Wednesday, 8 April 2020

Quarantine entry #18 - April 8


Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and so, to distract myself, I went back to DW, to its’ final season for a change. This time, I re-watched the ‘Teddy Roosevelt vs Lawrence of Arabia’ episode, and again, I was hit as to how unbalanced the entire DW became by S3.

As I said before, since S2 onwards, DW became either prejudiced or partisan in favor of the U.S., but in S2, the show did downplay this fact. In S3, it did not... and it was bad at it. In the U.S. vs. North Korea episode, the U.S. team won by half a percent. Half a percent! This sort of fudging could have satisfied neither the U.S. partisans nor the fair play team. However, in ‘Teddy Roosevelt vs. Lawrence of Arabia’ the fudging was different, as I have written before.

To recap: in the first round, the U.S. team won fairly: the British’ Vickers machine gun jammed where the U.S. Gatling gun did not. That is fair. Third round – the British Jambiya got the edge of the U.S. Bowie. Fair again. Second round – the U.S. Krag tied with the British Lee-Enfield. This is where things got murky, because the DW team justified in using the Krag over anything else by mentioning the U.S. Cuban adventure – aka an attempt by the U.S. to capture Cuba. It failed, among other things, by the Krag’s flaws, so using the Krag on the DW was the sticky point.

The most disappointing thing for me, however, was this episode’s staged fight – Roosevelt’s tactics in taking down Lawrence were very much the same as Washington’s taking down Napoleon in the S3 premiere episode. This is not too surprising – apparently, for its’ S3, DW wanted to show the American supremacy over the British and the French – but rather disappointing. In the first two seasons DW was really good, for all of its’ flaws; in S3 – not so much. Maybe that is one of the reasons as to why it went down, aka got cancelled. I still enjoyed observing the WWI tactics displayed in this episode, though. Anything else?

Yes, in fact: today I want to return to my original fiction, so here is a short drabble of a story, to give you something different:

A fox was hunting during winter - for hares, mice, rabbits, etc. Once upon a time, it came across a hare, and promptly began to chase the latter. The hare fled past a stump without paying attention... and a really big great horned owl was sitting there. It saw the hare and took off, slamming the mammal into the snow, pinning it down. Only... this was not the Mesozoic, The age of reptiles and birds, for the fox, which had generated its’ own burst of speed, had half-leapt and half-slammed into the owl, knocking it off the hare.

A great horned owl is just as formidable as its’ relatives, the eagle and the snowy owl are, but the red fox got a really good grip this time...

When the noise ended, the hare looked out of its’ snowy pit and the first thing it saw was the red fox, busy plucking and eating the big bird. It shot the hare a look over a bloody muzzle, and the hare fled, leaving the fox in the field by itself with the prize. It may be the Cainozoic now, aka the age of mammals, but the mammals were not quite equal to each other either.

End

…Did you like it? Comments and criticisms are welcome! But for now this it, see you all soon instead!

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