The Meg - April 9

The long-mastered and semi-obligatory disclaimer: the real life sometimes…no, not really suck, but is crazy and unpredictable and sometimes is very easy to hate, or at least to feel confused, for those of us for whom ‘hate’ is a too specific and concrete word. Okay? Now where were we…?

With ‘The Meg’. It is yet another monster movie, shark movie, based on, not surprisingly, on the biggest real life shark – the megalodon of the Miocene and Pliocene epochs. Ever since Discovery Channel’s ‘Megalodon: the Monster Shark Lives’ mockumentary, done for a Shark Week special week, megalodon was given a special status in human mythology: it is the latest embodiment of human fear of the sea.

Let us elaborate. Humans have always feared the sea, as it was an alien element for them, and an inhospitable one. They feared the fresh water bodies too, but the ocean-sea? Especially so. Those fears manifested in various monsters, such as the kraken, (later identified as the real life’s giant squid species), the sea serpent, (whose real life identity remains undetermined by now), and the other monsters from the myths of the ancient Greeks, Scandinavians and beyond. Jolly good, and then there was the shark.

…The shark is the alpha predator of the sea; not the only one, but the most visible one, (though lately the killer whale and the saltwater crocodile are beginning to muscle in on its’ turf). Yes, we are talking about the great white shark, whose fame was made via the ‘Jaws’ franchise. Yes, the initial ‘Jaws’ novel was based on true events that happened in the U.S. pre-WWI, but as more modern examinations have uncovered, the culprit might’ve been the smaller bull shark instead. Both of these fishes were discussed when we have talked about AFO, so let us try on focusing on the megalodon.

Here is the thing. In real life, in the prehistoric past, megalodon was a shark. A giant shark, but just a shark. In modern times, the sharks are proportionally more fragile than the crocodiles are, because they do not have real bones, but cartilage, and they are not as smart, versatile and adaptable as the killer whales/orcas are. They are formidable fish, but nothing more. And yes, megalodon fed on whales, but preferably on smaller, softer species of the baleen whales; when the bigger, tougher toothed whales, including the ancestors of the modern killer whales and sperm whales appeared on Earth, megalodon began to die out – but that was just one of the reasons why.

Another reason was the climate. Most fictional movies, including mockumentaries, place megalodon in the cold dark depths of the ocean – a proper place for a fictional monster, but in real life megalodon died out because it was a native of more shallow, warmer, tropical seas, (that disappeared when the Panama isthmus formed, BTW, in the Pliocene epoch), and couldn’t handle colder deeper waters, such as at the Earth’s poles, whereas the whales could, because they were warm-blooded – and the same goes, sort of, for the great white shark. It does not really like the cold either, but it is also warm-blooded. No, honest, the scientists have discovered, not so long ago, that while some sharks are cold-blooded, (like the blue shark), the great white shark and its’ cousins – the mako sharks, the salmon shark, and the others – have evolved some sort of a warm-blooded system in their anatomy, maybe because they specialize in warm-blooded prey, such as the marine mammals, or…bony fish like the tuna, which have also evolved to become warm-blooded. Neither the great white shark and its’ immediate cousins, nor the tuna and its’ relatives are really related to the mammals beyond that all the groups are vertebrates rather than invertebrates, but there you have it – and where’s the megalodon?

Elsewhere, it seems. National Geographic’s ‘Prehistoric Predators’ series have done a megalodon-related episode, because, well, duh, it couldn’t be avoided. Fair enough and they showed the genetic mapping of the megalodon, the modern great white shark, and an extinct mako shark, (a relative of the great white). The megalodon located quite some distance away from the two cousins; the mako and the great white had a lot in common with each other; with the megalodon…much less. Ergo, the megalodon was not warm-blooded, and it could not survive in cold waters, so…no megalodon in real life. What is left?

A movie monster. Judging by the trailer, ‘The Meg’ is going to be yet another monster movie, combining both horror and lighter, more tongue-in-cheek, humor. Fair enough, maybe it won’t be so bad, but why make it look like a great white? For a while, there was a ‘Beast Legends’ show on History, which featured a monster shark of its’ own, the Dakuwanga, (or something similar), which was a mythical monster, a shapeshifter that could become a shark, a man, or a sea snake. (We are talking the real life sea snakes, not the giant sea serpents of myths and legends). They based their sea giant on the bull shark instead of the great white, so why not do that with the megalodon instead? Fossil animals are defined by their fossilized bones, (duh), but the megalodon was a shark, it had no bones, but cartilage, and cartilage fossilizes much worse than bones do, so what we have from megalodon, (and the other fossil shark species), are mostly teeth, and again, they aren’t very similar, the teeth of a great white shark and a megalodon…so why make the movie/fictional megalodon an oversized great white shark? Who knows…?

Well, this is it for this time; see you all soon in the future, (hopefully)!

S.H.I.E.L.D. 'Inside Voices' - April 7

Misadventures of AoS continue. Last week’s episode was the second lowest; only ‘Life Earned’ was lower, (though not by much). This week’s episode – ‘Inside Voices’ – show why is that: AoS is back being a mess.

For example, the Hintons are back. This time, Robin is still a girl, so she is back to being annoying, rather than insipid, as she was in the future, the older version. That isn’t bad enough, but the last time we saw her and her mother, the Hintons were under the protection of Hunter and Morse – and yet there is no sign of either of them, while Carl Creel fought Ruby, (in this episode, again), with batons, as Morse used to. So, he is what? Some sort of a substitute for Hunter and Morse? I, for example, was never the biggest fan of the HuntingBird duo, but to replace them with Creel? It is simply strange…

This strangeness continues. AoS continues to treat Talbot…vaguely. Sometimes he is a comic relief, sometimes he is certainly not. Again, is it so hard to pick a theme for the character and keep it? In addition, what is his relationship with Creel? In other news, the canon name for his wife is…Carla Talbot, so maybe the good general-brigadier has a fetish? If so, then we certainly go into a strange area, here…and the fact that Coulson has used Hydra’s loaned alien tech to zap himself and Talbot into what had been Canada back in S1, does not help either. Creel now…he seems to have survived his fight with Ruby by going inorganic, and this is important, since he also has acquired a bond with gravitonium. This means what?

On one level, we had a brief cameo of Ian Quinn and Raina, back between S1 and S2 of AoS. In it, however, gravitonium ate Ian, just as Dr. Hall was, back in S1 gravitonium episode proper. This week, gravitonium tried to eat Creel, but general Hale’s minions got him out in time. This makes the gravitonium similar…not so much to Hive, but the Kree monolith that sent people, (including Jemma Simmons) to Hive’s planet. It is also similar to the extradimensional entity that bonded with Whitney Frost back in AC S2 as well, and hey – Raina. Pre-Puerto Rico Raina, to be more precise, meaning that AoS got Ruth Negga to come back, however, briefly. Good for them, and we will wait to see if Ruth will appear in the future AoS episodes, cameos or otherwise. (She is wonderful at the ‘Preacher’, whose third season is coming this year as well).

Anything else? ‘Blindspot’ will return later this April, and as it was pointed out, AoS is still suffering from a morass of a mess. It continues to recycle old ideas and characters with varied effects, and not just from a semi-intentional ‘mix and match’ strategy. They have a general idea of where they are going, but it might not be good enough, especially if Gregg, (Coulson), will be returning to MCU movies in the near future instead. In that case, AoS might have to kill him off…only he already died in this episode, and Creel resuscitated him, so now Coulson and S.H.I.E.L.D. owe Creel one: we’ll just have to see what will come of that, or will AoS just let it go…

Well, this is it for now; see you all soon!

Boulanger's Tree Frog - April 4

…To be brief and to the point: I got my hands on April 2018’s issue of NG; a ‘special issue’, related to race – the human race in general and the various human races (‘colors’? Sorry, if this is the wrong word, but somehow it sounds so appropriate) as well. And?

It is a masterfully done piece of everything, doing its best to be politically correct, factually accurate, repentant of the past deeds and etc. And yet there is a pinch of tar in that jar of honey, and it concerns a frog.

The frog is this month’s endangered animal, featured in NG. It is named ‘Boulanger’s Tree Frog’, and I decided to look it up. The search engines produced nine major frog species that have the name, and one species of tree-dwelling lizards that is also associated with Boulanger – and yet none were a perfect fit to NG’s frog, (to say nothing of the lizard).

So, I looked up its’ Latin, scientific name – Rhacophorus lateralis – and this time I found the mysterious amphibian: it is known as Boulanger’s Tree Frog, but also as the small tree frog, and also – as the winged gliding frog. In other words, this frog doesn’t fly as birds, bats and insects do, but it, and the rest of its’ family, has evolved the webbing between its’ fingers into a parachute of some sort. Since the Boulanger’s Tree Frog in NG is a part of this family, it must be able to glide as well. But…

But none of this was mentioned, the focus here was on the amazing rediscovery of the frog, which fit with the determinedly cautiously optimistic tone of the NG issue. Between that tone and the way this frog got handled by NG – well, how its’ facts got handled – I am treating this NG issue with a grain of salt now. This is all.

Good luck to everyone, and see you all soon!

S.H.I.E.L.D. 'Rise and Shine' - March 31

This week’s episode was called ‘Rise and Shine’. And?

And it was a tense, dramatic episode, focusing on several issues.

One is general Hale’s back history. Apparently though, she was still not given a first name, so let us just call her Catherine, okay? The audience saw her interactions – in a flashback – with Jasper Sitwell, baron von Strucker, Dr. Whitehall and more, which also serves to reintegrate AoS with the rest of MCU. That is important, because a ‘Captain Marvel’ movie is in the works, and it is supposed to feature such already-depicted characters as Ronan the Accuser, and – agent Coulson. In canon, the rest of MCU considers Coulson to be dead, which is fine, since the ‘Captain Marvel’ movie is supposed to be set in the past, before the events set in motion by the ‘Iron Man’ movie series…or some other point in time; we will just have to wait and see how this film fits into MCU-verse.

Back in AoS proper, we had general Glenn Talbot, and it was his time to shine. AoS treats Talbot the same way it treats the rest of its’ characters – without any particular respect, which just muddies the issue. Half the time, Talbot is comic relief and the other half, he is a friend and an ally of Coulson and his S.H.I.E.L.D., and AoS cannot determine which aspect of Talbot is more important to it. The result…for example, in this episode, Talbot acted both heroic and goofy, and the result…he was not convincing as either. Can AoS please pick a theme for him and stick to it?

With Coulson, there is no such issue; he is a hero all the way. Ditto his friends/team, though they got about ten to fifteen minutes out of the entire episode, and Deke Shaw was not even in it. Instead, we had Mack helping Jemma with Yo-Yo, and while this isn’t a problem per se, Mack is still an engineer, not a sturgeon, so can he really help Jemma? Or is Henry Simmons, (who plays Mack), and NCB (Yo-Yo) are obliged by their contracts to be in every ep? That would be interesting to know…

Anything else? AoS is dividing its’ cast into good and bad guys, no more shades of grey here. Coulson and his people are good, everyone else is bad, forget the redemption. Mind you, maybe Creel will reconsider, since he and General Talbot used to be friendly, but one should not count on it. After the failed redemptions of Grant and Kara back in S2, (Grant had had something in S4, but it is uncertain if a framework redemption counts), AoS is done with them. Well, bully – now S.H.I.E.L.D. has to stop Hydra, its’ alien allies, (who are probably Kree, rather than Skrulls or Asgardians or anyone else), and everyone else. Except for Thanos, because the Avengers and their allies will stop Thanos instead. Or not, and half of MCU will die, we will just have to wait until the movie itself is released.

…Well, this is it for now; see you all next time!

MLP, S8 - March 27

To be brief and to the point. In seasons past, MLP: FiM has taken on Starlight Glimmer and her godless communism; this time, this season, it seems to be chancellor Neighsayer, and his racial segregation shtick.

No, really, this is how this season of MLP works – Twilight Sparkle has opened a school for friendship, and the focus on this season’s premiere episodes was on six students who were a pony, a yak, a changeling, a dragon, a griffon and a hippogriff, symbolizing or standing in for racial variability and integration. The evil chancellor is against this sort of thing, so yes, he is a segregationist and is liable to get into trouble with the rest of Celestia’s (and Luna’s) government before this season is done. Yay for MLP and its’ way of dealing with the thorny real life issues, superior to the one done by AoS. Anything else?

Not in particular, since real life sucks, especially in Russia – there was a major fire with many causalities in a shopping center, in another city there was a mass poisoning due to a mismanaged garbage disposal ground and the MeToo movement has surfaced in that country at last, so it’s been a very exciting post-elections time there after all.

Back to MLP? Ever since the storm king movie…the canon there is that the seaponies and the hippogriffs can transform into one another…by magic. How high was the mind that came with that idea, as an off topic? In real life myths, hippogriffs are born from griffons and horses, an impossibility because griffons hate horses and would rather kill or eat them instead of mating. And yes, both griffons and hippogriffs are mythical beasts that never existed outside of one’s imagination, yet even in Middle Ages people accepted that the hippogriffs were twice as mythical as, say, dragons or unicorns, because griffons would never mate with horses, both because they were imaginary and hated horses, so if a hippogriff came into existence, it was very lucky…but also associated with a griffon, and – its’ relative. So where did the seaponies fit/came in? Some great wit in the MLP creative team stretched their creative muscle and came with the instance sea-to-sky conversion in the storm king movie? Who knows…

So. The new season of MLP has shown that it continues to be one crazy world, connecting components of reality, and imagination, and myths, and its’ own content. Good luck to it. And – see you all soon!

S.H.I.E.L.D. 'Devil Complex' - March 24

This week had been weird…for ‘Blindspot’, as the script writers not only have tangled up Patterson, Zapata and Reede, but also have tangled this episode, and the 100^th episode from two weeks ago, when Patterson fell into a coma…and had a groundhog day like syndrome. Somehow, this carried onto this week, when Borden, the former double agent for the former Sandstorm, is back. Why?

…Well, in part ‘Blindspot’ is weird in S3 – Crawford is a clear substitute for Sandstorm for the first two seasons, (complete with a new megalomaniacal plot to take over the world, with Roman as the Pinky to his Brain, it seems), while Rich Dot Com became a semi-regular character on the show…even though this wasn’t necessary. He is a wonderful foil and comic relief, but this doesn’t make him a necessity for the show; are the scriptwriters trying to make the cast an even half-dozen or something? Is someone from the crew/cast of ‘Blindspot’ have a real life numerical fetish? Who knows…?

And then, on the other hand, we had AoS’ ‘The Devil Complex’ episode, which shows that…Anton Ivanov is back, of all people. Seriously? At the S4 finale, Coulson made a big point about how Quake and the Ghost Rider teamed up, how badass it was, and…what? Ivanov still survived. Yes, he is an LMD/robot/cyborg/android/etc. now, but still. Quake and the Ghost Rider are supposed to be ‘heavy hitters’, and he…took them on and won, by default, maybe, but still. Ouch. And he works with General Hale, her family and team, and they all work for Hydra, and-

And the AoS team decided to bring in some real life elements of their own. May accused Ivanov of being yet another Russian who meddled in their democracy; General Hale’s mysterious superior mentioned a Confederacy a couple of times. Let us rant.

Firstly, yes, Mueller did establish that the Russians meddled in the last presidential election…to discredit Hillary, not to elect the current president. That is it. If the Americans had gotten their shite together within the previous year (2017) and impeached the current president, this would have been the end of that…but this means that Mike Pence would take over, and people like him even less, so instead…it became a long, drawn-out, bloody fight between the Republicans, the Democrats, and everyone else. The Russians are there, out there, but they are doing their own thing, (whatever it is), and using the American internal fighting to their own benefit, rather than to meddle in the U.S. proper, because they do not have to. Go U.S.

Pre-WWI, there was a comic, in which Uncle Sam gets high in an opium den, and imagines himself being the king of the world – and then he sobers up, (or whatever the proper term for the experience after the high ends is called), and realized that he’s a mocking-stock of everyone. The comic was not Russian, (Russia at that time did not really have comics, period), but rather it was Canadian, cough. But then again, whenever U.S. and Canada went to war, Canada would defeat its’ southern neighbor soundly, so there is that. The comic is apparently coming true, and the U.S., is going crazy while being caught in a self-fulfilling prophecy. It happens, they say – just ask Voldemort.

(Yes, there is a new Newt Scamander movie coming forth to the cinema screens in the future; the first one was very good, so let us wait and see what the second one brings).

And as for the Confederacy reference, John Oliver once did an episode on his about the Confederacy, and made a big deal about how it really was about slavery, not separatist tendencies. Here is the truth – it was both. Slavery was one of the worst inventions of humanity; even those apologists of the Confederate way of life admit that slavery destroyed the humanity of both slaves and slave-owners; the social problems that plague U.S. even in modern times have their roots in slavery too. But! For every ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ (Harriet Beecher-Stowe), there is a ‘Native Son’ (Richard Wright), which makes something of a diptych. UTC is about the fate of Afro-American slaves in the pre-Civil War south; NS is about their descendants in the American north; UTC is rural, NS is urban…plus some of its’ characters are genuine communists, and not exported from the USSR – homegrown in the U.S., so not surprisingly, NS isn’t as popular among the lay people as UTC is…so what’s the point?

AoS is not succeeding in real life; last week’s episode, ‘Principia’, was not the lowest episode yet, (this goes to ‘Life Earned’ episode), but it was certainly in the top five. Almost from the beginning, AoS did its’ best to appeal to critics, not to the audience, and it shows. So now AoS is trying to be edgy and have some sort of a connotation with real life…never mind, that in real life not everyone agrees with the statements that the Russians have meddled in the last elections, (they had, but the Americans themselves made it much worse for themselves, and they are becoming of aware of this…slowly), or that the Confederacy was bad, (it was. Slavery’s bad, period, but the U.S. Civil War was about prevention of separatism as well), and so it is unknown if they will continue to watch AoS after such politically approved bon mots. Regardless, good luck to AoS – by comparison, ‘Blindspot’ is succeeding without such blatant statements, but then again, it actually respects its’ characters.

Well, this is it for this time, see you all soon.

Cloak & Dagger - March 20

…To continue the theme of real life sucking, today we learned that one of the last northern white rhinoceroses has died. It leaves the white rhinoceros subspecies in question being represented by only two specimens, and both are very likely to follow the deceased animal – Sudan – before too long. This sucks, because the rhinoceroses as a whole are in trouble – the so-called western black rhinoceros subspecies has died out already, and the Sumatran rhinoceros – also known as the two-horned Asian rhinoceros – may not be far behind either. Considering that the latter is the last living relative of the already-extinct woolly rhinoceros, losing it would be a double-whammy to animal conservation beyond the obvious. Anything else?

Well, Marvel™ has released the first official trailer for ‘Cloak & Dagger’ TV series. So far, it only further develops what we have seen in the preliminary material: the titular characters, college students rather than high school, (as they were in ‘Runaways’), dealing with many issues, from being an Afro-American man and an Anglo-American woman, (the name ‘Tandy’ does not really sound European, you know, and neither does ‘Tyrone’), to being some sort of supernatural entities, maybe even superheroes, but this we’ll have to wait until summer 2018 to see. What next?

Nothing else; we do not even know just whom they will be going up against, unlike the ‘Runaways’, where they had to deal with their parents, the Pride. Cloak & Dagger do not usually come pre-supplied with archnemeses, Freeform™, who will be airing this version of ‘Cloak & Dagger’, (as opposed to, say, the cartoon version of 2010s, Earth-12041), may have to come up with their own villains, and since in their S1 Cloak & Dagger will probably be just figuring as to how they work – as individuals, heroes/villains, Americans, as a couple, etc. – some sort of a generic low-key villain is probably what they need: at the end of their S1, the Runaways were completely overwhelmed by their adult counterparts and had to run-away and to rethink their strategy. But…

But the Runaways, again, are the more defined and better-known superhero team out of the two, so they had it easier, while Cloak & Dagger will have it easier in getting away with original content – in ‘Runaways’, it was noticeable, while in ‘Cloak & Dagger’ it will be not so much. Anything else?

No, not at the moment, when we have a single trailer and a brief two-minute clip (aired in 2017) to go on – and on the other hand, we got the rhinoceroses, which appear to be going the path of the terror birds into extinction and oblivion: not much to go on either, so…

…So this is it for now, see you all soon!