Tag: tv series

“God, I hate the apocalypse.”

The opening chords and the "Have MERCY" catchphrase are stuck in my head, and I am gleeful.
The opening chords and the “Have MERCY” catchphrase are in my head, and I am gleeful.

It’s been a frustrating sort of day, so I am accentuating the positive. (This is me, so I am doing so by discussing Z Nation.)

God, I love that show.

I’ve basically dropped The Walking Dead, which I’m sure continues to be a well-acted depiction of desperate people driven to cruelty and making harsh decisions as kindness is slowly eroded from a dying world that they have no hope of salvaging.

I don’t think Z Nation is as good, in terms of narrative consistency or pacing, as TWD. I’m okay with that. It’s cheesy in its simplistic approach; it openly says that anyone still around three years into the zombie apocalypse is some kind of pulp-action-adventure badass, and then uses that as a reason to eschew grinding subsistence-level misery and proceeds to give a group of flawed, hopeful, mostly well-intentioned and kind characters a chance to actually do something that might save the world.

It has dark humour. It’s fun. It’s hopeful, in the game grim way apocalyptic settings can be if you give the characters an actual chance to achieve something. And there are moments–when Murphy leaves the door open–when I am actually shocked and horrified by the bad things people do. I like that. I appreciate the hell out of a post-apocalyptic story that can still make cruel things upsetting instead of allowing them to fade into a background slurry of mean-desperate-selfish-mean. Continue reading ““God, I hate the apocalypse.””

Hugo helpfulness

I understand that there’s going to be an announcement about the Hugo voter packages very soon. In the meantime, if you’re looking for a coherent list of links to what’s available online, you could do a lot worse than check out John DeNardo’s roundup at SF Signal. It’s huge.

Myself, I’m keeping a list here, Continue reading “Hugo helpfulness”

Green and bronze

I’m discovering I’m actually kind of liking Arrow. I was expecting a less obnoxious Batman[1] who beat up fewer poor people and was somewhat better adjusted. And I got that. But I’m getting more, as well.

There’s a sensibility to it that feels deeply rooted in the pulps–Doc Savage with more (and darker) character development, Remo Williams with less camp. The protagonist is not a hero. The protagonist is a vigilante with some very strict rules. I am reminded of Eric Burns’ brilliant description of the old pulp vigilantes, which I may be stuck quoting until the end of time because really, he nailed it:

I need horror turned against evil instead of for evil. I need psychology and mystery blended. I need the supernatural with a veneer of exotic science to handwave it away.

That is so why I’m watching this.

I think the show really clicked for me when Queen’s chasing down the Royal Flush gang and tries to get the guard to not pull the trigger because he wants to see them hurt as little as possible; that episode really came across as explicit acknowledgment that someone who isn’t a good guy can have a good effect. That you can tell stories about someone who isn’t a good guy, that they are doing that. (There are a lot of shows that do this. House of Cards springs to mind. House of Cards, like Pet Semetary, suffers from the “practically all our characters are assholes” curse. This does not make it a bad show, but it certainly makes it a less cheering one to watch.)

I don’t think Queen’s a good guy, not yet. I think he believes at least one good thing (“don’t kill people”), but primarily he’s driven to stop bad guys, and as Huntress so pointedly illustrates, those are not the same things. I think he can become a good guy if he listens to the characters who have a broader moral sense of how to behave and takes time to develop something more than the compulsion to fulfil his father’s quest; I am not sure he will do this.

And I am really enjoying the non-Queen characters. Diggle, who is willing to call Oliver on so much of his BS. Felicity Smoak, with Oracle-like research powers and an inability to actually get the right words out. Quentin Lance (weirds me out every time I see him for looking like such a perfect blend of the Weasel from Lost Room and Boyd Crowder from Justified), because dammit, you need a smart honest cop and it’s a relief to have a foil for the protagonist who isn’t a bad guy. Laurel Lance and Tommy Merlyn and their (admittedly completely unoriginal but nonetheless charming) crusading idealism and well-intentioned stumbling towards adulthood. Even Moira Queen, who is presented completely honestly as being both a criminal conspirator responsible for multiple murders and unquestionably devoted to her family. (I want to see what’s going to happen when those two drives are brought into sharper conflict.)

I even like a couple of the recurring locales–the diner where Diggle’s sister-in-law works, the rustbelt crumble of the abandoned Queen industrial factory. (Admittedly, diners and decaying industrial locales are an easy sell for me.) And the colour-coding of the scenes is not subtle, but it sure is pretty.

It’s not Leverage. I don’t love the characters and I don’t turn to this show when I want comfort watching. But it’s entertaining, and new, and I like the idea of a flawed protagonist who’s got a finite arc to him. So I watch.
—
[1] My opinion of Batman varies based on the iteration, but I can at the very least say that I have really not been a fan of the recent movies.

The year is 1876…

…but the history is not our own.

DL

Deadlands is alternate history–a steampunk horror weird Western where the dead get up and walk and things crawl in the shadows and hiss on the night wind and the more frightened people are, the closer you can get to Hell. Graced with the tagline “the spaghetti Western… with meat!” in the early days, its history noticeably diverges from real-world history on the day that the Battle of Gettysburg was called on account of zombies.

Years later, California has mostly fallen into the ocean, the war between the States has hit a kind of cold détente, slavery has been abolished, the new superfuel (colloquially called “ghost rock” because it sounds like damned souls screaming when it burns) is driving technology forward at an unprecedented rate, and what became the United States in our world has been split into six distinct political entities.[1]

I’m probably doing a bad job at describing it. And, let’s face it, the best description I can give it is still going to be textual. That’s not always the most evocative means of description.

And that’s okay. Know why?

They’re making a TV show.
—
[1] There are a couple of other changes that make me relieved; f’r ex, the most recent edition of the game explicitly sets out that racism and sexism in the game setting are the provenance of the villainous and shamefully ignorant. Arguably not plausible. Guess how much grief I am going to give a game that chose “implausible” over “deal with yet more unfun prejudice that is totally normalized”. Go on, guessssss.

Moving pictures. Or static pictures. Or voices on the wind.

So, as I have been reminded, I actually get to nominate works for the Hugos this year.

I think I am okay with coming up for nominations for written work. However, I would love a few more suggestions for art/artists, for graphic story, and for best dramatic presentation[1], both long form and short form.

Will cheerfully take suggestions that are either direct nominations or that are in the vein of “hey, did you know that a whole lot of people are listing their qualifying works over at this webpage?”

(And now I’m going to go have my quiet conniption fit because oh god, I have flight tickets and a hotel reservation and a con membership and it’s all real. Eeeek.)
—
[1] (Usually that’s movies or TV shows, with the 90-minute mark being the divisor, but it also applies to radio, live theater, computer games or music).

Alphas.

Since we’ve finished watching Leverage, I’m looking for a new TV show.  A friend recommended Alphas, which I’d heard nothing about.  Looked up a very quick summary–it appears to be people with low-level superpowers who are working to stop other people with low-level superpowers from being bad guys.

Having seen the first episode, I have to say I like it.  Five of the six Alphas are very well-drawn; a little simple so far (which is fine for the first episode), but distinctive. The sixth is a deliberate cipher, so that’s fine.  The moral ambiguity with Red Flag and Rosen’s superiors is the kind of thing I’d expect to come up with this setup, and I’m glad it’s being established so early.

Small spoiler and additional note after the cut:

Continue reading “Alphas.”

American Horror Story, season 2

Alright.  Despite the way the last one ended[1], I’m watching the first episode of the second season.  Bunch of the same actors; after the open, it looks like they’re going with a period piece.  The location for this season is an asylum–initially a tuberculosis sanitarium, turned into an asylum for the criminally insane run by the Catholic church. Given how they handled psychiatric help in the last season, I am the antithesis of optimistic.  (Credits do feature Clea Duvall, who I am glad to see, but I’m not sure that’s enough.)

Okay.  The light of my life refers to Mad Men as being a show that boils down to “look at these primitive savages, see how savage and primitive they are”.   I think there’s more to Mad Men than that.  Watching this episode, I am not yet sure I am seeing more than that here.

The woman running the asylum is vomitous.  The doctor brought in to run the medical side of things is arguably worse.  We’ve seen five patients talk so far, and the characterisation is… thin.  Particularly for the three who haven’t proclaimed their innocence.

Common elements in our protagonists: relationships deemed socially unacceptable and kept secret.  The self-proclaimed innocent murderer was a white man married to a black woman[2]; the reporter is a woman with a girlfriend.  Hmh, even Sister Jude, the woman running the asylum, is a nun lusting after her monsignor.

Betting that the doctor is either operating on patients to turn them into a strange new species or grinding them up to feed them to wolves.  Probably the strange new species thing.  There’s a real Nazi eugenicist vibe off him when he’s talking about creating new species.

(Flashback to the contemporary open!  That’s kind of cool.  I hope they make it out.)

Right, so, both the religious figures and the scientific figures are sources of horror.  The reporter’s been incarcerated; her girlfriend Wendy’s being blackmailed into cosigning the recommendation that she be committed with the threat of revealing the fact that she’s a lesbian (she’s a third-grade schoolteacher); and of course no-one that we’re invited to feel any sympathy for is actually insane.  Kit Walker was either possessed or framed by aliens (seriously, the doctor pulled a little metal bug out of him that then got up and ran away), and Lana Winters was locked up because Sister Jude figures she can get away with it.  Grace (the woman who warns Kit that the other inmates will rat him out if he turns off the Muzak in the common room[3]) claims she’s not crazy, and it says a lot about the show that given that she’s white, attractive, and accused of murdering her family (kind of like Kit!) that I am inclined to buy it.

There’s also Shelley.  She’s been diagnosed with nymphomania, which (1) given the time period is a diagnosis I am looking at with a great deal of suspicion, and (2) does make me wonder how she ended up in an asylum for the criminally insane.

Everyone else?  The people who we presume are actually mentally ill?  They’re scary decorations.  The first one we meet is a woman suffering from microcephaly who, we are told, drowned her sister’s baby and cut off his ears.  And there’s poor grooming, twitching, throwing around bodily waste…

So we’ve got a show set in an asylum, where all but three and two-halves (the Monsignor and Wendy) of the characters are patients, and we still can’t actually get a protagonist who’s mentally ill?  I mean, I knew it was too much to hope for, I just hate being reminded of that fact.

========

[1] In a fest of Biblical Roanoke magic spell therapy-is-all-lies and women-are-baby-crazy shit that had me earnestly explaining to the dog that if she ever meets a therapist like the one in the TV show she should bite him and she would be a good dog for doing it.

[2] She died.  Horribly. Probably.

[3] He’ll get five more blows with a cane, they’ll get a piece of candy.

Achey and tired.

I’ve had a headache for about ten hours now.  I mean, I realize I am having this headache on a day when a good friend of mine is having a migraine, and that does a lot to put it in perspective.  But it’s starting to wear on me.

I got a story rejection today.  I was expecting it, and it was very polite.  Still… what can you do?

(ObAnswer: Pick up and carry on.  I know, I know.  Goal for tomorrow: two new pages.)

Watching Game of Thrones and comfortably hating Theon.  I do love the Greyjoys and the Iron Islands; they make me think of King Hagrid, cold and drawn and grey, standing by the sea and watching the waves they rule. Blood and salt and iron.

And the Cthulhu shout-outs don’t hurt either.

Started two new anthologies–End of the World and Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead–and neither one is really grabbing me yet.  I’m hoping a good night’s sleep will clear things up.  Whether or not the extension goes through tomorrow (and I expect it will; early next week if not), at least there’s only six work-hours left until the weekend.

I’m very sorry.  I wish I could come up with something more interesting to say.

Notes from a dying laptop.

Huh.  822 words in just a bit under 57 minutes.  I think that’s actually pretty close to the “two hundred and fifty words every quarter hour.”  Mind, half of them need to be dragged out and shot, but there are words!

Had an interesting discussion about Dale (of Walking Dead), Glen Bateman (of The Stand), and Bobby (from Supernatural) with John, earlier today.  I was frustrated because I didn’t have quite the right words for them, and couldn’t pin down the common elements.  (Besides, you know, all three of them have made me cry once.  Damn characters.)

It’s hard to get into this without getting into spoilers, and my laptop is telling me “shut it down, dummy, you have 8 minutes left”, but the end result of the discussion was that we started with the idea of father figures and what they mean the hero has to do, and from there went through the concept of homemakers on to culture heros, tricksters, and civilizing influences.  TV Tropes has failed me, and that’s okay, because while it’s a nice thing to check in on occasionally I am actually perfectly fine with opinions that aren’t pre-listed on it.  (Still need a better breakdown of pet monster idea, too.)

4 minutes power left, warning light blinking, more later.