genius, right? Morrison's also the guy who going to give us Final Crisis, right? Well, let me go on record here and now saying All-Star Superman should be the new post-post-post-crisis default for Superman. I would LOVE for the Superman books to be an extension of Silver Age continuity. Here are five great excerpts:

5. Lex Luthor's reading materialWhen even a simple visual gag makes the list, you know you've got a great comic in your hands. And it's all part of a memorable scene that encapsulates perfectly what Superman and Lex each believe about the other, and how it has driven their relationship all these years.

4. The Kandorian Superman Rescue Squad's uniforms
Made me believe these guys could grow up to become the Daxamites, and in the All-Star universe, that's still possible. Because...

3. The Fate of Kandor
In what would be a bold move in the DCU, but is par for the course in Morrison's All-Star Superman, Kandor is freed from its bottle and the diminutive Kandorians given new life on a neighboring planet. Huge possibilities are opened (by this and the map of Superman's DNA) for future stories, and I'm feeling more and more like "He's got to be the last Kryptonian" post-Crisis stance was a wrong move.

2. Superman and Lois' timeless romance
This is a great moment about how static and yet iconic comic book romances are. Superman and Lois have always been meant to be together, their bond to be strong, and yet never to move too far ahead like real relationships do. That's no secret to Superman (meta-textually) and it doesn't crush Lois' hope. Perfect.

1. We are on Earth-Q
It was a weird Morrisonesque bit when Superman created a tiny universe in his lab some issues ago, but it pays off here when he experiments with it to see if a world can survive without a Superman. Answer: It can't. Thankfully, we don't live in such a world, even if he's not flesh and bone. I'm just glad we're in the DC Multiverse again, after Earth-Prime turned out not to have been it.

Star Trek 477: The 37s

477. The 37s

FORMULA: The Neutral Zone - 50 years

WHY WE LIKE IT: The hot Amelia Earhart.

WHY WE DON'T: Stock 30s characters. Too many humans this side of the border. Sights unseen.

REVIEW: If Learning Curve was a quiet season finale, The 37s is a REALLY quiet season premiere. Again, no real antagonists and the big outer space shot is of a rusting truck... IN SPACE!!! Very TOS, that. What directly follows is the usual scene where one character isn't a cabbage head (Tom Paris turns out to be a car buff) and everyone else seems incredibly badly informed about the 20th century (despite the number of holoprograms apparently made about this era).

Anyway, the crew follows an old S.O.S. to a planet where they find people who were abducted by aliens back in 1937. Sadly, their characterizations aren't really a step up from the 20th century stereotypes of The Neutral Zone. The one exception, I suppose, is Sharon Lawrence as Amelia Earhart. Hot off NYPD Blue, I remember this being a big deal at the time. Then she went and ruined her career with "40 and still sexy" and earthquake movies. In any case, Earhart was always an inspiration to Janeway, and there's a connection made there.

Then some aliens show up, but it turns out they're descendants of other 37s who had been thawed out centuries ago and put to work by the UFO aliens. It's too bad in a sense because those block-headed outfits were pretty distinctive. Tensions are quickly resolved once everybody figures out everybody's human. Humans long ago overthrew their alien masters and built a civilization for themselves, including three magnificent cities the crew visits, but we never see. This is really takes the air out of the episode's big dilemma: whether or not the crew should stay in this frontier paradise instead of risking a 70-year journey home. It's a good, courageous moment when no one shows up at the cargo bay to be put off the ship, but I'm not entirely sure how realistic it is (all the 37s want to stay, all the Voyager crew members want to leave).

If we'd seen the cities, maybe we'd have a better idea of the sacrifice, but the money apparently all went into designing Voyager's landing sequence. Yes, the ship can land. The only reason they never did in Star Trek is because of effects practicalities, but we're over that now, and despite the ship's dinky little legs, it still creates some striking shots, and gives the creators a chance to light the interiors differently as well.

Note that this marks the start of a couple of questionable trends for Voyager. One is the use or "urban legend" type factoids as a basis for an episode, in this case UFO abduction and whether or not Earhart could have been a victim of it. And the other is putting other humans in the Delta Quadrant, which frankly, makes Voyager less isolated. Not a good thing, thematically. If push comes to shove, they could always limp back to these human hotspots, couldn't they?

LESSON: There are 152 crew members aboard Voyager. Start the countdown.

REWATCHABILITY - Medium: Everything looks pretty good (including Sharon), but that hardly makes for an exciting or though-provoking season premiere.

Bored, Jaded Knockouts Through History

Been participating in Bahlactus' Friday Night Fights for a while now, and as this particular round (Knockout!) ends, I have cause to remember History's first ass-kickers. Asterix and Obelix. They kick ass without having to think about it.