CD, 'Blue Note' - May 23

Real life sucks. Thus speak the political specialists as they discuss the current election in India. And then there is C&D, whose last scene in this week’s episode, ‘Blue Note’, talk about suicide in real life. Since S2 began, C&D episodes often finish with an appeal to their real life audiences with some real life message, something that AoS, as an example, never did.

Why AoS? Not because of S6, which has begun to run earlier this month, but because of S2. Yes, it is about Kara and Bobbi and Grant and the rest of S.H.I.E.L.D – and how C&D responds to it. ‘Blue Note’ is inspired by AoS’ ‘villain flashbacks’: from S1 onwards, AoS tried to show backstory of various villains, one per season. S1 – Grant and Garrett, S2 – Melinda May…something that demonstrated loud and clear that AoS was having major restructures behind the scenes, something that continues even to this day – you noticed how Yo-Yo is no longer with Mack, but with a new agent, Keller? Odds are, this was supposed to be Deke and Daisy, but instead we got no Deke, (Jeff Ward). It is as if he got cut out of the show so far. Ouch! And after all the trouble they went to keep him on the show in S5! Seriously, just let him remain in the future, that is the end, but no. They brought him back to the past, actually did a decent job of integrating him into S.H.I.E.L.D., and now there is neither hide nor hair of him. Ouch!

And on the other hand, there is C&D, who actually keep a tightly knit cast where everyone often goes somewhere and know what they are doing. Sadly, Connors’ plot line is kind of veering around – even if Adina, (Ty’s mother), did kill him, this still is not fully convincing…but we are digressing. The point of tonight’s speech is this: Mayhem points out that people (characters) like Lia, Andre, Connors, are victims but also villains and should be treated accordingly. This is a direct indirect reference to Kara, Ward, maybe even Werner and Ruby from AoS who had no redemption, no nothing. (Framework Ward was no more Ward than Hive had been). To this Tandy replies with hope and mercy, compassion, and so Lia is brought to a hospital instead, where Lia had worked before she met Andre and was mentally enslaved by him. Mercy won, at least for now, and yes, Lia just might die in C&D S2 finale, but this was still better than how AoS has treated Kara in S2, period.

As for Andre himself…yes, he is a genuine villain, even though he is sympathetic on occasion, though he is an atypical one – he succeeds through music. He is a psychic vampire, a pimp, and a very bad person altogether, but you have to admit – he has style, imagination and thinks outside the box. Mayor Willikins from BtVS gives him two thumbs up! (If he still has thumbs, that is). Ty & Dy fail to stop him; Andre has ascended, and became a god slash loa of some sort. Let see them stop him now!

…Yes, they are going to, because otherwise, C&D are done, and that is not going to happen, so go our dynamic duo! In addition, apparently Lia is inspired (let us call it that) by a canon C&D comic villain, some sort of a demoness that tried to manipulate Tandy (the comic version) without much success. That I do not see – it is more likely that C&D is trying to act cute, in the manner of AoS, AC, even the now-cancelled Netflix shows (aside from others), C&D is trying to remake original Marvel characters with mixed success: Andre and Lia are well-rounded characters – but original characters, there’s nothing decisively demonic about them, especially in a literal sense: MCU/Freeform should have just kept them OCs and be done – they would remain as good. However, apparently, this is not how it is done in MCU – and now we got some useless trivia/Easter eggs about Lia – and plenty of very important backstory in this week’s ep. Will it prove to be important in the season’s finale? Namely, will Ty & Dy be able to defeat Andre with Lia’s help in the loa world? We will just have to wait and see.

This is it for now. See you all soon!

The end of GoT? - May 21

Obligatory disclaimer: sometimes life sucks, sometimes it does not, but everything always comes to an end, not just your life, (as the book of Ecclesiastes says), but also all times, good and bad. Most likely, I will not be around to write anything, especially in my blog, next week (i.e. the very last week of May), so let us try to put something extra this week, ok?

Let us start with Ms. Chokshi’s next novel about Aru Shah – ‘the Song of Death’. In it, the titular heroine and her soul sister Yamini meet another one of their number, as well as Aru’s love interest, a boy from her town, one that lives across the street or down the street or something along those lines. And?

When compared to the first novel – ‘the End of Time’ – ‘the Song of Death’ feels more mainline as far as the promoted children’s books by RR go. In ‘End’, Chokshi was all over the metaphorical place, treating RR no different than she did J-Ro of the HP novels; in ‘Song’ there are no references to such novels, but there are some references to Disney movies, especially ‘the Little Mermaid’ and ‘Moana’. It should be noted that RR did something similar in his ‘Magnus Chase’ series, especially the first books. Ergo, it looks as if Ms. Chokshi got her gear in, well, gear, as ‘Song’ is now more similar to the mold of RR, less clumsy, and with far less specifically American-Hindu social stereotypes.

Yes, Ms. Chokshi herself is an American woman of Hindu origins who lives in the American state of Georgia, and yes, her mother is a Filipino, (hence Yamini, Aru’s first friend and closest Pandava sister in her series), but firstly, that culture never got as much spotlight in her Aru series (so far), so clearly, there’s some conflict of interest and culture that is going on in her background and in the background of her Aru novels. Yes, ‘Song’ does not offer any social stereotypes, not directly, as they happened in ‘End’; covertly – yes, about as much as you would expect in RR novels about Percy, Jason and Magnus, meaning that Ms. Chokshi got more help in writing ‘Song’ than she did with ‘End’ previously. So?

So, it is hard to say, but in ‘Song’, one of the main protagonists is ‘Lady M’, sister of Ravana, the greatest Maharajah of the Rakshasas, period, and of Kunkarna, their greatest champion, and ‘Song’ talks about how she wasn’t entirely evil, she was also partially misunderstood and abused. Sure, she was still evil, but-

But in truth, that story of which ‘Song’ talks about started before ‘Lady M’ encountered Rama, Sita and Laxmana in the forest; it began, when Ravana, by acting pious for centuries, tricked the Hindu gods into making him almost invulnerable; only a mortal could kill him. So, a certain Hindu god (no spoilers, you want to know more, Google it), reincarnated as a mortal man, Rama, and eventually killed Ravana; ‘Lady M’, yes, was treated beastly by Rama and his exiled family, but in the end? She was only a piece in a greater game of thrones: who would win, gods or Rakshasas (demons, essentially).

…Yes, this brings us to GoT and the series finale. The Internet is an uproar regarding the eighth and last season; some claim that the characters changed too much, others – that not enough or reverted to their initial selves (think the very opening episodes of the series). My take that the main problem here is that HBO and co. did a hatchet job by combining two versions of the final season into one: the first 3 episodes and the last 3 have two very different feels.

What says the Bible? Nothing is new under the sun? Right on – for me, this is reminiscent of the last ‘Jurassic World’ film, which also tried two combine two movies into one: the first where Claire, Owen and co. go to the dino isle one last time, and the second, where the evil E holds his dinosaur auction and it all goes south, thanks to our plucky heroes. Ditto here, where the Night King and the King’s Landing plots make two different stories that are only loosely connected to each other; and what’s more…

What’s more, not unlike what has gone down in AoS for a while, GoT’s S8 has the feeling of characters – and plot lines – getting reshuffled, especially with Jon and Dany having very strong Jaime and Cersei vibes. Of course, there is a perfectly valid point about how HBO handled GoT S8’s characters and plot just fine, with GoT’s characters remaining true to their nature: i.e., Jaime went back to Cersei because he always went back to Cersei; Arya went away because she was always on the run, and so forth. The problem with that statement is that GM spent the entirety of his novels having Jaime, Arya, Brienne, Sandor, Sansa, Gendry, and etc., etc., breaking free of their mold and becoming something new: character development, put otherwise. In S8, (and to lesser extent in S7), all of this went out the window…just because. The actors, probably, didn’t care, (their counterparts in AoS aren’t that unique, it seems), and neither did the crew, seeing how they rushed through S8 – forgotten Starbucks™ coffee cups and plastic water bottles? Really? That is just inattentive – and rushed. Guess they are now all-focused on the following GoT spinoff or something, yay. What next?

Well, GM is keeping his opinions to himself, mostly – he may not be the biggest fan of GoT fan works, but HBO has never been a ‘fan work’, but rather paid him some very handsome sums of his own, so he isn’t going to be widdling in a good thing, that’s number one.

And number two is last week’s episode of MLP: FIM, aka ‘Frenemies’, where the titular characters are beginning to resemble the Lannister siblings vaguely. Tirek is Jaime at his worst – not quite a musclehead or a jock, but close. Chrysalis is Cersei, a crazy queen who has lost of all of her subjects, with CG being an eviller, and crazier, version of Tyrion while Grogar is Tywin with…minimal personality changes and slightly different goals, true. Sombra’s Joffrey, though it should be pointed out that that shadow pony had had some reboots of his own – in the comics, he even got redeemed, so Hasbro here is trying to be Marvel, I suppose…

But as for the ‘Frenemies’ themselves – Sombra is gone now for good, looks like – they are slowly moving towards a crossroads, where they will have to accept friendship for real and stop being villains, (kind of like Discord, who’s more of an anti-hero these days than a villain these days), or not, in which case their friendship, (or the ersatz that they developed in its’ stead), is done and gone.

Yes, their relationship with Grogar complicates things somewhat: the ‘Frenemies’ episode openly showed that they will betray him, or vice versa, (since he is the biggest bad of this MLP season), but that does not change anything, generally speaking: either ‘Frenemies’ will stop being evil, or they stop being friends, and back to Tartarus they go, because otherwise? Tirek wants to drain all the magic, CG – all the friendship, and Chrysalis – all the love. On their own, every one of them had been a hoof-full for the Mane 6 and associates; together, the three of them would destroy Equestria, which is both resilient and fragile at the same time, period.

Back to GoT – if the ‘Frenemies’ are Lannisters, then the Mane 6 are Starks: Robb and Jon, (who is not a Targaryen, period), Bran and Rickon, Sansa and Arya, with Spike being Theon, and the sister princesses – the Stark parents. (Yes, Ned as a sparkly pony princess is ridiculous, but regardless). Everyone else – you make the equations; what we should keep in mind is that GoT may be gone from live TV (you can always stream, or download it, or something), but it can return in the most bizarre places, and hey, MLP – is just Starks vs. Lannisters these days, (which is GoT at the most basic, really).

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

S.H.I.E.L.D. 'Window of Opportunity' - May 17

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and then there is Ali Smith. Her novel ‘Autumn’ was kind of pessimistic but still well-written and normal; ‘Winter’ was more, um, derived, (and no, this isn’t a compliment), and her latest novel, ‘Spring’ feels like a flow of consciousness, reminiscent of James Joyce at his most…semiotic. It is anyone’s opinion if this approach works; personally, it feels more like a breakdown of the author (Ali Smith) as a person due to personal issues with it reflecting in her works, not unlike as to what is going on with J.-Ro, whose professional life post the HP books isn’t going so smoothly either.

On the other hand, there is also ‘Dynasties’, both the book and a TV series. It works in both incarnations in an intriguing and thought-provoking manner. There are flaws – we have discussed ‘Dynasties’ last year – but it still works, regardless of the flaws. Go team Attenborough and co.! Raise the natural awareness! Fight the good fight! Yeah! …Real life sucks, but not always, and now let us try to talk about AoS S6.

The adventures of the titular AoS characters continue to delight; this week’s episode – ‘Window of Opportunity’ – stared the new, (and further?), adventures of Fitz and Enoch. Enoch was the non-human alien, whom is not quite android and not quite alive…interesting. The point being, however, is that the team FE killed off ‘the Controller’, who was really a minor villain and a jerk, and are off to the planet of Kitson for further adventures, with team Jemma being close behind them. The odds of them constantly missing each other until the S6 end are astronomical, AoS almost constantly kept the FitzSimmons apart ever since the second half of S1, so they probably are not going to change this dynamic in S6. Anything else is up in the air, free for grabs.

Trivia time: not only this week’s episode took place on a backdrop of a planet that looks suspiciously like real-life planet of Jupiter, but also AoS had no idea as to what to do with languages: the Controller spoke perfect English, while at least some of his crew – the engineers – talked some sort of an authentic alien language, cough. Seriously, who do the script writers think they are? Tolkien? Then let us have Fitz drop into, or onto, Middle-Earth and help Aragorn, Gandalf, and the hobbits fight Sauron and his orc hordes, shall we? The S6 of AoS – the space part of it – has some clear and obvious influences of SW, so why not LotR as well?

…Yeah, that annoying copyright issue and everything, but regardless, an AoS/LotR crossover could be cool. Does anyone want to write it? Really, I will read it and all! Back to trivia?

…Baron Samedi’s wife in real-life voodoo mythology is called Mama Brigid. Cough, but doesn’t our detective O’Reilly have something atypical in her ancestry? Just asking… oh wait, we are discussing AoS now.

Coulson/Sarge and his people continue to be a motley crew of chaotic, unpredictable, and possibly amoral antiheroes…but there does not appear to be an outright evil vibe coming from them. Maybe there is more to them than just destroyers of worlds, as they appear to be set-up in the eyes of S.H.I.E.L.D., (Mack’s version). Moreover, the scriptwriters did their best to make Yo-Yo be, well, important in this episode, NCB got to show-off her character’s new prosthetic arms, (from the second half of S5, when Ruby Hale had cut them off with her chakram – hello Xena, agent Heartly and Lucy Lawless) and ran around a bank. Yay Yo-Yo! …Of course, the fates of Bobbi and Lance come to mind: they were made regular characters on AoS in the first half of S3, and in the second half, they got dropped completely, and now their actors are done with MCU, at least for now. (Cough, the Orville, cough). Yo-Yo and her actress have lasted proportionally much longer than they have, but still…

Speaking of new agents? The one shot by Sarge last week was an agent Fox. (Really?) And now we got agent Keller and it does not look as if he is going away in a hurry, so apparently this side of the AoS script equation got a lot of its own drama now too. Yay! Not, but AoS is doing its best to be exciting – Melinda’s fight with Sarge’s crew was certainly interesting and well-choreographed – so let’s throw them a bone and worry about anything else later.

…This is it for now. See you all soon!

CD, 'Two Player' - May 16

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. GoT seems to give it a run for its money, though, but first – C&D.

The excitement in the lives of our plucky and intrepid characters, C&D, Ty & Dy, you name them, you know them, keeps on coming. This time, they got to play in the land of the dead to rescue Tyrone from, well, dying. Yay!

…Of course the depiction of Baron Samedi was decidedly campy and possibly not very respectful towards the loa version of Hades, (just look at Riordan’s Jason Grace series to connect the dots), but then again, C&D treat the other depicted loa of the series – Papa Legba – in a very bizarre way, so there’s that.

It would be nice to move onto the living now, but firstly, we must mention Edita’s aunt Voodoo, who is officially dead, and her niece will now be the next voodooist of New Orleans…at least until the end of S2, after which it’s anyone’s guess how the cast will change. In particular, Tyrone’s family, including his mother, Adina, have changed some, Adina in particular has acquired some vigilante traits of her own, less suitable to the S1 version of her than to Mayhem.

Mayhem and detective Brigid have made their peace at last, and they are back in one body, and Mayhem is the dominant personality, for now. Honestly, we can safely say that while the cast of C&D is tight, their script is not, not so much, and while the main cast of C&D is small, the scriptwriters did not always figure out how to balance them out, as they did in AC, in the not-so-distant past. Father Delgado seems to be back, but right now, he seems to be more of a sounding board for Adina and the show never really figured out how to utilize Mayhem & detective Brigid to their full potential, (though their actress was still quite awesome, no argument here). Instead they got a storyline that meandered all over the place and will probably come to a head in the next week’s episode, when Mayhem and Tandy will face-off over ‘a girl’, most like Andre’s ‘girl Friday’, whom he had used up and discarded. Apparently, she is still alive, and can be rescued, physically, if not anyhow else.

Yes, Lia is both a victim and a villain, not unlike the canon take on Kara Palamas/agent 33 in AoS S2, but she’s treated much better here as a character, with much more respect and professionalism by C&D’s cast, which makes C&D a better show than AoS, who treats its’ characters like crap – and that brings us to GoT.

GoT S8 sucks. AoS has its own flaws, it certainly lags behind C&D, ‘Blindspot’, AC and others, but never there had been a fan petition to remake a season. In case of GoT S8 there is. Will it amount to nothing? Naturally, most petitions just vanish into oblivion, though sometimes there is some recognition of it, especially online, but that is it. There’d been a petition or something, (on top of anything and everything else) to cancel Brexit in the UK before it even got started, but the U.K. government went onwards with it anyhow, and now they’re in a worse mess than Westeros is – and I doubt that GoT S8 will have a remake.

Why? Because it is the series finale, no muss, no fuss, no S9. People are largely done with it, with ‘people’ meaning cast and crew: it is over; it’s not going any further. People have invested in it, and now they are done with it, and are moving on. To SW, if rumors are of any indication; apparently, SW has changed its’ approach again, and will release a plethora of new movies in the recent future. Will it bite them in the ass? Probably yeah, but they will act all stupid and say ‘What is that? Why? We were so sure!’ the end. Moreover, GoT is at its’ end too, and suddenly the fans’ opinions, ratings, numbers, etc. do not matter so much anymore.

Of course, it is not as straightforward as it may sound; the premiere episode of AoS S6 was summed up with a number 2.31 – the same number that came with the AoS 5x07 episode ‘Together or Not At All’. This is low number, but AoS is gamely plowing on ahead regardless. Good luck to them, and we will see them tomorrow, this Friday, hopefully.

This is it for now; see you all soon!

S.H.I.E.L.D. 'Missing Pieces' - May 11

AoS S6 is here. And?

Firstly, the obligatory disclaimer: real life can be trying, but that is real life for you. How does AoS stack up to it?

The season’s premiere, ‘Missing Pieces’, is about Coulson and Fitz, since both died at S5 finale. Now, though, Team Jemma (her, Daisy, Davis and Piper) are travelling through space, kicking alien butts and taking their numbers while looking for Fitz – and there is a giant-ass space ship chasing them instead. However, never let it be said that Simmons is not an opportunist – she used the ship’s latest attack to take her team into a new territory, to continue to look for Fitz, though the rest of her team are unhappy with her, and there is going to be drama.

Simmons’ issues with Fitz aside - by now everyone knows that the FitzSimmons make their own drama, and this season AoS just might’ve jumped the shark with them, pity – what is worth noting is that Piper and Davis have become proper supporting characters: here’s to them lasting at least to mid-season, and not just because otherwise the FitzSimmons and Daisy will have to make a lot of uncomfortable explanations to Davis’ family at least, you know? Secondly, Daisy is having her own issues – she is channeling either Ward or Morse, and it does not do her character any favors. And finally – Deke is pointedly not with them; as Marvel Entertainment accidentally showed on YouTube, Jeff Ward (Deke) and Iain (Fitz) do not get along, so they clearly had to do something about it, while keeping Jeff on the show. Why is another question; they did a half-arsed job of trying to make chemistry between him and Chloe’s Quake in the second half of S5, but apparently it didn’t stick, so no Deke in space. Pity, because he and Elizabeth Henstridge (Jemma) actually had a good thing going-on in the second half of S5…

Back within MCU, Fitz is shown at the episode’s end, being dominated, somehow, by someone (or something) called the Controller. In Marvel, it is a man named Basil Sandhurst, who is…an Iron Man villain, actually, but in MCU, Stark is dead – for now, at least – so it is an open question if this is going to be a real-life version of the man, somehow. The point is that Fitz is having his own problems – again…so, it is nothing new. The more interesting question is – where is Enoch? He was not bad back in S5, did liven up AoS somewhat, and it would be exciting to see more Chronicoms in the future AoS episodes too. The fact that Fitz is in trouble, is mentally dominated, does things that are probably morally ambiguous at best, and needs Simmons and the team to help him is nothing new – remember the S4 Framework mini-arc, anyone?

This brings us to the other half of the season’s premiere – Mack’s version of S.H.I.E.L.D. on one hand, and the appearance of ‘Sarge’, (Coulson’s look-alike) on the other. There are several characters called ‘Sarge’ already in Marvel; the main ones are Nick Fury Jr. (and now that would be an interested character to introduce to MCU proper), and a mutant for a secondary universe (earth 2099 A.D.) now more usually called Travesty.

…Yes, in S5 already AoS took its’ characters to the future, and yes, there are gifted individuals of some sort, working for Gregg’s Sarge character, so it’s always possible that S.H.I.E.L.D. will be dealing with time travellers from a new future – the old one got derailed when S.H.I.E.L.D. blew up the alien space shift and defeated Talbot/Graviton in final S5 episodes, remember? The time loop is broken, the future is free from grabs – and MCU has introduced, sort of, the concept of a multiverse in ‘Avengers: Endgame’ movie, and it might be developing this concept further in the upcoming ‘Spiderman’ movie, just look it up at the IGN YouTube channel. IGN is not perfect, but it does deliver. What is next?

The main twist here is that as contrasted by a deliberately misleading clip released earlier, this version of Coulson/Not-Coulson is no friend of S.H.I.E.L.D. at all; the man he took down was a new S.H.I.E.L.D. agent instead, but on the other hand, despite their rugged appearances and crazy behaviours, he and his people aren’t trying to intentionally & deliberately hurt people, so maybe they’re not actually evil? In this case, Mack and co. will need to invent a new strategy beyond throwing armed forces and armored vehicles at them, while dealing with new drama: Mack and Yo-Yo have broken up, and now Yo-Yo is beginning to flirt with a new character named Keller, while Mack is with May…yes, because Coulson is dead now, (so far, Sarge is being set up as someone who’s not S.H.I.E.L.D.), and because AoS had thrown them together on occasion, especially in S4. What will come out of that, aside from the generic answer – more drama – is currently unknown.

…Also, speaking of drama, Mack and May managed to persuade an old friend of Dr. Garner to work for S.H.I.E.L.D. while the FitzSimmons are in space. Since Dr. Garner was revealed to be Lash, a killer InHuman, (who got redeemed, supposedly, by rescuing Daisy from Hive and dying in the process), it’s possibly safe to take the newcomer’s moral alignment with a grain of salt; after Radcliffe and the Darkhold disaster it is better to be safe than sorry, right?

Anything else? Gabriel Luna will return to his role as the Ghost Rider…this time, on his own show. Since it will be on Freeform, his show might have more in common with C&D that AoS, so (tentatively) welcome back, Mr. Luna, to MCU! Hopefully, you will have better luck here than Blood and Palicki did – by now, they are firmly in the past/recurring character sector of AoS, alongside Dalton and Campbell; ah well, ce la vie.

As for ‘Missing Pieces’ as a whole, it did a good job by bringing out the best aspects of AoS – special effects, a decent plot, great acting and decent dialogue. Now all they have to do is to keep it up and to win back their strayed fans. Between ‘the Gifted’, ‘the Runaways’, C&D, and ‘Legion’, (though it is supposed to have its final season this year, hah), it will be a tough job, even with Netflix’s series gone, and the Ghost Rider show still being in production…

This is it for now; see you all soon!

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!

CD, 'B Sides' - May 2

Obligatory disclaimer: real life is not very good, to put it lightly. Now onto C&D.

In this week’s episode, ‘B Sides’, the script writers took ques from the C&D comic arc ‘Shades of Grey’, complete with a villain who enslaves others by getting into their minds and draining them of their energy, in a matter of speaking. Put otherwise, this is a variant vampire mixed with Killgrave from Netflix’s JJ, complete with a female minion (ala JJ), who has been completely brainwashed, in a matter not unlike how Kara/agent 33 was brainwashed on AoS S2.

…Yes, AoS S6 is returning to TV next Friday, (May 10, 2019), and from the current trailer, we can already see that Gregg’s new character is a villain of some sort, rather than a hero; or at least – an anti-hero. Gosh! How new and exciting! Not.

Since S1, AoS had had the following themes in its plot: doppelgangers with different alignments often played by the same actors. Dalton did it with Ward…period, and also with Hive in S3. (Hive was never Ward; Ward may not have had any powers ever in AoS TV canon, but he was the more dangerous villain out of the two by far; I am a fan of his, but how he destroyed Coulson’s morals at cost of his own life? Brutal. This is what Coulson got from messing with a suicidal man – but we have digressed). Wen did in S2 as Palamas, (primarily in the first half of the season), and then in S4 as the LMD version of herself. Actually, everyone in the ‘main cast’ of AoS S4 got replaced by LMDs at that time – and later on they got to play slightly different versions of themselves, (including Dalton as Ward, cough), so Gregg playing a different character that just happens to look like someone else, cough, from the past is nothing new.

…Furthermore, Gregg’s new character just happens to look exactly like the old main male lead who had conveniently died between S5 and S6, so there’s no conflict of interest, and no need to juggle two roles and being the showrunner for at least the S6 premiere episode either. Consequently, odds are he will not be killed-off in the first few episodes, because AoS needs Coulson.

Well no, not really, but the cast and crew of AoS clearly consider Gregg to be an integral part of the team or something, so he is going to stay at AoS for S6 at least. I may be wrong, but I am still making this bet. (There are noises that AoS is going to be cancelled in summer 2019, but considering that it just got revamped by being associated with the MCU’s CM movie, it is not very likely). Ergo, his new character will probably be redeemed or something along those lines, as the AoS S6 title promo implied. AoS already planned to do something like that in S2 with Ward, but then they threw a curveball…the end of that. Coulson/not Coulson will probably be luckier, cough, but where were we?

…Talking about movies, I suppose. A trailer for yet another film came out today – ‘Crawlers’. Basically, it is a monster movie about an Anglo-American heroine, her father and dog, getting stuck in a hurricane-driven flood with some monstrous alligators who eat people. Oh Hell.

Where to begin? First, there are supposedly three species of crocodilians living in the U.S.: the American Alligator, (2-5 m long), the American Crocodile (2-4 m long) and the Spectacled Caiman (1-2 m long). The latter is an introduced species, yet another exotic reptile that escaped into the wilds of Florida and the rest of the southeast USA. Of the three, the American Alligator is the most common, but also – is the most retiring and does not like to attack, kill and eat humans as a rule. The American Crocodile and the Spectacled Caiman are more aggressive, but they also have a smaller range than their Alligator relative does; plus I am honestly not sure that there are wild/feral Spectacled Caiman living on the USA territory – the sources are controversial and can go either direction. What is the point?

…My point that the alligators of ‘Crawlers’ are unrealistic, and given that we see the movie’s main character destroying their eggs, they are unreal. Unlike the eggs of fish and amphibians, the eggs of reptiles must be kept dry and out of water; the nest of crocodilians, (including the gharials, the most aquatic of them all) are always kept well away from the water, and the mother crocs and gators bring the young to the water via a journey, (short or otherwise), in their jaws – just look at a BBC or a NatGeo crocodile special, for example. If there was a flood in a crocodile or alligator nesting area, it would be a disaster, as their nests and eggs would be lost. (Yes, just as their bird/dinosaur cousins’ crocodilians make nests. They are different from bird nests, but still nests). Ergo, no gator (or croc, or caiman) nests in a hurricane/flood area – they do not really exist. ‘Crawlers’ reptile monsters’ offspring just wouldn’t be able to survive – baby crocodilians are really fragile and vulnerable, unlike their parents…

Back to C&D, since on one hand, they already have a doppelganger of their own – Mayhem, via detective O’Reily – and on the other, they are located in the southeastern USA, where alligators and etc. live, but not really. It is already clear that Dy is in trouble and Ty is going to save her, and she will save him, and together they will rock, as they rocked in the ‘Shades of Grey’ comic. Good luck to them!

…This is it for this time; see you next time!