Twilight Sparkle vs. Godless Communism

And so, the fifth season of MLP: FIM is coming upon us in 2015. Already, a trailer has been released (in a manner of speaking). In it, Twilight Sparkle and the rest of her team are about to face-off with... the Godless Communism.

Well, no, it will not be denounced directly as that, not on a children’s show, but otherwise... In the trailer, the Elements will come to another pony settlement, whose inhabitants have given away their cutie marks (marks of their individualities) in favor of monotony – the sign of equality (two parallel black bars). They all behave distinctly brainwashed too, even in the trailer, so whatever this town may stand for, it isn’t democracy; and the fact that it is run by a mayor Marx (who is probably a villain – or one of them – of the episode), it probably doesn’t stand for  Nazism either (not on this occasion). 

What can be said? Yes, propaganda is an appropriate federal tool for the USA as well as for any other country, and yes, since the third team of president Putin the relationship between the RF, the EU and the USA have become strained, so some anti-communism slathering is just what the politicians have ordered. But!

Firstly of all, the US is supposed to be better than Them. Do Americans really have to drum the concept of “individuality good, indistinction bad” as such an early age? What, or rather – whom do they expect to raise with such an approach? A variant breed of Orwell’s sheep? “Four legs good, two legs bad”. No, wait – “four legs good, two legs better”! Yeah, that did not work as expected, but that is the only way indoctrination works, whether it is done by the Russian state, the American, or some private company, firm or sect. 

And second, lately the propaganda war is not being waged too successfully by the US. Setting aside the already-established fact that the individualistic Americans tend not react in a positive way when the American government tells them what to do directly – they go and begin to act in a clearly contrary manner – the thing is that lately the American propaganda didn’t work all that well.

As an example, Deadliest Warrior (DW) tried its best to present the States as unbeatable ever since their S1 episode had the American Green Berets lose to the Russian Spetznaz. Naturally, the Americans became upset, and by S3 DW did its best to show the Americans as unbeatable. The result?

A series of rather crude propaganda pieces, and not very successful either – i.e. NKSOF was defeated by the US Rangers only by 0.5%. 0.5%! Keep in mind, that this was some time before the end of 2014, when in connection with “The Interview” movie North Korea had almost put the global community in its place. Ouch!

Needless to say, DW did not fare so good – it was cancelled after the 3^rd season and has not been renewed. Oh sure, the various games that were inspired by it still hang around – if you like playing a bloke fighting other blokes to establish their hierarchy that is the game for you; and if not, there’s always Deadliest Battle, where Rogue fights Wonder Woman, Batman – Captain America, and Gaara – Toph. No political subtext there, no indeed!..

Getting back to propaganda, that discrepancy with reality has plagued the American world for quite a while now. The Punisher and Rambo can kick Vietnamese arse in films and comics as much as they want – in real life the Vietnam War was lost by the USA. DW – that was already discussed above; “The Interview” – that did backfire on Sony very badly, and it was only some real-life Western backbone that the rest of the world was not hit as well; and now – MLP: FIM. Twilight Sparkle and the rest of the elements vs. the Godless Communism in its’ child-friendly incarnation. Ayn Rand and her novella Anthem are spinning in her grave, most likely.

Sigh. On the theme of propaganda, Anthem was a fine piece, completely detached from reality and dedicated to fighting the evils of indistinction in the name of godly individuality and ego. It did not use any colorful ponies to get its point across. It was not trying to adapt to the current global situation either, unlike “The Last Ship” the TV series (the original novel is something). Twilight Sparkle? With the beginning of S5 of MLP: FIM, you just might have been had.

On the theme of MLP: FIM villains. In the first three/four seasons, the elements of the stable and unchanging Equestria fought and defeated villains who were much more malleable: Nightmare Moon, who could turn into fog or other ponies; Discord, who is pretty much protean in shape; Chrysalis and her Changelings, who made change or metamorphosis into their trademark power; and Sombra, who alternated between a unicorn stallion and a cloud of darkness. See the theme? The arrival of Tirek shook that up, and so yes, Twilight Sparkle’s upcoming battle with Godless Communism, Equestria-style, is also a change – now we will only have to see if it is for better or worse.

End

Agent Carter - general remarks

And so, with LG taking a midseason hiatus (never mind that it is the last season of the show, so there really is not any need for a hiatus), things are rather slow in the TV land. True, there is Marvel’s Agent Carter airing, but despite it being the same solid piece of work as S.H.I.E.L.D., there is something missing from this show, some sort of a spark.

Let us rewind: Howard Stark, (the father of Iron Man), has been framed, (supposedly) into being a terrorist of some sort. He gets Peggy Carter to clear his name and to recover his stolen inventions. Peggy has to outrun both the bad guys (communists rather than Nazis here), and the SSR (the prototype S.H.I.E.L.D.) with the help of Jarvis, Howard’s human butler (unlike his son’s version, which is an AI). 

Sounds exciting? It is, yet despite all of that, plus historical accuracy of the series, plus a rather lively cast of actors, plus the show’s address of such important issues as gender equality back in the early Cold War era, the show somehow remains less exciting and interesting than S.H.I.E.L.D. was. The characters, they go through their motions, yet the audience does not get touched by them – not really. The fanbase remains largely untouched – Carter is barely more popular (as a show) than ‘Naturally, Sadie’ or P: NW are, even though both shows have been finished, done, ended. Even the online Wikia, or rather – the ‘Fanbrain’ section of it – have gotten somewhat disenchanted with the show, reducing its’ intake of the Carter episodes down to the bare basics: i.e., this is Junior Juniper, who died thusly on the show, while in the comics, he has died thisly – etc. 

So why does this happen? What has gone wrong?

Unlike LG, for example, or Primeval, Carter does not suffer from such problems as continuity, consistency of the cast, or even common sense – everything is solid with her, the character development, as well as the plot, develops and progresses as it is supposed to, one step at a time and no further.

The historical accuracy, the feel of the historical accuracy, rather, is also present in the series without any deviations or inconsistencies. The actors act too just fine, without any over the top or hammy acting, as it happened in other shows, such as Primeval or IP version of Sinbad, for example.

And yet, it is not enough. There are no surprises in Carter, as there are in S.H.I.E.L.D. – you just know that Sousa will figure out that Peggy is a double agent of sorts; that Thompson is going to become more respectful of Peggy, as will chief Dooley; that Peggy will be able to retrieve all of Howard Stark’s missing inventions; etc. There are no surprises, save that Dottie Underwood is an undercover Leviathan or Red Room agent; since she’s also female, odds are that she is going to be the one to have one final showdown with Peggy before the miniseries end. Of course, it’s also possible that Peggy will convert Dottie into a good guy, but unlike Whedon’s earlier series, BtVS and AtS, S.H.I.E.L.D. wasn’t big on redemptions; odds are, neither is Carter.

There are no surprises, but there is a rush – sort of. Carter is not a hackneyed job and there are not any plotholes, but neither there are any secondary plots; even Sousa trying to figure out if Peggy is the blonde or isn’t, is part of the main plotline: Peggy seeking to outrun both Leviathan and SSR in a race to recover Stark’s stolen inventions. There is Angie, Peggy’s waitress friend, who appears to be somewhat aware that Peggy’s more than what she seems, but because Carter is a mini-series without much time to waste, Angie appears to be largely comic relief for now, as are Peggy’s other neighbours (except for Dottie).

Then there are the special effects and CGI – there almost isn’t any. Carter is very historically realistic, but it is based on a comic series, so historical realism and accuracy is not that important to it. There are no super villains either, not yet, so the comic book element of Carter feels rather downplayed as well.

And the show is predictable, unlike S.H.I.E.L.D. or even LG. You just know that Carter is going to kick the villains’ ass while looking good in it. Some of the good guys are going to die, including SSR agents in the process – and that is another thing.

Because Carter is a mini-series, all of the characters present there are either episodic roles (literally), or main cast, who will likely last until the end. There are no secondary characters, and while the same is largely true for S.H.I.E.L.D., the fact it is a longer, multiseason show, gives it some leeway in that department, for example the Koenig brothers, making it different from Carter, and more exciting too.

And so, Agent Carter does not quite fall short of being a great series, it just is not one. Period. It is a very good series to watch, less so to review, so do not expect too many reviews of it here.

Cheers.

LG: End - Jan 25

Last night’s episode, “End of Faes”, was strange. On one hand, it fitted smoothly with the rest of the episodes, not unlike its predecessor, which did not, but on the other...well...

Let us start with the plot. The Ancients decided to make peace, not war, and invited Team Bo to their party. Well, actually, it was party for Bo, for she is the daughter of Hades, one of the Ancients himself. Having been exiled to Tartarus a long time ago, he plans to come back now, and he has been using Bo as a power conduit to achieve this. Bo does not like it, and so she accepts the help of Zeus/Zee and Zee’s family in a plan to stop Hades from coming back. This included Zee cutting Hades’ mark off from Bo – literally.

The problem is that Zee’s offer of friendship and alliance to Bo was based on a vision of the future, where everything was going to die. The vision is true, but it was based on Iris, not on Hades. Iris may be the goddess of the rainbow, but she is also the channeller of Nyx, the primeval darkness and/or night. 

Nyx, FYI, tends to get a bad rep in the press; for example, in Rick Riordan’s “House of Hades” novel she was depicted as powerful, but a scatterbrain at the same time. Here, in LG, Nyx is not even a person, but some sort of a creeping darkness that killed everything, from flowers to people, in a manner of minutes. Bo, though, being part Ancient herself, (and a daughter of Hades), is resistant to it, to an extent. Plus, she got a magical jack-in-the-box from Hades, as well as plenty of cryptic advice, to apparently contain this evil darkness, Nyx. (The Greek mythology keeps being bastardized by LG, it seems.) Fair enough.

So, while Bo is playing the music (and is about to face it, too), the rest of the team are not fairing much better either. Mark tried to hang out with Iris, and ended up being stabbed in the process. (Iris here comes across as really crazy, BTW.) Dyson and Lauren (with Vex appearing out of nowhere – continuity is really a bitch in LG) are trying to save him. Tamsin is zapped by lightning but bonds with Zee beforehand over heartbreak. 

Overall, a coherent, but a lackluster episode. There is no personal development, though Tamsin’s feelings for Bo, and her mini-conflict with Lauren were touching. There is plot development – we get to see Hades as a rather plain and ordinary-looking bloke... just how was he able to score with Aoife (Bo’s succubus mother)? But overall it is a slow moving, almost a filler of an episode. Maybe the next one will be more exciting.

PS: And the title of the episode, “End of Faes” – it sounds ominous, but has not really been developed in this episode; it must just be a preliminary of some sort, again.

LG: Night - Jan 18

Last Sunday marked the airing of one of the worst LG episodes...ever.

The problem was not the actors, who performed as well as they always do. The problem was not the setting or the special effects (the episode took place during the night – it was aired during the day, and then – or during the filming – special effects were added to make it look like a night). The problem... the problem was the same duo that had plagued LG from the start – the problem with continuity and the cast rotation.

This particular episode, however, was something else. For a start, Evony’s pet monster had escaped – and it was another one of the ‘Ancients’: Eros. Eros was the Greek god of love, so why the LG scriptwriters gave its’ name to some sort of an invisible stalker type of creature is anyone’s guess. The most likable is that on top of continuity and cast problems, they decided to bastardize Greek mythology too.

Well, that was always a feature of LG – they took bits and pieces of real-life myths and tried to assimilate them. Sometimes it worked; sometimes – as in a recent LG episode centered on Japan and the Japanese culture – it does not. Lately, aside from Hades, they have been working with a genderbent pair of Zeus and Hera, oracles, Iris (the girl who has been flirting with Mark in the episodes past), and lately – the myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha. The later is, basically, the Greek version of the great Deluge, with Deucalion being the Greek Noah (and a son of Prometheus). In this episode, Trick claims that Zeus used Iris, the rainbow god, to unleash the aforementioned deluge. 

Right. Iris was a goddess of the rainbow, just as Helios was the god of the sun, and Eos – of the dawn, so let us try to keep the genderbending at a minimum. Secondly, she helped to wipe out the human race with the flood, but it was mainly done by Poseidon’s will (the Greek god of the sea, if anyone has not read Percy Jackson novels lately). Trick’s LG version of the myth is just incomplete and incorrect, period.

But this vanishes before the problems of continuity and cast rotation. In particular, Iris, the LG character – not the original goddess – was depicted as something of a love interest for Mark Dyson’s son in the past. Now Iris is no longer in evidence, and Mark is being shaped-up to be as a romantic interest for Vex. Seriously?!

To be fair, the episode tries to give this twist some justification; in particular, it was not really Mark, who gave Vex a blowjob in this episode, it was the trio of oracles, who sought to uncover truth about Bo from the lips of those close to her. Fine, but in case of Vex they were nowhere near his lips, so perhaps they were just trying to derive some satisfaction from him instead? Either way, this still opens the question about Iris and Mark – perhaps in some future episode the two of them and Vex will form some sort of a threesome...or have a massive confrontation about it. Who knows – it will at least give Mark a role of some importance in the show, something that he had lacked before.

On the other hand, speaking of threesomes and confrontations, this was also a sad episode for team Valkubus: as a Valkyrie, Tamsin appears to be monogamous, as a succubus, Bo is an embodiment of lust. (No, really). Tamsin cannot understand that Bo has a lot of both living to live and of loving to give, and so they break up. Very sad, this is, yet “Night” was able to give this episode something of a disjointed feel; this confrontation should’ve occurred after Bo arrived at their place but before she met the oracles, who were disguised both as Dyson and Lauren (just not simultaneously). Instead, this happens after...everything, at the very end of the episode, making one wonder where Tamsin was all the time between her confrontation with Bo and her earlier discovery of Bo and Lauren doing the nasty. Seeking out Hades? Other Ancients? Or just doing nothing, for the continuity of LG sucks, as it was said earlier.

Take another good look at Vex. He came to Lauren’s clinic with Evony in order to recapture her monster and to recover her serum. And then, without any good reason he disappeared, only to reappear back at the Rahl in order to help Dyson scare away the oracles from Trick. Trick, for his part, also did this sort of strange disappearance... from the Rahl, in order to appear at Bo’s and rescue her from the oracles...also in time. Yes, the reason for Trick’s actions is understandable: he has to save Bo, for she is his granddaughter and the star of the show. The reason for Vex’s actions are less understandable: they’re the key reason behind the new and rising Vex/Mark ship...something that we could’ve lived without...but still. Yet the execution of these actions, their depiction in the show, to put it frankly – sucks. Vex went with Evony to the clinic, did nothing there, and then vanished from the clinic and appeared in the Rahl without any realistic or reasonable explanation. That is just wrong, and not the good kind of wrong, the sort that Bo has with Dyson and Lauren.

Dyson...he confronted the one that he thought was Zeus, but was actually Hera. He received a faceful of swarming flies or locusts for his trouble, but his new widow friend was able to fight off her fake husband by stabbing Hera with a convenient shard of glass. That what it takes, folks, to fight off Hera, the vengeful and powerful queen of the Greek gods – stabbing her (while she is disguised as a man) with an ordinary piece of glass. The ancient Greeks, who made their gods almost all-powerful and invincible, were absolutely wrong. Ouch.

Regardless of this, Dyson rescued his new fair maiden and took her to his place, where she went to sleep – conveniently, too, for then Dyson was visited by the oracles disguised as Bo and became otherwise occupied for a while. The same goes for Lauren, only she had been occupied by the real Bo, to Tamsin’s heartbreak...

(The Bo-Lauren-Evony confrontation and defeat of the invisible monster was one of the better parts of “Night”, BTW, but that is not saying much.)

So: Bo and Tamsin have broken up, Dyson appears to have acquired a new love interest, ditto for Vex, Evony appears to have played a rather important role in the episode, and Lauren had lost another lab assistant to a Fae. (Seriously, does she think that she is captain or Kirk or Picard and that her lab assistants come in an unending supply?) Either way, this was one of the worst ever executed episodes of LG.

LG: Clear eyes - Jan 11

The latest episode of LG is an interesting and strange bag of good and bad. Just as an earlier episode, “Big in Japan”, was based very much on Japanese symbols, metaphors, allegories, etc, so the “Clear Eyes...” is centered on football. 

One can ask straight from the start: why football? LG is a Canadian show, why not hockey? Possibly because Tamsin/Rachel Skarsten had to star as a jock in this ep, the cast and crew decided on football; maybe Skarsten is not that good on skates...or maybe they just wanted to dress her in a cheerleader’s uniform, something that is more connected to football, rather than hockey, even in Canada.

That aside, what else? The cast, as always, has delivered, even Mark’s actor: whatever one can say about the role, the actor is certainly doing his job well enough. The role, however, is rather redundant: Mark is mainly hanging around, doing filler staff, nothing important. Sure, he is flirting with Iris, who is the daughter/youngest member of team evil, but beyond that, one cannot help but feel that he is filling the hole left by Kenzi (Ksenia Solo) as does Tamsin (Rachel Skarsten). And frankly, while Mark is doing a rather uninspired job, Tamsin is not filling the gap either, though she (and Rachel) tries. 

But if Mark is just an unimportant placeholder (though probably, as his connection with Iris grows, so do their roles in the conflict/S5 of the series), Dyson is being something else.

For one thing, he is being (seemingly) purposefully obtuse. “Fae don’t sleep with humans”, he tells Mark. The Hell? Someone tell this to Bo, because she certainly is not averse to sleeping with Lauren (or another human). And the conflict at the end of S4, with the druid, had a lot of human/Fae interaction, including the druid himself, who was a Fae/human hybrid. Thus, either Dyson is still feeling sore about the good ship Doccubus (currently put into the backyard in favor of the ship Valkubus), or yet another sign of the changing world of LG in the background; the crew of LG aren’t stupid and are doing their best to downplay the changes as much as they can, but even so, these changes are very much in your face.

Then we have Dyson strike a relationship with a widow of one of the deceased... who have become resurrected as avatars or hosts of the Ancients. The deceased in question was known as ‘Heratio55’ in the previous episode, and since his ‘spouse’, Amanda Walsh’s character, can shoot lightning bolts and generated storms, this makes him Hera and her – Zeus.

Now, the problem with that idea is not the fact that their genders were reversed, in the Classical mythology the Greco-Roman gods got into stranger situations and metamorphoses than this one; the problem on one hand, is Iris – the goddess of rainbow, she wasn’t one of the 12 Olympians and certainly not the daughter of Hera or Zeus, unlike Heracles, better known as Hercules.

What Herc has to do with this? He had descendants, the Heraclides, who eventually initiated the process known as the Dorian invasion of the Achaean Greece on one hand, and one of them (there were several brothers at first) had a descendant – a quarterback at the school and the football team that were central to this episode.

And on the other hand, why did the evildoers arrive in Toronto? Being the apparent heirs or avatars to Greek gods gives them a bond with Hades, but the trick is that Hades was not an Olympian, he was a sibling or uncle to the big 12, but he never really came to Olympus himself, so this tie is weak.

Yet it is the only tie that we – the audience – currently have. So far the evildoers appear to be interested only in Bo (yes, the widow is interested in Dyson instead, but since this would make the evil trio a quartet, it isn’t very likely – so far S5 had a lot of ‘investment’ into the number 3, and switching the evil trio to a quartet would make it pointless or useless – so Bo and her father Hades are the reason why, the most likely guess.

Other than Dyson being a moron and a worthy father to Mark (not a compliment), we had Tamsin both as a cheerleader and a football player; Bo, who was zapped by lightning; Trick, who had flirted a bit with Amanda Walsh’s character (‘Zeusse’?); and Lauren, who is being the brain, just as Bo is being the heart, Tamsin the muscles and Dyson – the dick.  

Lauren’s role is actually worth mentioning because of her connection with the dark Fae back in the previous season. So far this has not been really mentioned at all; Evonee, after a single appearance, is back to being a no show, and though she put some sort of a bound monster into Lauren’s lab, Lauren doesn’t appear to be disturbed by this fact either; but then again, she’s Lauren, so she may be just cool like this.

Vex, however, has not appeared either in this episode, and he had been relatively active back in the previous two. It’s hard to decide whether he’s just lying low, or this is another one of LG’s problems – continuity; the cast of characters, the regular cast of characters, appears to be going through some sort of an alternating cycle, appearing together fully only rarely – like at the end of this episode, for example. Only Vex was not in it, so it does not count either. Oops.

In any case, both the good guys and the villains are hankering down for a fight; Mark and Iris might be caught in the middle, but only time will tell. Until later, people!