Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and you can always
count on your family members’ to make it work. Sometimes, separately, in modest
doses, they can work, but put them all together, and they do not, yourself
included. What had Gollum (in ‘Hobbit’) say? “Baggins, Baggins, thief! We hate
it, we hate it, we hate it forever!” Yeah, that. The old hobgoblin knew what he
was talking about after all…
Now that that is out of the way, where do we stand with AoS?
To my embarrassment, I hadn’t learned in time that AoS was bumped to May 2019,
(aka the last month of spring), nor that there’s going to be a seventh season on
top of the earlier-promised sixth, but…
But the truth is that AoS is being ‘cute’ again. The truth
is that their seventh season is going to be 13 episodes long too, just as the
sixth is, so odds are is that it and the sixth season are really a single
season, cut into two. This tendency was evident even way back in AoS’ S1, and
by S3, we had a nameless first half, and ‘the fallen agent’ story arc in the
second. In S4, there were really three mini-seasons – the Ghost Rider, the LMD
and the Framework, and though by S5 that approach was abandoned, the first and
the second halves of S5 were once more two related, yet separate, story arches.
And now, it seems, AoS S6+7 took this approach one step further, by making each
half-season into a ‘proper’ season. Whether it will work, we will have to see.
And as for the latest AoS clip, one that features Coulson’s
look-alike, cough? Yeah, Gregg could always play his character in a ‘tough guy’
persona, no doubt about it. Here, he seems to be delivering it again, so yay. Whatever
problems AoS had in the past, the actors’ acting was not it. The script was
often reset and recycled, and the characters were often disrespected, (as
opposed to ‘Blindspot’ and even ‘Reverie’), but that wasn’t really the actors
fault, now was it? Fitz’s stranded in space plot – yeah, it was probably
originally intended to be Lincoln, (possibly as a bridge to introduce the Kree
that in RL came in S5), but because Luke Mitchell quit AoS and went to ‘Blindspot’,
Lincoln just died instead. Pity, and it cost AoS in the long run, as Lincoln’s
fans joined the fans of HuntingBird and Ward as they stopped watching the canon
and went on to develop their own fanfics, fanvids, and so on. Probably not the
best idea of AoS, but it never could fully hide its real-life problems from the
audience, and yes, this is one of those problems that plague the show. Plus, as
Jeff’s statement at CM premiere indicated, the actors do not get along with
each other too. What is next?
We’ve began to tentatively play the new ‘Tyrant’s Grasp’
adventure path; we may or may not move past the first (out of six) installments,
and we’ve started to play ‘Dead Roads’ only because of nostalgia regarding us
playing ‘Mummy’s Mask’ campaign. The reason for nostalgia is two-fold. One is
the psychopomps that are appearing in ‘Dead Roads’ – we’ve encountered them in
the past in ‘Empty Graves’, when a necromancer began to bring all sorts of
undead creatures to life. This was when we have properly encountered the nosoi,
the vanth and the esobok psychopomps, in various ways. (We also acquired the ‘summon
psychopomp’ spells too on that campaign). And the second are the shabti, whom we
have encountered first in the Mask bestiary as a PC race, so it is interesting
to deal with them as proper opponents, as well as revisit the psychopomps as
well. Hence, we are currently playing ‘Dead Roads’, what happens next is anyone’s
guess.
And for now, this is it. See you all soon!
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