Friday, 10 May 2019

CD, 'Vikingtown Sound' - May 10


Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Sometimes, it is bearable, but that is being deliberately optimistic. Now onto C&D?

Last night’s episode, ‘Vikingtown Sound’, continued to develop C&D’s S2 plot further. Ty & Dy are the couple, and while on their own they are rather dysfunctional, together they are unstoppable. Well, maybe not, since VS finale showed Ty’s powers fritzing out and him collapsing, so now it is up to Dy to be the rescuer instead. Detective Brigid is coming along for the ride, but she has her own complication – Mayhem.

…The good news here is that Mayhem is trying to be a hero here, and she is sort of succeeding. Whereas Andre is apparently shaping up to be MCU’s version of the demon D’Spayre, (Despair, got, it, cough? Marvel puns are usually quite awful), Mayhem is genuinely trying to stop him, and she’s succeeding, but the fact is that she’s, well, mayhem; she may not be specifically good or evil, but she is chaotic and uncontrollable, and odds are, her help comes with its’ own price, unless she’ll be able to master it and make peace with her other half – Brigid.

And then there was aunt Voodoo. Was, because Andre killed her at the end of VS. That said, before the audience was shown that Voodoo was aware of Mayhem’s interference in Andre’s plot, was maybe in contact with her, and was trying to help her – maybe? Certainly, Voodoo did not seem to be perturbed when Andre killed her with his music, the end.

Andre himself… On one hand, his evil plan is being, well, a pimp. He is running a brothel of mentally broken down girls, and Lia is his madam, essentially. Not the greatest villainous plot in history, but given the fact that so far C&D are your friendly neighbourhood heroes, this sort of evil is just what they can handle; ‘handle’ being the loose term, since so far Andre is holding their own against them, by trying to keep them apart and disharmonious. Ty & Dy, however, are getting onto him, thanks to Mayhem, and maybe aunt Voodoo…which brings us to the other side.

The voodoo. VM talks about loa, and Andre, in particular, learned about Damballah. In real life, Damballah (or just Damballa) is a serpent spirit and ‘The Grand Master’, the primordial creator of life. He is so far out of Andre’s reach, that Andre should wish to be the man in the moon instead, it would be more realistic and more up to his calibre. That said, aunt Voodoo did tell him, that he himself was becoming a loa, (a spirit/god), (but she refused to help him, and so he killed her), and on the other hand? The promo for the next week shows Ty & Dy interacting with a baron Samedi-typed character.

First things first. In the world of Robert Howard and his followers, (the world of Conan and Red Sonja), Damballa is a serpent-god of evil, he usually takes second hand to Set, who is based upon real-life ancient Egyptian demon-god Apop, Apep, or Apophis, the monstrous serpent who would eat the sun, but the Egyptians’ sun god Ra was ‘the world’s buffest grandpa’, to quote Rick Riordan, and is able to beat-off Apop nightly. The end, and if you want to know more about Apop, you should real ‘The Kane Chronicles’ trilogy of Riordan’s – it might not be as good as his PJ series, but still a fun read. The point is that in fiction serpent gods have a bad rep, (and are often conflated – never mind that there was nothing serpentine about Set in real life; it’s hard to tell just what kind of animal Set is depicted as – dog, jackal, hyena and donkey were all suggested as likely candidates, but never a snake), and then we got baron Samedi.

If in real life Damballa is the primordial creator (and is sometimes syncretized with Christ, though he has both a wife and a mistress), then Samedi is the loa of death and the dead, a grim reaper who is dressed to the nines rather than just a robed skeleton with a scythe. (He has a wife too, but it is unlikely that we will see her in C&D). Put otherwise, Ty & Dy are going to the land of the dead, and it will be a team effort to leave it – but returning from the dead to the living is always a team effort.

This brings us to AoS, and not just because on one hand this show has encounters with the land of the dead itself, and because it is returning to TV tonight, (May 10, 2019). AoS is mentioned here because Andre is a more down-to-earth version of Dr. Whitehall, (Whitehall hadn’t been a pimp, but he was trying to use the Obelisk to become a god of some sort), Lia is a better version of agent 33, (‘better’ as in ‘better depicted’) – aka a villain that is so pitiful that she’s almost sympathetic, almost, and Connors is also a ‘better depicted’ of Ward going on a redemption path. Mind you, ‘Blindspot’ in S2 did a better version of a Ward-like villain going onto a redemption path, (sort of), but we are talking about C&D here and now. Essentially, in the second plot line of VM, Connors and Ty’s mother have a showdown of some sort, have their epiphanies, and – their breakthroughs. Will they emerge as better people from this? What will happen next? Hopefully, we will able to learn next week.

This is it for now, however. See you all soon!

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