Of Cybersix and other shows

Let us talk about a past cartoon series, called Cybersix. In those series, a leather-clad, genetically enhanced, (cross-dressing) super heroine fought against various Frankenstein-like monsters of an evil Nazi scientist, von Richter. This went on for 13 very successful episodes, and then it stopped. I cannot help but wonder why.

Cybersix had all the elements that a show – even a cartoon show – needs to succeed. It had scripts that were decent at worst and impressive at best. It had very wonderful audio, including the actors who did the voices. The technical details were also solid – yes, it was mostly the colors, the drawings (background), but still, they worked well. 

The fanbase? Back in 1999 fanfiction and fanart sites were not as well developed as they are now, but they were already there, plus the show did reruns, at least for a while. Yes, for a single-season, 13-episode show it had reruns for few years indicating that it was successful, at least for a while. 

And yet there was no follow-up; the last episode ended with an open hook that implied that some sort of a sequel could be in the wings; but nothing followed. Cybersix just died – irrelevant whether a whimper or a bang – and so far it is not being resurrected. Why?

Hard to say. The original comics did not belong to the modern day entertainment giants – DC, Marvel, Disney: Cybersix hails from Argentina, not the US. It is possible that as an ‘alien’ it was treated as an unnecessary rival that had to be put down, not encouraged by the giants mentioned above: the series is very popular in Canada, Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe, but apparently not in the States – maybe that’s the problem.

Of course there is also the fact that Cybersix’s creators were involved in a lawsuit against a TV show called Dark Angel, which was American (i.e. the States) and which did have similarities with Cybersix; eventually the lawsuit was dropped by Cybersix’s team, but Dark Angel itself was also cancelled, just after two seasons; perhaps that is why Cybersix hasn’t returned yet – maybe there was some sort of a deal to put down both shows in order to settle the suit...

Still, Cybersix may still have its last hurrah in 2014, as Discotek Media apparently plans to release all 13 episodes on a DVD, so let us wait and see...and as we do that, let me also point out to other shows that will be returning onto the TV screens in a near future.

1) MLP: FIM. The 4^th season is coming, and it seems that Twilight Sparkle will be once again battling against the forces of chance and change: the rumors say that the elder princesses, Celestia and Luna, will be kidnapped and TS shall go to the Everfree Forest in order to save them. The Everfree Forest is a land where seasons change on their own and animals and plants are not dependent on ponies to live their lives – therefore it is evil (according to the show’s logic) and must be avoided. And people wonder what is wrong with America – if your own TV shows undermine your own politics, naturally at least some of the new generation will grow up with conflicting messages in their heads; yes conflict may be a part of democracy, but MLP: FIM has no democracy in it whatsoever – zing!

And speaking of MLP: FIM, some people were giving Andy Price a hard time because he was going to be drawing a winged Twilight in the show’s comic-verse. People! Grow up! Andy does only what he is paid to do – if he is paid to draw a winged Twilight he will do it, a wingless Twilight – he will do it too. This fact only points-out that the show’s 4^th TV season is indeed at hand and the people at Hasbro have finally began to try to combine their multiple ‘verses together, make them more coherent and compatible with each other, nothing more.

2) And secondly, the Canadian TV series, Lost Girl, is also returning – on November 10^th. It has also dealt with a changing main heroine, but whereas MLP: FIM is saying loud and clear to everybody – winged TS is here to stay at least for a while - Lost Girl has had Bo ascend (dawn?) and then largely forgot about it – Bo before and after dawning is the same Bo, only perhaps with some newer powers. That said, the show-verse itself appears to be changing: now there are humans that are aware of the Fae and are not cowed by their powers; they may actually seeking to exploit them, as Isaac Taft tried to do. However, the show’s slot has also changed, from 9 to 10 pm, making me wonder if the show is slowly losing popularity – or has acquired some enemies that try to push it out of the earlier time slot to make it harder to watch – or it will contain even more mature and dark elements than before; either way, I will certainly watch it; hopefully, you will to.

So: one good show from the past that may be coming back on DVD, and two other shows that are still coming to the TV screen with new seasons and episodes.

S.H.I.E.L.D., Oct 22 - Girl...

In this episode we get to revisit the pilot episode of “Agents” on several levels. First, it is the obvious parallels between Skye & Hooded Hero in the pilot and Reina & Scorch in “Girl”...to a point. Skye, whatever associations she had with Rising Tide, was nowhere as deep as Reina is, who is high enough in the command chain to actually command other people, except (or not) the doctor but more on that below.

Secondly, the episode once again refocuses on Skye and her associations with Rising Tide. In this episode her loyalties become divided when her ex-boyfriend, Milton, gets involved. Skye chooses initially Milton over her teammates, and karma (well, the script, if you will) punishes her – she loses all of her initial privileges with the S.H.I.E.L.D. crew and may actually be arrested. Or not, but she certainly loses their trust and it hurts.

Let us speak honestly. In this episode Skye not only has to make a choice and live with its consequences (as does Milton, I suppose), but she also gets to show the audience (well, Chloe Bennet does, anyways) how much she has changed since the pilot episode as compared to Milton, who has not. Skye has grown more responsible and less greedy...but truth to tell, she probably was like that initially, Coulson and crew just brought it out...except for the secret.

What is the secret? Coulson now knows that Skye got involved against S.H.I.E.L.D. in search of her natural parents who are gone and S.H.I.E.L.D. got something to do with it. What exactly will be revealed in the next episodes, but what he does not know is that Skye got involved on Rising Tide’s orders with S.H.I.E.L.D. in the first place. Not that it matters – Skye now knows the stakes she is playing at and knows her choice as well.

Agent Coulson...no offense, but he had certainly turned onto Skye very quickly. Sure, that is what this episode’s script demanded, but still... What, he expected her to change her philosophy as soon as she joined? Well, maybe if his gut told him so...but his gut is wrong – see above.

The same can be said for Fitz – Skye has betrayed them after all they had been through? Perhaps, (she certainly did), but they have not been through that much...maybe he is talking about quality rather than quantity of their adventures, but still...

Speaking of Fitz and other agents – sadly, they did not get much character development beyond the usual, though agent May did let her hair down, or up, in the beginning of the episode when she offered Coulson to spar with him, and she was not dressed in her usual training leathers; also, the way she took Scourge out in the end – epic!

Speaking of Scourge – if he only waited for 5 to 9 days until the platelets taken out from his blood stream by the doctor, he would have been back to normal: his body would have recovered the drained blood platelets by then, so no fiery explosive death. Of course, if S.H.I.E.L.D. had not gotten overconfident and passed this particular mutant over to Professor X. and his school none of the above would’ve happened to begin with, but what’s done is done.

Finally, what it is with the “Agents” and Putin? President Putin isn’t a likeable fellow or even a decent one or anything, but why mention him at least for the second time in the season? As far as he will be concerned, that is just free PR, nothing more, but that is real life. As this episode with its combustible villain and the mysterious Clairvoyant (hopefully, this is not a synonym for the Trousers Titan, cough) shows, “Agents” are at the strongest when they are not involved with real life.

So: “Agents” are no longer redundant or realistic and a very important plot development has taken place. Let us see what will come out of this instead.

S.H.I.E.L.D., Oct 15 - Eye-Spy

In this week’s episode of “Agents”, the agents have to deal with a rogue agent, who has apparently defaulted and joined the dark side, robbing banks, and armored cars, and safes in order to get to some bizarre formula that not even S.H.I.E.L.D. can figure out. 

However, because this is Marvel™, and Whedon, things are not as they seem – the ex-agent, Akeela, has a cyborgnetic eye that will kill her if she tries to go back to the light side. It is up to the show’s heroes to make things right again, and they deliver!

Agent May livens up somewhat and becomes more human in this episode and less of an emotionless “cyborg” that she was in “0-8-4”, for comparison. She does not kill Akeela and actually appears to be warming up to Coulson even though their personalities still clash as they did in the previous episodes.

The FitzSimmons duo are still comically reliving despite themselves, or their intentions, perhaps. Yes, they successfully operate on Akeela, but somehow their babbling... it is still funny, perhaps intentionally so.

This brings me to my first two comments. Firstly, the dendrotoxins used on Akeela are neurotoxins made from the venom of mamba snakes, a group of 4 species of highly venomous – and agile – cousins of cobras. Secondly, the comic relief bit – it is not so much annoying as over-the-top and established: practically from the pilot episode the FitzSimmons duo have been alleviating the tension, the audience knows much less about their back story than about anyone else’s: they are seemingly secondary characters without much personality behind them. I say personality, because their characters are largely the same without much difference between them. Considering that the “Agents” are built around teamwork...see below.

There is chemistry between Grant and Skye, which is not surprising. “Agents” may be about teamwork, but it is also about couples – the FitzSimmons duo, May and Coulson, Grant and Skye. Coulson, true, tries to bond with everyone...but the FitzSimmons duo is on the bottom: they are important to the plot, they provide the scientific knowhow, but to the scriptwriters, at least, they are the least important characters, period. “Agents”, or rather the main cast of the show, is fieldwork oriented, and the FitzSimmons duo is situated mostly in the background. Possibly, they will have an episode or two to themselves, but that is anyone’s bet, really.

As for Grant and Skye their relationship continues to evolve even as they work together to imitate Akeela infiltrate a Belorussian scientific facility to acquire the formula, as mentioned previously. When Grant had to seduce, cough, a security guard - that was quite funny. Then again, so were the glasses – Clark Kent references probably abounded. That is sweet, but also...predictable.

Let us be fair. There is nothing wrong with being predictable; it is just that in Whedon’s earlier works – BtVS, Firefly™ - there was nothing particularly predictable about them. It is as if Whedon is taking the easy way out: they want a show about the States being great? (Never mind that the shutdown is still going on, ha-ha.) I will do that and nothing more. The passion, the raw energy that was so noticeable in the pilot episode is gone, and what we have is a solid, but rather stogy, Cold-War-reminiscent, spy thriller, down to the Victory Square. While there are several Victory Squares in the world, my money is on it being the Belorussian one, as opposed to one in British Columbia, Canada. Belarus seems to have become a stand-in for Russia and yes, why not, it is just that the Cold War is done and gone; there is no need to revive on both sides.

Of course it may be that JW is just tired, just as Jon Taffer from “Bar Rescue” is. In the episode “Crappy Cantina” you can see that he had enough with bar rescuing and as a result the cantina in question had to close even though he had supposedly rescued it. Maybe JW is suffering from the same fatigue, who knows?

In any case, the “Eye-Spy” episode was good, solid, impressive, but – uninspiring. It was a typical action flick without any of the charisma that BtVS was famous for, and for many people that would be fine, but for a screenwriter, author, producer, etc, of Whedon’s caliber that is disappointing. I just hope that the next episodes will show the “Agents” – and the agents – get out of this funk, because even with the lack of inspiration it is a good show and has the potential of being a great one.

S.H.I.E.L.D., Oct 8 - The Asset

In this week’s episode of “Agents” the teamwork hi-jinks continue. An S.H.I.E.L.D. agent (a physicist) was kidnapped by his former colleague, and it is up to Coulson’s misfit team to rescue him. Only... the team is not that misfit any more. In “0-8-4” (last week’s episode) the group had to work together basically for the first time to defeat Peru’s commandos – they did it by working as a team, if you do not get it. In this episode they are already working as a team without too many problems. Skye is the newbie on the team and Ward’s physical training is grueling (probably) so there is some tension but nothing that remains unresolved before the episode ends; Coulson’s little problems – reloading his gun, his wardrobe consists of identical black suits – are mostly tension breakers and aren’t really relevant to the plot; and agent May decides that she would rather be in the field than just pilot the agents’ plane. The last part really came unexpectedly – May gave no indication of that during the rest of the episode and revealed this to Coulson at the very end of this episode – and honestly while it will be interesting to see how this will change the team’s dynamic, we could have lived without it as well.

As for the team’s dynamic so far, it has worked. Skye used her feminine willies and Rising Tide connections to be invited to the villain’s party, and used to the technology given by team FitzSimmons to gain access for Ward and Coulson to come inside as well and save the day. Simple, easy and it works – except for the actual rescue part, but first...

It may sound strange – this is a show whose characters have to deal with “Tesseract energies” and “gravitonium” (probably right next to Wakanda’s “vibranium” on the periodic table) – but “Agents” may end up rather predictable and mundane as far as a show goes. There is only so much you can do with the “secret agents” plotline before your audience realizes that they have seen it before – in a Bond movie, most likely – and will change the channels, causing the ratings to plummet and the show to fail and fall. This is exactly what “Agents” are in danger of at this point – “The Asset’s” (episode’s) Maltese settings are straight out of a Bond film, and the agents’ behavior was clichéd, though the actors’ acting was flawless. The only twist came at the end, when “The Asset” – aka Dr. Franklin Hall revealed himself to be the mastermind behind his own kidnapping in order to destroy gravitonium (element that reversed Earth’s gravitational field) and his kidnapper and ex-colleague, Dr. Quinn...alongside the rest of the island republic of Malta, whose laws prevent S.H.I.E.L.D. from launching a mass rescue, Avengers-style. (If anyone is wondering, Malta is a real island republic in the Mediterranean Sea, but the laws are made-up, alongside the rest of S.H.I.E.L.D.-verse.)

Again, not unlike the pilot episode of the series, there are strong overtones of a special agent reasoning with a terrorist. Not unlike the pilot episode, the ‘terrorist’ gets up shot, only this time in the glass... that separated Coulson and Hall during their final confrontation from the gravitonium in the centrifuge-like device. Hall fell, dying for his beliefs, right onto and into gravitonium, causing the device to abort the final countdown, and, according to the episode’s final scene, bonding with it. So far so good, if you ignore the fact that Hall did die for his beliefs – Quinn is a money-grabbing bastard (who got away in the commotion, BTW) – and that S.H.I.E.L.D. is worse. Skye, incidentally, believes that S.H.I.E.L.D. is a better deal out of the two: good for her, for when the time comes this means that she will work with her S.H.I.E.L.D. teammates and survive, rather than work with her Rising Tide teammates and die, for Coulson can be that ruthless if the fate of the world (or at least a country) is at stake. That said, Hall did die for his beliefs (sort of) and that compels me to say that such people are a force to be reckoned with... but that is real life. “Agents”, as evidenced by Malta’s laws concerning their agency, are quite detached from it and can post whatever they want – as long as they do not forget the ratings.

And it seems that they have forgotten them – or at least their scriptwriters died. The pilot episode featured 12.12 million viewers, “0-8-4” – only 8.6 (roughly one-quarter less) and “The Asset” – only 7.8 (roughly one-third). At this rate “Agents” will not survive their first season: for example Impossible Pictures’ show “Sinbad 2013” started with 1.9 million viewers and finished with 0.87 million – roughly one half of the initial viewers. The result? The show was cancelled after just one season, and their decrease took 12 episodes and a much slower rate than what the “Agents” show so far. Considering that I like the “Agents” it would be a pity if they were cancelled after their first season as well.

So: great acting but a rather mundane and a predictable plot – not a winning combination. Does anyone disagree?

Sinead vs. Miley - WTF?

Miley, Miley, Miley, are you an agent of patriarchy or not?

Lately the American society has developed some sort of a love-hate relationship with the former “Hannah Montana” star: they claim to hate her, but they love to write about her at the same time. She may be a disgrace, a stripper, an agent of patriarchy or a tactics-strategy genius – take your pick. Her “wrecking ball” clip has caused quite a commotion among the American public, making Miley famous (or infamous, it is possible that she does not care) even before her performance at SNL – and then in came Sinead O’Connor to puff her up even more.

Let us elaborate. Sinead wrote an open letter to Miley after her initial infamous performance, urging her to get help and to clean up her act. This is not quite unusual – lately internet sites (like MetaPicture and Yahoo) post various open letters between people, urging them to get help or to f*ck off instead. What is unusual is that Miley replied to it, telling Sinead (rather crudely, perhaps) that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, reminded how Sinead tore a photo of the pope John Paul II and compared her to Amanda Bynes in general.

Sinead’s Irish temper flared up, she threatened to sue Miley. Miley appeared to offer Sinead an olive branch, offering to talk to her before SNL. Sinead promptly refused, and again told Miley that she needed help. So far Miley had not replied to this – third, so far – open letter. Did Sinead win, then?

Let us think about it. On one hand, Miley’s behavior is crude at best and reminiscent of Lindsey Lohan and Brittney Spears at their worst. Plus, she did start it, by mentioning Sinead’s name (though completely innocently) first. On the other hand, what did Sinead expect, when she wrote an open letter to Miley? That it would remain unanswered? (If so, then why write it in the first place?) Or that Miley would repent and declare Sinead to be her new guide in life and spiritual-behaviouristic guru? No, seriously, what?

If Miley’s mention of Sinead was something of a provocation, then Sinead went fully along, writing a rather condescending letter to Miley. And Miley, to everyone’s surprise, replied (see above), by suggesting that Sinead does not have the moral superiority to talk to her like that – and Sinead was caught. Instead of keeping that same sanctimonious/morally superior tone, she threatened to sue, threatened that various advocates of mentally unstable people will sue, etc. if Miley does not back down.

Miley did not back down, no one else appeared to have supported Sinead, and instead Amanda Palmer (not Bynes) has written to Sinead in support of Miley, telling that Miley is the one in charge of her own performances and whatnot, and that Sinead should back down. Miley herself has tweeted Sinead, offering to talk to her before Miley’s SNL performance, but Sinead has appeared to have recovered her moral high ground, telling Miley that she will talk to the younger woman only after she had help (to paraphrase her) and that she won’t mock the American either. Good for Sinead!

Only, in the end, Sinead has caused more harm than good. Miley has not apologized to her (at least not publicly) and probably will not apologize in the future. So far, the rest of the American cultural community has not come to Sinead’s defense either, no matter what their own feelings on Miley’s performance are, nor has anyone else. Amanda Palmer has actually turned on Sinead, implying that the moral superiority are on Miley’s side as well, so all that the Irishwoman could do was back down as magnanimously as she could. It is doubtful that she will write a fourth letter to Miley now, not if she really wants to take her to court - with dubious results.

Well, not that dubious in regards to Sinead’s moral superiority – by the time the case of “O’Connor vs. Cyrus” would be over, it would be long gone along with anything that Sinead really values (at least in theory), like integrity. The American society supports Miley and not her and that what matters. All that Sinead really achieved was to give Miley another popularity boost just before the SNL one. Thank you, Sinead, Miley really needed that.

And Miley...odds are she was just being herself, but it is also possible that she started all of this just to get that popularity boost. Sinead is from Ireland, few people in the States have heard of her, and fewer yet want to support her against Miley, so Sinead was really at a disadvantage, an easy mark. That is cheap, Miley, and you know it.

So. Is Miley a tactical music genius or just Justin Bieber with boobs? Is Sinead an innocent victim or just a hypoctical busybody who was blown up on her petard? You tell me.