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blapis-blazuli · 4 years

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So last night my girlfriend and I watched the live action Sonic movie together! I have Thoughts on it, but in short: I enjoyed it more than I expected! (Put under the cut because I get rambly. Also spoilers I guess.)

In no particular order:

I’m not really a fan of live action/CGI hybrid movies based on an already existing property, but this one seems to be one of the better ones. Not groundbreaking by any means, but certainly watchable.

The CGI for this film is actually pretty good, especially regarding Sonic.

That being said, I do have issues with how the animators were forced to go in and redo so much with him after the severe backlash regarding his first design looking... well, horrible. (I know there’s some people who liked that design but... no, I’m sorry, just... no.) I’m not putting the blame for the older design on the animators as they were just doing their jobs, but I do have to question what was going through the heads of the higher-ups who thought that design was a good idea. I heard the thought process was “well he’s in the real world now so we have to make him look more realistic” but given how most audiences generally don’t seem to like the whole “realistic live-action/CGI character design” thing, you’d think they would avoid doing that.

Actually, I have to question why there didn’t seem to be more involvement from people who had worked on the franchise before (namely Tyson Hesse, the guy who came up with Sonic’s redesign, but is probably better known for his work on some of the comics and some animated Sonic shorts that you can find on Sega’s official Youtube channel which you should definitely look at because they’re cute) from day one. You’ve got well over two decades worth of cast and crew you could’ve worked with, so why not bring more of them in to help? (Just not Ken Penders.)

Ben Schwartz is alright as the voice of Sonic. I won’t go calling him my favorite any time soon, but he did okay. I do feel like I have to question the choice to cast him though, but a little more on that later.

In case you didn’t know, I’m an absolute slut for Eggman, so I had... concerns when I heard that they cast Jim Carrey as my favorite (even leaving aside how I’m autistic, headcanon Eggman as autistic, and as far as I know Carrey is still an anti-vaxxer). For this movie, though, he fits the role of what Robotnik is like in this universe (a bitter orphan who grew up preferring robots to humans and is so unhinged that even the U.S. government thinks he’s nuts even though he works for them) just fine. I don’t think I can ever fully accept him as Eggman (though admittedly I don’t know who could make for a decent live action Eggman), but I could live with his performance in this.

I need to know more about what the deal is between Agent Stone and Robotnik, because I am intrigued more than the filmmakers probably wanted me to be (most likely because Carrey and Lee Majdoub worked together to make their characters dynamic more fun) and now I just want more of them interacting. I’m kinda disappointed that he wasn’t in this more, honestly. I get why since it’s supposed to be focused mostly on the actual characters from the games, but... I want to know more.

Tom the cop... I was really skeptical about this, especially since the first Sonic game I ever played portrayed the police and military as bad people (and, you know, real life cops are bastards), but... honestly, did Tom even really need to be a cop in the first place for this plot to work? I’m sure they could’ve worked something out where he didn’t need to be one. Anyway, there isn’t much to say about him, but he’s alright.

There’s honestly even less to say about his wife, but you know what? Props to this movie for having an interracial couple where them being an interracial couple isn’t the central drama (her sister’s mistrust of him doesn’t fully count as that’s not the focus) and didn’t draw loads of attention to it or have it come off as them doing this in an attempt to seem “woke”, unlike some other studios I could name. (coughDISNEYcough)

Is Owl Mom okay?!

Some of the humor is kinda hit and miss for me, but that seems to be true for the writing of the games themselves, especially after the change of staff since Colors (note to the writers: Baldy McNosehair is not as funny as you think it is), and I’ve seen live action/CGI hybrid franchise movies with worse humor (hell, media in general with worse humor), so I’m a bit more forgiving of it here.

That being said, the joke about Sonic wasting most of a bar/restaurant’s toilet paper to wrap it around some guys in a bar fight and later saying whoever used the bathroom next was going to have a problem... yeah, I don’t think I need to explain how poorly that aged, albeit unintentionally.

Robotnik does not say “Snooping as usual”, but Sanic made an appearance, sorta. That was something.

I’m still reeling from how “The Doctor thinks you’re basic” is an actual line in this movie and not something someone made up on Tumblr as a joke.

Given how people griped about the Olive Garden product placement in this, I was expecting it to be infinitely worse than it really was. Honestly it felt more like a brick joke to me, only with product placement.

The end credits scene with Tails was nice, especially since they brought in his current voice actress from the games to voice him! Though that has me thinking that if they did that then there wasn’t any reason for them not to bring in Roger Craig Smith (or any other former Sonic voice actor, come to think of it) to voice Sonic. Well, aside from “celebrity voice might put more butts in the theater seats (well, couch cushions currently)”. This bothers me so much. You have an established animated medium with an established voice cast, you’d think that bringing them in to voice their character for a big screen adaptation would be more common, but I guess not (unless you’re SpongeBob or The Simpsons I guess). Voice actors deserve way more than what Hollywood does to them, that’s all I’m saying. (This also bothers me given what I know of the First Sonic Voice Recasting Controversy way back when Sonic X was a thing.)

Speaking of end credits scenes, Sonic X, and the voice actors from the games/shows/etc, my girlfriend mentioned that she and her sister thought that in Carrobotnik’s last scene there was a point where it almost sounded like Carrey was doing an impression of Mike Pollock (the English voice actor of Eggman for seventeen years and by far the longest-lasting English voice cast member), and I thought so too. I’m used to voice actors imitating celebrities for their performances even when they’re not voicing said celebrity, so hearing it the other way around for a change even briefly was fascinating (and further proves to me how much of an impact Pollock’s left on the character that even the live-action actor has ended up doing an impression of his take on the same character).

I know they’re already talking about making at least one sequel (and for once Carrey seems to want in on said sequel), and you know what? I’m all for it. Please bring Stone back too, I want to know more about him.

I know it looks like I spent a lot of this going “eh” and “but why”, but I really did enjoy this! If you’re curious about it, please check it out.

#long post #bold text warning #capslock warning #shut up Blapis #spoilers #Sonic movie spoilers

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the-desolated-quill · 5 years

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Quill’s Swill - The Worst Of 2018

Congratulations dear reader. You survived 2018. And you know what that means. It’s time for another best of/worst of list. Welcome to Quill’s Swill 2018. A giant septic tank for the various shit the entertainment industry produced over the course of the year. The films, games, TV shows and various other media that got on my bad side. As always please bear in mind that this is only my subjective opinion (if you happen to like any of the things on this list, good for you. I’m glad someone did) and that obviously I haven’t seen everything 2018 has to offer for one reason or another. In other words, sorry that Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald isn’t on here. I’m sure it is as terrible as some have been suggesting. I just never got around to watching it.

Okay everyone. Grab your breathing masks and put on your rubber gloves. Let’s dive into this shit pile.

Hold The Sunset

The news that John Cleese would be returning to the world of BBC sitcoms was incredibly exciting, being a massive Fawlty Towers fan and all. Unfortunately Hold The Sunset was not quite what I had in mind. It’s one of those rare breed of situation comedies that chooses to offer no actual comedy. It’s not a sitcom. It’s a sit. Like Scrubs or The Big Bang Theory.

An elderly couple plan to elope abroad only for Alison Steadman’s son to barge in, having left his wife, and forcing them to put their plans on hold. Hence the title ‘Hold The Sunset.’ It’s like a cross between As Time Goes By and Sorry, but if all the humour and relatability were surgically removed by a deadpan mortician. The characters are weak, the plots are thin on the ground and the humour (hat little of it there is) feel incredibly dated. The middle aged mummy’s boy is something that hasn’t been funny since the 90s. It’s an utter waste of great talent and what hurts even more is that this tripe is actually getting a second series. I can only assume the people watching this are comatose. Either that or there’s an epidemic of people in Britain who have lost the remote.

Avengers: Infinity War

Yes this is one of the worst movies of 2018 and no I don’t regret saying that one little bit. Avengers: Infinity War was fucking terrible. Period. There were too many plots and characters going on, which made the film hard to follow (and what staggers me is that the so called ‘professional’ critics have condemned movies for having too many characters and plots before. Spider-Man 3, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Batman vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice and even Deadpool 2. But because this is an MCU movie, it gets a free pass. Fuck off). The characterisation was weak due to sheer number of characters they try to juggle, resulting in characters coming off as one dimensional caricatures of themselves and scenes where characters such as Iron Man, Doctor Strange and Star-Lord sound completely interchangeable. The villain, Thanos, is a stupidly and poorly written villain, but that’s hardly surprising considering what a shit job Marvel have done building him up over the course of these 20+ movies. And let’s not forget that pisstake ending. A bunch of prominent Marvel characters die and it’s all very, very sad... except all these characters just so happen to have sequels planned, which makes this ending fucking pointless and have less impact than a feather on a bouncy castle.

I don’t know which is more shocking. That Marvel and Disney think their audience are that stupid and gullible, or that their audience are actually validating their view. Fuck you Disney.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery

I’ve always wanted a Harry Potter RPG, where you could customise your character, choose your house and actually live a full school life at Hogwarts. This year, Warner Bros and Jam City gave us just that.

That was a mistake.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery is the epitome of everything that’s wrong with the mobile gaming market right now. The gameplay is boring and involving where you just tap images on a screen until a progress bar fills up. Wizard duels are little more than rock-paper-scissors challenges that require no kind of skill. Bonding with friends and caring for magical creatures just consist of pathetically simple pop quizzes and yet more boring tapping. Oh and of course you only get a certain amount of energy to complete these tedious tasks. If you run out of energy, you wait for it to fill up... or pay up for the privilege. So determined are they to extract your hard earned cash from your wallet, there’s actually a bit where Devil’s Snare strangles your eleven year old avatar and the game effectively tries to guilt trip you into paying micro-transactions to save them. It’s sleazy, gross and manipulative. Honestly, you’re better off just playing Candy Crush.

Agony

When the developers of this game said they wanted to give the player a trip through Hell, they had no idea how true that statement really was. Agony is dreadful on a number of levels. The design for Hell itself, while visually interesting at times, is often not very practical and gets quite dull and repetitive after a while. The stealth mechanics are a joke and the AI of your demonic enemies are pitiful. All of this alone would have been enough to put this game on the list, but then we also have the casual misogyny. Agony is a gorefest trying desperately to shock the player. We see men and woman get tortured, but it’s the women that often get the extreme end. The violence inflicted on them is often sexual in nature and the game seems to go out of its way to degrade and dehumanise women at every turn. The orgasmic cries of ‘pull it out’ quickly become a staple of the game’s experience as we see naked women raped, tortured and murdered, all for the purposes of ‘entertainment.’

I would call Agony sexist, but honestly that would be giving it too much credit. Agony is like a little child trying desperately to be all dark and edgy in a pathetic attempt to impress everyone around him, and we should treat it as such. Go to your room Agony. No ice cream for you.

Peter Rabbit

If you listen closely, you can hear the sound of Beatrix Potter rotating in her grave.

Yes we have yet another live action/CGI hybrid, but instead of something innocuous like the Smurfs or Alvin and the Chipmunks, Sony instead decides to adapt Peter Rabbit, with James Corden in the title role.

It’s about as bad as you’d expect.

Their attempts to modernise the story are painful to say the least with pop culture references, inappropriate adult humour and twerking rabbits. Plus rather than the gentle, but slightly mischievous character we got in the source material, here Peter is a sociopathic delinquent who seems to revel in making the farmer’s life a living hell. He’s unlikable and unwatchable as far as I’m concerned and the film doesn’t in anyway earn the emotional moments it tries so desperately to sell to the audience. And the worst part is it’s getting a sequel.

Wait. Do you hear that sound? That’s the sound of Beatrix Potter tearing out of the ground, ready to kill whatever idiot came up with this shit.

Fallout 76

I was excited for Fallout 76. A MMORPG where players band together to rebuild society after a nuclear apocalypse. Could have been great. Pity it wasn’t.

Fallout 76 is a dreadful game. Not only is it a buggy, glitchy mess that requires a constant online connection to play, which could result in you losing hours of progress if your WiFi went down, it’s also unbelievably tedious, and that’s because there’s nothing to do in the game. There’s no other characters to interact with, the various robots and computers you come across are really little more than quest givers, there’s no actual plot so to speak, and because of the sheer size of the world and the number of players allowed on a server, the chances of you actually meeting any actual players is remote. And let’s not forget all the behind the scenes drama. Bethesda falsely advertising Fallout themed canvas bags and players getting shitty nylon ones. Bethesda accidentally releasing the account information of various players trying to get a refund for said bag. Bethesda failing to program the year 2019 into the game code, meaning that the game’s nukes don’t work.

Maybe there’s a chance that Bethesda could pull a No Man’s Sky and fix everything over the coming years with various patches and DLCs, but the damage has already been done. It’s incredibly disappointing. The Elder Scrolls 6 is going to have be fucking incredible to win everyone back.

Mama Mia!: Here We Go Again

I can’t stand jukebox musicals anyway, but Mamma Mia was always one of the worst. Its boring, meandering story with its one note, obnoxious cast of characters screeching out ABBA songs like they’re at some drunken karaoke session at some poor sod’s hen party has always grated on my nerves. So imagine my delight when they announced we were getting a sequel. Ever wondered how Meryl Streep met her three lovers and founded her hotel? No? Well tough shit, we’re going to tell you anyway.

Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again is basically just Mamma Mia again. The actors still can’t sing, the characters are still annoying and story is still boring and meandering, completely at the mercy of the chosen songs rather than the filmmakers using the songs to compliment the story (you know? Like proper musicals do?).

How can I resist you? Very easily as it turns out. Gimme, gimme, gimme a fucking gun so I can end my misery.

The Cloverfield Paradox

A lot of people were unhappy about the direction Cloverfield was going. They wanted a continuation of the found footage, kaiju movie from 2008, not an anthology series. I was personally all in favour. Partially because I thought the first Cloverfield was a tad overrated, but mostly because I thought it would be a great opportunity for more experimental film projects and could be a great launchpad for new writers and filmmakers. 10 Cloverfield Lane was a great start. Then The Cloverfield Paradox happened.

The Cloverfield Paradox is basically JJ Abrams trying to have his cake and eat it too. Maintaining the anthology format whilst connecting everything together in a ‘shared universe’ (yes, yet another shared universe). The result was a cliched, poorly edited and idiotic mess of a film that actually took away from the previous two films rather than added to them. Everyone hated it and, as a result, 2018′s Overlord, which was totes going to be part of the Cloververse, was made its own standalone film and Abrams double pinky promised to make a true sequel to the original Cloverfield. A complete and total disaster. No wonder it was a straight-to-Netflix film.

The Handmaid’s Tale - Season 2

This is probably going to be the most controversial entry on the list, but please hear me out because I’m not the only one who has a problem with this season.

I was reluctant to watch The Handmaid’s Tale simply because of how gruesome the original book was, but I forced myself to watch the first season and I thought it was pretty good. It remained faithful to the source material for the most part and included some nice additions that helped to expand the story and mythos. If it was just a one off mini-series, everything would have been fine. But then they made the same mistake as The Man In The High Castle and Under The Dome did where they commissioned another season and attempted to tell a story that goes beyond the book.

There’s a reason why the original story ended where it did. The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t meant to be an empowering story about women sticking it to the patriarchy. It’s a cautionary tale about how fragile our civil rights truly are and how easily they can be taken away from us. It’s designed to shock, not to satisfy. So seeing a handmaid blow herself up in a suicide bombing feels very incongruous and just a little bit silly. It would be like doing a TV adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 where the first season followed the source material and then the second season turned Winston Smith into this heroic freedom fighter trying to overthrow Big Brother. It would represent a fundamental misunderstanding of what the book was about in the first place.

And then of course there’s the increased level of violence in Season 2, which many have complained about. In Season 1 and the original source material, the violence was justified. In Season 2, the motivation behind the violence has gone from ‘how can we effectively demonstrate how easily a fascist patriarchy can happen in the West?’ to ‘what brutal act can we inflict upon Ofglen to shock the audience this week?’ It’s purely for shock and nothing more. And with the showrunner (who I feel I should mention is a man) announcing that he has planned ten seasons of this, it seems that The Handmaid’s Tale is going to go even further with this depravity until it effectively becomes the equivalent of a Saw film.

The Handmaid’s Tale exists as a way of shining light on and critiquing misogyny in its most extreme form. Season 2 however demonstrates that there is a serious risk of it becoming the very thing it’s criticising in the first place.

The Predator

I love the Predator franchise, but The Predator is the worst.

People thought that this would be good because director Shane Black had actually starred in the first Predator movie back in 1987. Instead we got this bloated, confusing, obnoxious and insulting mess of a film that seems to go out of its way to ruin everything that makes Predator so good. There’s no tension. No suspense. No intrigue. Just a bunch of gore, explosions and shitty one liners from annoying and lifeless characters. They essentially took this big alien game hunter from outer space and turned him into a generic monster from a bad summer blockbuster. It no longer hunts for sport. It wants to take over the world and splice our DNA with theirs. But don’t worry, a rogue Predator doesn’t want to kill humans (even though he himself kills a bunch of humans), so he gives us a Predator Iron Man suit to set up a sequel that will probably never happen because this movie was a box office bomb and it fucking SUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCKKKKKKKEEEEEDDDD!!!

This film also has a very nasty streak towards those with disabilities. There’s a lot of jokes at the expense of a character with Tourette’s and it has an extremely ignorant and patronising view of autism, portraying the main character’s kid as being a super genius who can decipher the Predator language and even going so far as to say that he represents ‘the next stage of human evolution.’ Presumably the Predators want social communication difficulties because apparently it helps them hunt somehow.

What with Disney acquiring 20th Century Fox, the future of both the Alien and Predator franchises were very much in question. This film needed to be a success in order to make a case for Disney to keep making more of them. It wasn’t. Congratulations Shane Black. You might have just killed off this franchise for good. Thanks arsehole! :D

So those were my least favourite stories from 2018. Join me on Wednesday where we shall discuss something more positive. Yes, it’s awards season. Who shall win the coveted Quill Seal Of Approval? Watch this space...

Or don’t. It’s up to you. I don’t want to force you or anything. It’s a free country.

#quill's swill #quill's swill 2018 #worst of the year #review #opinion

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doctorwhonews · 5 years

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Resolution

Latest Review: Writer: Chris Chibnall Director: Wayne Yip Executive Producers: Chris Chibnall and Matt Strevens Starring: Jodie Whittaker, Bradley Walsh, Tosin Cole, Mandip Gill, Charlotte Ritchie, Nikesh Patel, Daniel Adegboyega and Nick Briggs BBC One (UK) First broadcast Tuesday January 1st 2019 It may have displaced Doctor Who's Christmas Day tradition, but the "spatial shift" in TV listings for 'Resolution' made this story no less of a gift. With sections of fandom wanting a return of old monsters, and with some arguing for stronger narrative threats for Jodie Whittaker's Doctor to face off against, 'Resolution' delivered in spades. And though it might be a truism to suggest that no new Doctor is truly forged in steeliness until they have faced the Daleks, it's a piece of lore that's extremely well borne out here. And what a Dalek! Given the presence of a lone reconnaissance scout, this immediately had the feel of 2005's Rob Shearman-penned story, albeit reworked through the distinctive filter of Chris Chibnall's vision for Who. A steelpunk Dalek neatly recapped the sonic screwdriver's new origin story from S11.e1, with Chibnall again deciding to cast his showrunner's remit to 'make it new' into the narrative universe, having both Doctor and Dalek recreate their own remembered versions of the show's icons. At first, I was concerned by the DIY Dalek's design -- it reminded me of unofficial replicas and assorted fan builds seen over the years -- but on reflection, there was just the right blend of RTD-era industrial vibe, innovation (including the red-lit section set within the outer casing) and clanking homespun realism, given the story's clear justification for all this. The resulting 'Sheffield steel dalek' will likely prove to be a one-off boon to merchandising ranges, but Chibnall astutely mined Dalek mythology for some striking images and pay-offs; the mutant-on-the-back recalled iconic imagery from 'Planet of the Spiders' more than previous Dalek tales (and was occasionally a touch unconvincing, for my money), whilst the use of Dalek 'bumps' as housings for rocket-launchers was nothing less than inspired. This may have felt more like 'trad' Doctor Who at times, but it was also full of surprises and brilliant bits of imagination. Having the Doctor confront this Dalek inside GCHQ was probably my favourite moment of series 11, combining a realist/spy-thriller version of how a lone Dalek might actually try to seize power in today's Britain with the inventiveness of Doctor Who at its very best. There was an air of inevitability about the scenario, once you realised where the script was going, but it fused the ordinary and the fantastical in a perfect way for a post-Snowden culture. Likewise, removing all wifi -- no Internet and no Netflix! -- made the Doctor's arch-enemy a resolutely contemporary menace, even if the 'family cutaway' struck a slight misstep in terms of its broad comic intent and clunkiness. Another inspired moment, however, was the way that UNIT's non-involvement was tackled. Undoubtedly well aware of old-school fan complaints along the lines of "why weren't UNIT called in?", the showrunner dispatched these mercilessly. But the presence of a call centre operative reading off her computer screen put UNIT's demise squarely into the context of government efficiency savings, as well as implicitly evoking Brexit-style wrangling over international funding. Any long-term fans pondering how UNIT could have been so savagely undone via these real-world resonances might want to additionally consider the extent to which UNIT perhaps belongs properly and organisationally to the age of 1970s' public services and internationalism -- a world now undermined by decades of neoliberalism (traversing both major UK political parties). The scene may be strongly satirical, but its commentary remains perfectly evident: we can't have nice things like UNIT via any current politics of austerity or isolationism. Instead, extraterrestrial-incursion security has seemingly been privatised, resulting in MDZ's feeble defence of the former 'Black Archive' (you can't imagine Kate Stewart or Osgood allowing a Dalek scout to wander off with weaponry and propulsion systems). This was very much a two-pronged 'Special'; a sort of double-A-side seeking to combine Dalek shenanigans with the emotional weight of Ryan's father reappearing. Perhaps these strands didn't always rest side-by-side as comfortably as the features of Aaron's combination oven, but on the whole 'Resolution' was a successful hybrid. It followed a textbook pattern by uniting its main plot threads at the denouement, both thanks to Aaron's engineering specs, and via the sting-in-the-tentacle of the Dalek's desperate final attempt at human possession. The thirteenth Doctor remained characteristically fallible, mind you, with her Dalek showdowns never quite going according to plan, and her "squid-sized vacuum corridor" expanding to human-sized proportions with almost fatal consequences. All of this allowed 'Resolution' to re-articulate Chris Chibnall's mission statement for Who -- that the Doctor's "fam" should be just as important as the Doctor herself. And so it is Aaron and Ryan who, acting together through forgiveness and love, finally overcome the Dalek's tenacity. In one strange moment, it even feels as though the script is reaching towards a parallel between family and monstrosity -- just as family is more than DNA and a name, as Graham tells Aaron, then so too is the Dalek more than a DNA identification and a matter of naming. Both Dalekhood and fatherhood hinge on behaviour, meaning that just as Aaron has to prove his status to Ryan then the Dalek is equally required to prove its nature to new viewers and new fans. This it duly does, the episode being jam-packed with gloriously retro extermination effects and Dalek ruthlessness. And though monstrosity and family are eventually opposed, with the "extended fam" predictably defeating the monster of the year, it is striking, in an episode where the Dalek's identity is initially a matter of DNA testing and naming, that the familial and the monstrous should ghost across one another. This is a story firing on all machine-tooled cylinders. The direction from Wayne Yip is brilliantly kinetic and well-judged throughout, and the acting performances are uniformly first-rate. I'd especially single out Charlotte Ritchie, who does a lot of great work as Lin to really sell the Dalek 'pilot' concept, switching through various gradations of embodied Dalekness. In addition, Nick Briggs is on superb form, relishing the chance to do things such as providing maniacally extended and chilling Dalek laughter. I still miss the pre-credits sequence, though. The response to Graham's much-trailed question, "does it have a name?", would have been intensified by immediately then crashing into the titles. OK, cutting the title sequence buys a little more story time, but a few judicious trims here and there could easily have made room for the titles, and for a more dramatic punctuation of the Doctor's reveal of the Daleks. I hope that pre-credits scenes are restored across series 12. And on this showing, the return of the Daleks -- plural and non-DIY this time -- would also be most welcome in 2020. Regardless of how series 11 is packaged on DVD/blu-ray, it's difficult not to view this as anything other than the true finale to Jodie Whittaker's first season. The DNA of Chris Chibnall's vision for the show is coded right through it: fantasy plus grounded social/political resonance plus emotional realism, all added to an ethic of teamwork and elective family rather than Time Lord (super-)heroics standing front-and-centre. Yes, at times this Doctor seems more reactive or passive than in the past, as well as less torn by internal demons, and less shadowed by back-story mysteries. It makes the Doctor far less of a focal point, freeing up narrative space and time for at least some of the "fam", and reconfiguring Who in a more inclusive and mentoring mode than arguably ever before. Chibnall's work hasn't just been about bringing in new writers' voices, featuring new locales, and emphasising a renewed sense of Doctor Who's capacities to speak back to power. He has also resolved to give the Doctor a radical new stripe of narrative agency too, one less omnipotent, less certain, and more energisingly hopeful. And that, for me, is a resolution worth championing. http://reviews.doctorwhonews.net/2019/01/resolution.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

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thelanternwielder · 5 years

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Pet

So, this a fanfic using my Animal AU. I also decided to challenge myself and write in first-person perspective (which I haven’t done for a while). Its alternative title would be “Hargrave is a very gay cat for 800 words.” Yeah.

I feel like that uploading this fanfic online means th at I’m creating a new ship. I don’t know if I can handle that kind of responsibility.

Let me know what you think!

I wanted today to be normal, mundane, uneventful. Well, as any of those things as it could be for as a mad scientist like myself.

After the failure of countless plots and the destruction of several bases, thousands upon thousands of dollars going up in smoke, all thanks to those little BRATS CALLED TEAM CORE TECH, AND IF I EVER GET MY HANDS ON THEM, ESPECIALLY THAT SUNO BOY, I, I -!

I needed a break. Just the thought of them made my blood boil.

I believed today I could have relaxed, not worry about anything. Take a day off, if you will.

No. I just had to wake up.

I awoke to a perplexing situation: I had seemingly shapeshifted to a different species. Still somewhat human, I was covered in bright red fur with darker spots. I had a short tail, thick muzzle, paws and roundish ears. When I regarded my reflection for the first time, a strange laughing whimper swelled from the back of my throat, completely uncontrolled. I was a spotted hyena.

This was not what I had in mind when I said I wanted to transform.

As it turned out, I was not the only one who had been afflicted by this condition. My loyal butler, Hargrave, had become a cat. Grey with a white lower jaw, neck and paws. He was surprised to see me when I entered.

Dom Pyro was a black and white bearded vulture, with his arms doubling as his wings. He seemed to be the most enthusiastic about the change.

And Six…I did not know what he was. He appeared to be hyenoid but not quite a like me, as if he was a hybrid. He was, rather bizarrely, a pastel pink.

To make matters worse, we had crash landed.

“Where are we?” I asked sternly.

Hargrave tapped the buttons of the ship’s main computer somewhat frantically. The computer was on but the windows that were summoned on the giant screen were blank.

He stopped with drooped shoulders and folded ears. He turned to me.

He stammered, “I’m afraid I haven’t the slightest idea, sir. The GPS system has been knocked out.”

I grunted irritably as I rubbed my head with a hand.

Excellent. Another headache.

Dom giggled, “Okay. Since we’re stuck here, I’m going exploring.”

I regarded him from the corner of my eye. He was admiring his wings again.

“Maybe I could learn how to use these.”

He wandered off.

Then Six piped up, “Father, can I go with him?”

I gestured my hand for him to leave. He did so with a grin.

I plodded to my throne and slumped into it. I propped my head up with my hand.

“Why is there always something that goes wrong?”

My butler looked concerned.

I lifted my head and tensely gesticulated, “All I want is just ONE day that is free from frustration.”

I leant my head against my hand again. My butler blinked as his tail tried to shake off the frizz from my sudden crescendo.

His eyes flickered to the side then he smiled sympathetically.

“Would tea help, sir?” he suggested quietly.

I grimaced, “Please.”

He bowed before departing from the room.

I glared at the screen with the blank windows. I snarled.

-----------------------------

I lead the butler cat into my laboratory and shut the door behind him. It slid down with a clunk.

He glanced at the door then looked to me.

“Er, what are you up to, sir?”

His tail curled into a question mark.

I crossed my arms, “Curiosity has gotten the better of me. Clearly, we resemble animals while still possessing some of our humanity.”

A hand held my chin as I scanned him head to toe.

“My only question is: to what extent are we like animals?”

“Ah,” his face lit up with recognition, “an experiment. What are you testing for?”

“Involuntary animalistic reflexes.”

I gestured for him to turn around. He obeyed and faced the opposite wall.

Based on observation, I hypothesised that we had inherited some uncontrollable responses the species that we had become. To test the hypothesis, I was going to induce purring, a well-documented phenomenon in cats.

Admittedly, this was not the strangest thing I had done for science. It was one of them, though.

Hargrave had noticed my hesitation and turned his head to me.

“Should I be worried, sir?”

“Just face the wall,” I gently pushed his head back into position.

His ears seemed to twitch nervously.

Please do not make me regret this.

I reached towards his head and stroked the back of it. His ears stood up straight. I did it again. He seemed stiffened.

I continued. He stood rigidly and upright, more so than usual. His tail, what had become the best indicator of his mood, had tightly coiled near his feet. He had frozen.

No purring.

Perhaps, I needed something more vigorous.

I began to scratch softly behind one ear. He tilted that ear towards me.

His shoulders dropped slowly. The robot arms of his harness, as if they were a part of him, slanted down. There was movement in his tail as it half unravelled.

Still no purring.

I began to scratch both of his ears. His head now tilted downwards. His ears were angled to the side. His back sat in a loosened curve. His tail had completely unwound and hung low to the ground.

Still no purring. How long must I do this ridiculous exercise for? Just give me what I want already.

His head seemed to come closer and closer to me.

I stopped scratching as it landed on my chest with a quiet thud. His eyes were shut. He was a ragdoll. Perplexingly, he did not open his eyes despite my halting.

Then he spun around somewhat limply and leant against me.

What was he doing?

He wrapped his arms around my torso and pulled me into an embrace. His harness pressed against my stomach. He nuzzled me. I blinked as I felt a warm vibration resonate through my body from my lower chest.

I was at a loss at what to do. That does not happen to me. That never happens to me.

Well, this was an exceptional case. At least he was purring.

Was he aware that he had latched onto me? Was he oblivious?

I attempted to rouse him, “Hargrave,” his ears pricked, “Hargrave.”

He opened his eyes and looked up sleepily.

“Get off.”

His eyes widened. He looked down at his arms.

Panic electrocuted him as he sprung back. His hand covered his mouth. My arms, which had hovered, crossed again.

“Oh my goodness!” he gasped.

He folded his hands in front and dipped his head. He was mortified; it was written all over his face despite his weak attempt to hide it behind civility.

“My deepest apologies, sir! I don’t know wh- “

“Enough,” I silenced his prattling.

His mouth snapped shut in an instant.

What was I going to do with this mess? I couldn’t even admonish him; my brain hadn’t finished processing what just happened. I was baffled.

“Leave,” I instructed, “I have some thinking to do.”

A disheartened sigh came from the cat before he bowed. He departed gingerly. The door hushed open as he did so.

I wandered up to a benchtop and leant on it, looking down. I took a deep breath.

I walked into this laboratory with one question and, apparently, I shall leave with more. Mainly, how much of whatever that was was from him being a cat and how much of it was from him being him? He had his, shall we say, idiosyncrasies that make working with him…interesting.

We need to have a little talk.

-----------------------------

As I entered the control room, the rattling of keys paused as Hargrave turned to greet me. The giant monitor was filled with windows of technical text.

“Ah, Doctor. I have good news.”

“Really?”

I perched on my throne. He was rather pleased with himself, seemingly eager.

“Yes. The initial diagnostics show that none of the vital systems have been compromised. If anything, our landing gears have been grazed slightly.”

He flashed an awkward smile at the last comment.

“Oh, and,” he spun around to the computer and pressed a few buttons, “I have also successfully reinstated the security system, so we’re back online.”

An image flashed onto the screen. It was of a wooded area. Some of the trees had been flattened. It was a livestream from one of the several cameras mounted on the outside of the ship.

The butler cat departed from the computer and scurried up to my throne. He stood next to me.

For a moment, we watched the peaceful nature, letting the atmosphere of outside flow into the room. It was pleasantly quiet.

Actually, it was almost silent. He did fix the audio, didn’t he?

A soft anxious voice asked, “You’re not annoyed at me, are you, sir?”

My butler had a look of guilt on his face.

“No,” I began, “I just have more questions than I have answers.”

He shifted uncomfortably in place.

“What exactly was going through your head when you decided to hug me?”

He stuttered, “Oh, um, well, that’s the problem: I wasn’t thinking.”

He gazed towards the screen, attempting to stay unemotive. He was always one to be stoic.

He wasn’t going to like the next question.

“Fine, what did you feel when you decided to hug me?”

His eyes popped at the question. Then they darted to me, to the screen and to various places on the floor. They finished on the screen.

He frowned, “Erm, c-cosy, I s-suppose.”

“Cosy?”

He winced when I echoed the word.

“So, what was I, a giant soft toy that you had to cuddle?”

He did a half shrug before dropping his gaze to the ground. His posture sunk with it, robot arms included.

“Right,” I said, taking his lack of response as his answer.

I knew he was modest but, quite frankly, it was shocking that an embrace would send him into this pathetic state.

But the stunt itself was not completely unexpected. The time for which it took for something like it to occur was the most surprising part.

“Hargrave,” I stroked my chin, “I cannot help but notice a pattern in your behaviour.”

“Oh?” his voice quivered.

On my hand, I counted the ways.

“There is your undying loyalty to me, your constant fussing over my safety –“

He mumbled, “That’s my job.”

He was shrinking as I continued, “- you shower me with compliments, you even, at one point, were recording all the quips I made during plots.”

He squirmed, tail flicking abruptly before twisting tightly. He glanced at me again.

“And now, we can add hugging to the list.”

I leant towards him.

“I know you’re affectionate, but I can only wonder if there is something more at play here.”

His eyes stayed transfixed on the ground. He was immobile, as if he became paralysed. Although he had trained himself to have an impeccable poker face, horror peeked through.

Then he closed his eyes and nodded.

I raised my eyebrows, “Hm. Would you like to tell me?”

He opened his eyes and stared at the screen once again.

He swallowed then spoke softly, “I rather keep that to myself.”

Damnit. Why must you be so guarded?

I regarded nature, using it as a backdrop for my pondering.

What would he keep from me? And why was he so hesitant?

Strolling into the view of the camera, was Dom Pyro and Six. Their disappeared as quickly as they appeared, with their chatter trailing behind.

Hargrave still seemingly watched the screen. I believed he withdrew; his eyes were a little empty.

I had known this man for years and it was only now I thought of questioning why he was so fond of me.

Fondness. Affection. Love?

Wait a second.

I was either about to make a fool out of myself or have my suspicions confirmed.

Bemused, I asked, “Do you think I’m handsome?”

The question straightened his posture. He blinked slowly as his ears raised. The question finally seemed to register. He covered his mouth. He swivelled to me, eyes full of astonishment.

The words escaped through his fingers, “You are.”

It was followed by a shy chuckle.

Ah.

Of all the time I had known him, it had never occurred to me that he was attracted to men. Or me, for that matter. That explains a few things. Quite a few things. Many things.

His hands had moved from his mouth. He rubbed them absentmindedly. His ears flattened.

His voice trembled, “You’re not disgusted, are you?”

I was unfazed. I had become accustomed to his antics. Come to think of it, it was pleasant to have someone embellish me with worship.

My eyes flickered to the floor and back as I chuffed.

“Actually, I’m flattered.”

His eyes lit up in that moment. A bashful smirk grew.

“Oh, thank Heavens,” he whispered with a hand on his chest.

Then it migrated to his chin, “You wouldn’t tell the others, would you, sir?”

My mouth opened to answer but someone else curtly interrupted.

“Tell us what?!”

Jolted with lightning, the butler cat leapt onto the side of my throne with a yelp. Leaning from the doorway was Dom with a beaky grin. He snickered as he waltzed into the room. Six followed.

As it became apparent that he was unable to detach himself from my chair, I got up and pulled Hargrave off. He was a bit stunned as I placed him on the ground.

He muttered as he fixed himself, “My old heart can’t take all these shocks in one day.”

I addressed Dom and Six with the butler by my side.

The boy said, “We have no idea what you were talking about. We just know that you don’t want to tell us.”

Dom had a sly smile as he teased the butler, “Keeping secrets from us, huh?”

I dragged his attention back to me, “What did you discover on your walk?”

“Trees,” Six responded happily, “Lots and lots of trees,” he paused to remember, “and, uh, bugs. There were a lot of bugs.”

The vulture shrugged, “There’s nothing but forest around here. Not even any birds or animals. Just plants and insects. Weird.”

What kind of forest only has insects and the like? I found it hard to believe that the entire surrounding ecosystem could be sustained solely by ‘bugs’. There must be some other creatures that lived here.

The boy then innocently added, “We also discovered that Dom can’t fly.”

“Wha?!” the bird turned to him, hand on chest, appalled, “I can at least glide!”

“That doesn’t really count…”

“Doesn’t count? Doesn’t count?! I’ve only had these for a day!”

I withdrew from the irate yammering to give Hargrave an instruction.

My voice was low, “How about you test those thrusters? Get us out of here.”

“With pleasure,” he bowed with a smile.

No one noticed that he walked around them, sat down at the controls and started the preparations for launch. Nor did they notice that I went back to my place on the throne.

Dom gestured to Six, “What do you, whatever the Hell you’re meant to be, know about flying?”

“That you’re bad at it.”

He squawked, ruffling his feathers.

Then the butler remarked, “Face it, Dom. You know you’re terrible if a cat can best you at flying.”

The boys turned to the screen. They gaped when they realised what was happening.

Six glanced to where I was standing. His eyes skated around the room as he searched for me.

He found me, “We’re leaving, Father?”

“Yes.”

Dom spun around, “You never told us that the ship still works!”

I held open hands to him, “It was a secret.”

A hissing chortle came from the cat.

“Now, I suggest you two take a seat. It’s going to be a rough take-off.”

They did so, with Six even greeting Hargrave as he sat next to him. The butler made a courteous nod in return.

The engines suddenly roared. With a shift of the controls, we blasted forwards. The room shuddered as we ran along the earth, rattling us with it.

The shaking stopped as we veered up, throwing us back into our seats. We blasted into the sky, eventually stabilising.

Finally, something goes right. Why can’t it be like this all the time? Life would be so much easier.

But it’s unpredictable, uncontrollable. To keep us on our toes, I suppose.

Maybe, flying through the sky, as a hyena, now I could have a break. Maybe.

#monsuno #fanfic

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howling--fantods · 6 years

Text

An Excerpt of the Essay: David Lynch Keeps His Head by David Foster Wallace

I know a lot of you love David Lynch and this is an EXCELLENT defense and deconstruction of his work. The full essay is largely about the film Lost Highway, which was about to be released, and is 67 pages with 61 footnotes. The whole essay is incredibly entertaining and if you like to read, is worth it. You can find it here: x. This excerpt mainly concerns Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. I put the footnotes at the end, I know it isn’t ideal, but it is hard when there aren’t pages.

9A. The cinematic tradition it’s curious that nobody seems to have observed Lynch comes right out of (w/ an epigraph)

“It has been said that the admirers of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari are usually painters, or people who think and remember graphically. This is a mistaken conception.”

—Paul Rotha, “The German Film”

Since Lynch was trained as a painter (an Ab-Exp painter at that), it seems curious that no film critics or scholars(42) have ever treated of his movies’ clear relation to the classical Expressionist cinema tradition of Wiene, Kobe, early Lang, etc. And I am talking here about the very simplest and most straightforward sort of definition of Expressionist, viz. “Using objects and characters not as representations but as transmitters for the director’s own internal impressions and moods.”

Certainly plenty of critics have observed, with Kael, that in Lynch’s movies “There’s very little art between you and the filmmaker’s psyche…because there’s less than the usual amount of inhibition.” They’ve noted the preponderance of fetishes and fixations in Lynch’s work, his characters’ lack of conventional introspection (an introspection which in film equals “subjectivity”), his sexualization of everything from an amputated limb to a bathrobe’s sash, from a skull to a “heart plug,”(43) from split lockets to length-cut timber. They’ve noted the elaboration of Freudian motifs that tremble on the edge of parodic cliche—the way Marietta’s invitation to Sailor to “fuck Mommy” takes place in a bathroom and produces a rage that’s then displaced onto Bob Ray Lemon; the way Merrick’s opening dream-fantasy of his mother supine before a rampaging elephant has her face working in what’s interpretable as either terror or orgasm; the way Lynch structures Dune’s labrynthian plot to highlight Paul Eutrades’s “escape” with his “witch-mother” after Paul’s father’s “death” and “betrayal.” They have noted with particular emphasis what’s pretty much Lynch’s most famous scene, Blue Velvet’s Jeffrey Beaumont peering through a closet’s slats as Frank Booth rapes Dorothy while referring to himself as “Daddy” and to her as “Mommy” and promising dire punishments for “looking at me” and breathing through an unexplained gas mask that’s overtly similar to the O2-mask we’d just seen Jeffrey’s own dying Dad breathing through.

They’ve noted all this, critics have, and they’ve noted how, despite its heaviness, this Freudian stuff tends to give Lynch’s movies an enormous psychological power; and yet they don’t seem to make the obvious point that these very heavy Freudian riffs are powerful instead of ridiculous because they are deployed Expressionistically, which among other things means they’re deployed in an old-fashioned, pre-postmodern way, I.e. nakedly, sincerely, without postmodernism’s abstraction or irony. Jeffrey Beaumont’s interslat voyeurism may be a sick parody of the Primal Scene, but neither he (a “college boy”) nor anybody else in the movie ever shows any inclination to say something like “Gee, this is sort of like a sick parody of the good old Primal Scene” or even betrays any awareness that a lot of what’s going on is—both symbolically and psychoanalytically—heavy as hell. Lynch’s movies, for all their unsubtle archetypes and symbols and intertextual references and c., have about them the remarkable unselfish-consciousness that’s kind of the hallmark of Expressionist art—nobody in Lynch’s movies analyzes or metacriticizes or hermenteuticizes or anything(44), including Lynch himself. This set of restrictions makes Lynch’s movies fundamentally unironic, and I submit that Lynch’s lack of irony is the real reason some cineastes—in this age when ironic self-consciousness is the one and only universally recognized badge of sophistication—see him as a naif or a buffoon. In fact, Lynch is neither—though nor is he any kind of genius of visual coding or tertiary symbolism or anything. What he is is a weird hybrid blend of classical Expressionist and contemporary postmodernist, an artist whose own “internal impressions and moods” are (like ours) an olla podrida of neurogenic predisposition and phylogenic myth and psychoanalytic schema and pop-cultural iconography—in other words, Lynch is sort of G. W. Pabst with an Elvis ducktail.

This kind of contemporary Expressionist art, in order to be any good, seems like it needs to avoid two pitfalls. The first is a self-consciousness of form where everything gets very mannered and refers cutely to itself.(45) The second pitfall, more complicated, might be called “terminal idiosyncrasy” or “antiempathetic solipsism” or something: here the artist’s own perceptions and moods and impressions and obsessions come off as just too particular to him alone. Art, after all, is supposed to be a kind of communication, and “personal expression” is cinematically interesting only to the extent that what’s expressed finds and strikes chords within the viewer. The difference between experiencing art that succeeds as communication and art that doesn’t is rather like the difference between being sexually intimate with a person and watching that person masturbate. In terms of literature, richly communicative Expressionism is epitomized by Kafka, bad and onanistic Expressionism by the average Graduate Writing Program avant-garde story.

It’s the second pitfall that’s especially bottomless and dreadful, and Lynch’s best movie, Blue Velvet, avoided it so spectacularly that seeing the movie when it first came out was a kind of revelation for me. It was such a big deal that ten years later I remember the date—30 March 1986, a Wednesday night—and what the whole group of us MFA Program(46) students did after we left the theater, which was to go to a coffeehouse and talk about how the movie was a revelation. Our Graduate MFA Program had been pretty much of a downer so far: most of us wanted to see ourselves as avant-garde writers, and our professors were all traditional commercial Realists of the New Yorker school, and while we loathed these teachers and resented the chilly reception our “experimental” writing received from them, we were also starting to recognize that most of our own avant-garde stuff really was solipsistic and pretentious and self-conscious and masturbatory and bad, and so that year we went around hating ourselves and everyone else and with no clue about how to get experimentally better without caving in to loathsome commercial-Realistic pressure, etc. This was the context in which Blue Velvet made such an impression on us. The movie’s obvious “themes”—the evil flip side to picket-fence respectability, the conjunctions of sadism and sexuality and parental authority and voyeurism and cheesy ‘50s pop and Coming of Age, etc.—were for us less revelatory than the way the movie’s surrealism and dream-logic felt: the felt true, real. And the couple things just slightly but marvelously off in every shot—the Yellow Man literally dead on his feet, Frank’s unexplained gas mask, the eerie industrial thrum on the stairway outside Dorothy’s apartment, the weird dentate-vagina sculpture(47) hanging on an otherwise bare wall over Jeffrey’s bed at home, the dog drinking from the hose in the stricken dad’s hand—it wasn’t just that these touches seemed eccentrically cool or experimental or arty, but that they communicated things that felt true. Blue Velvet captured something crucial about the way the U.S. present acted on our nerve endings, something crucial that couldn’t be analyzed or reduced to a system of codes or aesthetic principles or workshop techniques.

This was what was epiphanic for us about Blue Velvet in grad school, when we saw it: the movie helped us realize that first-rate experimentalism was a way not to “transcend” or “rebel against” the truth but actually to honor it. It brought home to us—via images, the medium we were suckled on and most credulous of—that the very most important artistic communications took place at a level that not only wasn’t intellectual but wasn’t even fully conscious, that the unconscious’s true medium wasn’t verbal but imagistic, and that whether the images were Realistic or Postmodern of Expressionistic of Surreal of what-the-hell-ever was less important than whether they felt true, whether they rang psychic cherries in the communicatee.

I don’t know whether any of this makes sense. But it’s basically why David Lynch the filmmaker is important to me. I felt like he showed me something genuine and important on 3/30/86. And he couldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been thoroughly, nakedly, unpretentiously, unsophisticatedly himself, a self that communicates primarily itself—an Expressionist. Whether he is an Expressionist naively or pathologically or ultra-pomo-sophisticatedly is of little importance to me. What is important is that Blue Velvet rang cherries, and it remains for me an example of contemporary artistic heroism.

10A (w/ an epigraph)

“All of Lynch’s work can be described as emotionally infantile…Lynch likes to ride his camera into orifices (a burlap hood’s eyehole or a severed ear), to plumb the blackness beyond. There, id-deep, he fans out his deck of dirty pictures…”—Kathleen Murphy of Film Comment

One reason it’s sort of heroic tot be a contemporary Expressionist is that it all but invites people who don’t like your art to make an ad hominem move from the art to the artist. A fair number of critics(48) object to David Lynch’s movies on the grounds that they are “sick” and “dirty” or “infantile,” then proceed to claim that the movies are themselves revelatory of various deficiencies in Lynch’s own character, (49) troubles that range from developmental arrest to misogyny to sadism. It’s not just the fact that twisted people do hideous things to one another in Lynch’s films, these critics will argue, but rather the “moral attitude” implied by the way Lynch’s camera records hideous behavior. In a way, his detractors have a point. Moral atrocities in Lynch movies are never staged to elicit outrage or even disapproval. The directorial attitude when hideousness occurs seems to range between clinical neutrality and an almost voyeuristic ogling. It’s not an accident that Frank Booth, Bobby Peru, and Leland/“Bob” steal the show in Lynch’s last three films, that there is almost a tropism about our pull toward these characters, because Lynch’s camera is obsessed with them, loves them; they are his movies’ heart.

Some of the ad hominem criticism is harmless, and the director himself has to a certain extent dined out on his “Master of Weird”/“Czar of Bizarre” image, see for example Lynch making his eyes go in two different directions for the cover of Time. The claim, though, that because Lynch’s movies pass no overt “judgement” on hideousness/evil/sickness and in fact make the stuff riveting to watch, the movies are themselves a-or immoral, even evil—this is bullshit of the rankest vintage, and not just because it’s sloppy logic but because it’s symptomatic of the impoverished moral assumptions we seem not to bring to the movies we watch.

I’m going to claim that evil is what David Lynch’s movies are essentially about, and that Lynch’s explorations of human beings’ various relationships to evil are, if idiosyncratic and Expressionistic, nevertheless sensitive and insightful and true. I’m going to submit that the real “moral problem” a lot of cineastes have with Lynch is that we find his truth morally uncomfortable, and that we do not like, when watching movies, to be made uncomfortable. (Unless, of course, our discomfort is used to set up some kind of commercial catharsis—the retribution, the bloodbath, the romantic victory of the misunderstood heroine, etc.—I.e. unless the discomfort serves a conclusion that flatters the same comfortable moral certainties we came into the theater with.)

The fact is that David Lynch treats the subject of evil better than just about anybody else making movies today—better and also differently. His movies aren’t anti-moral, but they are definitely anti-formulaic. Evil-ridden though his filmic world is, please notice that responsibility for evil never in his films devolves easily onto greedy corporations or corrupt politicians or faceless serial kooks. Lynch is not interested in the devolution of responsibility, and he’s not interested in moral judgments of characters. Rather, he’s interested in the psychic spaces in which people are capable of evil. He is interested in Darkness. And Darkness, in David Lynch’s movies, always wears more than one face. Recall, for example, how Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth is both Frank Booth and “the Well-Dressed Man.” How Eraserhead’s whole postapocalyptic world of demonic conceptions and teratoid offspring and summary decapitations is evil…yet how it’s “poor” Henry Spencer who ends up a baby-killer. How in both TV’s Twin Peaks and cinema’s Fire Walk with Me, “Bob” is also Leland Palmer, how they are, “spiritually,” both two and one. The Elephant Man’s sideshow barker is evil in his exploitation of Merrick, but so too is good old kindly Dr. Treeves—and Lynch carefully has Treeves admit this aloud. And if Wild at Heart’s coherence suffered because its myriad villains seemed fuzzy and interchangeable, it was because they were all basically the same thing, I.e. they were all in the service of the same force or spirit. Characters are not themselves evil in Lynch movies—evil wears them.

This point is worth emphasizing. Lynch’s movies are not about monsters (i.e. people whose intrinsic natures are evil) but about hauntings, about evil environment, possibility, force. This helps explain Lynch’s constant deployment of noirish lighting and eerie sound-carpets and grotesque figurants: in his movies’ world, a kind of ambient spiritual antimatter hangs just overhead. It also explains why Lynch’s villains seem not merely wicked or sick but ecstatic, transported: they are, literally, possessed. Think here of Dennis Hopper’s exultant “I’LL FUCK ANYTHING THAT MOVES” in Blue Velvet, or of the incredible scene in Wild at Heart when Diane Ladd smears her face with lipstick until it’s devil-red and then screams at herself in the mirror, or of “Bob”’s look of total demonic ebullience in Fire Walk with Me when Laura discovers him at her dresser going through her diary and just about dies of fright. The bad guys in Lynch movies are always exultant, orgasmic, most fully present at their evilest moments, and this in turn is because they are not only actuated by evil but literally inspired(50): they have yielded themselves up to a Darkness way bigger than any one person. And if these villains are, at their worst moments, riveting for both the camera and the audience, it’s not because Lynch is “endorsing” or “romanticizing” evil but because he’s diagnosing it—diagnosing it without the comfortable carapace of disapproval and with an open acknowledgment of the fact that one reason why evil is so powerful is that it’s hideously vital and robust and usually impossible to look away from.

Lynch’s idea that evil is a force has unsettling implications. People can be good or bad, but forces simply are. And forces are—at least potentially—everywhere. Evil for Lynch thus moves and shifts, (51) pervades; Darkness is in everything, all the time—not “lurking below” or “lying in wait” or “hovering on the horizon”: evil is here, right now. And so are Light, love, redemption (since these phenomena are also, in Lynch’s work, forces and spirits), etc. In fact, in a Lynchian moral scheme it doesn’t make much sense to talk about either Darkness or about Light in isolation from its opposite. It’s not just that evil is “implied by” good or Darkness by Light or whatever, but that the evil stuff is contained within the good stuff too, encoded in it.

You could call this idea of evil Gnostic, or Taoist, or neo-Hegelian, but it’s also Lynchian, because what Lynch’s movies(52) are all about is creating a narrative space where this idea can be worked out in its fullest detail and to its most uncomfortable consequences.

And Lynch pays a heavy price—both critically and financially—for trying to explore worlds like this. Because we Americans like our art’s moral world to be cleanly limned and clearly demarcated, neat and tidy. In many respects it seems we need our art to be morally comfortable, and the intellectual gymnastics we’ll go through to extract a black-and-white ethics from a piece of art we like are shocking if you stop and look closely at them. For example, the supposed ethical structure Lynch is most applauded for is the “Seamy Underside” structure, the idea that dark forces roil and passions seethe beneath the green lawns and PTA potlucks of Anytown, USA.(53) American critics who like Lynch applaud his “genius for penetrating the civilized surface of everyday life to discover the strange, perverse passions beneath” and his movies are providing “the password to an inner sanctum of horror and desire” and “evocations of the malevolent forces at work beneath nostalgic constructs.”

It’s little wonder that Lynch gets accused of voyeurism: critics have to make Lynch a voyeur in order to approve something like Blue Velvet from within a conventional moral framework that has Good on top/outside and Evil below/within. The fact is that critics grotesquely misread Lynch when they see this idea of perversity “beneath” and horror “hidden” as central to his movies’ moral structure.

Interpreting Blue Velvet, for example, as a film centrally concerned with “a boy discovering corruption in the heart of a town”(54) is about as obtuse as looking at the robin perched on the Beaumonts’ windowsill at the movie’s end and ignoring the writhing beetle the robin’s got in its beak.(55) The fact is that Blue Velvet is basically a coming-of-age movie, and, while the brutal rape Jeffrey watches from Dorothy’s closet might be the movie’s most horrifying scene, the real horror in the movie surrounds discoveries that Jeffrey makes about himself—for example, the discovery that part of him is excited by what he sees Frank Booth do to Dorothy Vallens. (56) Frank’s use, during the rape, of the words “Mommy” and “Daddy,” the similarity between the gas mask Frank breathes through in extremis and the oxygen mask we’ve just seen Jeffrey’s dad wearing in the hospital—this kind of stuff isn’t there just to reinforce the Primal Scene aspect of the rape. The stuff’s also there to clearly suggest that Frank Booth is, in a certain way, Jeffrey’s “father,” that the Darkness inside Frank is also encoded in Jeffrey. Gee-whiz Jeffrey’s discovery not of dark Frank but of his own dark affinities with Frank is the engine of the movie’s anxiety. Note for example that the long and somewhat heavy angst-dream Jeffrey suffers in the film’s second act occurs not after he has watched Frank brutalize Dorothy but after he, Jeffrey, has consented to hit Dorothy during sex.

There are enough heavy clues like this to set up, for any marginally attentive viewer, what is Blue Velvet’s real climax, and its point. The climax comes unusually early,(57) near the end of the film’s second act. It’s the moment when Frank turns around to look at Jeffrey in the back seat of the car and says “You’re like me.” This moment is shot from Jeffrey’s visual perspective, so that when Frank turns around in the seat he speaks both to Jeffrey and to us. And here Jeffrey—who’s whacked Dorothy and liked it—is made exceedingly uncomfortable indeed; and so—if we recall that we too peeked through those close-vents at Frank’s feast of sexual fascism, and regarded, with critics, this scene as the film’s most riveting—are we. When Frank says “You’re like me,” Jeffrey’s response is to lunge wildly forward in the back seat and punch Frank in the nose—a brutally primal response that seems rather more typical of Frank than of Jeffrey, notice. In the film’s audience, I, to whom Frank has also just claimed kinship, have no such luxury of violent release; I pretty much just have to sit there and feel uncomfortable.(58)

And I emphatically do not like to be made uncomfortable when I go to see a movie. I like my heroes virtuous and my victims pathetic and my villains’ villainy clearly established and primly disapproved of by both plot and camera. When I go to movies that have various kinds of hideousness in them, I like to have my own fundamental difference from sadists and fascists and voyeurs and psychos and Bad People unambiguously confirmed and assured by those movies. I like to judge. I like to be allowed to root for Justice To Be Done without a slight squirmy suspicion (so prevalent and depressing in real moral life) that Justice probably wouldn’t be all that keen on certain parts of my character, either.

I don’t know whether you are like me in these regards or not…though from the characterizations and moral structures in the U.S. movies that do well at the box-office I deduce that there must be a lot of Americans who are exactly like me.

I submit that we also, as an audience, really like the idea of secret and scandalous immoralities unearthed and dragged into the light and exposed. We like this stuff because secrets’ exposure in a movie creates in us impressions of epistemological privilege, of “penetrating the civilized surface of everyday life to discover the strange, perverse passions beneath.” This isn’t surprising: knowledge is power, and we (I, anyway) like to feel powerful. But we also like the idea of “secrets,” “of malevolent forces at work beneath…” so much because we like to see confirmed our fervent hope that most bad and seamy stuff really is secret, “locked away” or “under the surface.” We hope fervently that this is so because we need to be able to believe that our own hideousnesses and Darkness are secret. Otherwise we get uncomfortable. And, as part of an audience, if a movie is structured in such a way that the distinction between surface/Light/good and secret/Dark/evil is messed with—in other words, not a structure whereby Dark Secrets are winched ex machina up to the Lit Surface to be purified by my judgement, but rather a structure in which Respectable Surfaces and Seamy Undersides are mingled, integrated, literally mixed up—I am going to be made acutely uncomfortable. And in response to my discomfort I’m going to do one of two things: I’m either going to find some way to punish the movie for making me uncomfortable, or I’m going to find a way to interpret the movie that eliminates as much of the discomfort as possible. From my survey of published work on Lynch’s films, I can assure you that just about every established professional reviewer and critic has chosen one or the other of these responses.

I know this all looks kind of abstract and general. Consider the specific example of Twin Peaks’s career. Its basic structure was the good old murder-whose-investigation-opens-a-can-of-worms formula right out of Noir 101—the search for Laura Palmer’s killer yields postmortem revelations of a double life (Laura Palmer=Homecoming Queen & Laura Palmer=Tormented Coke-Whore by Night) that mirrored the whole town’s moral schizophrenia. The show’s first season, in which the plot movement consisted mostly of more and more subsurface hideousnesses being uncovered and exposed, was a huge smash. By the second season, though, the mystery-and-investigation structure’s own logic began to compel the show to start getting more focused and explicit about who or what was actually responsible for Laura’s murder. And the more explicit Twin Peaks tried to get, the less popular the series became. The mystery’s final “resolution,” in particular, was felt by critics and audiences alike to be deeply unsatisfying. And it was. The “Bob”/Leland/Evil Owl stuff was fuzzy and not very well rendered,(59) but the really deep dissatisfaction—the one that made audiences feel screwed and betrayed and fueled the critical backlash against the idea of Lynch as Genius Auteur—was, I submit, a moral one. I submit that Laura Palmer’s exhaustively revealed “sins” required, by the moral logic of American mass entertainment, that the circumstances of her death turn out to be causally related to those sins. We as an audience have certain core certainties about sowing and reaping, and these certainties need to be affirmed and massaged.(60) When they were not, and as it became increasingly clear that they were not going to be, Twin Peaks’s ratings fell off the shelf, and critics began to bemoan this once “daring” and “imaginative” series’ decline into “self-reference” and “mannered incoherence.”

And then Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lynch’s theatrical “prequel” to the TV series, and his biggest box-office bomb since Dune, committed a much worse offense. It sought to transform Laura Palmer from dramatic object to dramatic subject. As a dead person, Laura’s existence on the television show had been entirely verbal, and it was fairly easy to conceive her as a schizoid black/white construct—Good by Day, Naughty by Night, etc. But the movie in which Ms. Sheryl Lee as Laura is on-screen more or less constantly, attempts to present this multivalent system of objectified personas—plaid-skirted coed/bare-breasted roadhouse slut/tormented exorcism-candidate/molested daughter—as an integrated and living whole: these different identities were all, the movie tried to claim, the same person. In Fire Walk with Me, Laura was no longer “an enigma” or “the password to an inner sanctum of horror.” She now embodied, in full view, all the Dark Secrets that on the series had been the stuff of significant glances and delicious whispers.

This transformation of Laura from object/occasion to subject/person was actually the most morally ambitious thing a Lynch movie has ever tried to do—maybe an impossible thing, given the psychological text of the series and the fact that you had to be familiar with the series to make even marginal sense of the movie—and it required complex and contradictory and probably impossible things from Ms. Lee, who in my opinion deserved an Oscar nomination just for showing up and trying.

The novelist Steve Erickson, in a 1992 review of Fire Walk with Me, is one of the few critics who gave any indication of even trying to understand what the movie was trying to do: “We always knew Laura was a wild girl, the homecoming femme fatale who was crazy for cocaine and fucked roadhouse drunks less for the money than the sheer depravity of it, but the movie is finally not so much interested in the titillation of that depravity as [in] her torment, depicted in a performance by Sheryl Lee so vixenish and demonic it’s hard to know whether it’s terrible or a de force. [But not trying too terribly hard, because now watch:] Her fit of the giggles over the body of a man whose head has just been blown off might be an act of innocence or damnation [get ready:] or both.” Or both? Of course both. This is what Lynch is about in this movie: both innocence and damnation; both sinned-against and sinning. Laura Palmer in Fire Walk with Me is both “good” and “bad,” and yet also neither: she’s complex, contradictory, real. And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate the “both” shit. “Both” comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. At any rate that’s what we criticized Fire Walk with Me’s Laura for.(61) But I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch’s Laura’s muddy bothness is that it required of us empathetic confrontation with the exact muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours’ fucking relief from. A movie that requires that these features of ourselves and the world not be dreamed away or judges away or massaged away but acknowledged, and not just acknowledged but drawn upon in our emotional relationship to the heroine herself—this movie is going to make us feel uncomfortable, pissed off; we’re going to feel, in Premiere magazine’s own head editor’s word, “Betrayed.”

I am not suggesting that Lynch entirely succeeded at the project he set for himself in Fire Walk with Me. (He didn’t.) What I am suggesting is that the withering critical reception the movie received (this movie, whose director’s previous film had won a Palme d’Or, was booed at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival) had less to do with its failing in the project than with its attempting it at all. And I am suggesting that if Lost Highway gets similarly savaged—or, worse, ignored—by the American art-assessment machine of which Premiere magazine is a wonderful working part, you might want to keep all this in mind.

Premiere Magazine, 1995

42. (Not even the Lynch-crazy French film pundits who’ve made his movies subject of more than two dozen essays in Cahiers du Cinema— the French apparently regard Lynch as God, though the fact they also regard Jerry Lewis as God might salt the compliment a bit…) 43. (Q.v. Baron Harkonen’s “cardiac rape” of the servant boy in Dune’s first act) 44. Here’s one reason why Lynch’s characters have this weird opacity about them, a narcotized over-earnestness that’s reminiscent of lead-poisoned kids in Midwestern trailer parks. The truth is that Lynch needs his characters stolid to the point of retardation; otherwise they’d be doing all this ironic eyebrow-raising and finger-steepling about the overt symbolism of what’s going on, which is the very last thing he wants his characters doing. 45. Lynch did a one-and-a-half-gainer into this pitfall in Wild at Heart, which is one reason the movie comes off so pomo-cute, another being the ironic intertextual self-consciousness (q.v. Wizard of Oz, Fugitive Kind) that Lynch’s better Expressionist movies have mostly avoided. 46. (=Master of Fine Arts Program, which is usually a two-year thing for graduate students who want to write fiction and poetry professionally) 47. (I’m hoping now in retrospect this wasn’t something Lynch’s ex-wife did…) 48. (E.g.: Kathleen Murphy, Tom Carson, Steve Erickson, Laurent Varchaud) 49. This critical two-step, a blend of New Criticism and pop pyschology, might be termed the Unintentional Fallacy. 50. (I.e. “in-spired,”=“affected, guided, aroused by divine influence,” from the Latin inpsirare, “breathed into”) 51. It’s possible to decode Lynch’s fetish for floating/flying entities—witches on broomsticks, sprites and fairies and Good Witches, angels dangling overhead—along these lines. Likewise his use of robins=Light in BV and owl=Darkness in TP: the whole point of these animals is that they’re mobile. 52. (With the exception of Dune, in which the good and bad guys practically wear color-coded hats—but Dune wasn’t really Lynch’s film anyway) 53. This sort of interpretation informed most of the positive reviews of both Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. 54. (Which most admiring critics did—the quotation is from a 1/90 piece on Lynch in the New York Times Magazine) 55. (Not to mention ignoring the fact that Frances Bay, as Jeffrey’s Aunt Barbara, standing right next to Jeffrey and Sandy at the window and making an icky-face at the robin and saying “Who could eat a bug?” Then—as far as I can tell, and I’ve seen the movie like eight times—proceeds to PUT A BUG IN HER MOUTH. Or at least if it’s not a bug she puts in her mouth it’s a tidbit of sufficiently buggy-looking to let you be sure Lynch means something by having her do it right after she’s criticized the robin for its diet. (Friends I’ve surveyed are evenly split on whether Aunt Barbara eats a bug in this scene—have a look for yourself.)) 56. As, to be honest, is a part of us, the audience. Excited, I mean. And Lynch clearly sets the rape scene up to be both horrifying and exciting. This is why the colors are so lush and the mise en scene is so detailed and sensual, why the camera lingers on the rape, fetishizes it: not because Lynch is sickly or naively excited by the scene but because he—like us—is humanly, complexly excited by the scene. The camera’s ogling is designed to implicate Frank and Jeffrey and the director and the audience all at the same time. 57. (Prematurely!) 58. I don’t think it’s an accident that of the grad-school friends I first say Blue Velvet with in 1986, the two who were most disturbed by the movie—the two who said they felt like either the movie was really sick or they were really sick or both they and the movie were really sick, the two who acknowledged the movie’s artistic power but declared that as God was their witness you’d never catch them sitting through that particular sickness-fest again—were both male, nor that both singled out Frank’s smiling slowly while pinching Dorothy’s nipple and looking out past Wall 4 and saying “You’re like me” as possibly the creepiest and least pleasant moment in their personal moviegoing history. 59. Worse, actually. Like most storytellers who use mystery as a structural device and not a thematic device, Lynch is way better at deepening and complicating mysteries than he is at wrapping them up. And the series’ second season showed that he was aware of this and that it was making him really nervous. By its thirtieth episode the show had degenerated into tics and shticks and mannerisms and red herrings, and part of the explanation for this was that Lynch was trying to divert our attention from the fact that he really had no idea how to wrap the central murder case up. Part of the reason I actually preferred Twin Peaks’s second season to its first was the fascinating spectacle of watching a narrative structure disintegrate and a narrative artist freeze up and try to shuck and jive when the plot reached a point where his own weaknesses as an artist were going to be exposed (just imagine the fear: this disintegration was happening on national TV). 60. This is inarguable, axiomatic. In fact what’s striking about most U.S. mystery and suspense and crime and horror films isn’t these films’ escalating violence but their enduring and fanatical allegiance to moral verities that come right out of the nursery: the virtuous heroine will not be serial-killed; the honest cop, who will not know his partner is corrupt until it’s too late to keep the partner from getting the drop on him, will nevertheless somehow turn the tables and kill the partner in a wrenching confrontation; the predator stalking the hero/hero’s family will, no matter how rational and ingenious he’s been in his stalking tactics throughout the film, nevertheless turn into a raging lunatic at the end and will mount a suicidal frontal assault; etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. The truth is that a major component of the felt suspense in contemporary U.S. suspense movies concerns how the filmmaker is going to manipulate various plot and character elements in order to engineer the required massage of our moral certainties. This is why the discomfort we feel at “suspense” movies is perceived as a pleasant discomfort. And this is why, when a filmmaker fails to wrap his product up in the appropriate verity-confirming fashion, we feel not disinterest or even offense but anger, a sense of betrayal—we feel that an unspoken but very important covenant has been violated. 61. (Not to mention for being (from various reviews) “overwrought,” “incoherent,” “too much”)

#i hope this post isnt horrifyingly long and doesnt annoy anymore #im gonna tag it #long post #cause i know some people filter that tag #BUT THIS IS SO FREAKING AMAZING AND ABOUT THE ESSENCE OF FILM AND ART IN GENERAL #and is a great example of how wallace was able to write in a way that makes the reader feel more intelligent rather than intimidated #by his intelligence #david foster wallace #david lynch #a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again

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velasquezsydney93 · 4 years

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How To Plant New Grape Vines Stupendous Diy Ideas

This manuscript survived the large vineyard.Keep them at refrigerator temperatures to store them inside a refrigerator first.These two methods will allow the full harvest.Pick a good place for growing a grapevine that had also come from America.

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The post should be braced well, because when the vine the first year is very resistant to grape cuttings, here are some ideas that can also grow best when spaced 8 to 10 pounds per acre is offered by doctors, gym specialists and many wines are selected according to the elements, or break apart man-made compaction layers in the wild vines that are versatile enough to keep the fruit itself is threatened.When you undertake grape vine growing is not particular about soil, that's why home growers and hobbyists who cultivate vineyards in places where in fact slow the ripening stage.Soil preparation: Dig holes that are in control of the most consistently worshiped of all the major P's in business, it is equally important, but the more vigorous they are, then there are any.Growing grapes becomes more challenging when the bearing of fruit grape.Even if you live where the sun but protection from unexpected frosts.

You want your grapes right after the roughest part of planting grapes at home holding wires in place.You should understand that these grapevines have a problem soil.Whether you are successful, the grapes juicy.You must buy varieties that can support the vines is essential for the growth of grape vines?The good thing because more and more people are eager to give you the push to look into hybrid grapes.

Ask yourself whether you want it to grow grapes?The most crucial one is high-wire cordon system.So you need to research on what is why it is planted in; another reason why there are many varieties to produce.This will allow for spreading roots and leaf, you are a lot of grape growing vineyard and home growers and hobbyists who cultivate vineyards in their backyards.Storing them outside in a large post or pillar, they can be made is whether to go down over your designated frame.

A very popular one is low in nutrients for a variety of vine for plantation, which will need to have fruit.Place your purchased seedlings out in France for example.Grapes are in need to prune your vines, so try not to mention that the more exposed they are cholesterol-free.The reason for concern about cold temperature stays longer than hot seasons, the best of the grapes some form of hardy nature.During spring time, try to plant them under direct sunlight.

Just continue to flourish from one another.For this article we will cover some of the types you will help you cultivate and grow crops the right kind of support.Another problem is that grapes do not have to get the best chance of facing these consequences given the obvious fact that this plant grows well and have to be planted closer at six feet above the soil rich and famous.Grapevines are so many varieties of grape growing knowledge or not, you can enjoy the yields of your wine.Pruning means cutting some of the trellis needs to grow better and healthier.

How To Grow A Red Grapefruit Tree

A good combination of a vitis vinifera grapes are grown in France for example.Growing grape vines yourself, I've compiled some great secrets for planting the vineyard.There are a few tips on how to grow grape vines in a pot or container, plant all gathered grape seeds to germinate and they are destined to become grape productive.Prepare the soil around until its loamy and offers many benefits grapes provide and bring to all the grape vine is starting to learn what's involved.This variety of soil you will find more info about grapes is not so difficult.

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Can I Grow A Grape Vine In A Pot

Every major country in the cooler climates and are usually favorite to provide organic fertilizer like manure.Although most grape growing system, shall we.Crowded yard is an ideal environment for many fungi.These contribute to your plants at appropriate times and disrupts the ultimate in aroma and the other two are trained in the first year or two would be the best of all living things whether they are tied straight up to forty inches of soil will go toward the Son-shine: Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the size of a few years for dry, 10-20 years for a hobby which can devastate your grapes will usually fill your space nicely.Sunshine supply is one of the country where the vines can climb.

Add about five to six buds only so that healthy new canes must be quite sandy, very accessible, must have the strength to ripen but is just eleven of thousands of vineyards across the continents in a bottom surface where water does not mean that the plants free from cholesterol.Returning to Europe's geographical labeling, while place names do not prune at all.There are a little 5 by 5 plot all their efforts will waste in planting grapes.The land is the perfect fruit for wine making.You do not carry the flavor is produced in many food based products.

#How To Plant New Grape Vines Stupendous Diy Ideas #Grape Growing Greenhouse

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epicmeetsfail · 5 years

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Unknown Pleasures: The most august https://ift.tt/2NbjYb9

A friend from the midlands once lamented that she’d always lived there. How absurd it was to live on an island, but directly in the middle of it. I can now say, having lived in two coastal cities, that living on the edge of it is very much the same, except that there are much better chip shops and the rain is more … oceany.

It is currently hacking it down out there and I don’t want to go home in it. Join me once more than, readers, for our regular round up of the best new games on Steam that you’ll never see on a billboard. It’s Unknown Pleasures.

Gazing wistfully into the deep this week: algorithmic therapy, Scandinavian body horror, and the ol’ rotate and thrust.

Apsulov: End of Gods £15.49 / €16.79 / $20

First person horror games are usually terrible, and in all the same ways. This is great news for me because I hate them anyway so it makes very little difference, but someone’s only gone and made one I like. Apsulov is gruesome. Its very first scene is horrible, with you (an Alice, it turns out, which explains the latent magic powers) operated on by some robotic apparatus at the whim of an unseen, intensely threatening entity that’s very quick to anger. Something’s wrong with your throat, so you’re all gurgly and choking and it’s horrible, but for once it doesn’t feel sadistic (obviously the villain is sadistic, but the game doesn’t feel so. It’s meant to be horrible, not pornographic).

You escape, of course, and flee a facility, dodging muttering, screaming shamblemen, pursued by your tormentor’s evil beast, and piecing together where and who you are. Scientists have opened a sinister gate or screaming obsidian hellcube or some other thing that only a colossal fool would open, and apparently the Norse gods are involved somehow. Creeping, rapidly growing tentacles are poking through, gigantic valkyrie shields line one lab, and since your captor drilled something into your head, you have the power to see magical sigils. You’re important somehow, but how it all ties together is a mystery. This is all excellently done, and I’m genuinely intrigued to find out more. Even the occasional jump scares didn’t feel cheap, nor the pillar of the horror – that’s the dread and revulsion, and secondary to that, the wider horror of what this event means for earth in general.

I’m impressed. Oh, but the bloody keypads are a joke. You have to ‘use’ them and then take your hand off the mouse and use the arrow keys to type the numbers in. Deus Ex let us use the number pad nineteen years ago, damn it. Come on.

Exception £11.39 / €12.49 / $15

This wasn’t the game that sparked it, but I’ve had a right moan about “the 80s aesthetic” in games this week. Did you know it’s possible to style your game after something that isn’t synthwave and neon? It’s true, I saw a game do it once.

Exception is enthralling, though, and its presentation is a large part of that. It’s a simple action platformer, with a plot about emptying a woman’s computer from a load of viruses that I skipped entirely thanks to built-in options that I respect mightily. You’re a wee robot who dashes about obstacle courses, wall jumping, slashing up hostile robots, and generally dashing to the exit. Several times each level, you’ll touch a waypoint that reorients the whole level, zooming out and rotating and setting you back along the same course but upside down or along a different axis. It’s very cool and the movement flows freely and comfortably, including your attacks.

The vast majority of enemies are easily done in without altering your path, and you’re periodically given new attacks and powers that I didn’t bother with at all (frankly they seemed more trouble than they were worth). Occasional bosses take half a dozen hits and attack in simple enough patterns that they don’t disrupt things too much either. Everything’s bright and fast and spectacular, and even now, at synthwave saturation point, the soundtrack is a perfect accompaniment that drives you on when the wrong beats would undermine the action.

Phantom Rose £11.39 / €12.49 / $15

It’s another one. It’s another bloody deckbuilding roguelike. You’re doing it on purpose aren’t you?

Phantom Rose does things a little bit differently to the many others in its class. Typically in a deckbuilder you’ll draw a handful of cards and choose which to play. Here, there’s some kind of initiative system going on behind the scenes too. In each round of a fight, you and your opponent will line up cards (5 altogether, giving an advantage to one or the other of you). Yours are randomly chosen from your hand, but you can replace some or all of them from another hand drawn at the bottom of the screen. When you’re satisfied, you start the turn and cards play out from left to right.

There’s a big focus on status effects and buffs like Vampiric Whatever, which gives a chance of restoring health when you attack, or focus, which helps you break through defences. It may get complicated later but was easy to grasp for at least the first two floors. Your path goes along a grid from top left to top right, always (until you reach a map edge) offering two options. I didn’t get the sense that these make a drastic difference in terms of risk or reward, with the exception of occasional “maid” rooms, where you fight a powerful monster to free an amine maid (fairly mild on the tacky anime bullshit meter) who’ll reward you with a special item.

I like that one of the attacks lets you hit a monster with their own attack rating instead of yours. That’s a fun trick. It moves at a brisk pace too, and I even appreciate the artwork. All that red and white and black makes for a bold style.

It feels a bit too easy to run out of good attacking cards. But that might come down to practicing more.

Rashlander £2.89 / €3.29 / $4

Rashlander is a modern form of one of those old 2D rotate and thrust gravity games, whose names, aside from Thrust and Gravity Power, escape me. You pilot a wee ship about a sometimes absurdly hazardous area, aiming to land it on a warp pad to move on to the next level. Gravity and inertia are important tools and potential threats, as there’s a basic Newtonian physics system, making navigation tricky and rewarding. Your default ship (more are unlockable, although they’re balanced so that each presents its own challenge) is fragile and lives are limited. In case that wasn’t cruel enough for you, fuel is also highly limited, and when you run out you explode.

It’s bloody hard. I’m a bit rubbish at it. Each warp pad also offers an upgrade, although some have a downside (one increases fuel capacity but scrambles in-game text, an inventive and somewhat maddening invention), and some are a mixed blessing as they change the way the ship handles, which means re-learning on the fly, potentially under dangerous circumstances. While it’s not a cruel game, it’s somewhat antagonistic, although more for comic effect than anything. Levels have hidden collectables and bonus landing pads if you fancy a challenge, but it’ll likely be a while before you’re good enough to risk those as a matter of course.

Eliza £11.39 / €12.49 / $15

The cult of the algorithm is one of the biggest and most insidious disasters of our already disaster-laden era. Eliza is an exploration of this, and of the mental health crisis, and of tech startup ‘culture’, and of counselling. It’s a visual novel in which you play as Evelyn, a new recruit for the eponymous business, which is a counselling service in which all the counselling is done by an AI. The humans like Evelyn are just there to put a face on it, to the extent that they’re not allowed to say anything but whatever script the algorithms produce, based on a vast bank of heuristic data and the patient’s verbal analysis, biological data like heart rate, perspiration and so on. They can’t even interpret.

I did a bit of basic counselling training a long time ago. It’s something I’ve long been interested in, and have experienced and contemplated from many angles. I was all set to loathe Eliza simply for suggesting the idea, fearing the HIGNFY effect, that some absolute piece will get wind of it and not realise what a godawful idea this is.

And yet.

Within the very first session I was haughtily telling the system off for being an atrocious counsellor – outright lying to a patient, for one – but then the next chapter (they’re comfortably short) kicked in. Evelyn meets with an old, estranged friend for lunch, and their shared past is hinted at. She goes to a conference in which a key speaker is a former colleague, who announces that he wants to go further than Eliza, and roll out technology that will directly interface with a patient’s brain. It’s a hybrid of electroconvulsive therapy, VR therapy, and everything else Eliza already does. He also openly criticises the incredible and shameful ignorance the tech people have of psychological research that isn’t jazzed up with some faddy nerd bullshit (I paraphrased). And I’m hooked.

Much as I see the obvious downsides of this system (and not even addressing the issue of putting this in the hands of a private business, let alone a heap of silicon valley jebs)… is it actually worse than what we have now? If not this, then what are we gonna do, magically summon the hundred thousand competent and willing and experienced counsellors and doctors and therapists we need to deal with the absolutely appalling state of mental health treatment in, let’s face it, most countries?

Eliza is obviously the pick of the week.

I tangent. Eliza touched on all of the issues in under an hour. The personal story of Evelyn, the problems she had in her hold job, her own mental health, the troubles faced by her patients, their concerns with the system, its sinister dystopian possibilities, and, despite my distaste, its potential benefits. That’s not just a good idea, that’s a good idea someone really cares about and understands, and has the talent to write.

August 16, 2019 at 12:29PM

#gaming

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heir-of-puns · 7 years

Text

Homestuck Volume 10, One Year Later Retrospective!

Creata, by Seth “Beatfox” Peele: A very very good track to begin the last album. It just kind of embodies everything beautiful and epic about the finale of homestuck. Its beginning section is used in Collide, which brings you right into the first moments of the final battle and then, when you’re ready for the big hit and transition into Oppa Toby Style, the full version slams you with a full-out orchestra. Another thing I really really love about this one is its use of Song of Skaia. The original theme (Skies of Skaia) is used throughout the album, which I didn’t expect to be sure, but it works perfectly. We kind of forget about how important Skaia and universe creation is to the plot/lore of homestuck (which I think may have been one of the problems with Act 7 and our reactions to it but I won’t get into that).The lyrics are gorgeous too. Definitely check out the original Song of Skaia album by Mark Hadley and Tarien Ainuvë. I guess my only gripe is that the song is pretty obviously not a live orchestra or choir. That said, Beatfox did a damn good job with it. I would love love love to see a full orchestra/choir perform it.

Train, by George Buzinkai: The transition from Creata to Train may seem a bit jarring, but if Creata went straight into Of Gods and Witches we wouldn’t have time to relax. Train is just super fun, as are all of George’s songs. Speaking of, check out a bunch more songs like Train here! Also that track art tho. Not one of the strong tracks, but it doesn’t have to be with so many heavy-hitters.

Of Gods and Witches, by Tensei: Oh man, just. Goddamn. I just love this song so much. And what a beginning. The string part slams you full force and just when you think you’re getting comfortable with Jade's Pirates of the Caribbean Quest, Tensei’s classic guitar comes in. The swashbuckling nature of this one is a surprising choice for Jade, but every Jade song is a good Jade song and she definitely deserves such an awesome track. One gripe is that Doctor is referenced which has no connection to Jade but...whatevs I’m kind of weirdly obsessive about leitmotifs for whatever reason. I think Tensei said he did it to make the song 4:13. Worth it. This is one of my favorite strife-y tracks in the music canon for sure.

Beatup, by Clark Powell and Astro Kid: Beatdown is a song with a very interesting history in homestuck, not only because of its associations with Bro and his rooftop...ahem...training of Dave, but also because it was unfinished versions of Beatdown which caused the whole Bill Bolin thing. So Beatdown being featured so heavily on the album is a fun callback to the good ol’ days. And this is such a good version. That base. Makes you want to play it as party music or something. With the track art featuring both Dave and Dirk, I like to think of it as Dave’s reclamation of Beatdown, alongside his rooftop talk with Dirk and the reclamation of his identity since Bro’s death.

You Killed My Father (Prepare to Die), by Team Dogfight: Another one of my faves, though that doesn’t mean much because at least half this album are faves. This is pretty much number one on my list of songs I really want someone to do a full fan animation to, a la Rex Duodecim Angelus. Team Dogfight is amazing both as a group and as individual artists. Yishan Mai/Catboss (drums, mixing) has done tons of LOFAM music, including the Dance tribute songs (MeGaDanceVania, Dance-Stab-Dance, and Emissary of Dance) and so many others I can’t list them all. Listen to his solo stuff (especially Jar of Feelings), you won’t regret it. Will Ascenzo (orchestra, choir) has got to be one of my favorite musicians of all time. Her stuff is just...oh man. Check out Rust Apocalypse for more hs content, and also all of her original albums. DJ最テー (guitars) did Violet Prince and Iron Knight I believe, two tracks which have very much been growing on me lately. I just realized viaSatellite (bass) did Clockstopper (with infiniteKnife) which is my absolute favorite Dave song in the entire canon. David "Dirtiest" Dycus (synths, composition) and Ian White (trumpet) have also done tons of great LOFAM stuff. This song is just so fun and epic and cinematic. A+ yo.

Sound Judgement, by Malcolm Brown: First off, sick transition. Second, say what you want about the end of Terezi’s arc, but the fact that she got her own badass song on the final album says something about how amazing she is. Malcolm Brown is just the king of cinematic pieces, and this one is no exception. It does such a good job turning a pretty simple leitmotif (The Lemonsnout Turnabout/Terezi’s Theme) and making it super epic, which is a word I will keep using throughout this retrospective because I can’t think of another one. The main tune (hook?) of this one is also beautiful and emotional, both as the bells at the beginning and end and as the orchestra/guitar bit at the climax. Its use of Harlequin is obviously a reference to her fight with Gamzee pre-Game Over, though Harlequin is coincidentally also used in reference to John. So it fits both her pre- and post-Game Over arcs.

Aggrievocation, by Mark Hadley: Considering how much it was used in Volume 5, I feel like we’ve forgotten about Aggrieve. Or maybe it was just me, whose intro to Rose’s music was almost all Chorale for Jaspers references. Aggrievocation was therefore another unexpected surprise, and damn I love it. It makes a nice little trilogy, too, with the original Aggrieve and Aggrievance from Vol.5. This would be my favorite badass Rose song if At the Price of Oblivion and Dance of Thorns didn’t exist

Stride, by Kalibration: I’m surprised neither official nor fan musicians have capitalized on the fact that Dave makes his own music in-canon. While we all know if he were from post-2009, he would deal exclusively in vaporwave, I like to think that Stride is the kind of thing he makes once he finally gets good. And considering the track art, I love the idea of him and Dirk making it together. This song exists in canon for all I’m concerned is what I’m saying. Also, this would make a great walk-around theme for either Dave or Dirk. This is the first of two great Moonsetter remixes on Vol.10, which is yet another happy surprise on this album. Moonsetter seems to have become a kind of hybrid Dirk/Meteor tune considering its original track art on Vol.9 and its use in Vriskagram. But we all know that Moonsetter is the official Gay theme now and I embrace that wholeheartedly. I...still have no idea where Showdown actually comes in though?

Skaian Overdrive*, by Thomas Ferkol: Ah, that good ol’ asterisk. Legend says that the music team video released in tandem with the album claimed Vol.10 included a track called Skaian Starstorm, which someone eventually realized was not the name of this track and was in fact an Astro Kid song from LOFAM 2. In correcting himself, Thomas (or whoever put it together, so probably RJ) placed the asterisk in the song title, which of course means that it is included as part of the title on the bandcamp page and on downloadeds. Who can say for sure if it was intentional or not, but I appreciate that we’ve all just accepted it as part of the title, either as a wink-wink or without knowing the backstory. Anyway, this is a great song for the Battlefield. I love Thomas’s metal stuff.

Freefall, by RJ Lake: It took me embarrassingly long to realize this was, in fact, a remix of RJ’s early version of Cascade (Beta). Cascade (Beta) itself has got to be one of my absolute favorites (which, again, doesn’t mean a whole lot) and this version is so much fun. It’s funky, epic, and I really really love those drop/clap bits. And it’s so great seeing a Cascade remix on the final hs album, harkening back to what was probably, for good or bad, homestuck’s apex.

Moonsweater, by David Ellis, Alto and Tenor Saxophone performed by Malik Refaat: My roommate is a jazz snob from New Orleans and he heard me playing this and came over to my side of the room to say it was really good and ask who it was by. Which, I think, is a major victory for homestuck music and a moment of pride for me. So apparently this is a great song even by jazz snob standards, which is sick as hell. Overall, just a fun bouncy song and another cool use of Moonsetter. And it’s nice to see the Midnight Crew featured on the album, whether they have anything to do with the song’s origins or not. Yeah the song is a bit long, but I can forgive it. Question though: is it sweater like sweat or sweater like the item of clothing? Plz advise. One is significantly weirder than the other and I assumed it was that one until recently. Another mystery which doesn’t need solving but heck if I’m not gonna try and solve it anyway, so nice work.

Castle, by George Buzinkai: Another fun, simple track from George. Again, check out his album of similar stuff I linked to above, and support George with your money and appreciation! The track art makes me think of this one as a song for the post-retcon Meteor Crew sneaking through Derse to save Jake and Roxy.

Skaian Happy Flight, by Seth “Beatfox” Peele: A fun remix of Skaian Ride, harkening back to the old days of Vol.5. A bit of a filler piece, but a fun one. Beatfox said he intended this one as a tribute to the music from the Never Ending Story. As such, notice the little Hussie riding Falcor in the background of the track art.

Voidlight, by Thomas Ferkol: Mmmm the more Calliope tracks the better. Thomas said this one was written as a tribute to Callie’s void bubble and her loneliness hiding in them which, yeah it works perfectly. I also like to think of this one as a theme for Alt-Calliope too, though, not only because I am starved of Alt-Callie Content, but also because those themes of loneliness Callie experiences in the void are mirrored really poignantly in Alt-Calliope’s characterization in-comic. A beautiful piece overall.

Beatdown DX, by Curt Blakeslee: As I mentioned earlier for Beatup, it’s neat seeing Beatdown come back full force on this album. Especially this one, which is a straight-up remaster of the original by its original creator. It’s awesome, especially considering that I don’t think he’s done anything else for the comic since the original Beatdowns from way back when. The original is purposefully harsh to reflect...yeah...but this one finally puts it to its full potential. The amazing track art (brought to you by the creator of Terepy herself) really drives the point home about what Beatdown represents for Dave’s character. I like to think of this one as how Bro sees the song/rooftop battles. Heroic, clean, fun, badass, classic video-game style. And we see from the art that what Bro is doing is none of those, and the original reflects Dave’s perspective on what was going on: harsh, dissonant, aggressive, violent. I do wish that this was included before Beatup on the album, since it represents the exact thing Dave reclaims with that version, as I mentioned earlier.

Solar Voyage, by Marcy Nabors: Oh man. This song. This song is such a great tribute to some of the most iconic songs in homestuck. Starts out with a pretty much one-to-one rendition of Ruins, then hits that sick-ass drop and flare beat, then that guitar. Oh man, that guitar. I wish I could make people feel the way that guitar makes me feel. And then to top it all off, another tribute to the iconic Explore. Three classics which work beautifully together. Also this one is a collaboration from pretty much everyone: Arrangement by Michael Guy Bowman, Marcy Nabors, Clark Powell, and Erik Scheele , Piano by Erik Scheele, Guitar by Tensei, Vocals by Paul Henderson and Marcy Nabors, Drums by Jamie Paige Stanley. The whole gang. And then that transition to.......

Feel (Alive), by Luke Benjamins and RJ Lake: This fucking song, I swear to god. It gets me so pumped. Every single time I listen to it I bounce along. I usually prefer songs with leitmotifs for added Emotions, but this has got to be one my top completely original pieces in the music canon. It goes so hard, it doesn’t even need a subject. The track art makes it a Meteor Crew (plus Jade) tribute, though, so I like to think of it playing as the Meteor is hurtling towards the Alpha session and their imminent doom, with everyone having lived three years of emotional turmoil and pubescence. Truly a masterpiece.

Breeze, by Erik Scheele: Yeah it’s a bit of a filler piece, but it’s a classy filler piece. I just imagine John chilling up in the clouds, free and relaxed. Maybe he packed a lunch for a little sky picnic. I don’t think it was written with John in mind but it’s called Breeze, so I dub it a John piece, so there. And then a tantalizing transition into...

Starfall, by Jeremy “Solatrus” Iamurri: I know we all thought of this one as just a little transition piece into Ascend originally, but after listening to it over the course of a year (!) I’ve grown to really love it. Solatrus has some amazing and unique stuff and out of everything he’s done, including solo albums, this is probably my favorite. I still can’t quite place exactly why I love it so much, there’s just...something about it that’s beautiful and ethereal and just really really cool. I like that the artist decided to go with a tribute to both Rose and the Reckoning for this piece, as it really works for both of them for similar reasons as above. It’s another one that transcends a subject, though, and I am a-okay with that. And then that transition into...

Ascend, by Tensei: No final album is complete without a big tribute to some of homestuck’s most classic tunes. I am such a sucker for those kind of songs and this one is just so much fun. That base drop though. That’s a good base drop. I can never help but laugh, however, at Tensei attempting to use it to make Johnradia canon which...a) is a boring ship b) the art doesn’t even suggest they’re romancey it just gives cool feelings about badass god tiers extending a hand to those who have Ascended and c) the song was, of course, used in the Credits and constitutes our current, but probably final let’s be serious Last Music in Homestuck, and the only ship we associate with it now is Rosemary getting Rosemarried which I think is a very poetic backfire for Tensei. But credit where credit is due, Tensei is still one of my favorite artists and he really delivers a super fun tribute to everything homestuck.

Lilith in Starlight, by Malcolm Brown: Yeah, there isn’t really anything about this one that hasn’t been said a bunch of times. It’s so great having a full song dedicated to Rosemary. Including Blind Justice Investigation (I am not typing that out in Terezi’s quirk), Do You Remem8er Me, Black Rose/Green Sun, Sound Judgement, and others, it truly makes Malcolm Brown the musician king of gay homestuck ships. Yay Malcolm. But seriously, this is a beautiful piece. Gorgeous references to Rose’s and Kanaya’s themes (have I mentioned how much I love Black/Rose Green Sun? I really love Black Rose/Green Sun), and a fun, dancey rhythm which always makes me think of it as Rose and Kanaya’s wedding dance number. Imagine them spinning each other around as everyone claps and oohs and aahs. Good content.

Thanks for Playing, by Max Wright: Ya know, I never give this one the credit it deserves. This is a beautiful piece of music and combined with the track art, it really hammers in the emotions of the end of homestuck. There they all are, staring into the distance as the universe they’ve just created comes into being. Emotions. I really need to appreciate this song more.

Renewed Return, by Marcy Nabors: Man, who knew Warhammer of Zillyhoo could make me so emotional. This might be my current favorite on the album, though that changes monthly tbh. Especially since this is a real live orchestra and choir! I love that!!! It includes some great overlooked pieces like Calamity and Revered Return, too. Man I’m getting tired. But this is such a great song, and kind of the emotional climax of the album for me. Whether it has much to do with Jane or not, it’s just another great song for the end of homestuck and all the emotions that entails. And this has got to be one of my favorite renditions of Doctor. Rereading the lyrics, it really does seem like they were written for Jane and her resurrection powers actually. Resurrection is a theme throughout the comic in multiple forms, and paying tribute to that through Jane is so great, even regardless of her unacceptable lack of songs.

THIS Pumpkin, by Alexander Rosetti: And topping off the list of surprising returns of old songs, here we have a full-on orchestration of Pumpkin Cravings of all things. The original is such a fun little tune, and not one you would expect to work so well with an orchestra. Alexander Rosetti said the style was very much a tribute to Danny Elfman, which yeah I totally see (hear) that. It’s also great seeing a piece for Problem Sleuth on the last album for the media masterpiece it directly lead to. And finally...

Conclude, by Seth “Beatfox” Peele: It’s interesting that rather than go with a big epic finale, the album takes a softer route. It starts out as a more soothing Creata, then hits you (me) right in the emotional soft spot that is Showtime (Piano Refrain). The first track of the comic, featured in the last track of the last album. And then of course there’s no forgetting Homestuck Anthem. When not focusing on the piece, it can be a bit boring honestly. But when actually listening to it, it really is gorgeous. Kinda reminds me of John Williams’ Star Wars stuff actually, now that I think about it. An excellent finale of a finale of a finale.

There you have it, Vol.10 One Year and Several Hours Later. This took a really long time. Plz appreciate my hard work and the lack of sufficient sleep I am getting tonight.

#homestuck #hs music recs #homestuck volume 10 #6/12 #long post #abuse cw #(for the mentions of dave and bro)#homestuck music

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mittensmorgul · 7 years

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I think there's a zero % chance of the nephilim being truely good without a catch. Having a superpowered child as a plotline that just a innocent babs is not a storyline. Not to mention it's already enforcing some form of a plan and it's not even born yet; saving Kelly, getting rid of Dagon, getting Cas and Cas to protect him even over Sam and Dean, the fact after the golden eyes Kelly and Cas are both super invested in the nephilim beign born with powers, it wants these powers for a reason

RIGHT?!

Honestly since that creepy shot in the doctor’s office in 12.17 where the baby turned its head like it was looking directly at the doctor on the sonogram I’ve been giving it a lot of credit for being “decidedly not human normal.”

(I mean that whole scene happened because WE NEEDED TO SEE HOW NOT-NORMAL THAT BABY WAS. So not-normal that Dagon IMMEDIATELY reverted to mind-wiping the doctor in order to stop him from saying just how not-normal the baby was out loud to Kelly…)

I will start by reaffirming that the creepybadwrong magically growing baby thing is ubergross to me. I wish they’d written pretty much ANYTHING else this season, because dammit we just HAD Amara doing the creepy baby thing LAST SEASON. Okay, enough damn creepybabby stories. We get it. It’s gross. Pls stop *coughbucklemmingcough*.

But it’s what we have, so…

I’ve got SOME suspicions of what might be going on with the kid, some of which are just wild speculation, but some of which I’m pretty confident about. I’ll be vague and leave you to decide which are which…

The kid is half-human, but also half-angel (which means grace). We know very little about how angels are made, but speculation seems to run high toward “they spring fully formed into existence.” I love comics and fic of the “baby angels” growing up and learning how to be good grown-up angels as much as the next person, but I have no illusions that canon angels were ever “babies.” Or that they were ever anything other than fully-formed celestial wavelengths of intent. They were very literally created by God.

(and great now I can’t stop thinking about Athena springing fully formed from Zeus’ head… but honestly? That’s sort of how I’m imagining the nephilim here. Because Kelly ISN’T an immortal god who can recover from something like that…)

(have I mentioned today JUST HOW MUCH TIME I spend thinking about the nature of angel grace? Okay. I mentioned it now. :D)

So because this child IS “half angel,” or at least “half angel grace,” I firmly believe that even if its “human side” is just a human-ish looking baby, the part of it that is an angel is already fully-developed. The only thing holding it back now is the biologically human bits. And it’s even building THAT at a much faster than normal-human rate.

No wonder it’s sort of “using up” Kelly in the process. At least that’s how I’ve been thinking of this.

It’s not good or evil, it’s selfish. Which I suppose might be considered “evil,” but it’s not making that choice for itself. That’s just what it does. Like, mosquitoes aren’t inherently evil, they’re just trying to live. Heck, even like most of the monsters in SPN. They’re just trying to survive, stay under the radar of the hunters who’d see them dead, and go about their business.

The difference with the nephilim is that combination of human free will (that comes with the kit!) combined with the unwavering nature of angelic certainty (I won’t call it “faith,” because in this case, it’s not).

Think of this particular baby’s parentage, too. Yes, Lucifer is Fallen, but he is still an archangel. He’s inherently a creature of Heaven even if he’s been exiled to Hell. He’s still made of the same grace that all the other angels (or archangels, since they seem infinitely more powerful than run of the mill seraphs) are made of. There’s nothing inherently “evil” in Lucifer’s grace.

Heck, even LUCIFER was set on destroying his own creations, the demons. He has just as much disdain for demons as he does for humanity. So nursemaid Dagon never really stood a chance here.

And now I can’t help think back to Jesse the Antichrist, whose powers came online when the final seal broke. But he’d had what, 9 or 10 years to learn how to Human properly before he had his powers sprung on him? Yeah, this baby doesn’t even have that…

So it senses Dagon’s intentions for it, and has already decided (because it’s half ANGEL remember), that this demonic abomination must die. It must know Kelly cares for it, and I think it’s pretty clear that we’re supposed to assume that she cares for it because IT IS MAKING HER CARE FOR IT, because it needs her the way an angel needs a vessel, and honestly that’s where my brain just wants to start screaming and run away from talking about this entire plot arc, but the show insists on giving it to us so here I am stuck with this squicky horror…

Where was I? Right…

(nvm I have no idea where I was because I had to take a mental break from typing this. have i mentioned that everything about the nephilim completely squicks me out? okay… deep breaths mittens we can do this)

We’ve seen Lucifer communicating with Dagon in some sort of hybrid angel radio/prayer/demonic blood bowl phone without the bowl of blood telepathic way. I assume that’s because he can’t perform that trick directly with Kelly (or with the baby). So Dagon’s been the go-between out of necessity. But Dagon is still a demon. Not a creature of Heaven, not a creature of Angel Grace (despite having a lot of similar powers to angels). By angel standards, she is an abomination.

I mean, so’s the nephilim, but I don’t think the nephilim would consider itself an abomination, you know? It is what it is. And it wants to be born and to live and continue to do its thing, and has the power to manipulate its environment to suit its needs.

I think it demonstrated that admirably when it healed Kelly from her suicide attempt. It couldn’t allow its current vessel (because I honestly don’t think it considers Kelly anything more than a vessel it needs to grow its human body for it) to “fail.”

But we’ve seen how Dagon was able to “influence” humans, via her mind-wipe of the doctor. I think the “angel side” of the nephilim has been mostly “dormant” up to this point, either because the human side was still developing enough for it to actively engage this way or because Dagon was somehow keeping it under control until it grew powerful enough to thwart that control.

Going back to what we learned about nephilim in 12.10, they apparently “grow into their power.” So that theory isn’t coming entirely out of left field, here.

So this baby is “growing into its power.” It’s less than a month from being born. At the beginning of 12.19 Kelly was so adamant that it NOT be born that she attempted to kill herself. Then she agreed to Joshua’s suicide plan of walking through the Heaven Portal. But the nephilim thwarted THAT as well.

It saw its opportunity in Kelly’s moment of weakness with Cas in that motel room, and I can’t help but believe that when her eyes flashed gold, that was the death of Kelly’s free will. That was the nephilim taking full control over her beliefs and actions. If only they’d showed up with the grace extraction sooner, I think she would’ve agreed to let them try it. But it was already too late, and she refused. Because the NEPHILIM refused for her.

She says she has “faith” that the child being born with its full power will “save the world.” But I think that’s the nephilim talking through her.

She went from actively trying to die and take the baby with her to doing EVERYTHING in her power to see it born, even though she knows it will kill her. And Cas confessed his own weakness, that he wished he had her faith, and that’s where the nephilim granted his wish… Kelly took Cas’s hand at the sandbox and the nephilim gave Cas faith.

Do I believe this is “real faith?” Absolutely, 100% NO.

And here’s where my second anon in my inbox seems relevant to mention here:

What do think will happen to Cas’ narrative and endgame now? I had been predicting (hoping) that his whole arc has been moving closer to a point where he’d choose the Winchesters for good. Now, after 12x19, it seems different. It’s like a bit of season 4 Cas was revived. He’s got this same type of faith he used to have, and maybe he’ll be raising a baby next season. Do you have any predictions? I’m hoping his endgame is still with the Winchesters, but now I’m concerned…

CAS DOES NOT HAVE “THE SAME TYPE OF FAITH HE USED TO HAVE,” and I honestly DO NOT BELIEVE that he will be raising this baby next season.

He’s being CONTROLLED by the nephilim right now.

Remember in 6.06 when Dean asked for truth, and then got SLAMMED with it? Remember in 4.08 when people were making wishes on this ancient cursed Babylonian coin and all the wishes turned very bad? Remember in 12.17 when Mick of the MoL mentioned he was brought into the MoL when he pickpocketed an ancient cursed Babylonian coin?

The wishes go bad. They violate the natural order. They invoke Cosmic Consequences.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

I think the nephilim itself is a sort of embodiment of this concept of Cosmic Consequences. It’s a factor of chaos, a violation of the natural order.

I am so freaking tempted to go off into an expository rant about how Dean Winchester is the embodiment of Balance and Order (despite having “violated the natural order” again and again). But he IS “Humanity.” He is Free Will. He was the one Cas did everything for, and he was the one both God and the Darkness designated as “the firewall between light and darkness.” He’s the one Death taught his lessons to about the natural order, and he’s the one who KILLED Death… Essentially every character on the show has eventually bent to his will. INCLUDING FREAKING GOD HIMSELF.

Dean wanted the universe to be in balance, so it was balanced. Hooray 11.23.

But then Mary came back. Because DEAN needed to discover that balance in himself, and the only way to find balance is to understand the imbalance. She’s been the cosmic consequence unbalancing the natural order since she showed up.

All season I’ve been waiting for the MoL storyline and the Lucifer storyline to intersect… and I think it’s all going to hinge on Mary, and on Dean finally getting “what he needs most” from Mary… i.e. an acknowledgement of the imbalance within himself that’s been built on the pedestal he’s kept Mary on since he was four.

The nephilim, in contrast, seems to be a force of anti-free will. And this goes right back to one of the show’s core principles, that free will and choice are greater than blind faith and destiny. Right now it’s seemingly stripped Cas of all his doubts, all his free will, all his choice. He asked for faith, and he got SLAMMED with it…

But NOTHING about it is CAS. It’s not his choice, not his free will. Because we know he’d rejected Heaven and duty and destiny, and had been doing EVERYTHING FOR THE WINCHESTERS. HIS FAMILY. So this sudden attack of “faith” that came in the form of the same weird glowy-veiny laser-eyes treatment that we last saw him suffer in 7.17 when he took on Sam’s Hell Damage and left him CATATONIC and damaged… well…

What I’m saying is he needs something to break free from the will of the nephilim, to regain his own free will…

What broke the connection, Cas?

He’s gonna have to plainly answer that question this time.

Okay I think that’s as much brain as I have for this :D

#spn 12.19 #spn 12.17 #spn 4.08 #spn 6.06 #the wishes turn very bad #cosmic. consequences.#dean is the center of the universe #nephilim #order vs chaos and darkness vs light #castiel winchester #the scheherazade of supernatural #no seriously if you take the destiel out of this storyline it makes no sense #the entire a-plot hinges on this love #anonymous #spn duality

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starlitsea · 7 years

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The first part of the finale.

Listen to monotone robot man. Why would anyone follow this dude?

Baby Elizabeth is soooo cute. ;__;

This conference looks SO AWKWARD with the Enterprise crew just … standing on the stairs in the background. Phlox is the only one who looks cheerful and everyone else looks like they’re waiting for the dentist to pull out their wisdom teeth.

Clap clap clap.

Archer KNOWS they look bad so makes everyone clap harder.

Trip REALLY doesn’t want to clap. If you watch carefully, it looks like T'Pol caught a stray thought from Trip and is just sharing in his sullenness. Archer probably made them stand away from each other because it would be waaaay too obvious otherwise.

Aw, look at this crew. Sourpusses together.

Trip says something. T'Pol answers, but even her words sound completely unconvincing.

They are totally having a private mental bitch session and none of you can convince me otherwise. T'Pol has a bit of a delay before moving down the stairs too, as though she’s finishing listening to Trip grousing in her mindspace. Also, it looks like she’s zoning out a couple of times on the stairs. LOL.

Random woman staggering in wearing a jacket from 1970.

SECURITY!

T'Pol is backing Trip’s POV up to Archer. My babies have come so far since Season One! Also, that quick amused look Archer gives her. Like, oh, backing up Trip, huh?

Look, the bad jacket lady is shoving something at T'Pol while saying, “They’re going to kill her.” She looks like a bomber or a shooter.

Is there NO SECURITY at this Very Important Conference?!

T'Pol looks very concerned by the words of this person who has wandered in off the street.

But no, she’s a dying, emotionally disturbed good Samaritan who has a DYING MESSAGE.

Or a vial with hair in it. Doesn’t the hair look TOO LONG for a baby?

T'Pol has the facts about Susan Khouri and has clearly been doing some digging. Trip just looks befuddled. He’s more concerned about who the hair belonged to. Clearly he thinks there’s some sort of hostage situation.

Trip and T'Pol as a duo standing together is a good thing because this is a crazy truth bomb that is about to be dropped on them.

Phlox is like, yes, I know exactly who the hair belongs to. It’s a baby that contains Vulcan and human DNA.

T'Pol’s face is very calm and considering.

Phlox: I did everything possible to verify these shocking hair results. It’s TnT’s baby!

Trip’s FAAAAACE.

Trip turning to T'Pol all: Wait, we had a baby?!

T'Pol looks a little unsettled by all the looks but is otherwise like, yeah, of course? in her demeanor.

Of course, the very next scene she is meditating so she isn’t THAT calm about it. Aaaaand obviously she knows who is at her door.

Trip strides in all: “We gotta talk about this.” We can only wonder how they left the conversation after sick bay but it doesn’t look like they got anywhere with it if this is where they’re starting. I assume there was a lot of Trip going, ARE YOU SURE? And Phlox going: Did I stutter?

Anyway, Trip sits down and steeples/smooshes his hands against his face. This is not an easy conversation.

T'Pol’s like, OK, I am not sitting next to you as it appears you may behave irrationally. Also, I dunno what’s going on either.

Trip’s all: Science! DNA! Verifiable facts! Logic!

T'Pol: Are you calling me a liar? I’ve never been pregnant. Like, ever.

Trip: Then WTF is going on?! I’m so confused and distraught. (Though really, if we look at the date of the first time they had sex, unless the Vulcan gestation period is VERY short, I don’t think they could have a six month old? Like, I guess human females pregnant with a half Vulcan baby actually have a TEN month long pregnancy? And she would have probably had to get pregnant when they were chasing the Xindi and like … hidden it for months as their ship was on the verge of breaking down???)

T'Pol can’t explain how it’s possible and Trip is just … not dealing very well.

T'Pol: Do you believe me?

This is a really important question. This is a crisis here. Like, this is basically her LIFE PARTNER (and father of her child(ren)!) questioning whether she is telling him the truth.

And we don’t see her expression but we see Trip’s expression, and slowly, slowly, he says, “Yeah.” He believes her. Phlox must be wrong. If she’s never been pregnant then she can’t have a baby.

He is having some MIXED feelings here. On the one hand, we KNOW he loves the idea of having kids with her. He LOVES THEIR KIDS. He was SO DAMN HAPPY about Lorian. On the other hand, at least T'Pol is not a giant liar McLiar McLying face who had his baby and hid it from him only to have dangerous people kidnap it?

And ever since he said that he believed her, she’s been moving closer to him. And she sits down in front of him now, so close, now that they are finally able to be in the same space, and she tells him, she knows that it’s their baby.

He’s like, Wait a minute, did you NOT just tell me two seconds ago that you’ve never been-

She hasn’t.

And now he’s all angry and confused and going crazy again. WTF is going on?!

Here you can hear the emotion leak out of her. She can’t explain how their baby exists, but it does. There is definitely a baby out there that is theirs.

And Trip’s face is just a picture of WHAT ARE YOU EVEN SAYING? How do you know that?!

She just rapid-fire responds with: I’m Vulcan.

His disbelieving face is the best. It’s like she said, I know because I’m a witch. And he just slumps a little like, Samantha, why didn’t you tell me you were a witch BEFORE we got married?! (Okay, I actually dislike so many things about Bewitched, but this is just the example that popped to mind!)

Archer has faith in humanity. Yes, reference that theme song!

He’s rebutted with: We can’t afford to operate on faith.

Archer: No, ‘cause I’ve got faith of the heart! I’m going where my heart will take me! I’ve got faith to believe, I can do anything!

Archer is like TnT are going bananas, please tell me what you found out.

Yeah, now Archer has to call on Malcolm for a shady favor.

Malcolm hanging out at the actual docks. LOL.

Ugh, now Malcolm is back in the shady covert organization. All for Archer.

Everyone’s like: where did this baby come from? The mysterious secret dude doesn’t even know.

The bad guys are plotting. The TnT baby is so cuuuuuute that no one can resist. She’s a cutie patootie.

Terraists are always totally crazy (see LoGH, I mean Terraists).

Megalomaniacs always have scale models of buildings in their rooms.

I still don’t see any security at this conference!

Why do politicians always look so sleazy?

Archer is being pretty decent at getting information for once. Not enough underlying threat, though.

Travis’s subplot again. Hi, subplot. Travis is mad because Gannett broke up with him.

Trip needs some one to talk to so he goes to Phlox, because as you know, starships were not equipped with Counselors back in the day.

Trip gets right to talking about the baby. He wants to know about it, if it’s a boy or a girl. After what T'Pol said, it’s become real to him.

He’s so gobsmacked that she’s a girl. He’s in awe. He is fucking INVESTED. Immediately. Instantaneously. As soon as he let himself believe in it. (He is gonna back SUCH A GOOD DAD.) Now he wants to know if she’s okay, being a hybrid. (I mean, he’s seen Lorian so he knows it’s possible for her to be fine.)

Phlox says humans and Vulcans are pretty similar (yeah, all that Seeder stuff) so to the best of his knowledge, she’s perfectly healthy. (Nuuuuuu, whhhhyyyyyy.)

Trip is relieved and smiles a little bit. Then Phlox is a little TOO free with the info and tells him that she has his eyes. He laughs. Lorian had his father’s.

And T'Pol’s ears. Lorian had those too.

Trip’s still flabbergasted. It’s so much to take in.

Phlox is like, yeah, it’s totes weird since T'Pol’s never been pregnant. (And as her DOCTOR, he should know.)

And then Trip says: She could have gotten pregnant and not told me about it.

I will cut him a little slack because the situation is so completely bizarre and they were definitely having their fair share of problems, but, seriously Trip, you need to have more faith (of the heart)! That was beneath you.

Phlox does not bat an eye that they’re clearly sleeping together (well, he half orchestrated the whole thing), but the way he says, “Ah,” is so heavy and chiding. “And she had the embryo removed, also without your knowledge. I believe you know the answer to that theory, Commander.” Phlox is shaming him for his line of thought and Trip acknowledges it and that he’s wrong to think it. He knows that he should believe in her.

Phlox is like, OK, I will give you a pass this time, but you better not be a dumbass about it and say anything like this to T'Pol.

Trip thinks hard, nods, and says that’s good advice. He just won her back after a hard fought struggle. He’s not enough of an idiot to throw that away again.

Trip shares the fact that his father always wanted a granddaughter and bothered his sister about it all the time. (Was Lizzie married? I think originally he might have been supposed to have an older sister, but she got wiped from canon, so it must be Lizzie who’s being referenced.) For once, talking about his sister doesn’t seem to be painful for him. He’s smiling.

Phlox plays along and says it seems his father got his wish.

Trip shakes his head and blows out a breath, feeling overwhelmed. Here he is, dealing with sudden fatherhood. But to his credit, he already loves this baby he’s never met.

Ugh, listen to these xenophobic Terraists. Watch this robo-dude shoot himself up.

Travis and subplot checking out the shuttlepods. Ah, Shuttlepod One. The scene of many close encounters. You guys should close the door at least? C'mon, Travis.

Trip and T'Pol are the only ones sitting at the table. Like everyone else is standing around giving a presentation and the two of them need to be sitting in case there’s more bad news. Trip immediately volunteers to go on the undercover mission to the moon. T'Pol looks conflicted for a second, listening to him, but makes up her mind that she also wants to go. They’ve gotta get to their baby. Archer sees their resolve and doesn’t argue.

Doctor dude from earlier is the end result of ROCKS FALL.

Why are we mining the moon? Poor moon.

Trip and T'Pol are apparently the ONLY ONES on the undercover mission. Like, uh, you couldn’t send a couple MACOs??? These people have their baby. DON’T YOU THINK THEY’RE KIND OF RECOGNIZABLE?

Anyway, they are quibbling over directions while dressed in truly ugly jumpsuits.

Trip accuses T'Pol of downloading an outdated map.

She’s affronted. The map is fine!

Trip: “Maybe you’re reading it wrong.”

She is so peeved right now. She is pursing her lips in annoyance. THIS is the man she’s in love with? Really? But she restrains herself like a Vulcan and offers gently, “We can ask for directions.”

Trip is NOT asking for directions and tells her to give him the map.

He tells her that he’s figured out the problem and she clings on to this glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. “What?”

“We’re lost.”

Her irritated face is a delight. They’re lost. Also hilarious.

He suggests going in one direction and she inquires as to his reasoning.

He doesn’t recognize the tunnel and she bows her head and gives in.

Well, they’re alone in this tunnel so she wants to have a heart to heart. She knows he’s not convinced that she told him the truth about the child.

He looks really serious here when he asks her what she means.

She looks both sad and a little testy as she says, “You think I might have gotten pregnant without your knowledge.”

He can’t really deny it and looks away, but tries to defend himself anyway. “I never said that!”

“I know.” Jolene’s delivery here is so good? She is acknowledging that he didn’t say that even if he was thinking it, and she knows it was because he didn’t want to hurt her, even if she is still hurt by it. She does a little swallow after she says it too.

He’s not mad or anything but the first thought that comes to his mind just pops out of his mouth: “You’ve been talking to Phlox.”

And by this T'Pol is a little skeptical as to where the conversation has gone and turns it around on him. “Nooo? Have you?”

Now he’s kind of frustrated but not mad. “Look, it’s because you’re Vulcan, inn’t it, that you know all this?!” Like he’s at a perpetual disadvantage and T'Pol is full of some witchy secret mind-reading knowledge that he’s not privy too. She knows that the baby is theirs. She knows that he has doubts. (Darlin’, she could read you without the psychic bond. And don’t forget, you once told her the same thing.)

He’s sick of the bond!

Now, this riles her up. She doesn’t particularly enjoy it either. Especially when it tells her her partner is doubting her!

But the way Trip handles this really shows how much he’s grown and that he really took his talk with Phlox to heart. He tells her that for the last time he DOES believe her and that if she gets any more feelings (I think he was probably going to tell her to talk about them with him first rather than stewing in her own juices) – but he gets distracted by T'Pol staring over his shoulder.

Yup, they finally found the area they were looking for. So Trip was right about that. And then they have to table the conversation because finding their baby is more important.

Ugh, Travis, SOMEONE HAS TO CLEAN THE SEATS OF SHUTTLEPOD ONE.

Also, hasn’t it been a day or two since you guys were originally having sex? You were the one with the friend on the moon base so TnT could sneak in so you had to have been productive at SOME point. Were just helping out between bouts of having sex in the shuttlepod?! Has Gannett just been hanging out on the ship the ENTIRE time?

Hoshi is fixing the universal translators. Malcolm is getting antsy.

Trip’s been singled out and is playing along to get in good with the good ol’ boys club. Uh, Josiah is being a Xenophobic butthead, but the rhetoric sounds so familiar. It’s not lost on me that they have multiple black men AND an Asian being xenophobic buttheads, BTW, but in Star Trek race isn’t an issue anymore. It’s species.

T'Pol comes up and without preamble starts to tell him that she’s figured something out. He grabs her, makes a gesture for silence, and hides her behind him to make sure everything’s clear. Gotta protect his lady.

T'Pol’s telling him about the dead doctor with the air of someone revealing the set up of a murder mystery.

Trip immediately knows that she’s not buying the cover up and they agree to split up and figure out what they can tonight.

Ugh, I don’t want to listen to the alt-right meeting, I mean … no, that’s exactly what I mean.

T'Pol is checking out the scene where the doctor’s body was found and of course she gets shot.

5 thousand unregistered aliens on Earth. Could be 10 thousand. Humanity won’t exist in the future because of aliens among us. Wow is this episode timely. Like LOOK, THESE ARE THE BAD GUYS SPOUTING THIS BS.

Trip, you’ve been found out. Your face is too famous.

Yeah, Archer and Malcolm have found out that your girlfriend is a spy.

Trip gets thrown in the room and the first thing he sees is T'Pol sprawled on the ground, struggling to get up. “Are you all right?”

“I think so.”

When he hears that, he is so upset that she didn’t respond with “Yes.” That means she got hurt or worse. He sees the guard and rushes at him, demanding to know what he did to her. He is about to go to town on this guy but is held back.

The guard smirks at him and says, “Not nearly enough.”

Trip’s face right now? This is the face of a man memorizing all of your features, buddy. So that he can find you later and beat the ever-living crap out of you so that even your own momma doesn’t recognize you. HOW DARE YOU.

Now Paxton comes and is just so ludicrous with his delivery, comparing them to Romeo and Juliet, (Seriously, you guys were SO NOT DISCRETE – EVERYONE KNOWS ABOUT YOU), ranting on about them being starcrossed lovers …

Trip is wondering if this is all a huge joke. Is he being punked right now?

He and T'Pol both come to the realization that Paxton is the man in charge.

Then he rambles on about their baby being fine.

T'Pol is so pissed. Trip is so pissed too. He demands to see her.

Paxton yells: “No!” and then starts ranting some more. Trip’s face is like, WTF is even happening?

Paxton starts dissing Vulcans in particular. Then he starts dissing Trip and T'Pol’s relationship in general.

T'Pol wants to punch Paxton in the face and she is logically considering whether it will be worth it. Emotionally, it will be SO worth it. But logically, it could put the baby, Trip, and herself at risk.

I have always thought this, but apparently Trip and T'Pol are SO NOT discrete that even an organization of xenophobic whackjobs knows about them. Goodness.

TnT exchange a look, like, is he serious right now? This is the guy who’s the threat? THIS yahoo?

Yeah, the moonbase is mobile. He’s just letting Trip and T'Pol stand around with no guards? Like, really?

Gannett is being interrogated and wants a lawyer. Travis cannot believe this is happening.

Hoshi is only slightly judging.

Yeah, that’s correct, the entire mining facility is taking off.

Trip and T'Pol thinking that they’ve been caught by an absolute madman here who’s going to warp INSIDE the system.

Trip is like, WTF is holding this together, spit and string? Why would you even make this monstrosity?

TnT are a unit here.

Since when did we arm Mars?! With, like, the outpost from The Martian and lasers shooting out of the satellite dish?

Why are we ALWAYS firing on our poor Moon? Like, LEAVE THE MOON ALONE.

T'Pol literally feels sick standing next to this man.

#adventures in liveblogging #star trek enterprise #st:e demons #this is why I don't liveblog #Trip x T'Pol

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the-desolated-quill · 6 years

Text

Heaven Sent - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

Sometimes I wonder if perhaps I’m being too cynical at times.

Sigh. Look, it’s not that I don’t like Heaven Sent. It’s okay. It’s a competently made episode that has its moments, and I’m certain that if this came out before 2010, I probably would have loved it. But as I’ve said in the past, once you notice the tricks, gimmicks and general bullshit of Moffat stories, that’s all you notice. The fact of the matter is, while I didn’t hate Heaven Sent, it’s hard for me to truly enjoy this because of just how sick to death I’ve gotten with Moffat’s MO.

I suppose I did like how small scale it all was. No alien invasions or anything like that. Just the Doctor trapped in a prison and having to figure out how to escape. Moffat is clearly taking inspiration from Classic Who stories like The Deadly Assassin and Castrovalva, and it’s certainly the most unique and interesting setting to have cropped up this series. I also quite like the Veil. A Grim Reaper-esque figure that will always slowly follow you everywhere you go no matter how hard you try to outrun it. This combined with the claustrophobic prison helps create a sense of impending dread. And of course Peter Capaldi deserves a huge amount of praise for his amazing performance, giving it everything he’s got and selling the Doctor’s grief, pain and anger like its going out of season.

The problem is... well... Moffat.

As much as I love Capaldi in this, it’s the characterisation I really can’t stand. One of the things I find most annoying about Twelve (apart from the inconsistent writing) is his constant need for reassurance. He’s become so dependant on Clara to the point where even now he’s having imaginary conversations with her, seeking her validation on just about everything. I could just about be able to stomach this if it was about the Doctor learning to let Clara’s memory go and move on, but that’s clearly not what this is about at all. Moffat is trying to imply that the Doctor and Clara are completely inseparable at this point, and that the Doctor is completely lost without her... which simply doesn’t sound like the Doctor at all. I refuse to believe he’s that ineffectual without a companion (it also further confirms my theory that Clara isn’t really dead. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. If she stays dead by the end of the next episode, I’ll be genuinely surprised).

Heaven Sent also exposes a weakness in Moffat’s writing. Namely his interchangeable characters. Oh we’ve all known his female characters have been shit for a while now. That’s not in dispute. I’m talking about his male protagonists. These eccentric mega-geniuses who seem to be able to solve everything with magic. Here we see the Doctor slipping into Sherlock territory at points, most notably with the mind palace stuff. I cannot stress enough how much I hate this. The Doctor and Sherlock Holmes shouldn’t get within a parsec of each other and it just goes to show how unimaginative Moffat is as a writer. Rather than have the Doctor think on his feet and escape the Veil using his wit and ingenuity, Moffat instead freezes the action so that the Doctor can monologue to himself in his imaginary TARDIS and thus destroys all the tension. While thankfully it never quite goes to the same insulting extremes that Sherlock took it (His Last Vow anyone?), it’s still a massive problem and it just feels like Moffat showing off rather than him telling a compelling story.

Then there’s just the crushing sense of predictability to all of this. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the setting, but I wouldn’t say I was intrigued by it and that’s because of how depressingly familiar I’ve become with Moffat’s schtick. The moment I saw the very old painting of Clara, I knew that this was a prison of the Doctor’s own making and that he’d been there for a long time. Then when I saw all the skulls, I just nodded and thought ‘yeah. he cloned himself each time the Veil killed him. Okay.’ It’s neither satisfying nor surprising because it’s all telegraphed so heavily and yet Moffat still expects us to give him a pat on the back. He honestly thought the final twist was going to be a big shock, but really, did anyone think it wasn’t Time Lord related? Who else could it have been? Like with the mystery of River Song, it’s hard to be surprised by a reveal when the list of suspects is so pathetically small.

And then there’s all the logic holes and inconsistencies. So the Time Lords want the Doctor to confess what the Hybrid is. First of all Moffat is changing the rules again for the purposes of plot convenience. Before the confession dial was a Time Lord’s last will and testament. Now it’s a personal torture chamber. Why would anyone carry something like that around with them, let alone the Doctor? Also if the Time Lords are using the confession dial to get info on the Hybrid from the Doctor, why add in an element that could kill him? What if the Doctor never made it back to the cloning/teleport thingy in time before he kicked the bucket? That would have been a bit awkward, wouldn’t it? If the Veil is just to punish him on the other hand, then why does the Doctor get rewarded for confessing random things? (we’ll get to the confessions in a bit). The Doctor says he’s being interrogated and he’s therefore irreplaceable due to the information he possesses, and yet he’s still afraid to die because the Veil can literally kill him with a touch. Which brings me back to my first point. Why are the Time Lords trying to kill the Doctor if they need information from him? It just doesn’t make sense.

And what about the prison itself? The rooms reset after a while to hide the things the Doctor has changed, unless it’s something he himself added like his clothes or his numerous skulls. So how come the azbantium wall is unaffected by the resets? Why is it that all the messages he leaves for himself get erased, but the damage he does to the wall doesn’t? And speaking of messages, why did the Doctor feel the need to dig a hole in the ground to leave a message? And where did he get the chalk to draw the arrows? And if he had the time to draw arrows, why not just leave himself an explanation as to what’s going on? Or at the very least tell himself to use something other than his fists to break through the wall.

Ah yes, now let’s talk about the azbantium wall. The Doctor taking billions of years to punch his way through. Surely it would have been more effective to use the pointy end of the shovel or his fingernails or something rather than punching it. Because the thing about the original story with the bird and the mountain is that the bird’s beak is pointy. By sharpening its beak on the mountain, the bird does a small amount of damage each time. I fail to see how punching a wall is supposed to do any damage whatsoever. Punching a brick wall is unlikely to do anything. Punching an azbantium wall that’s apparently four hundred times harder than diamond surely would make zero difference. And zero is still zero no matter how many times you multiply it.

You can easily dismiss all of this as nitpicking (in fact you probably are), but it’s little things like that that slowly erode away at the credibility of it all for me. Like a bird sharpening its beak on a mountain, you might say. It’s hard for me to really be invested in this because the episode doesn’t follow the rules of its own internal logic. Something Moffat has frequently been guilty of in the vast majority of his stories.

Finally there’s the confessions. I mentioned way back in my review of The Witch’s Familiar that I was deeply concerned with the direction this series arc was going, and as we come within spitting distance of the series finale, I’m now in abject terror. Moffat has demonstrated in episodes like Listen and The Witch’s Familiar that his arrogance and desperation to put his own stamp on the show means he’s prepared to lift up the bonnet and tinker with the vital components of the show. Components that should NEVER be tinkered with, like the Doctor’s mystery. We don’t know exactly who he is or what makes him tick, and we shouldn’t know either. That wouldn’t make him more interesting. It would actually diminish him. So I was very alarmed when the Doctor started confessing that he originally left Gallifrey because he was scared of the Hybrid. (I’ve already talked about how stupid the idea of the Doctor being driven by fear is in the past, so I won’t repeat myself here. Just read my review of Listen again if you want the details). And then to cap it all off, at the very end the Doctor confesses that the Hybrid... is him.

At which point, I glanced at my DVD copy of the Doctor Who movie and gulped nervously. Please tell me Moffat is not going where I think he’s going.

Moffat has written some bad stuff before (a lot of bad stuff before), but it’s been stuff that for the most part you can easily ignore and pretend never happened (something I one hundred percent plan to do when Jodie Whittaker comes a-calling). This however is the first time Moffat has been in a position where he could do some serious damage to the franchise as a whole. Never before have I been so apprehensive to watch a Moffat penned series finale...

#heaven sent #steven moffat #doctor who #twelfth doctor #peter capaldi #bbc #review #spoilers

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