#I HATE THIS SCENE SO MUCH LIKE . no.1 the needless exposition of shit we already know (but thats a given for modern kh.)

[robotsafari]

man. i'd rather have the devs make riku stare deadpan into the camera and call me, the player, a slur than have him say this shit like are you fucking kidding me.

[the-desolated-quill]

BBC’s The War Of The Worlds blog - Episode 1

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

I was very much looking forward to the BBC’s adaptation of the H.G. Wells sci-fi classic. How could I not? It’s the definitive alien invasion story that jump-started an entire genre of science fiction  Not to mention this is the first adaptation made by a British film company and actually set in the time period it was written. I was very excited. Nothing could possibly dampen my spirits... until I learned who was writing it.

Peter Harness is a writer I’ve been less than kind to in the past. For those who don’t know, he wrote some of the worst episodes of Doctor Who. Remember that stupid story about the moon being an egg? Yeah, that was him. He also has a penchant for writing painfully forced and thinly veiled allegories with all the grace and subtlety of a ballet dancing rhino in a glow in the dark tutu. Kill The Moon, for example, was a pro life metaphor that portrayed the other side as being irrational baby killers, and his Zygon two parter was about Muslim immigration and integration, with the slimy repulsive Zygons being used as stand-ins for Muslims and non-white immigrants.

Harness’ ability to write allegorical stories about sensitive topics is... under-developed, to say the least. So naturally he’s the perfect candidate to adapt one of the most beloved sci-fi stories ever written. I mean, why not? The BBC have already ruined Sherlock Holmes, courtesy of Steven Moffat. Why stop there?

In all seriousness, while I wasn’t excited about the prospect of Harness getting his grubby mitts on War Of The Worlds, part of me hoped that maybe he could pull something out of the bag. You may recall I held a very similar negative view toward Chris Chibnall, and his first series as showrunner of Doctor Who was an extremely pleasant surprise. Maybe Harness could achieve his own metamorphosis.

He doesn’t.

The first episode of War Of The Worlds was fucking tedious to sit through. It actually looked quite promising initially. We get some nice moody shots of the surface of Mars as Eleanor Tomlinson recites the famous opening lines of the book. But then just after the opening titles, it all goes downhill.

I was sceptical when it was announced that this would be a three parter because that just seemed too much. A feature length film you could do. Maybe a two parter, at a push. But three episodes? Each an hour long? That’s going to require a lot of padding, and that’s exactly what Episode 1 is. We see the Martian cylinders launch from the planet at the beginning of the episode and it’s not until the forty minute mark where we get our first proper glimpse of the Tripods or the heat rays. So what do we get in the mean time? Mostly pointless shit.

The original War Of The Worlds book isn’t exactly remembered for its characterisation. Outside of the astronomer Ogilvy, none of the characters even have names, but to be fair to Wells, the characters themselves weren’t really the driving force of the narrative. The Martians were. The narrator, a journalist, was merely there to relay and facilitate the plot, giving us a first hand account of the subjugation of Earth. Fine for a book, but somewhat harder to get away with in a film or TV series, which is why most don’t even try. Every single adaptation of War Of The Worlds attempts to expand on the central characters to varying degrees of success, and the BBC version is no exception. But where Harness really miscalculates is in anticipating how much the audience is going to care about the characters, to which the answer is ‘not that much.’ We don’t want them to die obviously, but we’re not so interested in who they are or where they come from because they’re not the main focus. The Martians are. So to have a significant chunk of the episode focusing on their day to day lives is quite baffling. Not to mention unbelievably boring.

George, played by Rafe Spall, is living out of wedlock with Amy, played by Eleanor Tomlinson, which causes their neighbours’ tongues to clack and net curtains to twitch. The only person supporting their union is Ogilvy, played by Robert Carlysle, which is how they learn about the mysterious goings on the surface of Mars. This is all established in the first five minutes, but as I said, the Martians don’t properly show up until the forty minute mark. Until then we’re subjected to painfully forced and tediously dull ‘right on’ posturing and irrelevant social commentary that adds nothing to the core narrative.

Here’s the thing. I’ve got nothing against the idea of expanding the characters. I definitely have no problem with giving the narrator’s wife from the book more development and screen time. In fact I’m all in favour of it. What I do have a problem with, however, is when that expansion and development comes at the expense of the plot.

A man and a woman shacked up together in defiance of society is all well and good, but what does any of this have to do with War Of The Worlds? It’s not even as if Harness tries to connect this back to the story’s main themes of imperialism and colonialism. It’s mentioned that Amy was born and raised in India. Maybe if she was an Indian woman, it could have been more thematically relevant, but no. Once again we have a period drama with no people of colour because, as we all know, non-white people weren’t invented until 1962. Also, while I get that society at the time was very strict, I’m not entirely convinced George and Amy’s relationship would have been that scandalous to the point where it would have affected his career as a journalist. That just seems like a step too far and is merely there to add some artificial tension... in a story about Martians invading the Earth.

In the end it all comes down to this. Why the fuck should I care? What’s the bloody point of this? Yes it expands the characters, but it doesn’t contribute anything to the narrative. It just wastes time. Again, I must stress, we don’t get our first Martian until forty minutes into an hour long episode. Previous adaptations never felt the need to bore the audience to death with pointless shit because they knew what audiences came to see. Martians blowing shit up. Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of War Of The Worlds from 2005 didn’t piss about giving us needless exposition about Tom Cruise and his family. We’re given the basic info about the characters and their relationships within the first ten minutes before the Tripods emerge and the action gets going. The BBC version, in contrast, is just painfully slow, dictating every tiny thing about these characters even when it’s not relevant to the plot.

And the thing is, once we actually get to the bits from the actual book (you know? The bits people actually want to see?), it’s actually pretty good. The Tripod looks incredible, as was the scene in Horsell Common where we saw people getting killed by the heat ray. Unfortunately we have to slog through all this other crap before we can get to the good stuff.

Eleanor Tomlinson probably gives the strongest performance as Amy. It’s just a pity the character is so utterly uninteresting. Like I said, I’ve got nothing against giving her a bigger role than she had in the book, but it feels like Harness is more interested in showing off his feminist credentials than actually telling a story or creating a believable or likeable character. Her being an assistant to Ogilvy I think is a great idea, but it soon becomes clear that this was only done so other male scientists could comment on how unusual it is to have a woman digging up a crashed cylinder, which is kind of ridiculous because I’m pretty sure female scientists did exist back then and you don’t exactly need a penis to use a fucking shovel. Then things turn really stupid when George’s brother, played by Rupert Graves, starts blaming her for the Martian invasion, saying that everything was going fine until she came along. Exploring 19th century sexism is one thing, but this is just daft. There’s no interest in actually exploring the root causes of sexism back then. Instead Harness seems content with portraying men as being the equivalent of cartoon caricatures foaming at the mouth.

George, meanwhile, goes from being a fairly boring character to a downright hateful one when it’s revealed that he and Amy aren’t just living out of wedlock, but that he cheated on his missus because she was infertile. So not only do I not care about him, I now straight up want him to die because what the actual fuck?! And this is not helped by Rafe Spall’s incredibly wooden performance. Seriously, I’ve seen corpses with more life in them. When the Tripod first emerges, we see him stare at it in what I assume was supposed to be shock, but instead he just looked gormless. It’s honest to God one of the worst performances I think I’ve ever seen. There’s no emotional range to him whatsoever. He just blunders around wearing a confused frown on his face. It’s as if he had just wandered onto the set by mistake.

The biggest problem with this first episode is that Harness is focusing on all the wrong areas. A large segment is dedicated to George investigating the Dogger Bank incident, which seems to be an attempt at making a parallel between the UK’s tenuous relationship with Russia then and now. What this has to do with War Of The Worlds, I don’t know. There’s so far been no attempt at exploring the themes of the source material as we’re too busy with this shitty romance. There’s even a moment where we see the characters dig up the cylinder and take a photo only for the same exact scene to happen five minutes later. I mean for fuck sake!

And then there’s the pointless plot twists. First we get the cliched pregnancy reveal, then it’s revealed that the scenes we thought were on Mars turned out to actually be a post apocalyptic Earth with Amy and a seven year old kid who is presumably her son. Wait, how long has this fucking invasion been going on for?! It only lasted a couple of weeks in the book! What happened? Did the Martians get vaccinated? This just highlights to me how inept Harness is as a writer. He can’t just do a straight adaptation of War Of The Worlds. He has to engineer these pointless and utterly idiotic cliffhangers to get people to keep watching because the story and characters clearly aren’t doing that.

If I wasn’t committed to reviewing this mini-series, I honestly wouldn’t watch the rest of this. This first episode is legitimately terrible. Boring, poorly thought out and utterly, utterly clueless. Just like everything else Peter Harness has ever written. I don’t understand why he was chosen to adapt War Of The Worlds and I don’t understand why he chose to adapt it in this way. Why so much focus on pointless exposition? Why over-complicate the lives of the main characters? Why can’t they just be a normal married couple living a life of privilege until the Martians come and trample all over it? It makes no sense! Some could defend this saying it was building tension until the Martians emerged, but there’s a significant difference between making an audience nervously anticipate the Tripods arrival and making them wait impatiently for something, anything, interesting to happen.

[sleepymarmot]

I still have about 200 queued posts (bear with me... and sorry followers on mobile), but I want to quickly publish some of my post-binging thoughts before the new episode comes out. (Because I get overwhelmed by other people’s opinions and can’t remember what my own were unless I write them down. It’s easy to recall which parts I simply loved for what they are because other people did too and I can reblog their posts; it’s harder to not forget my own perspective outside of that.)

I didn’t actually expect to post these opinions because I don’t feel comfortable criticizing TAZ the way I tear apart big franchises like ME. But I did write it down, so what the hell. Let’s start with the biggest piece of negativity then. I can't name a favourite arc but I think the last place is Petals to the Metal. The racing sequence was spectacular enough that I didn't mind the pacing that much, but the final episode was really disappointing. A combination of not actually explicitly confirming the pairing in canon (I seriously expected that would be the culmination of the arc) AND Bury Your Gays (yes, I know Griffin dealt with the feedback gracefully, that doesn't fix the actual story though) AND some extreme railroading AND deus ex machina/Power of Love (at least the latter was retconnet as in not retroactive continuity but retroactive context). That actually put me off the show for some time. I think this moment encapsulates my problems with Hurley's writing pretty well. She really comes off as a Mary Sue written by a self-aware male writer who feels the need to put female characters on a pedestal -- certainly not the most objectionable phenomenon, but still makes my eyes roll. I feel the same about Carey and Killian in The Crystal Kingdom and the recurring remarks about "competent women". (I mean, I understand the gameplay reason for that, it's not that I'm asking for super detailed fights between NPCs, but I didn't like the way it sounded in the story.) Thankfully Carey got some development with Magnus, Killian had a good introduction before that glorification thing started cropping up, and their relationship's good obviously; plus, thankfully, Lucretia is completely free from this (she actually might be my fave NPC in terms of writing).

I think my least favourite part of The Suffering Game is the final past bosses battle? It's not just repetitive -- this repetition, needless in this case, devalues the other instances of our heroes facing the past. The first big one was Noelle (great: surprising, touching, important for the overall plot as we now know), then we had the three robots (I was pretty delighted to see Jenkins and Magic Brian again) even it was more about combat than meaningful facing of past mistakes, then the destruction of Phandolin was seen again in The Eleventh Hour, and only a bit later the setting of the first arc will be revisited once more. So even not counting this scene, it was starting to get a bit navel-gazey, and the complete lack of story relevance of that battle diluted things even more. It kind of sounded like running out of ideas -- I'd prefer any other challenge or just a repeat of the random monster generation. (Btw I totally expected to see the crab from Rockport Limited in that lineup. It's kind of special to me because back I went "Ah a floating crab, yeah feel you boys, I hate fighting Praetorians too, at least this thing doesn't shoot lase--" and then it started shooting fire, lol.)

Back to what I wanted to talk about: I have lots of thoughts/feelings about consequences re: the last episodes. The spoilers I've seen gave me so much anxiety! Like I've read that Magnus loses memory so I completely expected him to lose everything. So I spent a lot of time in complete dread, and when I read "Magnus forgets" in the summary my heart dropped, and then it wasn't that bad at all so I thought "that's it?" and felt relieved until the fucking clone tank. At which point I thought "No, this is it" especially because all of the players interpreted it that way. So I was very surprised and relieved that he kept everything, and that Griffin was so kind to him. But that kinda brought me to another problem -- that the new body undid Magnus's sacrifices. He didn't lose a finger or 10 years of life; the only loss was the identity of his nemesis which a) is a sad thing and he might be happier without it -- I would; and b) the boys promised to take care of that. Meanwhile, Taako and especially Merle have to live with their sacrifices. That's unfair. I was pretty thrilled when I realized the sacrifices were For Real, and was feeling real dread and anxiety about them (can't say if in a wholly good way) and I don't like devaluing that. Though of course I'm pretty jazzed that the character who is at the moment my favourite got treated so well. That scene was cathartic as hell! But back to the sacrifices: I'm intrigued by the problem of balance of hurting the character in a way that's good for narrative and/or game balance (yeah the intent of "let's nerf them a bit" was easy to see) but not compromising them as a piece of writing. I didn't give a shit about max health or dexterity penalties, but the story significant things about losing body parts and especially memories sounded brutal and cruel to me. I actually laughed when during one of the commercial breaks Griffin said something like "I hope this isn't causing you too much anxiety" because I was rushing through this arc because of that anxiety! But in the end, as it often happens, the half-misinterpreted spoilers made everything sound worse than it actually was. And I was very glad and relieved to hear Griffin specifically clarify that he's not going to take away important parts of a character.

But despite what I just said, when I started The Suffering Game arc I was actually amazed because it was second arc in a row built around my personal favorite tropes! I really appreciate Doctor Who-ish journey through genres (that doesn't take itself seriously but also has an epic underlying plot. All my fandoms are the same...) Murder on the Rockport Limited also counts in that category. So if I had to pick a favorite, they'd probably be among the candidates? Well I don't know how to count Reunion Tour for that. I really liked The Eleventh Hour, time travel/time loop stories are like my #1 fave. And it's a closed room mystery too (like Rockport Limited). That was the point where I started listening much faster because I needed to learn the truth. (Also, the Lunar Interlude before that arc, with the three separate stories, was freaking revolutionary and started a new level of character development for the show in general.) But I was kind of disappointed by the lack of a Holmes speech-type explanation of everything in the end. Because a big part of enjoyment was the expectation that it'll all click together beautifully in the end -- and some pieces still didn't fit. I'm still not sure if I missed something or that wasn't explained. Why was Isaak, like our heroes and unlike everyone else in the town, aware of the temporal loops and free to act? What was the interaction between Taako's spell and the code word -- did the spell have any effect other than almost drowning everyone, would "Junebug" have worked by itself? I had some more questions I thing, but right when I was going to pause/think/rest, everything was swept away by the freaking Red Robe Magnus cliffhanger, so I continued to run forward internally screaming "Explain! Explain!" like a Dalek, and then that was joined by the aforementioned Suffering Game anxiety. And that's the story how I marathoned the last part of the show three or more times faster than I planned to.

I really loved listening to TTAZZ, both of them, it was really good meta! I think I started to appreciate the show more after the first one. I can see where the fan criticism re: representation is coming from, but I myself also belong to the category of people who can never visualise their own (or anyone's, really) characters and therefore really love the freedom of interpretation. I'm also a bit sad about the commentary on racism in the new one, which, in addition to the comments about the Taco Quest in the first one, made me pretty sure that storyline/running joke is not coming back. I found it really funny back then in the beginning of the show -- more so because I, myself, have no freaking idea what tacos are actually like. I mean, we might have some mexican food places over here, but I've never been to one. And I intentionally didn't look it up after starting the show because it was funnier and kind of immersive this way lol. But they sound pretty committed to non-committance about the enthnicities, and raising the topic in canon again would force the issue, so I think they're just quietly abandoning it. Story-wise, I'd love to hear something like "Taako had invented a dish and named it after himself, but the voidfish baby ate the recipe so he couldn't recreate it until now" because I'm a sucker for justifying jokes and tying them into the main plot/emotional storyline. But in general I'd prefer any option that offends people the least. I was kind of surprised when Justin talked about abandoning Taako's early "dumb" characterisation, because I hadn't actually thought it was "officially" thrown away. I assumed Taako was just really bad at paying attention, and got better at managing that as a part of organic character development. I actually found that kind of relatable, plus "absent-minded professor/wizard" is a classic trope. Also TTAZZ made me wish even harder for the lost awesome adventure of Magnus and Kravitz in the astral plane. And it was already slightly souring my excitement about the totally awesome & touching scene we got instead.

I didn't really get the exposition about the planes in The Crystal Kingdom, and the long explanation in the latest two episodes require more attention than I gave them. Hope today's episode will make things clearer. Some things I hope to hear explained soon:

Why has Merle died more times than Magnus or Taako?

Also, looking forward to the promised explanation of how Gundren can be Merle's blood relative lol

Why was the Chalice so much more self-aware and civil than the other Relics? Is it related to the fact that its creator has some special connection to the (a?) voidfish?

Was Magnus a wizard before? Being a lich, creating a Grand Relic... If so, why doesn't he have magic now?

If Magnus is a lich, can he one day die and stay in the astral plane with Julia like an ordinary human, like he wanted? If not, that's a pretty big and tragic turn of events for him. (Granted, this might be more of a D&D mechanics question...)

(I actually just found a Reddit thread starting with the same question, discussing whether all 7 are really liches or not, so these two points might not be even valid haha)

(I also saw someone theorize that Lup invented the taco recipe -- and damn I really do want to see that now. Imagine trying to figure out something and later realize that it was created by your dead sister who named that thing after you.)

(I was confused about LichBarry’s reveal because I thought at the end of PTTM he was mind-controlling Captain Captain Bane to poison THB. Someone had the same question and another person answered that Barry’s spell was only to make Captain drink the poison, and the murder attempt was on him. I totally didn’t get that. Between this and my question about “Junebug”, either mind-control spells are not very clearly explained in this show, I suck at understanding them, or both.)

(Shit, this list has transformed from future episodes wishlist into reactions to Reddit lol)

Since I was talking about Taako and Lup, here’s another passing thought: remember how Taako immediately wanted to be Like Them when he saw the lich duo? You know, the elven brother and sister?!

Not related to anything, but I just realized I can wear jeans as a stealth fandom reference and it's delightful :D