‘The Patriot’ was aired yesterday; was it good?
On a certain, technical, level – yeah. ‘The Patriot’
promoted the series plot further; it gave Jeffrey Mace, (the titular patriot,
technically speaking), character development, and it brought back general
Talbot…
Well, actually, it brought back Hydra. Right now, they are still not back to being 100%; they are
still being dominated/integrated into the Watchdogs, (and is anyone surprised?
Really?), but they are back, and at least one of them has this oversized
machete – apparently, he is setting himself up to being Mack’s nemesis…maybe.
This has happened before; in ‘Primeval’, they
killed-off their number one villain, Helen Cutter, at the end of their S3…and
quickly realized that they didn’t have anyone to replace her; they brought her
back, sort of, at the end of S5, and-
-And then they got cancelled; both them, and P: NW,
(the spin-off), which is a pity; both shows had plenty of problems of their
own, especially the original ‘Primeval’, which replaced about 80% of its’ main cast
by the final, fifth, season: even AoS isn’t that bad – they really just
replaced Brett Dalton (Grant) with Henry Simmons (Mack), while Nick Blood
(Lance), Adrienne Palicki (Bobbi) and Luke Mitchell (Lincoln) just left – Luke in
particular is doing well over at ‘Blindspot’ as Roman…
Pause. Stop babbling. Try again.
One of AoS’ main issues is its’ inability to move
forwards, (something that is also plaguing the new SW movies, BTW). The S3, (especially the second, post-Maveth,
half) felt like a continuation of S2, with Andrew/Lash being the male
counterpart to post-Terrigenesis Raina. (They even looked similar, gender
differences aside). Now, with Talbot back, and Hydra back, and Radcliffe &
Aida Mk II acting almost like a softer version of Whitehall and agent 33, the
LMD arc feels almost like AoS’ S2 revisited…again.
No, seriously, I wrote about this. In S2, Hydra tried
to capture May and replace her with a doppelganger – Kara Palamas, wearing a
photostatic veil. Coulson uncovered the truth within an episode: guess these
days his Maydar is on the fritz or something. However, the point is that
Radcliffe and Aida (is Aida Mk II even an android or what?) have done the same
thing, and AoS itself has done the same thing: it has Ning-Ma Wen, (i.e. May)
play two characters at once – May and agent 33. In second Maya Stojan took half
of S2 Kara’s role…but AoS handled Kara’s plotline very badly, so I’m not
getting in-depth into this.
What I am getting in here is that the ‘LMD’ plotline
follows a similar premise, save that the LMD May does not have the same scarred
face that Kara-as-May had. Seriously, was May supposed to be a villain on AoS?
She even had her own flashback back in S2 – so far the only other people who
had it were Grant in S1 and Gideon Malick in S3, both villains. By contrast, ‘The
Patriot’ did fill-in the gaps of
Jeffrey Mace’s backstory, but without
a flashback, and he is being presented as a sympathetic and not-really-evil
character, so yeah?
…Of course, odds of Mace dying at the end of S4 are still
fairly good, as AoS has real life problems of holding onto cast members ever
since the pointless kill-off at the end of S2, so there is that.
In addition, I confess – I am mentioning AoS’ S2 excessively
often, but as far as I am concerned? AoS itself just cannot let go and returns
to it, plotwise, repeatedly, so S2 cannot be avoided if you are talking about AoS,
so let us talk about something else. ‘For Honor’, maybe.
Not only its’ beta testing starts this month, (Jan
2017), but the final three playable characters were unveiled. They are the
Valkyrie, the Lawbringer, and the Nobushi. All three of them are armed…not with
ranged weapons, but with weapons that have reach – greater reach than the
weapons of the Raider, the Warden and the Kensei, for comparison.
The Valkyrie, (named, naturally, after the Valkyrie of
the Norse myths), is armed with a specialized buckler and a spear. It is an
ordinary spear, unlike the Nobushi’s naginata, which is also a spear,
technically, but with a proportionally longer blade, which is also designed for
slicing, (as a sabre would), rather than for stabbing. DW S1 featured, compared
and contrasted the two weapons both in the episode 1x02, ‘Viking vs. Samurai’
and in the first part of its’ ‘Back for Blood’ special, where the Samurai faced
off with a Spartan, also armed with a spear, (and lost). While the Europeans
used their spear for directly forward, straight thrusts and stabs, the Samurai
used his naginata almost like an axe, or even a polearm, using more sweeping
moves, (similar to the greataxe used by the Viking in their battle).
Speaking of polearms? This brings us to the Lawbringer’s
poleaxe, which is basically a halberd, (also used by various fighters in DW, in
all three seasons, BTW). A poleaxe
has an axe head for slicing, a spearhead for stabbing, and a hook for grabbing and
pulling down enemy cavalry fighters. This makes it different from such weapons
as the bardiche and the Dane-axe, (used by the Raider of ‘For Honor’), which
are just axes on extra-long handles. This sort of brings as back to AoS, where
Mack just uses axes as his signature weapon for no particular reason, but hey! He
now probably has an archenemy of his own, armed with a machete, (a signature
weapon?), and-
That fight was important in other ways. First, LMD May
discovered that she is an LMD because of it, (also, her metal flesh is tough
enough to bend saw blades), and second, she fought the machete-wielding Hydra
agent with a shovel. WTF with that? It is probable that initially it was
Adrienne Palicki, Bobbi Morse/Mockingbird, who was supposed to be Coulson’s
team in S1, while May would have joined it in S2 as part of Gonzales’ crew - or
maybe as the initially brainwashed, but later redeemed agent 33…who knows? This
did not happen, S2 handled Kara’s plotline very badly, and right now, NCB/Elena
‘Yo-Yo’ Rodriguez is playing a recurring Latin-American character on AoS instead…
(Of course, the position of AoS and the rest of MCU in
the acting world is somewhat ambiguous in itself: recently, CNN released a
mini-series called ‘Creators’, featuring Ruth Negga – Raina of AoS. AoS was not
mentioned at all. WTF with that? It is not so
bad.)
To conclude: just like ‘Broken Promises’, ‘The Patriot’
was a good and solid episode, which isn’t necessarily what the AoS needs right
now. It tried a partial reboot with its’ S4, but it needs to complete that
reboot, or else it will not work. Conversely, ‘For Honor’ is shaping to be an
awesome wargame; regardless, this is it for this talk – see you all later!
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