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esonetwork · 3 years

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Timestamp #TW41: The Blood Line

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Timestamp #TW41: The Blood Line

Torchwood: The Blood Line (1 episode, s04e10, 2011)

Everything changes… back.

Gwen stares out the window and relates a story about the day that her father was accused of thievery. Young Gwen offered to help pay back the money, but her dad taught her a lesson about impressions and honesty. He couldn’t stand being known as a dishonest man when he wasn’t. Gwen saw him as the nicest man in the world.

Today is the day that she kills him.

The two Torchwood teams prepare for the coming confrontation. Rex and Esther contact Director Shapiro for CIA assistance while keeping Jack, Gwen, and Oswald’s presence in Shanghai a secret. Unfortunately, that includes Charlotte, the mole in the agency. Meanwhile, The Mother plans to bomb the sites of The Blessing to keep it safe.

In Shanghai, Gwen locates the site but retreats to contact Jack when she gets whammied by the emotions surrounding it. Before they rendezvous with Gwen, Jack and Oswald have a heart-to-heart. Gwen takes a moment to call Rhys, who is working with Andy Davidson to gain access to the Cowbridge Overflow Camp so he can say a proper goodbye to Gwen’s father.

Across the planet, the CIA coordinates with the Argentinian army. Captain Federico Santos arrives with a detachment of soldiers, but a Three Families agent inside the detachment bombs the truck. The soldiers are all Category 1, the supply of Jack’s blood is destroyed, and Rex and Esther are presumed dead. Director Shapiro demands that they find the CIA mole immediately. Charlotte sets a bomb and leaves just as the trace is completed. The bomb makes everyone in the command center Category 1.

The two teams infiltrate their respective sites. Oswald objects to leaving a trail of Category 1 bodies and Gwen gets notification that Rhys has arrived at her father’s side. He only has ten minutes before the Category 1s are taken to the ovens. As Rhys comforts Gwen’s father, Andy comforts an unknown 15-year-old girl.

Jack, Gwen, and Oswald descend to the Blessing and are met by Jilly, The Mother, and three armed guards. Unfortunately for them, Jack has rigged Oswald with a suicide vest. Unfortunately for Torchwood, Rex and Esther have been captured and are being held at gunpoint by the Three Families. The standoff is stalemated when Jack presents his blood to the Blessing. He warns The Mother to be very, very careful with him.

Oswald, exposed to his very soul before the Blessing, almost loses himself in the reflection of his sin. Jack brings him back before he and Gwen muse about the origins of the Blessing. Jack muses about the Doctor, Silurians, the Racnoss, and huon energy before admitting that he has no idea where it came from. It projects a morphic field in symbiosis with the human race, but the Families fed Jack’s blood to the anomaly. The Blessing transformed the blood’s pattern into a gift for all humankind and the Families took advantage of the worldwide disruption in a form of eugenics.

In order to secure the plan, the Families drew Jack out of hiding and attempted to kill him. Jack threatens to bleed into it and reset the planet’s mortality, but the Families remind him that it has to be introduced from both sides simultaneously. As the standoff intensifies, Rex reveals that Esther transfused Jack’s blood into him. The destroyed blood was a ruse.

To stop the salvation of the world, the Families mortally wound Esther. As Rex descends into sorrow, Gwen talks him back off the ledge. Together, Rex and Jack drain themselves into the Blessing.

Death returns to the world in a single breath as every Category 1 says goodbye.

Both ends of the Blessing begin to tear themselves apart. Jack returns to life as his immortality is restored while Oswald and Rex eliminate the Families representatives and Gwen knocks Jilly out. Rex and Esther, both on the edge of death, are retrieved by Captain Santos. Jilly disappears into the explosion at Shanghai.

Several months later, Jilly is found by her contact in the Families and offered a place to restart her life in charge of Plan B. Elsewhere, the Torchwood team joins Charlotte and Rex at Esther’s funeral. Charlotte offers her condolences to Rex before leaving. Rex gets an update about the trace program that Shapiro was running and finds out that Charlotte was the mole. She shoots Rex and is gunned down by the other agents in attendance. Rex is declared dead.

And then comes back to life. His wounds, including the Miracle Day wound, all heal. He is now immortal.

Everyone is surprised, but none more so than Rex.

The production team killed the wrong person.

No, seriously. In terms of character growth over the ten episodes of Miracle Day, Esther moved leaps and bounds over Rex. By killing her off, they not only wasted that character development, they also committed the narrative sin of fridging her in order to motivate Rex.

That trope originates from the comics, specifically Green Lantern. In that story, the villain Major Force left the corpse of then-Green Lantern Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend, Alexandra DeWitt, literally stuffed into a refrigerator. The idea is to spur the hero into action by brutalizing someone that they care about. It was later named and shamed by comic book writer Gail Simone.

In this case, Esther was fridged in order to motivate Rex. It’s lazy writing that immediately devalues Esther as a character. No matter what happened with her to this point, her final intrinsic narrative value is a plot device to motivate a stereotypical action hero.

It’s also sad, because the story and characters could have been better served. Keep Rex as the vessel for Jack’s blood, an idea that came from Esther to begin with, and transfer the Gwen-shooting-Jack action to Esther instead. Let Rex die for the world and Esther come out with a completed growth arc that we watched happen over ten episodes of television. She could also end up with immortality, for all the good that it does Torchwood after this point, as a reward of sorts.

Other than that rather large elephant in the room, the finale was entertaining enough, if not a bit bloated (as was the rest of the Miracle Day season). The return of death to the world was emotionally stirring. Oswald was finally useful.

The cliffhanger itself is rather disappointing in the end given that this marks the end of Torchwood on television. In fact, Rex Matheson hasn’t appeared on television again to date. He’s been in two novels, one of which is a prequel, and an audio drama, but his parts in the post-Miracle Day universe appear to be sparse.

How disappointing.

It should have been Esther who survived the Miracle.

Rating: 2/5 – “Mm? What’s that, my boy?”

UP NEXT – Torchwood: Web of Lies

The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

#Timestamps Project #Torchwood #Torchwood: Miracle Day

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thebibliomancer · 4 years

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Essential Avengers: Avengers #209: The Resurrection Stone

July, 1981

“The Resurrection Stone: will it save the universe -- or destroy it?”

Well, the universe hasn’t been destroyed, at least circa the comics I read this morning. But it hasn’t really been saved either.

Still, pretty intriguing tagline. Pretty intriguing cover.

And written by J.M. DeMatteis. One of the Kraven’s Last Hunt guys. He doesn’t seem to do a lot of Avengers.

Let’s see how he do Earth’s Mightiest Team of Specifically This Four On the Cover.

We start with some silent intriguing intrigue as an alien ship crashes into Nevada and an alien crawls from the alien wreckage. Instead of distributing rings to people, he gets shot by a green guy who likes purple. I sure can’t think of several people that this applies to.

The shooter checks some possibly alien PDA but then beams up as the ship explodes.

How baffling.

Ok, J.M. DeMatteis. You have my interest.

So we start chapter one-

Chapter one? What is it with fill-ins and putting chapters in Avengers books. That three dooms one from a while back also did this.

Anyway, chapter one of this normal length Avengers adventure: “Love... and Death!”

So on specifically April 10th, 1981 2:17 PM (a fact which we must firmly ignore in these sliding timescale days), Beast has brought an old flame to Avengers Mansion to meet Wonder Man, Vision, and Scarlet Witch.

Presumably all of the other Avengers couldn’t make it. Or Beast didn’t want them meeting Vera.

Oh, and she’s not a new old flame.

Vera Cantor goes back to X-Men #19 in 1966. She knew him before he blue it! And she was the one who got away because mutant biz kept getting in the way.

But they had a chance meeting in a Soho bar and they’re giving it another shot!

I guess Beast is finally settling down from his wild party dating multiple women at a time days.

And y’know what? He and Vera are cute together.

Beast is exuberantly in love with her. He’s apparently been talking about nothing else for weeks.

Scarlet Witch: “Vision -- just look at the Beast’s eyes -- I’ve never seen them sparkle so. He must be in love.”

Beast is so excited he’s bouncing on the couch and jumping all over the place and bumping into Jarvis. Knocking the tea tray out of the butler’s hands.

Beast, pls. Reign in.

He does manage to catch the tray in his feet though. No spilling.

Its a bit weird that Jarvis is here to be bumped into. He’s supposed to have one of his days off to visit his mom and get some of that “near-mythical Yorkshire pudding.”

But he brushes off the question with concern over the bad impression all of this is giving the guest.

Vera doesn’t mind though. She’s used to his obstreperous (“noisy and difficult to control”) nature and finds how energetic he is to be part of why he’s so cute.

The blue fuzz surely does not hurt!

Oh. And then Vera takes a sip of the tea Jarvis brought and immediately keels over dead.

The butler did it??

Jarvis. You made it too strong!

No, no. Surely not. Jarvis would never make such an error or miss out on Yorkshire pudding.

“Jarvis” is actually... A SKRULL!

Beast wastes no time slamming the Skrull into the wall but said Skrull says ‘hey you want the woman to live again maybe keep your hands to yourself.’

And Beast backs off, sensing some truth in the Skrull’s tone.

The Skrull: “Ah -- that’s a bit more like it. Even in this vile atmosphere, I do so value my ability to breathe!”

By the by the by, this guy goes unnamed until 2008 in a Secret Invasion infobook but I’m not about that. His name is Jaddak.

Jaddak channels his inner-Darkseid and sits in the comfiest chair provocatively and begins on THE TALE OF THE RESURRECTION STONE!

Seems that millennia ago there was a space civilization in space that merged high science and high sorcery to bring an epoch of peace and plenitude to all then known worlds.

The epoch of peace and plentitude looks a lot like someone jammed Medieval knights and castles into rocket times.

Which I guess fits the whole union of science and magic thing.

And then the greatest scientist-wizard, Tus'Au, invented the Resurrection Stone and ruined everything.

The stone, as the name implied, could bring life back to the dead. And while that doesn’t seem too impressive by today’s standards where plot devices to resurrect the dead are so numerous (including just teleporting out of heaven) that it doesn’t bear counting, remember that this was an earlier, more innocent time. A filler time.

Everyone wanted this Resurrection Stone and a great war ignited that eventually ruined a thousand, thousand planets.

Amidst that nonsense, the stone itself was lost forever.

Until an Anthigorite archeologist named Krru, like, did some serious research. Around about 5,000 years worth of research. And thanks to all his book learning, he eventually found the stone.

Which was unfortunate because Jaddak had been stalking him this whole time, sure that he’d eventually find it.

He chased Krru over twelve solar systems, finally blasting him out of the sky over Earth. But when Jaddak searched Krru’s ship and checked the recorder-log, as we saw in the opening two pages, he learned that Krru had decided that the Resurrection Stone was inherently corruptive and should have remained lost.

You know an ancient magical stone is bad news when an archeologist goes ‘actually you don’t belong in a museum.’

So when Krru was shot down, as a last ditch effort, he broke the stone in two and sent both halves into Earth’s past so they’d be lost forever.

I have so many questions.

If they were sent to the past then they’d be in the present now unless destroyed in the past. That’s how time works.

Two, dick move, Krru. You think this thing is inherently corruptive and you drop it into Earth’s past, possibly altering the timeline? Fuck you.

But with the stones in the past forever inaccessible clearly, Jaddak decided, hey this should be the Avengers’ problem and not mine.

Jaddak: “I knew then that I needed... pawns. Powerful pawns.”

Wonder Man: “Pawns... as in -- Avengers. And that’s why you struck down an innocent woman?!”

Jaddak: “It seemed a splendid idea at the time!”

Pffffffft.

Ok, I know. I know. This is a terrible situation in-universe but also out of universe because they brought back Vera only to immediately stuff her into the fridge.

But this skrull going ‘look it seemed like a good idea at the time’ cracks me up.

Seemed like a good idea doesn’t cut the mustard with Wonder Man who just hauls off and punches Jaddak into the bookcase.

Vision even verbally pats him on the back for it.

Vision: “Well played, Simon. -- There was no need to listen to this madman's rantings any longer.”

But as the Avengers congregate to stomp on Jaddak’s head a few times, I presume, Beast stops them.

Cradling Vera’s body he says he’ll do anything to bring her back.

;__;

And that brings us to chapter two: “DOOM in the DARK AGES!”

Let me just get ahead of any hypothetical questions I wouldn’t even be able to hear until after the fact anyway. Tragically Doctor Doom does not show up.

Whoof, a lot of exposition at the beginning of chapter 2. Because a lot of stuff happened off-panel, between pages.

Real Jarvis had been contacted to make sure he’s okay. The four Avengers took a Quinjet to the Fantastic Four and told Reed Richards what’s going on. Reed went ‘sure I’ll lend you Doctor Doom’s time machine and send you to the coordinates a SKRULL gave you.’ And Jaddak went to go wait in his spaceship with Vera’s body.

So now the Avengers are in September 16, 1348, England. Prompting Vision to start giving a lecture on the bubonic plague.

Scarlet Witch: “Darling, please. Not now.”

Save it for the bedroom, Vizh.

The locals respond, understandably enough, with hostility to the people that just appeared in thin air dressed like clowns. They call the Avengers demons and unholy creatures and tell them to tell a wizard Devlunn to fuck off and that he can’t have any more of their dead.

Wanda decides that explaining time travel and superheroes from the FUTURE is more trouble than its worth. Instead, she plays along.

Scarlet Witch: “Devlunn? We are far greater than that upstart! He is a mere wind -- we are the storm!”

And then she fires off some of her bolts to cow the villagers so she can ask if anyone wants to take her to “this weakling Devlunn.”

See Wanda figured out based on the one comment that someone toying with the dead might be linked to the half of the Resurrection Stone they’re here to find. Or one would hope someone toying with the dead has a dumb magic reason for it!

One of the villagers does volunteer to take Wanda to Devlunn.

Villager: “I pray you four are as powerful as you appear -- for it will take great magicks indeed to best this lunatic child.”

Because, yup, Devlunn is a ten-year old child.

And yup, he has half of the Resurrection Stone.

He also has a big crowd of locals begging him to return their dead since they did promise to follow him and give him all that they own. Really, that’s a fair trade for some moldy old corpses, right?

Devlunn: “Why should I listen to you? When this talisman fell from the sky and whispered to me -- I knew then it could make me a god! And gods do as they please!”

Welp.

Beast: “No one should play god, Devlunn. -- Least of all obnoxious little boys! C’mon guys -- let’s get this over with!”

And Wonder Man punches the tower Devlunn is standing on and Vision SOLAR BEAMs it and a ten year old child falls off a tower.

And then he just stops in midair and floats.

Not sure why the Resurrection Stone also has flying powers. That seems beyond the scope of what it was designed to do.

That’s like if you had a scroll of fireball that also did your taxes.

Yes, that would be amazing. But the two things aren’t related things.

Anyway, Devlunn takes these four weirdos in stride.

Devlunn: “Ah -- so I’ve impressed you with my little trick! Good! For, you see, I know who you are! You are spirits from heaven to test me to see if I’m worthy of godhood -- to see if my talisman can do more than merely hold me on high like some wingless bird! You wish a show of strength -- a little play! And what you wish -- Devlunn-the-god shall grant!”

And then he sicks a horde of zombies on the fearless foursome.

The four realize the truth of Devlunn’s half of the Resurrection Stone. Because this is a cool magic artifact that conceptually splits in half instead of just physically or in terms of output or whatever.

Devlunn’s half gives life to the dead but only life without the spark of the soul. Aka, zombies.

Also, not very impressive zombies. They’re more pitiable than formidable. And Devlunn isn’t much of a necromancer.

The Avengers fight them. Well, except for Vision. Vision just lets them flail against him ineffectually.

Beast rushes through the pack of zombies, even grabbing one with his thighs to toss out of the way?, towards Devlunn and then takes the 1/2 Resurrection Stone like candy from a baby.

Revealing Devlunn to not be a great and powerful wizard but rather a very sad child.

Devlunn: “My stone give it to me! Give it back, I say! I was... nothing until it came to me! My family -- my friends -- all died! But the stone made me important! It gave me control over death! It made me safe! Please give it back! Please -- I want to be a god! I have to be a god!”

And then he collapses to the ground and starts crying while the Avengers are whisked away into the future by Reed.

So, that’s sad.

And I don’t imagine chapter three (“Rosenblatt’s Dance!”) is going to be any cheerier.

It’s now April 13, 1945. Dachau.

So. Yeah.

The Avengers blink into existence right in the middle of some Allied troops chasing some Nazis. And not being ones to miss a chance to go ape shit on some Nazis, Wonder Man goes ape shit on some Nazis.

Unlike the dark ages peeps, the Allied soldiers see some random people with superpowers wearing bright clothes and go ‘ah, superheroes’ and ask if they’re with the Invaders or the Liberty Legion.

Wonder Man: “Right. I’m... uh... Captain America.”

Phew. Timeline secure.

Anyway, they’re glad to see some superheroes because they’ve got a messy situation at Dachau. And its nothing that punching Nazis can fix.

So, yeah this is set at a concentration camp so its not going to be particularly happy.

The one who has the other half of the Resurrection Stone is a man named Rosenblatt. And this half of the stone also has half the power of the full stone. But in this case it returns the soul to a lifeless husk.

And Rosenblatt has used it to revive his dead wife and daughters and he’s joyfully dancing with their lifeless bodies while they beg him to let them go and free them of this existence.

It’d be really messed up if the usual superhero methods had to be applied here but thankfully the less employed but still common superhero empathy is in the quiver.

Beast approaches the guy and just talks to him.

Beast: “You have to set their souls free.”

Rosenblatt: “Are you the devil, come to take them? Well -- they’ve been in hell long enough. They’ll never be yours!”

Beast: “Look at them, my friend -- they will never be yours either. Not the way you knew them. The way you cherished them. Give me the jewel. P-please...”

And his words get through to the man who hands the half Resurrection Stone off to Beast.

And as before, the instant they have the stone, Reed yanks them forward in time.

Y’know. This only occurred to me on my second read. Maybe if Reed hadn’t instantly pulled them out of that time, it would have occurred to Beast ‘hey wait I have both halves now, I could combine them and bring this guy’s family back to life for real and not in some cursed half existence.’

Doesn’t really work with how the book goes, but it’s a thought.

And now for the thrilling conclusion: Chapter 4 The Cost!

April 10th, 1981, SPACE.

So we’re back in the then present.

A Quinjet flies into space, as Quinjets can apparently do, to meet with Jaddak’s spaceship. Jaddak contacts them over the space Zoom and tells Beast that he’ll have to teleport over alone with the Resurrection Stone.

The other Avengers think this is reeeeeaaally fishy and don’t really like the idea of letting Jaddak get the Resurrection Stone but they can’t tell Beast what to do. This is his weird fill-in issue quest and it has to be his decision.

So Beast teleports over alone. And finds himself in a chamber with a video screen. Skrull ain’t taking any chances.

He’s hidden behind an unbreachable wall. Through the video screen he tells Beast to deposit the stone in a portal which will send it over to the skrull who will test it for authenticity.

Then, he’ll use it to revive Vera. Swearsies.

Beast: “And why should I trust you?”

Jaddak: “Because I am a Skrull. Treacherous and savage as my people are -- we value honor more than life.”

Doubt.

Beast pauses to consider the power of the Resurrection Stone. Thinks about Devlunn and his zombies and Rosenblatt’s dance.

Beast: “Vera... I’m sorry. But this power is too much for any man to hold. I hope you can forgive me for what I’m about to do -- and I hope I can forgive myself!”

And then Beast slams the two halves of the Resurrection Stone together, KRUNCHing them into dust.

Jaddak: “Y-you crushed it! But that is... impossible! My plan was perfection! The vagaries of human love should have assured me victory!”

Wonder Man: “There are higher forms of love, Skrull -- but don’t strain your brain trying to figure out what they are!”

Because, yes, Wonder Man, Scarlet Witch, and Vision are also here now.

Vision intangibled onto the ship while Jaddak was distracted and used Jaddak’s own teleporters to bring the other two aboard.

As for that unbreachable wall?

Nah. Totally breachable. Wonder Man peels it open like nothing.

Jaddak tries to use Vera’s dead body as a hostage but Scarlet Witch blasts the gun apart in his hands with a SQUAKK.

So there may be a bird that used to be a gun loose on the ship.

And that just leaves one thing to take care of.

Beast jumps at Jaddak and starts slamming him around.

Scarlet Witch protests that Beast is going to kill Jaddak but Wonder Man tells her that Beast has to left off some steam.

Wonder Man: “He has to vent some steam or he’ll really snap! Besides you know Hank as well as I do -- that Skrull will get some much-needed lumps -- but that’s all!”

Beast: “Yeah. That’s our Beastie. A hero to the end. Can’t even bring myself to play the old ‘eye for an eye’ game. Not that it would do me one stinking bit of good. I’ve lost her -- forever.”

AND THEN AN EPILOGUE. Later that day at the Baxter Building.

Reed has been involved between panels this whole story and now he gets exposition exposited to him to fill in the gaps and in return he’s going to exposit too.

Wonder Man explains that he, Wanda, and Vision always intended to destroy the Resurrection Stone if Beast went through with the deal with Jaddak. Not that they thought he would. Knowing Hank McCoy and all.

But its a subversion of the ‘this is something he must do himself’ trope. Where they left the decision in Beast’s hands but also planned to go over his head if he made the wrong decision and put the scary power of phoenix down in the hands of the Skrulls.

Gotta keep your friends honest or something.

So now Reed has news. Weird news about Vera.

The poison that Jaddak used was super rare, so rare that Jaddak didn’t even know how it worked. He just had to be a murder hipster and goofed up.

Its actually a slow-acting poison that takes days to fully kill someone so Vera is technically only mostly dead. She could theoretically be cured one day.

So Reed has thrown her into a suspended animation tube and hopes to come up with an antidote eventually (which he doesn’t but Vera ends up cured anyway in Defenders #105 about a year later in another story by J.M. DeMatteis).

What is it about weird filler stories and having someone end up in a freezer tube to be maybe cured later?

Reed Richards: I know it’s not much of a chance, Beast -- but at least there’s hope.”

Beast: “There’s hope -- !”

Follow @essential-avengers because one day I’ll be up to date on that blog and it’ll have Essential Avengers stuff and no miscellaneous reblogs of other stuff. Wouldn’t that be nice? Maybe? Also like and reblog if you like to reblog.

#Avengers #essential avengers #Beast #Wonder Man #Scarlet Witch #the Vision #skrulls #essential marvel liveblogging #geez beast's focus issues are always so weird

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august-wynter · 5 years

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August wanted to blame his busy few days on work but really most weeks were about the same when it came to the dead around that place, the numbers didn't fluctuate too much either direction. He had been keeping busy, yes, to keep his mind occupied. There was plenty to occupy it back at his apartment and he was still struggling with that. The familiar motions were easier; corpses did nothing to bother him and he was so used to dealing with them, sewing and fixing the broken spots and making the dead look less like the shambled mess they often arrived in. The families never knew, in the cases where there were even families, so at least he was doing something positive.

The scent of blood had felt more intense than normal that week though, maybe he was too much on edge and those baser instincts were stirring up the predator in him. He didn't really have the option of handling the problem at home anymore so he had to be even more cautious at work; having that secret exposed would have been a disaster, at the very least. All in all it had been a mentally exhausting week, even if he refused to show it. His desk had ended up littered with pill bottles, roughly half of the ones he had in total but he didn't want to leave them lying around the apartment as much anymore. Somewhere along the way he forgot them more often than not though, days had left that tired feeling for more than just distraction as his body reminded him of the strain.

He had fallen into the habit of returning home later than usual, the mortuary closed by early evening but he stayed into the night to work on various things. Whatever he could find, whatever needed done; he'd moved more flower arrangements, set up staging for more viewings and filed more paperwork that week than he had in the entire time he'd been working at the place. It had gotten to the point that even the owner had noticed and told him in no uncertain terms that he looked tired and needed to just go home. His protests had fallen on deaf ears, she was as stubborn as himself at times, and August had found himself all but kicked out with the strict instructions to take the next day off because she didn't want to show up and find him sweeping the floors or something else they had other people there to do.

The temptation to just wander the city was strong enough that he had, for a while, the artificial moon at his shoulder and his mind trying to pick apart tired thoughts. He steered clear of the bars, knew better than that in his tense state, he wasn't one to pick fights but with his terrible luck lately he'd run across one anyway and there would be blood. Or, just as bad, run across a vampire that reeked of the stuff and end up making choices he would very likely regret the next morning.

So home it was, he knew the way without even trying it was so ingrained, the territory so familiar to him. Silence as he unlocked the door and slipped inside, reaching down to scratch at Simone's ears when she caught him in the doorway, unbuttoning his suit jacket as he walked across the living room trying to avoid making much noise, or really any at all if he could help it when he ducked into the kitchen. He hadn’t caught sight of anyone else yet but who knew where October or Ellery were, sometimes he lost track of them entirely in spite of the small space.

In the dim cast of light from the fridge as he opened it to grab a bottle of water he spotted one of the cabinets open and what he thought was a pack of cigarettes laying there, nothing shocking since he did have the occasional vice when his body was willing to put up with smoking. Right then he didn’t care, he just wanted calm and distraction, so he grabbed one out of the pack and the lighter from the drawer before sitting down at the table in the corner of the limited space. He must have been distracted because he didn’t notice until after he had lit it and taken a draw that it was not the acidic twinge of nicotine and chemicals that hit his nose and the back of his throat.

“And that is not a cigarette,” August mumbled to himself, tempted to roll his eyes at the fact that his sibling was smoking weed in the apartment but that was probably on the low end of the scale of things he didn’t need to know October was doing. Shaking his head, he debated snuffing it out before abandoning the thought and taking another draw; it wasn’t exactly the first time for him, no.

#people:ellery

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sillyprompts · 4 years

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Shit Me and The Guys Have Said During Jackbox Games Starter Sentences

Bigfoot won’t be at the amputee convention.

Mountains are just mother nature’s haemorrhoids.

Did you hear? They’re coming out with a new prequel: Baby Sheldon.

Why would I hide from shadow monsters? I’m fuckin’ them.

Ew! Gross! There’s water at the bottom of this swimming pool!

I’m sorry. The plastic surgery turned you into Simon Cowell.

All scientists are gay.

Oh God, oh God! We’re going to crash our rocket ship into the Planet of the Crashed Rocket Ships!

This is my latest invention: a vibrator that uses bees.

My fridge connects to Wi-Fi.

I’m pretty sure that merry-go-round has real horse corpses on it.

Dandruff is just scalp cereal and I’m hungry, baby.

I did ballet as a child.

I have framed a picture of Murdoc in a weird thot outfit.

One time, I fit a water bottle up my ass.

I thought I flicked off my whole nipple!

I’ve had ass worms, worms in my ass.

If I won the lottery, I would buy a one bedroom apartment.

I wanted to be a moral person when I grew up.

I’ve never texted you about my bowel movements.

My dog yote a hedgehog at me!

Let’s role-play Naruto on Pictochat!

I have to come clean: I’m into tentacles.

Slow walkers make me so mad, I’m going to take a shit.

I texted you half way through jacking off.

The last dream I can remember involved me having sex with a door.

Wanna snort McDonalds sugar packets?

I will never understand people who live in a society.

I broke the Guinness World Record for oldest virgin.

My weirdest bathing experience involved coconut in my eyes and a spider on my dick.

I haven’t been the same since I lost my foreskin.

You stole my foreskin.

#starter sentences #notsafe cw

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spookyspeks · 8 months

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Going insane over Freezer Simon rn

If I have to be the Freezer Simon guy I guess I will (I wanna make him his own character and give him some sweet lore/relation to the real simon)

#freezer simon fionna and cake #freezer simon #fionna and cake #simon petrikov #freezer simon petrikov #adventure time #adventure time simon #fionna and cake spoilers #fridge corpse simon

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drsilverfish · 5 years

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Re-Fridging Mary Winchester? The Ouroboros Narrative Swallows its Origin Story (14x18)

This is the last time we see Mary Winchester alive (14x17 Game Night). Her last words are, “Jack, please, listen to me!” and her last shot is this shaky close-up, straight to camera.

(Image credit Wayward Winchester https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIbBibdvsaM )

Doesn’t it look as if she’s directly addressing the audience here, as if to say, “Hey, folks, pay close attention!”?

The “real” Mary is, like the title of the episode (Absence) absent in 14x18.

Rowena says, after doing her locator spell, that Mary, “...is not on this earth.” We see ash that is supposedly hers, as Jack tries desperately to “resurrect” her. We learn Castiel has seen her soul in Heaven, but we do not see her, only the apparent door to her Heaven:

And the “body” Jack raises using Rowena’s necromancy spell? It is not Mary:

(Image credit Wayward Winchester: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ny7tLZC3nto )

Sam is very explicit about that. He says, “I talked to Rowena. She said she thinks that what Jack brought back, he just brought back a shell, a body, y’know, that it was empty, just a... replica, incapable of holding life.”

A replica, like... a doppleganger, a mirror-image?

The shot above, of her sons holding this shell, this replica-double, is laid out at a boundary, between grass and ash, between life and death, almost as if between one world and another (separated, perhaps, by a portal?).

You might have seen my posts already about 14x17 Game Night and 14x18 Absence, wherein I am suspicious (for various reasons) as to whether that is really the last we will see of Mary Winchester on the show. Just as I am suspicious about Jack’s “Hallucifer” really just being a part of his own mind, because likewise, I highly doubt we have seen the last of Lucifer on the show:

http://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/183968888069/lucifer-rides-again-games-within-games

http://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/184140015899/14x18-absence-the-games-continue

So, my consideration of the re-fridging of Mary Winchester in the S14 SPN narrative is caveated by the fact that I have a sense that this re-fridging may be contingent rather than final.

It is also caveated by the fact that Mary’s second (apparent) fridging was handled by Berens in a way which subverts it, because, as outlined above, Mary herself is absent from the mise-en-scène of her re-fridging. She has noped out of it!

But, if my suspicions concerning another twist to this narrative are incorrect (and I hope they’re not) then, deft or not, Mary is still dead again to further our male protagonists’ narratives.

I think we’re probably all familiar with the term, “fridging”....

The term originates with Gail Simone, a comic book writer who created the website Women in Refrigerators in 1999 (twenty years ago now, wow).

This is the link to the website (still live) and this is an excerpt of what she said:

“This is a list I made when it occurred to me that it's not that healthy to be a female character in comics. I'm curious to find out if this list seems somewhat disproportionate, and if so, what it means, really.

These are superheroines who have been either depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator. I know I missed a bunch. Some have been revived, even improved -- although the question remains as to why they were thrown in the wood chipper in the first place.”

http://lby3.com/wir/

The trope, “fridging”, has now taken on an established life of its own in pop-culture criticism.

Here is some more discussion of it in an article by Maria Norris “ Comics and Human Rights: A Change is Gonna Come. Women in the Superhero Genre” (2015).

“The trope Simone describes is now widely acknowledged, and the practice it describes has come to commonly known as ‘fridging’. The superhero genre typically depicts interactions and relationships between male and female characters that lack consequence, emotional resonance, permanence and accountability. Often, these fictional relationships stagnate, or end tragically. Too often, women in superhero comics become pawns in schemes meant to develop male characters or give them motivation to act.”

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/80285/1/Comics%20and%20Human%20Rights_%20A%20Change%20is%20Gonna%20Come.pdf

So, we can define fridging, from these sources as - the often gruesome or shocking death of a female character, for the primary purpose of driving male character motivation or development.

Whilst the trope may have been defined in the 1990s, it is much older in literature. We could argue that Oedipus’ mother, Jocasta, was fridged, for instance, because who she is (Oedipus’ birth mother) and her suicide, are framed as being all about Oedipus and the impact on Oedipus. We could even argue that Shakespeare fridged Ophelia, whose tragic suicide is driven by Hamlet’s cruelty (and his murder of her father) and whose death, in the play, is primarily designed to impact her menfolk - Hamlet (her beloved) and her brother Laertes.

Essentially, what we mean by the “fridging” of a female character is that in stories (usually by men) where men are the protagonists and the heroes (or tragic heroes or anti-heroes) sometimes (by no means always) women are written as primarily existing in relation to those men, so that their own deaths are not about themselves, but are used principally to explore the emotional landscapes of the hero-protagonists to whom they mattered and who live on after they are gone.

Mary Winchester’s original fridging, her gruesome burning on the ceiling, which we the audience see in 1x01 Pilot, provides the origin story for Supernatural.

Mary is fridged because she is dead the moment we meet her.

We don’t have time to get to know who she is, or what her death means as part of her own journey. She is killed gruesomely and that death provides major character motivation and development for her husband John Winchester and for her sons Sam and Dean. She is, originally, defined primarily by her relationships to them; as a dead wife and a dead mother.

Mary Winchester is fridged by fire and her menfolk are thus “birthed” into narrative. Over her silenced and torched corpse, they become words and action. Their narrative journey begins because hers ends.

That fridging is, in the very same pilot episode, repeated for Sam’s girlfriend Jess:

Supernatural, it is thus swiftly established (by a double fridging at the outset) is, overtly, a story of heterosexual men (John and Sam being so established by their relationships to Mary and Jess) without familial women. Men who have been initiated into a world of violence and grief, powerfully driven by revenge, because their women-folk have been slaughtered.

(Dean, however, has been queer-coded from the beginning, but that’s another story.)

In the established patriarchal order of the SPN universe (in which stories about men are central and stories about women are peripheral) heightened masculine emotion (which lies at the heart of Supernatural) is thus created and legitimised, by the death of women.

When Bobby becomes the Winchesters gruff substitute father-figure (with a gooey, although masked, heart-of-gold centre) his own back-story repeats the pattern. We learn Bobby had to kill his own wife, Karen, whilst she was possessed by a demon (see 3x10 Dream a Little Dream of Me, 5x15 Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, and 7x10 Death’s Door). In Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, Karen is raised as a zombie by Death, and Bobby is forced to kill her all over again, thus, once more, reinforcing the death of familial women as the origin point for the centrality of masculine emotion in the narrative. Karen, in the SPN narrative, does not really exist as her own person, only as Bobby’s tragic wife, framed, rather tellingly, as a home-maker and help-meet in this shot from 5x15:

Familial women, associated with the core male characters in Supernatural are thus, initially, strongly framed as occupying the domestic space, the hearth-fire, whilst hunting and the open road belongs to their (bereaved) menfolk.

For Mary Winchester, however, things become a little more complicated than that. Because, thanks to the time-travel abilities of the angels, she is “resurrected” in 4x03 In the Beginning and 5x13 The Song Remains the Same and her sons get to meet a living, younger, version of her. Mary becomes a person, raised as a hunter in her own right, rebellious, brave, independent, determined, a fighter. We see her having something of her own agency, although to a limited extent, in that she remains “trapped” by the angel breeding programme and the fate the angels have laid out for her - to marry John and to bear angel-vessel sons. She cannot therefore, escape her primary framing as a wife and mother, as in this shot from 5x13:

So, when Dabb inaugurated his era as showrunner, and his Ouroboros narrative structure, by taking us back to the start of Superantural and re-working the story by unnfridging Mary Winchester (11x23 Alpha and Omega):

(Image credit: http://timetraveldean.tumblr.com/post/144939142393 )

it was such a brilliant “un-zipping” of the original SPN narrative architecture. The Ur “woman in white” was back from the dead; Supernatural was going meta-narrative on its own ass in a big way. By having Mary brought back to life from Heaven by the feminine God-principle in the universe, Amara, who had previously been unjustly locked away by her brother, God, SPN was critiquing its own patriarchal origin story.

Yay!

Which is why Mary’s re-fridging in 14x18, IF the writers’ room is playing it straight (and, as above, I have my strong doubts about that) would be so disappointing.

Sure, on one level, from Dabb’s Ouroboros narrative perspective, it makes impactful and symmetrical sense.

Jack was always paralleled to Azazel, as well as to Dean and Sam, at his birth - see this meta of mine on 12x23 All Along the Watchtower:

http://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/160876601179/all-along-the-watchtower-12x23-and-12x22-and

A yellow-eyed supernatural being in a nursery, a baby, and a mother who dies. The ingredients are the same (1x01 and 12x23) - the recombination is different, as part of the narrative journey.

Mary’s first death inaugurated Dean as substitute-parent to Sam.

Jack’s mother, Kelly Kline’s death, inaugurated the Winchesters as substitute parents to Jack. And oh boy, did the narrative not treat Kelly Kline well. Kelly Kline was stealth-raped by Lucifer and died giving birth to Jack (her body mystically ripped apart by the birth). Kelly was fridged for Jack’s nascent emotional journey, because, once again, the show’s core depends on the absence of familial women.

Kelly Kline dies giving birth to Jack (12x23)

Jack’s birth and Sam and Dean’s parental responsibility for him also coincided with Castiel’s death, thus (in subtext) the narrative also mirrored Dean’s grief at losing Cas to his father John Winchester’s grief at losing Mary.

In a patriarchal culture where male feeling is repressed, which is definitely the in-show world of Supernatural (mirroring aspects of IRL US culture) the stakes, apparently, “have to” be bloody, they “have to” be high, in order for the narrative to “permit” the levels of traumatic emotion which Dean and Sam (and now Jack) continually cycle through, whilst maintaining their ostensibly “tough” hunter hero status.

The bedrock of that “permission”, i.e. permission to be a show about male sentiment? With Kelly Kline’s death, it continued to be predicated on the violent death of familial women - at the very moment the Winchesters themselves became fathers.

Dabb used the same (tired) trope in 9x20 Bloodlines (Ennis lost his girfriend to a werewolf attack, and was thus deeply emotionally wounded and bent on revenge).

Female familial death is the narrative “excuse” for the homo-social world of SPN, and it also works to contain the homoerotic subtext of SPN. Women are ostensibly, only absent from these men’s lives because they keep traumatically losing them, not because they, in fact, prefer the company of other men.

Two grown brothers and a male-embodied angel who live together, have adopted a son together, and who spend all their time in states of incredible emotional angst?

Hollywood culture (and the mainstream audience it imagines it is speaking to) still (for the most part - although let’s acknowledge Tapert’s Spartacus for Starz, 2010-2013) cannot compute how to experience that kind of set-up as both “queer” AND “manly” (which is why Troy [2004] eviscerates the homo-romantic from Achilles/ Patroclus) so the violent death of familial women in Supernatural is used as an excuse for their absence

Mary’s ostensible death in 14x18 seems, once again, to re-affirm this patriarchal order, even though, in her time back on earth, from 11x23 to now, Mary has been written and portrayed as a flawed, real person; her apple-pie baking, perfect Mom, childhood mirage (Dean’s dream of her idealised memory) thoroughly deconstructed. And I have lived for that.

To have her re-fridged, for her sons’ man-pain (i.e. for the narrative “permission” to cycle through grief and angst and growth again) after all that, just sits wrong with me.

And, despite the beauty of Beren’s structure, despite his respectful treatment of her, make no mistake, Mary is (if we read this as played straight) re-fridged, because her death, is not about her or her own journey, rather, narratively, it now deliberately leaves her sons in the place of their father.

A yellow-eyed “demon” (their adopted Nephilim son Jack, whom they fear has lost his soul) has killed Mary Winchester, again. Will the Winchesters follow in the footsteps of John Winchester’s revenge quest, or will they find another way?

I really hope Mary comes back from the AU world she’s been un-wittingly blasted to by Jack to kick some sense into her sons’ asses and, oh yeah, punch Lucifer in the face all over again:

Mary punching Lucifer in 13x22 Exodus.

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jess-the-vampire · 5 years

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At least none of the side characters in SvtFoE got actually Friged. That's a term for when supporting characters are killed off to develop the main characters, first coined by Gail Simone when Major Force killed Green Lantern Kyle Rayner's then girlfriend, Alexandra DeWitt and stuffed her corpse in a refrigerator just to hurt him.

oh, the “Woman in the fridge” trope?

true

but using them for love triangles and kicking them out is still pretty bad

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merry-melody · 5 years

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Misfits E2.6 grace notes

* Fascinating that after rewatching E2.3 and Superhoodie’s manipulations, here Alisha, albeit not intentionally, hits the same id points – where Superhoodie uses touch and his knowledge of the future as a form of control (not only by representing himself as immune to her powers, but also by linking her life to her relationship with him - when she tells him he can’t tell her she’ll fall in love as she doesn’t know if it’s true and it makes her uncomfortable, he leads into how because they’re together he ‘won’t let’ her ‘die’); Alisha’s now doing the reverse by explaining that Simon that he ‘needs’ to ‘become (this) person’, and that her entire life is reliant on him not only dying, but also engaging in this relationship. Likewise, Superhoodie purposefully keeps Alisha in the dark as to how he’s able to touch her (which I guess makes sense - if he told her she could sell her power, or that immunity to powers was on the market; there’d be nothing tying her to him as her only option) and here Alisha pays that forward, presenting Simon not only as her lifeline, but also as her only option to have a normal relationship.

It actually plays incredibly ambiguously (Simon looks absolutely crushed at ‘you and me, we’re together’, to Alisha’s hopeful ‘you can touch me’, he offers: ‘...and then I die’, and he only leans closer to her when she offers the option of the future as mutable: ‘I hope we will be (together).’ they struggle to find common ground: ‘...You’re surprised, imagine how I felt!’ and ‘It’s like in Terminator’ ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’) His discovery of Alisha’s secret parallels his discovery of Sally’s, as he recalls that he never told her about the ‘best time of his life’, just as he never told Sally he was lonely; which is fairly dark, but to be honest, makes this scene all the better for the complexity.

* It’s a shame that we conclude the scene by Simon and Alisha finally taking some kind of normal pace, as they agree that neither of them know what will happen, and actually spend time as friends; so of course let’s backtrack on that in favour of baroque, tearful scenes of one cradling the other’s body. Their relationship is tentative here, and this scene seems more about paralleling the Pieta pose from 2.4 than actually in-character with the pair in the present moment. Alisha herself is secondary, as Brian kidnaps all the girls and kills them off-screen (there’s also a charming full-body shot of Kelly’s minidressed corpse, whereas Nikki is a nonentity, with her death garnering almost no reaction), and this starts the trend of both Alisha being kidnapped and gagged by dark mirrors of Superhoodie; but also of the WOC on the show being fridged.

#alisha x simon is the worst #misfits #misfits meta #meta #e2.6 #misfits grace notes #misfits tv

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chronicbeans · 8 months

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Ok, for the Apartment Complex AU, hear me out:

Costume party turned murder mystery after someone gets "stabbed" (stabbed in quotation marks because the whole thing is probably staged). Cue OG Simon getting to be a detective for a bid, anddd Winter King being the main suspect for a lil while

Everybody is going to be fighting for such a long time. Fionna is probably the one to get "stabbed", since she mainly just wants to watch the chaos go down.

OG Simon is thrilled to be detective, running around and finding clues while dressed as Sherlock Holmes. Winter King is the main suspect for a long while, since he puts on this whole "I am going to be the flamboyantly rude character" for a long while, until he begins to get genuinely annoyed by OG Simon's questioning, and breaks character. After he's no longer the main suspect, it immediately goes to Freezer Simon.

Freezer Simon isn't wearing any costume, mostly because he sees himself as the costume. He's probably walking around on all fours, looking like some sort of creature from the underworld due to his disjointed and broken limbs. He's way too excited to be drinking the fruit punch, though, to actually be paying attention. He tends to answer all of OG Simon's questions with "I was stuck in the freezer for a while. I have no clue what is going on." (Which, to be honest, he was actually stuck in the freezer for an hour...). At some point he gets sad that he's the main suspect, and crawls back into the freezer Exorcist style.

M&S Simon is probably standing in the corner, talking to Ice King, like "Did you do it?" "Maybe." "THAT'S NOT AN ANSWER I NEED TO KNOW FOR THIS PARTY!" "A wizard never tells his secrets, nerd!"

Every Simon is suspecting that it is one of the other Simons that is the killer. It turns into a whole argument. There may or may not be a fist fight at some point. Fionna has probably fallen asleep at this point.

Meanwhile, Ice Marcy is standing in the corner, thinking to herself. "I did it. She refused to give me candy corn, saying that I couldn't eat it, so I pretended to stab her. I didn't expect this to happen, but I at least have candy corn."

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a-s-art · 5 years

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The “Women in Refrigerators” trope in literature

TRIGGER WARNING: dead bodies, mentions of sexual and physical assault, corpses, etc. SOURCE: “Women in Refrigerators” The term “Women in Refrigerators” or “Fridging” was most notably coined by female comic book writer Gail Simone. Simone is best known for her work on Birds of Prey, Deadpool, and Wonder Woman. The term came from Green Lantern #54, where Kyle Rayner is horrified to find his girlfriend, Alexandra DiWitt, murdered and stuffed into his refrigerator.

Kyle finds out she was killed by Major Force as a way to get under his skin. Simone was shocked to see Alexandra being used as little more than a plot point to further the story of the leading man, and was sick of women characters being treated like a dispensable commodity for writers. Many writers of all genders have taken her words to heart, and “Fridging” has become a topic of huge debate. The trope usually has 3 common occurrences 1. A female character (not just a love interest) is brutalized beyond repair in some way: killed, physically assaulted, mind broken, de-powered, or sexually assaulted. 2. A villain is responsible and only does it to provoke the hero. 3. The woman’s injury/death provides vengeful motivation for the hero to fight/kill/defeat the villain The reason “Fridging” is harmful trope is because it objectifies female characters, turns them into plastic story devices, and their character development just serves as motivation to the male protagonist. It’s the same reason why “damsels in distress” is a stereotypical trope; it gives the illusion that women cannot fight for themselves. These tropes are not just limited to love interests, but anyone woman in the male hero’s life. But the trope most often applies to a love interest. It’s considered more tragic and grief-inspiring for the hero to lose the women he’s devoted his life to. This isn’t a call for untouchable female characters; as long as the female’s death is more relevant to the story than just as the hero’s motivation. Regardless, I find it almost frightening to think about how common this is and how often it still happens. One counter-argument being made against the term “Fridging” is the idea that women do face these situations and it’s a real thing happening today. This argument is ridiculous, because the deaths of these women are never the central focus of the story, and their brutalization is never the theme. It’s the death of a woman for the interest of a plot point that makes it fridging. The other big counter-argument against the WiR trope is that men are killed all the time in literature, and singling out the deaths of females is simply being selective. This argument brought about the “Dead Men Defrosting” or “DMD” trope, designed to show how men being murdered as motivation and women being murdered for motivation were starkly different. Firstly, role-reversal (a super-heroine's love interest being killed off to further her story) is not half as common as those arguing this can make it sound. Additionally, men are not killed in the same manner as most female characters are. The death of a female character is far more often due to torture and/or exploitation or assault of a sexual nature than their male counterparts. Men that die often die in a very admirable or heroic manner, such as Steve Trevor in Wonder Woman (2017) who takes a plane full of explosives into the sky to save all the people below. Although it is used to further Wonder Woman’s anger so she can defeat Ares (the god of war), Steve sacrifices himself in a fiery explosion of glory and heroism, much unlike Alexandra DiWitt. The objectification of women in literature is a long-standing issue that needs to be far more seriously addressed. A woman is not just a love interest, not just a motive. It becomes extremely boring when female comic fans have to sit and read through 1-dimensional women after 1-dimensional women. Giving your female characters a personality and abstaining from reducing them to a plot device not only makes them far more interesting, it also forces you to come up with a better plot. Don’t write a female. Write a three-dimensional character.

#yes punisher im looking at your damn backstory #writing #wir #women in refrigerators #gail simone #writing ideas #writing tips #english #english tips #comic #comics #comic books #simone #big barda #big barda deserved better #women #feminism #female representation #representation

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