544. PreyFORMULA: Scorpion + Hunters + The EnemyWHY WE LIKE IT: The Hirogen.WHY WE DON'T: Racist Seven.REVIEW: The Hirogen vs. Species 8472. A close match, but the Hirogen definitely bite off more than they can chew when they go up against a stray 8472, if the carnage aboard their ship is any indication (decapitated heads? yeeesh!). This will force the last survivor (played by the always effective Tony Todd) to ally with Voyager, which is a good way to get to know a species. And the Hirogen do come off well once again. We see their faces for the first time (not bad, but I've always found their heads to be less than iconic without the helmet) and their rather impressive giant guns. Their hunts seem to be the stuff of legends, the hunter here having tracked prey in the collapsed mantle of a star on foot). But not much more on their culture as a whole.8472 remains a dangerous creature, even wounded, but it's harder to care about a CGI monster, no matter how pathetically it curls up into fetal position. There's one impressive shot of it crawling along Voyager's hull, but otherwise, it's a lot of jumping out of corners and not doing a lot of damage when compared to the one Harry encountered in Scorpion. The hunt is really a red herring, building tension with dark lighting and the "threat" of an antigrav situation, but ending with a moral dilemma rather than an action scene.The third ball the show tries to keep in the air is Seven's refusal to help Species 8472 get home. While Janeway chooses to interpret it as prejudice on the former Borg's part, it may just be very real caution, informed by experience. But you know, everybody has to disobey Janeway's direct orders and get that disappointed look out of her at least once, and this is Seven's turn. As far as arguments go, both make valid points, but though Seven's proven more or less right, she gets slapped down hard (how hard? see the next episode!). She struggles with the selflessness a Starfleet lifestyle imposes on her and with the limits placed on her individuality. It's not an uncompelling segment of her character arc, but it detracts from the epic confrontation the episode has set up.Speaking of things that don't pay off, Neelix finally gets a security assignment in this episode, but we don't ever see him on the job. More promising is the Doctor taking Seven under his wing. He needs someone to mentor now that Kes is gone, and well, they've worked well together in the past. Though they have affinities (both are studying to be more human), it also throws the two coolest characters together, which can't be good for the rest of the cast.LESSON: PADDs are the most elusive prey of alléREWATCHABILITY - Medium: Tries to keep too many balls in the air. It doesn't fail, but it's not spectacular either.
No multiverse? Here's a story featuring the first "other Earth" of the new single Earth DC Universe...SUPERMAN #22, DC Comics, October 1988
The 80s at DC from the Crisis onward were either about revamping their heroes and villains, or about fixing continuity that had gone all screwy in the wake of the Crisis. John Byrne's Superman was pretty great because he deftly handled both. Case in point: Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes.Prior to the Crisis, the 30th century heroes had been inspired by Superboy's exploits. More than that, Superboy and Supergirl had both been pretty prominent members! After Crisis, some books got revamped including Superman, but not the Legion (which probably should have been, except things were going pretty well over there, so it wasn't). In the new Superman, he was never Superboy, and there wasn't a Supergirl because Byrne had eliminated all other surviving Kryptonians. So no Kryptonian criminals, no Supergirl, no super-dog, no super-horse, no super-monkey... (You can see why Superman had to be rebooted.)But that doesn't jibe with the history of the Legion! Byrne fixed the Superboy problem by having Legion villain the Time Trapper create a pocket dimension where Superman was Superboy, and indeed, where he had powers at his pre-Crisis, planet-juggling, level. Anytime the Legion interacted with the past, they were always redirected to this pocket dimension, allowing them to play with Krypto the Super-Dog and have Superboy become a member. Then he killed off that Superboy and the Legion buried him.In late 1988, Byrne revisited the pocket dimension by having a version of Supergirl created from scratch by that world's Luthor. Here's what it now looked like:
What the hell happened? Well, seems like Luthor let the Kryptonian criminals (from Superman II, you know the ones) out of the Phantom Zone, and without a Superboy to recapture them, they laid waste to the Earth. They point blank massacred 5 billion people. There were no other superheroes in the pocket dimension, but people such as Bruce Wayne, Hal Jordan and Oliver Queen all stepped up and became part of Luthor's small, surviving resistance cell. They contact Superman from "our" universe, and off he goes to help them.If the 5 billion dead of Earth don't make this one bloodthirsty enough, I'm afraid Byrne has the nice idea to kill off everyone that's left too. Bruce Wayne goes out like a chump, melted by Kryptonian heat vision. Then it's Hal "Green Lantern" Jordan and Oliver "Green Arrow" Queen's turn:
Brutal! To make things more difficult, the post-Crisis Superman doesn't have nearly the power level of the pre-Crisis-style Kryptonians, so he can't do much about it. Then he remembers that Superboy had a secret base under Smallville where he kept all different kinds of kryptonite. In the post-Crisis universe, there's only the deadly green, but in the pocket dimension, it's a freakin' bag of skittles. Gold kryptonite, for example, removes a Kryptonian's powers permanently. And since pocket kryptonite doesn't affect our Man of Steel, he finds some and removes the bad guys' powers with it. And then to make things even worse, the Borg show up...
Nooooo... I'm kidding. That's Superman's makeshift prison for the super-criminals. So what to do now? These guys committed genocide on an incredible scale, and well, you saw the cover: Superman exposes them to green K and they die. Yep, Superman kills. Not a dream. Not a hoax. Not a Jimmy Olsen story. Not in self-defense. Three unarmed, unpowered people. A girl, even. (It'll come back to haunt him in a really interesting plot thread, so this was a good move.)Don't feel sad though, these guys showed just how evil they were even in their death throes. The two guys started blaming one another and die at each others' throats. And the female criminal started offering Kryptonian sexual favors in exchange for her life. Super-skanky stuff that once again shows Byrne's interest for all things pornographic...
543. HuntersFORMULA: Captive Pursuit + False Profits + Survivor (any season)WHY WE LIKE IT: The Hirogen. Letters from home.WHY WE DON'T: That the Hirogen couldn't maintain their size after this.REVIEW: Our first real peek at the Hirogen and they're a very impressive race. Visually, they are - I was going to say huge, but no - they are IMMENSE! Their chitinous armors and weapons are cool too, and while their ship design is just ok (reminding one of the Krenim), the interiors are weird and unusual. For once, an alien species doesn't have the usual flat consoles we so love to use. Their hunter culture is sketched broadly, but effectively, with war paints and rituals that beg to be fleshed out and explained. There's a lot of promise here, and you know a race is going to be trouble when they have to be defeated by "death by black hole"!And most certainly, Voyager is going to be on their radar. Not only is the ship full of species none of the Hirogen have on their walls yet, Janeway and crew just blew the last fuse on their ancient relay network, making them lose contact with each other. Not cool. But while the episode does turn into Gilligan's Island in that they lose contact with Starfleet again, they do manage to receive a message before the whole thing goes kaput. There's a coded urgent message we'll address when it becomes relevant, but the "letters from home" are the true story here, and the Hirogen, no matter how engaging in this first appearance, are merely set dressing.The letters bring with them a host of character moments that enjoy both good acting and finely written reactions. Harry is the least interesting with his expected home sickness and impatience, Chakotay gets bad news about the Maquis (what happened? Deep Space 9 happened!), and B'Elanna doesn't expect a thing. Seven isn't expecting anything either, but is disturbed at the notion she might anyway. Tom certainly doesn't want to get one, as it would be a piece of his old life, one he would rather forget. Not for the first time, we get a sense that he would rather the ship never get home. Neelix is quite good as the impromptu mailman too. The character we most linger on, however, is Janeway. She had, after all, a fiancé waiting for her back home, and not only did he move on with his life, but 14 months after giving up on her, he's already remarried. Kate Mulgrew reminds me here why she's good at this job, at once holding it in and transparent as a sheet of glass. She's pragmatic about it, but can also laugh at herself and her "Dear John" letter. The ending of the episode does burst the balloon when it comes to Janeway and Chakotay's "secret romance" though. I guess she just treats him as the gay friend she always pals around with.LESSON: Mark is a compulsive proposer.REWATCHABILITY - High: The fact that the human story manages to beat out the really very cool first outing of the Hirogen puts this in my Voyager Top 5.
Final Crisis is upon us, which just makes me want to reflect on past multiple worlds shenanigans...LAST DAYS OF THE JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA SPECIAL #1, DC Comics, 1986
One of my favorite comic book stories of all time, the Last Days was Golden Age comics expert Roy Thomas's fond farewell to some of the greatest heroes of the DC universe at a time when DC thought best to retire them because they had, in a sense, become redundant.See, the Crisis on Infinite Earths had just happened and... need a primer on this? Ok. In a nutshell... (This is harder than I thought...) Um... Ok. It's like this: DC's been publishing since the 1930s, and since that time, they've also bought out a number of companies and their characters. So to use all those characters, an editor by the name of Julius Schwartz invented the concept of the DC multiverse. Most comics take place on Earth-1, see, but the World War II comics took place on Earth-2 (explains how Superman could "slap a Jap"!). The stuff DC bought would turn up on similar Earths, so Captain Marvel (Shazam!) was on Earth-S, the Charlton heroes on Earth-4, the Quality Comics heroes on Earth-X, and so on. In the mid-80s, a 12-issue mini-series called Crisis on Infinite Earths made all these worlds crash together - it was the end of the worlds. At the end, you had only one Earth, one history, one continuity, which included parts of each surviving universe.So suddenly, the World War II heroes really had fought in our own heroes' past, so our Flash must've been inspired by the Golden Age Flash, etc. Characters who simply survived unchanged from the 40s to the 60s just didn't exist in the past anymore, so any story with Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman in the 40s just never happened, or simply not in that way, possibly with other characters filling in. Confused yet?The real confusing thing is that while many books were rebooted with totally new continuity right after Crisis (Superman and Wonder Woman being the most dramatic), some weren't (the Titans or Batman, for example, changed little), and some were only rebooted much later (like Hawkman, throwing all appearances between Crisis and his new series into confusion). My take is that at the end of Crisis, reality took a while to settle, and history kept changing for quite a few years as it tried to heal its wounds, erasing a character here, retconning events there. The Last Days of the JSA occurs in this post-Crisis chaos.After all, though there was never a Golden Age Batman and Robin, the JSA are standing over their graves. They remember Earth-2 and believe that they are now simply tired copies of younger, stronger heroes. Hawkman gives a eulogy which is as much for fallen friends as for his entire generation and he announces the JSA's retirement. Cue the Spectre, probably the most powerful being ever given his own series, this guy is now the universe itself... and he's dying!!!It would seem that history is already trying to rid the world of the JSA in the first of many post-Crisis birth pains, as the Earth has been destroyed since 1945! Naturally, the JSA is confused by this (are you?), but Dr. Fate (who's been given the appropriate information and can run it movie-style for everyone) explains in the few minutes they have left before that new history catches up to 1986 and wipes us all out.It all comes down to the greatest comic book villain of all time. Lex Luthor? The Joker? Doctor Doom? (Get out of here, Marvel Zombie.) No, I'm talking about Adolf Hitler. Cuz listen, you can't beat a Nazi for nastiness, and Hitler's the lord and master of all Nazis. Best. Villain. Ever. And just like in Indiana Jones, he likes to collect occult artifacts of immense power. In this reality, he's got his hands on the Spear of Destiny, and in the closing days of the war, he means to unleash its full power and bring about Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods, the End o' the Frickin' World! That's just the kind of rat bastard he is, what can I say?
In the new history, the JSA leave FDR's funeral bent on stopping the Fürer. Except the "magical" heroes who have always been restricted from entering occupied territory by the Spear (and from changing the course of the war, I'm sure). That's Wonder Woman, Superman (?), Green Lantern, Johnny Thunder, Dr. Fate and the Spectre. I've got to mention Wonder Woman's weird well-wishing here: "May Aphrodite be with you all." Athena yes, Hera maybe, but Aphrodite? The goddess of fertility and love? All that incantation is gonna do is get the JSA screwed, if you know what I mean.And as predicted, a bunch of them get shot dead. First Starman (no!), then the Golden Age Atom (noooooo, he's one of my favorites!!!), Hourman (nooooo), Mr. Terrific (...), and Dr. Mid-Nite (nooo, it's not his fault he can't spell, he's blind!). That's when my actual favorite, Wildcat, loses it:
There's nothing like some rockin' action from Wildcat. And that was just a Nazi anyway, right? But in the end, it's not enough, and the world blows up real good!
So what's the plan now? Dr. Fate brings the older JSA to a time before the apocalypse and has them fight Ragnarok themselves. Yep, they go right up to Asgard, take the places and roles of the Norse Gods (Starman is Heimdall, GL is Thor, Hawkman is Odin, etc.) to try and buy time, drag out the Final Battle That Will Bring About the End of All That IsTM long enough for Hitler to give up on it and shoot himself in the head already.But it's not gonna be easy. We get the Saga of the Norse Gods recited to us during the battle, and if the action is following that story hit for hit, everybody has to die.
This becomes apparent when the Flash (in the role of Frey) gets burned alive by Surtur, the Fire Giant With a Diaper of Doom.
Mmm, fast-fry... Time for more Wildcat action as he takes on the wolf-dog Garm: "Somewhere along the line, the JSAers gotta change the script somehow... and if somebody's got to start the ball rollin'..."
"...it might as well be the one-and-only Wildcat!" Yee-haw!
Elsewhere, one of the weirdest deaths in a comic book - ever - occurs when Starman decapitates Loki whose hair had become stiff like horns. The head flies off and slams him in the back, stabbing him fatally! That's straight from the Saga, kids! Those Vikings knew their comics!
The JSA win their battles, but most of 'em get skewered, poisoned or devoured in the process. When there are only a couple left alive, Dr. Fate resurrects the others (death isn't really permanent in this timeless place), but the evil Gods do the same and so our heroes get locked in an eternal battle. If they ever leave, Ragnarok will come to an end and destroy the whole of reality. And so the Greatest Generation of Heroes ends not at the old folks' home, but in a never-ending battle to keep us safe. Wow.Eventually, the story will be debunked, dispelled, reversed and forgotten, but it doesn't matter. For a good long while, this is how the JSA saga ended, and it was a great one. I'm happy to have them be among the living again (those that are), don't get me wrong, but if they had to go, what a way to do it.
542. Message in a BottleFORMULA: Eye of the Neede + Rascals + BasicsWHY WE LIKE IT: Seven tasers a Hirogen.WHY WE DON'T: The comedy holograms.REVIEW: With this episode, Voyager embarks on an actually pretty good Hirogen story arc. We're only teased with this new race here, but their first appearance must nonetheless be noted. All we know about them - except the fact they're not friendly - is that they use an ancient far-spanning communications network Voyager might possibly use to contact the Alpha Quadrant. Message degradation being what it is, they have to send the Doctor (a stronger data stream). The premise is ridiculous, since you risk destroying your medical officer just for a chance of letters from home. Actually, it wouldn't be so ridiculous if Star Trek didn't routinely ignore how computer uploads and downloads actually work. You're not supposed to lose your copy of a file if you upload it! (We'll have to wait for Living Witness to see a sensical, if anomalous, take on this.)But that's all set-up. Once the Doctor reaches the USS Prometheus, you forget about the ridiculous premise and concentrate on the ridiculous plot. Though I'm not saying there aren't some fun elements at work here, the scales tip way too far into comic territory. Andy Dick isn't as funny as they would hope him to be as the smug but cowardly EMH Mark II, and while some of the brains vs. experience repartee is humorous, the slapstick is limp. The Doctor is good as good as ever as an insurrectionist, but when required to fight Romulan ships, doesn't even know where the helm might be located. By the time they're activating ultra-secret prototype defense systems by hitting buttons accidentally, your eyes are rolling so far inside your head that you can see your own brain short-circuiting.One must agree that the Starfleet shown in this episode is one that has teeth. The Prometheus' rescue party includes two Defiant-class ships and one Akira, and the Prometheus itself can turn into its own little fleet. I guess the multivector assault mode is supposed to be cool, but it seems a real stretch from the days of the Enterprise-D's battle bridge. Three sections, all ably computer controlled? There must be a reason we never saw this design in the last battles of the Dominion War. Despite its new-fangled technology though, the Romulans have apparently taken it over with a minimum of fuss. Sadly, they're cookie cutter Romulans, none of them interesting in the least. A big yawn there.Back on the Voyager, the humor is more grounded and so works better. Nurse Tom is always fun, and Harry's attempts at creating a new EMH have ridiculous results without seeming stupid. B'Elanna's personality conflict with Seven comes to a head and she has to call her rude. Somehow, this rather tame confrontation makes me chuckle. The episode tries to end on a more serious note as contact with the Alpha Quadrant is made at the series' mid-point. I'm not sure I'd agree that Voyager "is no longer alone", nor that the scene has the right impact thanks to all the preceding silliness, but at least it's progress. Progress that threatens the show's premise, but progress nonetheless.LESSON: The bigger the file, the easier it is to up/download.REWATCHABILITY - Medium: An episode that desperately wants to be cool, clever and important, but is way too silly to achieve those goals.
Buys
Spring sales are going to come in now... I just can't help myself when stuff is discounted at low, low prices! So this week, I got me Babylon 5 Seasons 3, 4, 5 and the Movie Collection. I'm thinking of it as a possible replacement for Star Trek when I've done my final Enterprise review. I don't know yet.Other stuff? The two new Godzilla releases from Classic Media, including the very bottom of the barrel, All Monsters Attack! (which you may know as Godzilla's Revenge... it's the one where a little kid dreams of Godzilla). There's also Terror of Mechagodzilla, which oddly comes out before Mechagodzilla's first appearance. Shows I'm a completist, no? Plus: The first season of The Invaders, a 1960s series that has intrigued ever since I heard the Frank Black song about it. And Choke, the Chuck Palahniuk novel that's coming out as a movie in August. I love his stuff and want to read it before the end of the summer."Accomplishments"
I've been on a reading rampage lately, and so I managed to polish off two books this week. The first is Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma, which didn't attract overwhelming critical acclaim, probably because of the fantastical elements that crash into the story about mid-way. Except that these seem perfectly at home in the lives of characters who work on the X-Files tv show. What we have here is something of an ancestor of the much better Hey, Nostradamus, as Richard's girlfriend falls into a deep coma from which she will only awaken 17 years later... just in time for the Apocalypse. The metaphysics do tend to turn into sermons, which is too bad because Coupland also manages real tension and heart here. Final grade: Liked it.
Next came Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, which he really wanted to call Jews with Swords, if that helps. It's the story of pair of sword-slinging, swindling mercenaries in the Caucasus in the early days of Islam (I don't have a date for you, sorry). It's a beautifully packaged book, with nice Gary Gianni illustrations (I've liked his Shadow and Batman stuff, and he's as good here). If Chabon seems intent on applying his rich literary style to genre fiction (here, "sword and horses" adventure), I won't be the one to object. Final grade: Too short!
Movies... Well, I finally flipped Spider-Man 3, determined to prove to myself it wasn't as bad as reported. And I was right. Yes, there's too much going on here, and Venom certainly doesn't fit the theme of forgiveness that's motivating the rest of the screenplay. Most certainly, the film would have worked better if Peter went over the edge without the help of the black costume (which pretty much acquits him of his misdeeds), and Venom's story deserved its own feature (instead of taking vital screen time away from Sandman's). Still, the scenes taken out of the flawed structure do work more often than not. Some fun, some emotion, Gwen's a hottie, scenes for every recurring character... The parts are better than their sum. The DVD package is what you expect, a mix of behind the scenes material, outtakes and (really very positive and diplomatic) commentary tracks.
Then came Invasion of Astro-Monster AKA War of the Monsters AKA Monster Zero AKA Godzilla vs. Monster Zero. Now this was a lot of fun, but then I'm of the opinion that Rodan and King Ghidora make any Godzilla film better. And yet, there aren't a lot of giant monster battles in this one, the plot more interested in astronauts encountering aliens from Planet X, who have hatched a plan to control our noble monsters to destroy the Earth. What a strange place the Godzilla universe is! The integration of miniatures and the effects are quite impressive here, but I was most taken by Kumi Mizuno as the alien mole. Va-va-voooom! The DVD package is of the usual high quality, though the commentary track is perhaps a bit too focused on biographies and filmographies for my tastes.
Finally, I flipped a bare bones copy of Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, an odd and sometimes shocking little film starring Dustin Hoffman. This thriller asks questions about how a man who has refused to commit violence all his life can cope with the violence thrust upon him. Does pacifism actually ATTRACT violence? Is there a point at which one must put one's pants on and commit violence as a deterrent? We're not dealing in absolutes here. I'm giving major props to the editing which ups the tension about 1000%. Slow to start, provocative, and not for the feint of heart.No details on my RPG night because the second part of the story is tomorrow night, but I'll just say it was a pure superhero story where the twist was that the newly minted characters were actually Earth's oldest and most respected team. So they started with a lot of toys and a lot of enemies already.Unauthorized Doctor Who CCG: 12 new cards, mostly from School Reunion.GTA4 completion: 39.88%. Addiction Level: Fiend.Someone Else's Post of the Week
A new blog around these parts, Snell's I Expect You To Die!, all about James Bond, is excellent and I want to direct more internet traffic to it. Snell's analysis of Dr. No is a great start, though there's more there already.
541. Waking MomentsFORMULA: Ship in a Bottle + Phantasms + Persistence of VisionWHY WE LIKE IT: Good role for Chakotay.WHY WE DON'T: Boring dreams.REVIEW: Voyager does Nightmare on Elm Street. Aliens start visiting the Voyager crew's dreams, but you'd think they'd be a little more surreal. Sadly, they're little more than horror shows or wish fulfillment, or in the case of Tuvok, the classic naked dream that's only used for friendly ribbing and not as any kind of psychological revelation. It's all very ordinary stuff. Too bad, because there was a real opportunity for characterization here.Not that there isn't any. We have the crew teasing Tuvok about Vulcan nightmares being filled with laughter. We have Tom and B'Elanna suffering through opposite shifts (note her new uniform designed to hide Dawson's pregnancy - can't say I care much for the pocket protector). And we have Chakotay using his experience with vision quests and lucid dreaming to get the crew out of this dilemma. There's actually hope Chakotay will get stuff to do this season!He's perhaps uniquely suited to outwit aliens that live in what Australia's natives called the Dreamtime. An interesting notion and not at all improbable for a telepathic race (perhaps telepathic only during REM sleep). I do think their sleeping arrangements are on the rough side, with no indication of how they feed themselves, etc. Striking image though.As the crew fall under the aliens' spell, they are plunged into a shared dream that acts as the alternate reality of the week. What's real? What isn't? A well-played fake-out at the episode's mid-point is followed by the usual Voyager runaround. It couldn't be THAT easy, after all. Chakotay falling in and out of REM sleep is generally well done, but Janeway proving she's in a dream is a problematic scene. I just can't account for Tuvok's outrage that she would take the brunt of warp core breach just to be sure instead of taking refuge in the corridor outside engineering. My question: Since when does a warp core breach not destroy the entire ship? Thoroughly illogical, Tuvok. And get dressed please.LESSON: Pinching may not be enough.REWATCHABILITY - Medium: This kind of Dickian reality questioning has been done a lot in Trek, but these aliens do have an interesting shtick, and Chakotay gets a good role. Sadly, the dreams come off as missed opportunities (I mean, Tom dreams he's piloting a shuttle?!).
544. Prey
