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sueboohscorner · 6 years

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The 100 Ep 510 Recap "The Warriors Will" #The100

This episode was thrilling, and I didn't see the twists coming at all, but like any good twist, everything that happened made perfect sense and derived from the characters. I went into the episode expecting to see Gaia fall in the arena and probably Indra too, just hoping desperately that something would happen to save Indra at the last minute. I could never have seen it coming that Monty would be the hero Wonkru deserved. I also didn't see it coming that Octavia would go full Roman emperor and decide that it's okay to become the villain if your people no longer treat you as a hero!

And no lie, I miss Octavia. Blodreina is a nightmare of a person, and I loved Octavia, for all her faults, for four+ seasons (her ascent to Blodreina was the last we saw of her). I see a lot of fans bitching online, and I suspect that what it comes down to is that they loved Octavia too much to accept this version of her, so they're angry at the show. I've been there, where a direction the creators took a character made them so fundamentally different from the person I thought they were, I disconnected from the overall experience. The 100 is beyond that for me; I am fully invested in the world of the show, and I believe the changes they make have always been explicable and internally consistent.

Just as you could see the seeds of Finn's instability long before he gunned down a village, and the clues that Bellamy didn't trust Grounders as much as his loved ones did long before he joined forces with Pike, and the signs of Jasper's fragility long before he started acting overtly suicidal, Octavia's rage, insecurity, and need for unconditional approval have been laid in as fundamental character traits from the beginning. What we're seeing now is the end result of someone whose worst instincts and basest needs were not merely indulged but encouraged for a very long time, and now suddenly. The same people who eagerly followed her are turning their backs, triggering all the fears of abandonment and rejection she has nurtured throughout her life, and her reaction is proportional to how long and how fully her needs had been met till now.

So with the reaction out of the way, let's cover the action!

Clarke and Madi have gotten well away from Polis while Madi continued to sleep off her post-Ascension hangover. When Madi awakens, she's royally pissed that Clarke has spirited her away from her people, because the spirit of the Commander has increasingly taken hold--that will continue throughout the episode, and it's good to watch Clarke lose her confident certainty that she's in charge here, much as we watched Abby experience in Season 2. Madi is also experiencing the memories of past Commanders in her dreams, and the revelation that Becca was burned at the stake possibly tells us why the chip is called the Flame in the first place, as it was presumably all that remained of her after.

Clarke also dumps out the worm eggs from the Rover, for some reason leaving them in a wriggling pile rather than setting them on fire or something...seriously, I would have found some way to destroy them rather than leaving them there to grow into nightmare creatures, but Clarke isn't great on long-term planning these days.

The closer Clarke and Madi get to the valley, the more heated their discord becomes over what to do with the Flame. Clarke keeps making moves to take it out in Madi's sleep, and Madi ultimately promises Clarke that in order to keep her from ascending all over again, Clarke would have to destroy the Flame. Because that means killing what's left of Lexa, that's a no-go for Clarke...but I fully believe that if she didn't have a personal connection to an element of the Flame. She wouldn't hesitate, any more than Abby hesitated when demolishing the radiation test chamber or interfering in Clarke's attempt at ascending, because Clarke is an overbearing mother from hell. It's a coincidence of competing for self-interest that stands in the way of her maternal instinct to stand in the way of her "daughter's" growth and power.

When they reach the valley, Madi gets another demonstration of Clarke's limited range of concern: McCreary and his goons are killing a bunch of Wonkru defectors, and Madi feels the Commander's impulse to rush in and save her people, but Clarke holds her back. Madi knowingly reminds Clarke that Abby is a defector, too.

Major badassery points to Madi for slitting the throat of a McCreary underling rather than letting him talk or possibly find a way to escape while promising to be useful.

They sneak further into the village and find Abby passed out on the floor by her pill bottle. But how she got these pills? That's a fantastic scene!

This season's MVP guest star, Mike Dopud, delivers another stunningly creepy performance this week, as Abby summons him via neck collar shock (his underlying tone of menace as he implicitly threatens her never to do that again is chilling) to beg him for help getting a fix. McCreary cut her off, and she's in such withdrawal that she insists she will literally die without more pills...who knows how true that is, but her need is evident regardless.

Vinson returns later with a plentiful supply, and he brightly says he knows what's it like to need things as he indulges his own need--the desire to rip a couple of dudes' throats out with his damn teeth!

Abby's subsequent overdose may be partially a result of taking too much after waiting so long to have any, partially the response of emotional horror after what she's just witnessed.

But that's it for the valley, so let's move on to Polis! We came into the week with the knowledge that one or even two major characters would die in the area. The deadpool greatly favored Bellamy to be last man standing, but no one was ready to lose Indra. No one except Octavia, who chooses Bellamy.

Octavia first goes to Indra, begging for help to find a solution that will allow her to maintain absolute control over Wonkru without carrying out the sentence according to Wonkru tradition. Indra points out there's no other way, it's Octavia's own fault, and by the way, I'm going to kill your brother first, so my daughter is certain to survive, so the hell with you.

So Octavia goes to Monty and asks him to convey a message to Bellamy about Indra's weaknesses, and he's like, Nope, this is your fault and your problem, and anyway, you can choose to change your entire plan because of my dope botany skills that will save Wonkru without having to go to war!

Then Octavia gives in and talks to Bellamy herself, and it's one of the greatest scenes of the series. She reminisces about one of the many times he put her safety above all other concerns back on the Ark, and she begs him to kill Indra and Gaia so he can survive. The emotional weight of their relationship is so powerful, so beautifully carried by these two brilliant actors who have built their connection over the past five years.

Rebuffed by Bellamy, the final rejection, Octavia goes away, slices open her arm in the exact place Bellamy once cut himself to protect her and uses the blood as her warpaint.

It's arena time, and Bellamy holds out as long as he can, trying to be a conscientious objector, but survival instinct kicks in, compelling him to fight back. The battle is intense, and Indra is getting a number of good slashes in, but Gaia changes the game!

Gaia picks up a spear and prays to the spirit of the Commander as she hurls it straight at Octavia! Bellamy's instinct to protect his sister is ever-powerful, and he knocks Gaia off balance, causing her aim to go foul.

In this moment, Octavia has the opportunity to end the fight, execute Gaia for attempted regicide, and pardon Bellamy for his act of saving her life, then exile Indra because she'd definitely never forgive Gaia's death...but of course, that's not what happens. Octavia just pretends not to be rattled by this near-death moment, tosses the spear back into the arena, and commands the fight to continue.

But here comes Monty, the hero we needed, the hero we deserve! He bursts into the arena with proof of his success growing new plants, and he announces to Wonkru that Octavia is lying to them! They don't have to go to war--it's not their only chance at survival, and she knows it because he's shown her how he's revived the hydrofarm! They could stay and survive and use the same technique to recultivate the land outside over time.

This revelation is all Wonkru needed to turn against their Red Queen (many of them were at the tipping point anyway, because they wanted their new true Commander to take her place!). Monty and Bellamy are heady with the joy of stopping this nightmare, but they quickly grow worried when no one knows where Octavia has disappeared to.

Their search is short-lived because a fire alarm tells them exactly where she is and what she's done. She's set the hydrofarm ablaze, destroying any hope for the future that didn't involve following her into war. Even Miller looks disillusioned with her now.

But hey, it worked...for her selfish purposes. She has deprived them of any other option besides carrying out her initial plan. The rations they have now are the last food they will ever have unless they can take the valley.

A dispirited, morose army marches out of Polis, and there's only one thing keeping them from murdering Octavia at this point: She's an incredibly strong warrior, and they can't afford to sacrifice an asset like that. Which brings us back to the heart of the series in a neat little way--The 100 has always valued people based on one thing: Are you helping your people survive, or bringing them closer to death?

10/10 (I'd give it an 11 if I could. Can I?)

#The 100 #The CW #Mike Dopud

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thisisheffner · 4 years

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Pet Shop Boys: 'The acoustic guitar should be banned' | Music | The Guardian

The new Pet Shop Boys album is, they say, the third in a trilogy. Hotspot follows 2013’s Electric and 2016’s Super, all collaborations with producer Stuart Price, all examples of the duo’s return to “electronic purism” after a succession of albums where, as Neil Tennant puts it, they variously “pretended to be a rock band” (Release), “made a zany one with everything and the kitchen sink on it” (Yes) and “went to LA and made an album about being old” (Elysium).

“That was your big idea, being old,” says Tennant, nodding in the direction of his fellow Pet Shop Boy Chris Lowe, who is sitting alongside him on the sofa in a record company office in the City of London. “He explained that to our manager and she was absolutely aghast. She looked completely horrified.”

It is worth noting that in recent years the Pet Shop Boys have also written scores for Eisenstein’s 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin and a ballet based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale (2011’s The Most Incredible Thing), as well as premiering A Man From the Future – a kind of pop oratorio based on the life of Alan Turing – at the Proms. They also provided the music for a theatrical adaptation of Stephen Frears’ film My Beautiful Laundrette and a one-woman Edinburgh festival show by actor Frances Barber, based on the character of Billie Trix, the washed-up pop star she played in the Pet Shop Boys’ 2001 musical Closer To Heaven. Its revival was also noticeably more successful than the critically savaged original production. “It was a very outrageous piece for 2001, loads of drugs in it, somebody dies,” notes Tennant. “Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s company produced it and I remember him saying: ‘Well, sorry guys, I guess it was a bit too much for everybody.’”

Set against this backdrop, the Electric/Super/Hotspot trilogy does seem like a return to what you might call Pet Shop Boys basics. They began their career in 1984, working with hi-NRG producer Bobby Orlando, transforming the predominant sound of the era’s gay clubs into a very British and brainy brand of pop music, shot through with a streak of social comment so subtly done that people frequently missed the point entirely. Thirty years of the duo patiently explaining that Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money) was a satire of 80s excess doesn’t seem to have dimmed TV documentary directors’ enthusiasm for playing it in the background during footage of yuppies shouting into enormous mobile phones or spraying champagne; 1987’s Shopping was a withering portrait of London consumerism between the Big Bang and Black Monday, so shrewdly drawn you could imagine a City boy of the era banging the wheel of his Ferrari and bellowing along, oblivious to its real intent.

A lot has changed since 1984, though. For one thing, the Pet Shop Boys have sold 100m records. But while the vast majority of their 80s contemporaries have long been consigned to the nostalgia circuit or vanished entirely – “down the dumper,” as Tennant memorably put it while working as a journalist on Smash Hits – the Pet Shop Boys have become a kind of curious national institution. Still close enough to the heart of pop that younger stars flock to work with them – Hotspot features Olly Alexander of Years & Years, who, Tennant dryly notes, “is of a different generation to us, sings in a different style, more R&B, whereas Chris always says I sing like Julie Andrews” – and yet sufficiently highbrow that all the ballets and oratorios and scores for silent films feel like a natural fit rather than an affectation.

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The duo long ago reneged on their refusal to play gigs, although, as Tennant points out, his celebrated 80s line about how he “liked proving that we can’t cut it live” was meant as a joke, on account of their inability to make their grandiose plans for shows work financially – their first US tour was both a vast success and lost half a million pounds. Now, however, they are a reliably stadium-filling, festival-headlining act – a 25-date greatest hits tour of European arenas begins in May. It’s a state of affairs they seem to enjoy, but it’s not without its hiccups. “I announced I was going to retire,” sighs Tennant, “when we played a half-empty venue in Grimsby on my birthday in 2002.”

And yet here they are, in 2020, roughly where they were in 1984, occasional residents of Berlin (they own a flat in the city, its kitchen converted into a recording studio, complete with “a vocoder which we never use because I don’t know how to plug it in,” says Lowe), making music at least partly inspired by the city’s nightlife. They are regular visitors to its notoriously hedonistic techno mecca Berghain, although their approach to the club seems impressively genteel, as befits men in their 60s. “We go on Sunday lunchtimes,” smiles Tennant, “around 12 o’clock. We treat it as pre-lunch drinks – we go up to the Panorama Bar and have a glass of prosecco. You get the people who’ve been there all night, they’re absolutely twatted, but then there’s a fresh crowd coming in as well, and it’s a very interesting atmosphere. And it’s great to walk in from daylight on to the main dancefloor, which is completely dark, there’s just a kick drum playing four-to-the-floor, and it’s really, really exciting in an alienating way.”

If the duo’s penchant for satire seems less present on Hotspot, says Tennant, that’s because it was “siphoned off” on the 2019 EP Agenda, home to Give Stupidity a Chance and What Are We Going to Do About the Rich?, by some distance the angriest songs the Pet Shop Boys have ever recorded. “What was the reaction to them? Probably generally negative,” laughs Tennant. “I mean, if you’re doing something to wind people up and they get wound up, I suppose your job’s been done.”

In fact, a careworn song about the refugee crisis aside, the tone of Hotspot is often rather romantic. “Berlin’s quite a romantic place,” says Tennant. “People in Britain tend to think of Berlin, even now, as the wall and Bowie making ‘Heroes’. But it’s got 80 lakes in it, you can be in the countryside in 20 minutes, it’s such a beautiful place in the summer, you have pubs on the river. So that’s why I think it sounds warm and romantic.”

The duo are famously entertaining interviewees, Tennant’s background as a music journalist clear both in his theorising about “the discipline of the pop single” and an awareness of how things look in print. When talk turns to the current crop of earnest post-Ed Sheeran troubadours, he first, perhaps rashly, suggests: “I think the acoustic guitar should be banned, actually.” Then offers a headline for a feature based around that quote: “Pet Shop Boys Blast Lame Rock Rivals”.

Lowe, meanwhile, contrary to his public image – stony-faced and silent beneath an unending selection of preposterous hats – is drily funny about everything from his partner’s singing voice (“Neil is not from the gospel tradition, despite having been an altar boy”), to the Americanisation of British culture: “I can’t believe schools have started having prom dances. As if school isn’t bad enough anyway without a prom at the end of it. They never end well in films, do they? We’ve all seen Carrie.”

But nevertheless, an old-fashioned element of mystery and distance remains intact: what they do when they are not being the Pet Shop Boys remains largely unknown, their private lives off limits throughout their career. They don’t do social media, or rather they did, then reconsidered when they realised that it involved “interaction”, a word Tennant says with comic horror. “We were early adopters of Twitter,” says Lowe, “and early leavers. The only thing I liked about it was blocking people. I loved to block.”

“Chris,” smiles Tennant, “is the sort of person who, if he’d been a pop star in the 1970s, would have posted a turd to someone he didn’t like.”

They do feel a little out of place in the current pop climate’s obsession with authenticity and ordinariness (“authenticity is a style,” notes Tennant, “and it’s always the same style”), its lyrical penchant for what they waspishly term “narcissistic misery”.

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“We’re always looking for euphoria and excitement in music,” he says, “that sort of feeling we got the first time we heard Bobby O’s records, or Helter Skelter by the Beatles, or even She Loves You, going right back to being a child. That euphoric thing came back in with the rave scene in the 80s, but it isn’t really at the core of pop music now. Its context is social media; social media has actually created and defined the form of popular music and I think, unfortunately, that takes it down the narcissistic misery route. It doesn’t have the importance it once had, and that’s been the case for quite a while. It’s become a facet of social media. You know, everything we do, there’s people working out how to edit it down to 10 seconds, literally everything. I wonder what would happen now if you released Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Then again, says Tennant, they never did fit in. “When we started off we really did think we were going to create our own world that might reference other things, like a novelist writing a series of novels set in a particular era or something like that, where we were characters. And when we did collaborations, we judged them very carefully. So our first collaboration was with Dusty Springfield [on 1987’s What Have I Done To Deserve This?]. Our label didn’t want us to work with her, they wanted us to work with Tina Turner or someone like that. I remember the director of EMI going: ‘I can get you Streisand!’ But” – he thumps the coffee table before him for emphasis – “we wanted Dusty. Then we worked with Liza Minnelli and that was sort of politely greeted with horror, but everyone went along with it and it worked, because it’s our world.”

Of Top of the Pops, he says: “We were never the kind of performers who were going to enter into it wholeheartedly. Chris established early on that we weren’t allowed to look thrilled to be there. Whenever the camera came over to us, he’d say: ‘Don’t look triumphant!’ But we used to quite enjoy Top of the Pops, you know, being glared at by some singer because you’d said something nasty about them in the press.” He laughs. “I always liked the way that British pop stars always hated each other. When I worked on Smash Hits, I remember the editor saying: ‘We should do a piece on Paul Weller, because he’ll slag everyone off.’ The feuds! Duran Duran and Spandau, Boy George and Pete Burns arguing about who had those sort of gay dreadlocks first.”

“I don’t think bands do that now,” nods Lowe. “When we tour, we’ve got this band, young musicians, and it’s so refreshing because they’re so nice. They feel part of a musical community, they all know each other, they play on each other’s records, they’re all linked in. It wasn’t like that when we were around.”

But, of course, they are still around. Their albums – if not their singles – are inevitably Top 10 hits and sprinkled with songs that rank alongside their best. The Billie Trix cabaret show, Musik, is about to transfer to London, and there are excited rumours abounding that they are playing Glastonbury this year – “which we can’t talk about, which is annoying” – after their guest spot on the Killers’ headline set in 2019.

“Making music, there is still a magic about going into a studio and finding that sort of euphoria and excitement of something new,” says Tennant. “There’s a magic to realising there’s nothing more you can add to something, it’s finished, and then judging its value or whatever. It’s a supremely enjoyable and satisfying career, and, you know, you can’t stop doing it. I mean, if you run out of ideas, that’s when you stop.”

“I’m quite looking forward to that actually,” nods Lowe. “Running out of ideas.” He grins. “Because that’s when you go and work with Brian Eno.”

Hotspot is out today

This content was originally published here.

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vskpop · 6 years

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November 2017 ⋅ Dramama

I kind of love when all of my favourite groups release at the same time, even though it makes it incredibly hard to keep up with their activities – especially when there are two dozen members spread across any variety show imaginable. My two favourite groups with too many members both released albums this month – with great success and great sales for Seventeen, with less of an enthusiastic response for Pentagon.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that Seventeen are just a two-year-old group. They are at the point where they could do anything and fans would buy their stuff. What I truly appreciate is that this doesn’t mean they’ve started doing average or unoriginal stuff – they keep experimenting, changing up their image, working as hard as they did at the beginning.

I wasn’t super keen on how seriously they were taking themselves in Don’t Wanna Cry, so it was a relief to see them going back to their silly selves in Clap, as well as embracing the rock concept I had envisioned for them since Boom Boom.

Back in June, I had written: “I’m still mostly ok with Seventeen moving away from their bubbly, cute image, but not if it means rounding down to the blandest, trendiest thing they can come up with”. It feels that with Clap, they still moving away from the cute image, but in a way that’s more uniquely theirs and less beige (literally and figuratively).

I’ve always been so enamoured with Seventeen (and exhausted by the amount of people involved) that I never thought I could find another large group of comparable talent and with just as excellent and consistent releases. Pentagon has taken a lot from Seventeen’s Don’t Wanna Cry for their latest single Runaway and even for the previous one, Like This, but they execute it so confidently that they can stand the comparison with their senior group.

Pentagon have worked incredibly hard this year – this is their third round of promotions in 2017, and they’ve had five full comebacks in the span of thirteen months. That’s a lot even for the most prolific and active groups.

Of all these releases, Runaway has to be my favourite. I’ve read a lot of middling to negative reactions to it and boy, do I disagree. I find the rhythm addictive, and the chorus really effective without needing the drop that I was expecting when I first listened to the song. I understand that a “epic” twist would have probably made it more popular, but I love how powerful it is without being that obvious.

Both Pentagon and Seventeen have used the rest of their albums to experiment with combinations of members and genres that are not as comfortable for them. Pentagon’s rapper unit keeps being outrageous with Pretty Boys, the bona fide follow-up to Get That Drink. Seventeen finally break out of their sub-units, and the best result is without doubt rapper Vernon and singer Joshua’s Rocket.

All in all, Seventeen’s album reminds me of all the reasons why I prefer shorter releases: there is just so much material to work through, and it doesn’t feel as cohesive as it should. When I started listening to k-pop, I hated constant tiny releases, but to be honest I’ve been finding Pentagon’s strategy of short, frequent EPs much more easy to digest than a 13-song album. That’s not helping their sales in the least, but I still have hope for them.

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My less numerous but just as consistent favourite group is Monsta X, also at their third round of promotions in 2017 after the Beautiful and Shine Forever activities. In a market that is (obviously) guided by trends, Monsta X have managed to find and stick to an image that is almost uniquely theirs – musically and visually.

I’m always impressed by how well they manage to blend the hip-hop flavour of their songs and the rap sections with pop, danceable parts while still finding space to make their vocalists shine. That’s a lot to have in one song without making it feel like a mess, but they do it every time. Dramarama also continues my other favourite Monsta X trope – the hard-to-follow, vaguely sci-fi dystopian music videos, something that I could see more of from other artists as well.

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Speaking of gifts that keep on giving, EXID had already given me everything I wanted this year with Night Rather Than Day, when they picked something slightly out of their comfort zone and got the chance to highlight new strengths in the group.

This time around, their new album Full Moon and lead single DDD are a much safer choice for EXID. It’s undeniable that some parts are almost identical to some of their past hits (especially LE’s part is almost identical to Up & Down), but it’s been long enough since their previous super sexy, super catchy single that it feels new and familiar at the same time.

On a purely superficial note, the styling of this comeback was perfect. Whoever decided to put lilac hair on Hani deserves an award, and it was nice to see a girl group do a whole comeback in full-length trousers for once, even if they were jeggings.

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While we’re on the theme of concepts, I honestly would stay away from food-based concepts in an industry/culture so obsessed with thinness and dieting. I was sort of OK with Ice Chu, but Digipedi and whoever worked on this Gugudan comeback is the worst. Not a lot in k-pop this year has infuriated me as much as seeing Mina being “stick-and-carrot”ed with a donut – Mina, a minor (she just turned 18) who was ridiculed and disparaged because of her size, and made to lose a huge amount of weight after Produce 101. Fuck you, Jellyfish.

I was 100% less enraged by seeing that Red Velvet have been finally given a decent concept. This is probably the closest we’ll get to a “velvet” concept now that Red Velvet is basically the only SM Entertainment girl group, and by this I mean that the members literally wore velvet throughout the promotion.

My favourite thing about early Red Velvet was their signature use of chanty, nursery rhyme-y melodies in a creepy way, and I’m so glad to see that with Peek-A-Boo they brought this at the forefront.

Even if the song was garbage – which it isn’t, I’m obsessed with it – I would be so pleased by Red Velvet getting a good concept that I wouldn’t even be bothered. If this video and their MMA VCR are anything to go by, we might actually see more of this witchy aesthetic from them.

I do wonder if this twist in their concept is a prelude to a new girl group debuting at SM, just like SNSD and f(x)’s respective “sexy” and “edgy” turns came just before a younger group debuted.

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The only thing that I found marginally annoying about Peek-A-Boo is that this would have been a perfect Halloween comeback and, with a 17 November release, it was about a month too late to be tied in with the season.

Same goes for KARD, even though I found the horror twist in their music video for You In Me so clever and unexpected. Even though no song of theirs has reached the heights of Oh Na Na for now, I keep being surprised by how they manage to do so much with the same basic elements – two female singers, two male rappers, dancehall flavours.

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MORE SONGS OF NOTE

She’s Mine – VAV Pouring – DAY6 Jelly – Jeon Soyeon New – Yves (Loona) Dear – Snuper

STRAYS

NCT 127 Limitless Japanese version, aka this song finally gets a decent music video after almost a year:

Taemin’s personal vault of random material releases the VCR for Thirsty:

#seventeen #pentagon #monsta x #exid #gugudan #red velvet #KARD

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