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annecoulmanross · 5 years ago

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Rules:

Pick 5 TV shows, then answer the following questions. Tag 10 (or however many) people.

I was tagged by my dear @princess-of-france – loved your answers, Hal, and thank you!

1. The Terror (surprising no one) 2. Black Sails (haven’t finished yet but we’re in that age of sail mood) 3. TURN: Washington’s Spies (AMC history show hours) 4. The Borgias (okay we have no shame about history shows today) 5. HBO Rome (hey, why the hell not; all history it is)

Who is your favorite character in 2? I’m very partial to Thomas Hamilton, partly because, even though I haven’t finished the show, I do know where it’s going thanks to tumblr. Also, gotta love a man with a vision of a classical res publica. Also (part 2), who else can make Marcus Aurelius so sexy? (I swear I do like this show for more than just its classical reception.) Others on the favorite character list so far are Anne Bonny and Flint himself – he’s so gosh darned fun to watch; Toby Stephens is a gift of an actor.

Who is your least favorite character in 1? I mean, there’s no character in The Terror who doesn’t fulfill an important narrative role. But just because, (for example) Hickey is interesting and complex and well-written doesn’t mean I like him. I suppose, though, the character I find most repellent would be Des Voeux. Again, he’s narratively necessary and yet deeply emotionally distasteful. I’m not a villains person.

What is your favorite episode of 4? I’m also not finished with this one, so my favorite episode out of just the first two seasons... it’s very hard to choose, but “The Beautiful Deception” (02x03) is particularly stellar.

What is your favorite season of 5? Well, the first season is vastly better paced than the second season (a fun side-effect of a show that thought it was going to have a few more seasons than it actually received), but the second season has “These Being the Words of Marcus Tullius Cicero,” (02x03) which, tragically, has been vitally important to my honest-to-god career. So uhhh this is a toss-up.

Who is your favorite couple in 3? Favorite canon couple would be our darling tragic André/Peggy. Favorite non-canon couple would be the irrepressible boys, Ben/Caleb.

Who is your favorite couple in 2? Hhhhhh so yeah again, I started this show with a fair amount of fore-knowledge and Flint/Hamilton basically ticks all my ship boxes. Flint/Hamilton/Miranda also.

What is your favorite episode of 1? Oh god, it’s such a tightly written show that it’s very hard to choose. A part of me says that an early episode would be happier (I’m quite partial to “Gore” (01x02) since it has the best sledge party hours anyone’s ever seen, before everything goes wrong) but the tenderness toward the end of the show is so heartbreakingly lovely. For all its pain, “The C the C the Open Sea” (01x09) is incredibly beautiful.

What is your favorite episode of 5? As mentioned above, “These Being the Words of Marcus Tullius Cicero,” (02x03) is uhhhhh something. My “favorite” isn’t necessarily how I’d put it, but there’s no other episode that comes even close, so here we are. (I am haunted by the abstract concept of peaches...)

What is your favorite season of 2? Thus far, season 2, but I haven’t gotten to the third and fourth seasons yet, so this means very little, apart from the fact that I have a general preference for seasons with flashbacks with Miranda and Hamilton in them.

How long have you watched 1? I just watched The Terror for the first time this year, about two months ago. Yeah, I don’t remember what life was like before that either, for many reasons.

How did you become interested in 3? My dear @princess-of-france showed me the entire show this past summer and we discussed it episode-by-episode – an absolutely incredible viewing experience.

Who is your favorite actor in 4? Well, we were just talking about the glorious François Arnaud.... I also love Jeremy Irons, though. Both; both are good.

Which do you prefer, 1, 2, or 5? Why is this being done to me? Not Rome, that’s for sure, but I do really like both Black Sails and The Terror. Right now, I’m still so deep in The Terror that it’s hard to deny that it’s my preference, tragically. But I’m getting rapidly more into Black Sails.

Which show have you seen more episodes of, 1 or 3? I’ve seen all of both, but there are more episodes of TURN: Washington’s Spies than there are of The Terror, so TURN it is.

If you could be anyone from 4, who would you be? Oh this is NOT the show I would want to live in out of these five at ALL. Um, to be honest, I kind of adore the absolute moral conviction of Della Rovere. It would be... interesting to see what his journey is like from the inside.

Would a crossover between 3 and 4 work? If one has the ability to time travel, I suppose? A Long Island Yankee in Pope Alexander’s Court?

Pair two characters in 1 who would make an unlikely but strangely okay couple? Given the dedication and care that The Terror’s fandom has shown to minor characters and rare pairs, I’m not sure any pairing would feel truly strange to me. I’m partial to some niche couples like Rossier and Goodsir/MacDonald, but those are still stronger than just “strangely okay.” In the spirit of trying to provide a genuinely unlikely pairing, I would say that I basically never EVER consider separating Bridgens and Peglar (our canon couple, the lights of my life) – but I do think that, in some horrible Peglar-less universe, Bridgens and Goodsir could be a good pairing. As it is, I love Bridgens and Goodsir as friends.

Overall, which show has the better storyline, 3 or 5? This isn’t at ALL fair, because TURN got the number of seasons it wanted, and HBO Rome was cut off early, but even without that, TURN is a vastly superior show in my book. It’s TURN, no question.

Which has better theme music, 2 or 4? Wow, this isn’t the kind of thing I typically notice? My instinct is Black Sails over Borgias, but tbh I’d have to go watch a few episodes of both and pay more specific attention to the music. (If TURN was in here, it would win for all the beautiful covers of period-era songs. I have a TURN playlist that’s in regular rotation.)

I honestly have so much fun doing these kind of tag games – thank you, Hal, for the tag!

As for me: @kaserl @frauncis @endofvanity and anyone else who’s interested!

#about me #tag games

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aion-rsa · 3 years ago

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The Office: The Farm Spin-Off Would Have Wrecked Dwight and Angela’s Ending

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Warning: contains spoilers for The Office seasons 1-9.

“Geese and goats and Schrutes and hijinks at the Bed and Breakfast” is how Rainn Wilson, the actor behind The Office‘s Dwight K. Schrute, summed up proposed spin-off The Farm, which never went beyond its pilot episode. Speaking to fans on a Reddit AMA back in 2012, Wilson called the Dwight-focussed show a terrific, weird yet accessible rural family comedy. Had it been ordered to series, it would have told the story of the Dunder Mifflin paper salesman running a 1,600 acre farm and B&B with his brother and sister.

“It would have been a really big hit,” The Farm writer-director Paul Lieberstein told ‘The Office Deep Dive with Brian Baumgartner’ podcast in 2021. Lieberstein was co-showrunner on The Office for seasons five to eight, and played HR manager Toby Flenderson on the comedy. He told podcast presenter Brian Baumgartner how disappointed he was when NBC chose not to pursue the project in 2012, blaming a change in management. “I don’t see how someone could not give The Farm a chance. Not give the Dwight spin-off a chance,” he told the podcast.

The year before, Comcast had bought a controlling share in NBCUniversal, which resulted in a change of NBC Entertainment Chair. The new boss, says Lieberstein, did not champion The Office. “I have to say that they didn’t even know all of the characters’ names at that point, they weren’t really following the show. I think we were just a disappointing line item at the time.”

Lieberstein had planned for the spin-off to develop into a mockumentary about the hardships of running a small family farm “at a time when they’re being squeezed out”, he told The Daily Beast in 2018. “It would have old characters and new, and they’d have kept the B&B going. It would have been a lot of fun.”

The spin-off’s major new characters were introduced in the unaired pilot, 12 minutes of which were chopped up and edited into season nine The Office episode ‘The Farm’. A pre-Silicon Valley Thomas Middleditch played Dwight’s unlikely brother Jeb, a hapless drifter who’d stumbled into Californian weed farming. Roswell’s Majandra Delfino played their pseudo-intellectual, amateur poet, Chicago-dwelling sister Fannie, single mother to nine-year-old city mouse Cameron, played by Mom’s Blake Garrett-Rosenthal. The 12 minutes of the pilot shown laid the groundwork for Dwight to take ‘Cammy’ under his wing and school him in Schrute tradition.

‘The Farm’ episode also introduced a new love interest for Dwight in the form of Esther Bruegger (played by writer-director Nora Kirkpatrick). Bruegger’s character was an attractive, younger-than-Dwight sprout farmer from a neighbouring farm, who recurred as Dwight’s girlfriend on season nine of The Office until Dwight and Angela finally reunited and went on to marry in the series finale. If The Farm had come to fruition though, that series finale would have been entirely different.

Angela Kinsey – the actor behind The Office’s uptight, judgmental accountant Angela, who had a long-running secret affair with Dwight – was not part of The Farm’s cast. After the end of The Office, Kinsey was lined up to star alongside her real-life pal Rachael Harris in FOX sitcom pilot Dirty Blondes, a post-divorce female friendship comedy by Black-Ish’s Stacy Traub. When that didn’t happen, Kinsey starred alongside The Daily Show’s Rob Riggle in the pilot for oddball family comedy The Gabriels. That one didn’t go either, but if either had gone to series, then Kinsey obviously could not have also been part of The Farm, meaning that ‘Dwangela’ wasn’t always destined to be Dwight’s romantic endgame. Perhaps Kinsey would have made Lilith Sternin-in-Frasier-style guest appearances in the spin-off, but it seems that she and baby Philip weren’t always intended to be Dwight’s big story.

The Office: The Frustrating, Moving Story Behind Steve Carell Leaving

By Louisa Mellor

Parks and Recreation: What Happened to Mark Brendanawicz?

By Gavin Jasper

The original plan, if The Farm had gone to series, was for the backdoor pilot to have slotted in around episode five of The Office’s final season. At that point, Dwight had given up on Angela after (wrongly) learning in the season premiere that he wasn’t the biological father of her son. Rainn Wilson’s character would have been written out of the show around the mid-season point, leaving Dunder Mifflin for an Angela-free future.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, Dwight would also be leaving for a Mose-free future. Mose Schrute was Dwight’s strange cousin, a recurring character who lived at Schrute Farms and popped up to add weird vibes whenever the story ventured in that direction. Any fan would have expected Mose to be a cert for The Farm spin-off, but that was an impossibility. Mose’s character was played by one of the show’s writer-producers Michael Schur, and originally intended as a seldom-seen joke. The character though, proved a fan favourite, so the team kept finding ways to bring him back.

At the end of season four, Mike Schur and Greg Daniels left The Office to run its first ever spin-off, a city council-focused comedy that eventually became Parks & Recreation. In 2013, Parks & Rec was entering its fifth season, and there was no way that Schur would have time to run that show and continue playing Mose. Schur told Aint It Cool in June 2012 that Mose’s absence from the series proper would be explained, “and that the explanation was too funny to reveal ahead of the pilot’s airing.” A tragic farm-related accident? Scouted for a new season of Amish in the City? Or perhaps Mose finally elopes with his lady scarecrow… we’ll never know.

When NBC declined to pick up The Farm, the decision was made in good enough time for Dwight to be re-inserted as a lead into the last half of season nine, and for the series finale to be written around his and Angela’s wedding. An unintended victim, showrunner Greg Daniels told fastcompany.com in 2013, was British actor Catherine Tate who played Nellie on The Office:

“The toughest part was for Catherine Tate. There was going to be this zone where Rainn had left and Ed Helms was doing The Hangover [Part III] and we had talked to Catherine about the character of Nellie kind of filling the gap and being the driver of comedy A-stories in that period. Then when The Farm didn’t go, Rainn kind of came back and filled that role. So I think we kind of wasted a brilliant comedian this year a little bit with Catherine Tate.”

Greg Daniels, 2013.

‘The Farm’ half-hour eventually aired as episode 17 of the season, which introduced Dwight’s new girlfriend Esther just in time for Angela’s marriage to her closeted gay husband Senator Robert Lipton to have fallen apart, creating a mini love triangle. Who would Dwight choose, a young teutonic beauty who knew her way around a combine harvester, or his ‘Monkey’?

Dwight chose Monkey, and promised to raise her son Philip despite not being his biological father. That’s when Angela told Dwight that she’d faked the DNA results and Philip was, as suspected, his son. ‘Faked the results’ isn’t quite how editor-producer David Rogers put it in this 2013 interview with Office Tally. Rogers explained that lines had been cut from scenes suggesting that when Dwight took a used diaper from the garbage to test Philip’s paternal DNA, he accidentally picked up one used by Jim and Pam’s baby or another child, hence the lack of a match. In the end, that explanation was dropped to simplify things.

Dwight and Angela’s one-year-later wedding story in the series finale gave The Office the perfect premise to reunite the show’s cast, many of who had left Dunder Mifflin for pastures new. It let Steve Carell make a deliberately low-key cameo (he didn’t want to draw focus from the main event) as Michael Scott, Dwight’s surprise best man. It let Jim and Dwight show their brotherly affection for each other, after years of enmity. And it gave Dwight and a partially redeemed Angela – who’d been brought low by the end of her marriage and lost some of her sharper corners in the process – a happy ending. Had The Farm happened, all of that would have been different.

Some think that that NBC’s decision not to move forward with the spin-off was no bad thing. When writer of The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s Andy Greene was asked about the defunct series in this Jeremy Roberts interview, he clearly thought it was for the best:

“Everyone I spoke to felt it was a bad idea. I agree. You don’t want to spend that much time with Dwight on the farm. He’s funny at an office with people that are his total opposites. “The Farm” is a salvaged failed pilot that they chopped up into a regular episode because NBC didn’t want to pick it up. The whole thing was just a colossally wrong-headed idea and one of the worst Office episodes ever.“

Andy Greene, 2020.

Dwight works so well as a character in The Office because he’s the chaotic element in Dunder Mifflin’s everyday mix, the unpredictable wildcard in a place of crushing predictability. Surround Dwight K. Schrute with characters as unhinged as he is, and he loses his unique power. If The Office is ultimately about – as Pam says in the show’s last ever line – seeing beauty in ordinary things, then The Farm, with its oddball characters and outlandish Schrute family traditions, would have been anything but ordinary, so maybe wouldn’t have captured the same beauty.

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The Office: An American Workplace is available to stream on Netflix in the UK, and on Peacock in the US.

The post The Office: The Farm Spin-Off Would Have Wrecked Dwight and Angela’s Ending appeared first on Den of Geek.

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ryanmeft · 7 years ago

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War for the Planet of the Apes Movie Review

War for the Planet of the Apes, despite the title, contains only two significant battle scenes, bookending the rest of the film. Otherwise, it is rather quieter than I expected, given to scenes of reflection on what has come before and where the story will go next. It isn't the most individually gripping of the new Apes films, but taken as part of a whole, it thoroughly pays off their promise, and cements this series as both an evolution of the rather campy idea behind the originals, and as one of the best modern series in its own right.

Caesar (Andy Serkis) leader of the rising numbers of intelligent apes who were created by human science and have become their own society, begins the film troubled. A fanatical military leader named only The Colonel (Woody Harrelson) has made it his mission to destroy their kind, a mission made more urgent in his mind by the fact that the SImian Fu which gave birth to them has decimated humanity. When the Colonel takes something precious from Caesar, he sends his people to cross the desert to find a new, safe home, but he himself goes to take revenge. He is accompanied by stalwarts Rocket (Terry Notary), Maurice the orangutan (Karin Konoval) and great ape Luca (Michael Adamthwaite). They add Bad Ape (Steve Zahn), a zoo escapee who, like Caesar, has evolved beyond the others and can speak. Along the way they meet a young, mute girl they named Nova, played by newcomer Amiah Miller, and though she does not speak she is both the moral grounding that gives definition to Caesar's quest and the bridge between...well, that would be spoiling it.

The plot contains fewer surprises than the last two films, since it is intended to conclude their story. I will discuss what I can without spoiling things. Caesar has gone from a young and idealistic revolutionary convinced humans and apes can live in peace to someone who, thanks to the betrayal of his lieutenant Koba (Toby Kebbell) in Dawn, has been pushed to the brink of extremism. Instead he tries to find new homes for his tribe. While Reeves and co-writer Mark Bomback clearly knew what they were about when they chose to have a leader send his people across a desert looking for a perhaps-mythical promised land, they do not use the religious undertones like a club. And while the Biblical Moses had God literally on his side against the Egyptians, Caesar has only himself and a few loyal followers against the Colonel. It's the story of Exodus, if that story took place in a near-apocalyptic wasteland and involved a vengeance-minded Moses against an insane and zealous fanatic of a Ramses.

The Colonel is one of the more fascinating antagonists in modern film, and when you find out his motivations and secrets you realize the story could have been seen from his point-of-view. He's willing to do anything to, as he sees it, secure humanity's future, including murder, rebellion and genocide. He waits on the edge of Caesar's known world like Kurtz waited in his jungle compound, having built himself a place of terror that he sees as something of a wonderland. There are hints that his own past as described by him is partly a fabrication, whether intended or not, though I'll leave you to discover and interpret that yourself. What I will discuss is Harrelson's gaze, one of his hallmarks as an actor, here refined into the look of a man who is no longer a man, who exists entirely for his own self-designated purpose. Watch him during the initial, brief confrontation with Caesar, as he stands painted for battle under a waterfall, or when he tells Caesar he is taking the extermination of his people too personally. There is nothing behind those eyes; he has become his function. In some ways he's the tragic focus of the plot.

A large part of the success of the new Apes franchise has been trust. Rupert Wyatt and then Reeves have trusted the audience to accept talking apes as complex and emotional creatures, the fact that humans are secondary to these characters, and then that the well-known actors portraying the humans would not continue from installment to installment. They've trusted we'll accept a morally complex story built on the back of rather low brow originals, and that we'll have patience while it all builds. Audiences and critics have both rewarded them for this, proving that if you put in actual effort, they will indeed come. The films have received top shelf treatment from any perspective, notably the astounding performance by Serkis, who like Doug Jones seems capable of embodying any strange character and making them real.

I'd be remiss, however, if I didn't accept these movies would never work without modern technical wizardry. The effects in the original were excellent for their time, but we knew we were looking at humans in monkey suits. Here, though the apes are composed almost entirely with animation, emotionally we never doubt we are looking at real creatures, even when they open their mouths and speak. A father and son embrace, affection is exchanged between mates, apes mourn their fallen comrades, and not once did anyone at my screening so much as chuckle. In fact, there were several decidedly non-dry eyes in the house at times.

The effects go beyond the apes to the world they inhabit, which is intended to be California but is unlike any California we'd know. The apes initially find shelter in a cave inside a towering rock surrounded by waterfalls, and the compound The Colonel has built himself somehow manages to possess a bittersweet beauty when snow falls, despite the atrocities there; the audience are not currently apes, after all, and I was keenly aware it might be humanity's last refuge. The battles, too, when they come, work: they feel like they have real stakes, in a real world. It is all backed up by a purchase-worthy score Michael Giacchino. Sometimes relegated to work on films that don't make the best use of his talents, here he creates music that underscores audience's investment in this world, while many tunes still stand alone as works of art.

With War, it has officially become unnecessary and a bit passe to say that movies about talking primates (which, of course, is almost every movie) can actually be good. That fact has been proved, and with more Apes on the way and the ending of this film hinting toward larger plotlines to come, it would seem insane at this point if the decision makers at FOX were to lose faith and not demand the same level of quality going forward. If that happened, however, you could easily take Rise, Dawn and War, and decide they were a complete package with no need of any more add-ons. This third film cements the Apes reboots as solid proof that anything can be invested with gravitas and that if you believe in your story, everyone else will, too.

Verdict: Highly Recommended

Note: I don’t use stars but here are my possible verdicts. I suppose you could consider each one as adding a star.

Must-See Highly Recommended Recommended Average Not Recommended Avoid like the Plague

You can follow Ryan's reviews on Facebook here:

https://www.facebook.com/ryanmeftmovies/

Or his very infrequent tweets here:

https://twitter.com/RyanmEft

All images are property of the people what own the movie.

#toby kebbell #andy serkis #amiah miller #war for the planet of the apes #planet of the apes #woody harrelson #karin konoval #mark bomback #matt reeves #michael adamthwaite #rupert wyatt #terry notary #movies #movie review

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missmudpie · 7 years ago

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On Cliffhangers: Ones that Work, and Ones that Drive You Over the Edge

Wednesday night was a long night of TV watching in the Mudpie Household. In addition to the Season Finales of Arrow and The 100, it was also the two-hour finale of Survivor. Needless to say, it was hard to get out of bed Thursday morning.

Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about Arrow and The 100 - things that I liked, things I didn’t, but mainly I’ve been mulling over their endings. Both ended with cliffhangers. Both ended with the fate of the vast majority of the cast unknown and in peril, with the central protagonist facing the world alone, save for the company of a child. And yet, only one really worked for me.

And that was The 100.

For the past two days, I’ve been thinking a lot about these endings, about cliffhangers in general and, more specifically, ones from other shows that I’ve really liked. I’ve mentioned several times that writing is how I process things, so here we go - Cliffhangers: When they work, and Why the don’t.

(Warning: spoilers for Arrow, The 100, The Hunger Games, The West Wing, Battlestar Galactica, Alias, Lost and Grey’s Anatomy ahead.)

First things first - What is a cliffhanger? TV Tropes defines it as:

A Cliffhanger ends [...] with some or all of the main characters in peril of some kind and the audience is made to wait for the outcome. [...] Typically the longer the viewer is made to wait, the larger the seeming peril. Indeed, this can be a Downer Ending to the part just finished — although many apparent perils and catastrophes are not as serious as they appear. It is a rare Cliffhanger that will cut back simply to watch 'em fall.

Which we all pretty much knew, right? We all know this; it’s part of the common language of media and stories. Small ones occur every episode, usually right before a commercial break. Larger ones, with greater and graver consequences, occur at the end of the season.

But I wanted to start here because I wanted to be exact about the type of cliffhanger I’m discussing here. Every show has to end its season with some type of tease, some thread left unresolved or the start of a new problem, to keep viewers invested during the long hiatus. But not all of these are what I would call true cliffhangers. One of the best ways I can think to explain this difference is to look beyond TV. The Hunger Games (the novel) ends with (SPOILERS) Katniss and Peeta returning home to District 12. This chapter of their story has ended, but the book ends with the feeling that there’s more to tell - specifically, what will the ramifications of their defiant win be? It completely wraps up the main thread of the book (surviving the Games) while hinting at what is to come next. To me, this isn’t a cliffhanger. Catching Fire, the second book in the series, however, does. Again, SPOILERS - In CF, Katniss wakes up to discover she’s been extracted from the Games by a burgeoning rebellion, her home has been bombed out of existence, and several of her friends - including Peeta - are now being held hostage by the Capital.

This isn’t the ending of a chapter. This is a gut punch. When I read the first book, I was intrigued but able to wait a few days before starting the next book. When I finished Catching Fire, I immediately started Mockingjay - at 11pm.

That’s what a cliffhanger is to me. It’s an almost visceral reaction to what you’ve just seen or read. There is no peace, no easing of the tension. A cliffhanger leaves you with a knot in your stomach, and the only way to ease that feeling is by getting your grubby hands on the next book or episode immediately.

For this reason, I don’t classify some of my favorite season finales as cliffhangers. They successfully end the main narrative thread of the season, and end with intriguing set-up for the next season, but there’s not that, again, visceral gimme gimme feeling. Probably the greatest example of this is Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Season Five finale, The Gift. This is, of course, the one in which Buffy dies to save her sister, her friends, and the world. It’s a beautiful, tragic ending that somehow isn’t undercut by the fact that we all knew Buffy was returning next season (albeit on a different network). (Unpopular Buffy opinion: Sometimes I wish Buffy had ended with Season Five, not because I hated the next two seasons, but because the ending of The Gift was such a beautiful moment that did cleanly wrap up Buffy’s narrative - even if it did end in death.) . Season Five ends with our heroine dead and buried - but it’s not a cliffhanger, for me. It’s the ending of a chapter of her story, but it is, again, a clean ending. Likewise, I’m not sure I would classify the Season Two Finale, Becoming: Part 2 (my other favorite episode) as a cliffhanger, because it, again, cleanly ends a chapter of Buffy’s story (Angel is sent to a demon world, moments after regaining his soul) while hinting at a new story arc (just where is Buffy going on that bus, and how will she return).

Alias knew well how to deliver the kind of gut-punch finales I associate with cliffhangers, from Season One’s “Mom?” to Season Four’s “My name isn’t Michael Vaughn.” But nothing could top Season Two’s The Telling. After a brutal fight against her dead roommate’s secret doppelganger (”Francie doesn’t like coffee ice cream.”), Sydney passes out - only to wake up on the streets of Hong Kong. Her boyfriend, Vaughn, comes to help - only to reveal he’s married, and Sydney has been missing for two years. It’s the kind of WTF time-jump moment JJ Abrams would use again in the Season Three Finale of Lost, Through the Looking Glass, in which it’s revealed that the bizzaro flashbacks we’ve been seeing throughout the episode are really flashforwards, and that at least some of the castaways have made it off the Island.

Both Lost and Alias’ cliffhangers work because they raise more questions the more you think about it. Where has Sydney been? How did Vaughn move on so quickly? Where are the rest of the castaways? How, why and when were some rescued? Those who binged these series have it easy. These episodes were followed by interminable summers for those of us who watched live.

These and other cliffhangers ended with the fate, whether past or present, of the protagonist uncertain, but alive. Others put the actual life of the protagonist or other main character in jeopardy and doubt (See: Battlestar Galactica’s Season One, Kobol’s Last Gleaming Part 2, in which Adama is shot point-blank by an activated Boomer; Game of Thrones’ Season Five, Mother’s Mercy, in which we end on Jon Snow bleeding out in the, well, snow.). For some shows, though, leaving the fate of just one character unknown isn’t enough. For these shows, nothing less than putting the entire main cast in danger will do. I’ve always referred to this as pulling a Moldavian Wedding, but TV Trope has another name for it: the Bolivian Army Cliffhanger, so named for the final scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in which our heroes find themselves surrounded by the Bolivian Army and decide to shoot their way out. The odds are insurmountable, yet the action ends before we know if they lived or died (spoiler: they died). In the Bolivian Army Cliffhanger, the majority of the cast is stuck in a situation - be it a shoot-out, a plane crash, or massive explosion - that puts all their lives at risk.

The tension in the Bolivian Army Cliffhanger comes from wondering who lived and who died. And it’s the answer to that question, in my mind, that determines whether the cliffhanger is successful or not. You need to trust that the writers and the show will follow through with the promise made that not all of the characters you care about are going to make it out alive. I repeat: not all of the characters that you care about are going to make it out alive. If the show doesn’t follow through with that promise, it can feel like a cop-out.

That’s exactly what happened in Dynasty’s fifth season finale, Royal Wedding. This is the Moldavian Wedding I referred to earlier. In it, most of the cast was gathered at the wedding of the Moldavian prince, when revolutionaries stormed in and opened fire. The season ended with everyone wondering who was still alive. The answer: Everyone. Okay, not everyone - a boyfriend and a girlfriend died, but no one from the main cast. That’s not good storytelling; that’s a cop-out.

You can contrast this with The West Wing’s Season One finale, What Kind of Day This Has Been, in which gunmen open fire on the President as he’s exiting an event. We hear the shots, we see various characters go down, and the episode ends with Secret Service shouting, “Who’s been hit? Who’s been hit?”

When we return in the Season Two premiere, In the Shadow of Two Gunmen, it almost seems like we’re headed into cop-out territory - Bartlet is safe in the car, his daughter Zoey is puking in another car but fine, Leo is accounted for, Sam and CJ are alive and well at the scene. And then the President starts slurring his words and bleeding from the mouth, and a gunshot wound is discovered - right about the time Toby finds Josh slumped against a low wall with a bullet to the chest. Both eventually recover, although Josh has PTSD that is addressed over the next few seasons, and all the uninjured characters deal with survivor’s guilt in their own way.

This Bolivian Army Cliffhanger works, unlike Dynasty’s, because it’s revealed that there were actual stakes involved. True, no one died, but The West Wing wasn’t a show about people dying (until the end of Season Two; RIP Mrs. Landingham). The answer to the question, “Who’s been hit?” was two of our beloved main characters - two people we cared about - the event was not forgotten in the next episode, but instead impacted and changed these characters in real and lasting ways. In this, it’s comparable to the Season Eight Finale of Grey’s Anatomy, Flight, in which a large hunk of the main cast is in a plane crash. Lexie dies, and the fate of everyone else is unknown until the Season Nine premiere, Going, Going Gone, which occurs after a time jump and reveals everyone is still alive, except - Christina has moved to Minnesota and can’t get on a plane because of her PTSD, Derek’s hand hasn’t recovered yet, affecting his ability to do surgery, Arizona had to have her leg amputated, and Mark has been in a coma this whole time and is taken off life-support by episode’s end. Once again, characters we cared about were affected and changed in ways that will carry through throughout the rest of the series.

Which now, finally, brings me to the Season Finale of Arrow, Lian Yu, which is almost a textbook definition of the Bolivian Army Cliffhanger to the point that, when it happened, I literally said to my husband, “This is the Moldavian Wedding all over again.” (And to which he responded, “Can we watch Survivor now?”) . And it just didn’t work for me, at all.

For the Bolivian Army Cliffhanger to work, you need to have a deep emotional bond with the characters involved, and this is where Arrow first falters.

The Arrowverse has some great examples of fathers’ love for their children - biological, foster or found. Joe West is the epitome of this, loving Iris (the child he raised from birth), Barry (the child he fostered) and Wally (the child he discovered as a young adult) equally and fiercely. When Wally was introduced as Joe’s son, I had no trouble understanding and relating to Joe’s instant love for that boy, because the show has already showed us exactly the type of father Joe was. Likewise on Supergirl, it was easy to see the depth of affection J’onn J’onzz has for Kara and Alex; the three form a found family unit and will do anything to keep each other safe. My point is, if either of these men were in Oliver’s shoes, with one of their kids in danger, I would have been in tears.

With William, honestly - I couldn’t find it in me to care. Because William is still a plot point at this point. We have not seen Oliver be a father, although we got a glimpse of it Wednesday night. But I don’t know William, and he’s tainted by his parents’ lies. I don’t yet care about William, so the choice Oliver had to make did not resonate on an emotional level.

Likewise, there are a number of characters on Lian Yu who I like, but whose deaths would not devastate me - namely, Curtis, Dinah and Rene. Again, I don’t have anything against them; they’re fine as supporting players, but not essential to my Arrow-viewing pleasure. And if them leaving meant no more side storylines about custody hearings or talking over the smartest person in the entire Arrowverse, if their death meant more screentime for a certain former Army Ranger - then yeah, I’m good with their deaths.

There needs to be tension in the Bolivian Army Cliffhanger, and there just isn’t any here. There needs to be faith that the show won’t cop out and save everyone, and I just don’t have that here. Look, Arrow has a problem with the followthrough. It kills off its central hero and then brings him back with penicillin tea. Hell, Arrow already pulled a Bolivian Army Cliffhanger back in Season Three, This is Your Sword. Remember the episode ending with everyone in the cast dying in a prison cell? Remember the reveal that they survived because Malcolm had secretly inoculated them with handshakes, and then Barry pulled a Deus Ex Machina and flashed them all back to Staring City? Because I do, and I have little faith that Arrow is going to offer up a better explanation for why everyone survived here.

Again, the characters you care about have to be in danger. We know Felicity, Diggle and Thea are not going to get killed off-screen (or even on-screen), so there’s no tension there. Lance could die, but I really doubt he goes like this; I think if he goes, he gets a hero’s death and a goodbye scene with Oliver. Malcolm died off-screen, but come on - he’ll be back midway through Season Seven. Slade could go, having redeemed himself, and while I would be sad to see him go, it would be a fitting end to his character. I don’t see how the show kills Nyssa. That just leaves the Newbies and Samantha, and honestly Samantha’s death would anger me the most because 1) It would mean Oliver becomes insta-dad and I don’t see how the show adjusts to having a preteen around full time and 2) it would mean they killed of the reddest of red shirts instead of someone with a stronger connection to the audience.

Of course, no one has to die for the Bolivian Army Cliffhanger to be successful; see, again, The West Wing. But the event does have to change them; it needs to continue to affect them. And since Arrow is a show with penicillin tea and micro-implants, I have trouble believing that this won’t be forgotten by 5x05. And that, for me, is why the Arrow finale didn’t quite stick the landing.

The characters you care about have to be in danger, and since I know my faves are safe, there’s no tension, just anger that the show thinks I’m dumb enough to spend my summer worrying about Digg and Felicity’s fates.

Meanwhile, The 100 finished its fourth season with probably its best episode to date, an almost-in-real-time race against the Death Wave to get the remaining Delinquents (and a couple Grounders) launched into space, where they planned to spend the next five years surviving on reclaimed water and algae until it was safe to return to Earth. The other half of the cast was safe, for the moment, in an underground bunker, where the 1200 people had enough oxygen and resources to last five years.

Of course, just about everything went wrong in getting the Delinquents back into space. Clarke had to sacrifice herself; Bellamy, in a moment that echoed the Season One Finale, had to decide to launch without her. The episode ends with Bellamy, Raven and the rest having made it to the Ark, safe for the moment, while Clarke seemingly succumbs to radiation.

Except - that’s not how the episode ends.

Instead we jump six years and seven days into the future. Clarke is alive, the Earth has recovered - and she hasn’t heard from anyone else since Praimfaya.

Again, as with Arrow, the fate of the vast majority of the cast is unknown. And yet I’m not angry about this like I am with Arrow. Unlike Arrow, I care about pretty much every character on The 100, and so any of those deaths are not going to feel like a red-shirt cop-out; they’re going to matter. By doing a six-year time jump, the show has also changed the question. It’s not so much Who has survived, but rather How and Why have they survived? And the Hows and Whys give way to even more questions. What has life been like on the Arc with only seven people? What about life in the Bunker? If 1200 could survive for five years, what does it mean that they’ve been down there for six? Have babies been born? Has the Bunker resorted to the draconian measures of the first Arc, or have the learned? When we left, these people were all teenagers; now, they’re in their mid-twenties, and Bellamy is close to 30; how has that changed them?

Oh, yes - And what the frak is that mining ship doing there???

This was a true cliffhanger, a visceral feeling, a gut punch. What the hell happens next? Why isn’t January already?

A good cliffhanger leaves you wanting, nay, needing the next installment now. You need to know if Adama will make it, you need to know who among the President’s Men and Women were shot, you need to know how and why your people survived a second apocalypse. It leaves you in suspense.

Both Arrow and The 100 ended their seasons on a cliffhanger, but only the latter succeeded.

#Arrow #The 100 #Arrow spoilers #The 100 spoilers

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 8 years ago

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What don't you like about #47? Not hating. just curious.

Short opinion: I’m just gonna leave this here.

Long opinion:

Seriously, though, Isaiah Fitzhenry’s journal cuts off mid-sentence. Because we know he died in the act of writing it. Oh, and by the way, he’s lying in the middle of a battlefield, bleeding to death, while writing those words. This book clearly didn’t think things through nearly well enough, or perhaps assumed that its child readers wouldn’t notice. Trust me, I noticed. When I was eight years old* I had this ridiculous mental image of this dude lying there in the middle of a freakin’ Civil War battle writing in his notebook with his pen. Now that I know a little history I have this EVEN MORE RIDICULOUS mental image of this dude lying there in the middle of a freakin’ battle with a quill pen, an ink pot, a sheet of non-waterproof wood-pulp, a pen knife, an ink blotter, and some kind of writing surface AS HE BLEEDS TO DEATH IN THE MUD.

There are several other utterly ridiculous leaps of logic that this story is forced to make in order to achieve the journal at all. Why the heck even bother adding in a character named Jacob? Given that he died before meeting anyone from the Fitzhenry family who actually survived long enough to procreate, one can only assume that Jean Berenson has read her grandfather’s great-aunt’s dead brother’s journal enough to go want to name a kid after this dude, and yet she has never once mentioned that fact to Jake. Otherwise it’s just a weird coincidence, one which violates the One Steve Limit.

On the subject of dead brothers and Berensons (too soon?) it’s interesting to note that this book continues the motif of eldest siblings kicking the bucket that runs throughout the series. Rachel and Tom are the obvious ones, as I’ve noted, but there’s also Elfangor, Saddler, Arbat, Aldrea, and now Isaiah Fitzhenry. If I had to guess the fact that Isaiah has a younger sister and then dies tragically is no accident. (Although that all could have been avoided if he’d just gotten to a friggin’ medical tent instead of whipping out his complete set of writing supplies in the middle of a battlefield to continue his vaguely-racist memoirs…) It’s also a nice connection to that chilling moment at the beginning of the book where Jake dumps a box of Tom’s things in the trash because he has pretty much given up on the idea of saving his brother at this point in the war.

However, even the way that Jake ends up with the journal is kind of weird and logic-defying. His Grandpa G tried to leave it for him as a gift (which makes sense, given how obsessed that kid is with military history) but somehow or other it got lost in the mail because Jake is only now finding it mis-labeled in some box in the basement. Which makes sense how? Why the heck didn’t it come up during that whole sequence where Tom and Jake were looting all their great-grandpa’s stuff looking for medals and daggers? For that matter, why didn’t Jake’s grandmother just give it to him after the funeral, given that #31 specifically mentions she made sure to pass along everything that her father wanted Jake to have? Assuming it did get lost amidst the chaos of the funeral and the Attack of Moby Cassie and Tom ending up in the hospital and all, how on earth did it end up in a box in the basement among a bunch of Tom’s old school papers?

It also has to have traveled a heck of a ways to make it into Grandpa G’s possession in the first place. Someone has to have found it on the battlefield, presumably delivered it to Isaiah’s sister, who then passed it down to her children’s children, who then thought it would be a good thing to hoard and only pass on to the one great-grandchild who happened to prove himself worthy. For that matter, did Jake read the whole thing sitting there in the basement? If so, why does he only react to the first chapter? If he didn’t read the whole thing in one go, does that mean he’s carrying it around in bird morph until he reaches the hork-bajir valley? Again where it defies logic, and all to achieve a plot device that could have been conveyed so much more easily with good old-fashioned flashbacks.

And, well, as Cates has pointed out, no discussion of this book would be complete without commenting on the GLARING RACISM in the parallels between the past and present day. The idea of escaped slaves fighting back against the people who once disenfranchised them in both the 1860s and the 1990s would be interesting and all… But in the process this book compares hork-bajir, who Marco says have “the intelligence of your average second grader” (#51) to African American individuals. Not only does it draw a parallel between white individuals and humans while also drawing a parallel between black individuals and non-human characters, but it does so in a way that suggests that the black individuals are comparable to simple tree-dwelling primitive aliens with no written language or ability to comprehend complex ideas. If I think too much about this accidentally horrific metaphor (which I try not to) then it could arguably even re-cast the hork-bajir, with their simple but intuitive reliance on “head voices” (#13) and “Mother Sky’s flowers” (Hork-Bajir Chronicles), as Magical Negro stereotypes.

The racism is far and away the biggest problem with this book, because RACISM, but there are also a ton of flaws in the characterization and plotting that just bug me. Jake’s personality is all over the place in this book, most especially when he acts like a total jerk to Toby when Toby (very logically) points out that sixty-odd walking Salad Shooters can’t just duck and run every time the going gets tough the way that six morph-capable kids can. One of Jake’s great strengths as a leader is his decisiveness, and he spends huge chunks of this book quibbling about the right course of action in an utterly unJakeish way. Oh, and don’t get me started on the fact that during the final battle HE FORGETS THAT TIGERS KNOW HOW TO SWIM. Exactly how hard did you get hit over the head by Visser Three’s tentacle-morph, man?

Toby herself has a couple of downright bizarre lines in this book, including “The trees whispered something about new friends who would take up our cause. Human friends who would join our fight… I see things, Jake. Many things” (#47). Say what? I thought it was Aldrea who was secretly an andalite, not Toby. The hork-bajir like their trees, sure, but they also view the trees as a natural resource that needs to be carefully cultivated, not as sentient whisperers sent by the gods to warn about impending Trekkies. Also, no offense to the assorted Carpenters (Did Richard Carpenter have a younger sibling? I bet he did.) but why the hell do the trees consider their arrival important enough to bother telling anyone about it? It’s not like three civilians with no natural weapons are exactly going to turn the tide of a battle that is otherwise being fought by battle-hardened shapeshifters and walking razor blades. In fact, I’m kind of disappointed in Jake and Cassie for not simply morphing polar bear and herding the dumbasses back to civilization by force before someone could get killed. I’m 99% sure they contributed nothing to the battle outside of distracting the poor schmucks who had to worry about saving their sorry butts from the aliens.

Frankly this book feels like it accomplishes with a sledgehammer what #31 already did with a scalpel. It’s about how Jake is descended from this long line of badass warriors. It’s about how war is never pretty and the reality has no room for glory amidst the unspeakable horror. It’s about realizing that you have no control over who lives, who dies, and who tells your story (X). It’s about struggling to be a good person amidst cosmic events where there are no real clear answers. It’s a story about families and countries tearing themselves apart over the fight for freedom. All of which were already covered thoroughly in #31, in a book that actually advances plot, character, and narrative arc.

Part of what’s so frustrating is that, unlike #48, this book actually has several moments of decent writing. I love the image of Jake starting to write “Tom” on that box of his brother’s things only to cross it out and write “trash” instead. The sense of impending catastrophe is huge in this book, because even before the yeerks find the kids’ identities there’s building suspense around the idea that war, children, is just a shot away (X). The scene with Raines firing four shots in the length of time it takes Samson to reload is freaking powerful. The parallels between the American Civil War and the Yeerk-Human War are right there when you look for them. There’s some great social commentary on the fact that in reality the Union was almost as racist as the Confederacy because that was the poison everyone was drinking back then. There’s the most epic open battle in the whole series, one that is decided through the Animorphs’ home team advantage rather than the yeerks’ shock and awe tactics.

If only the author had decided to leave out the Logic-Defying Journal of Racism, this might have the makings of a really good Animorphs book.

*Side note: when I was eight years old and reading this book for the first time, I had no clue what a “Trekkie” was and could only assume at the time that it was some type of specialized camper, since the book never actually specifies what the term refers to and never even mentions Star Trek by name. Reading it as an adult, I cringe at this condescending portrayal of sci-fi fans in a novel written for sci-fi fans.

#asks #answers #anonymous #animorphs #animorphs reviews #the resistance #47 #animorphs negativity #racial slurs #freezing gif for people on mobile #racism #jake berenson

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recentanimenews · 6 years ago

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The 5 Most Loved and Hated Animal Ears in Anime

Animal ears. The anime trademark. In no other genre do you see more characters with wildlife features that aren’t straight up animals walking upright. They’ve launched a million online debates regarding the coexistence of human ears hidden under anime hair that few anime are brave enough to tackle head-on. Turns out they’re also a great predictor of love/hate relationships, although that shouldn’t be much of a surprise for anything resembling a cat.

Love them or hate them they’re a mainstay of the genre. Our friends over at Anime-Planet spend day and night cataloguing these unique features and leaving it to the fans to vote on the best and worst ears of all animal varieties. A note before we again, these are the result of popular votes that I can and will disagree with. Only your democratic will can determine who makes it on this list. With that out of the way, below are the 5 most loved and most hated anime characters with animal ears!

Loved

5. Black Rabbit - Problem Children are Coming from Another World Aren’t They?

I’d make a No Game No Life comparison for Black Rabbit but the list kind of beat me to the punch. Happily surprised to see she made the list given the difference in visibility between the two titles, especially since the whole experience of Little Garden is a... bit... more innocent. Changing hair color is neat. Anyway, Black Rabbit does her best and, at the end of the day, probably really needed this win.

4. Jibril - No Game No Life

I know the dog ears were temporary, but I was honestly expecting to see Steph here over Jibril. Black Rabbit fills a similar role, so I’m gonna assume you all just felt guilty about stacking NGNL in the Loved category. Admittedly Jibril has one of the coolest games against the siblings, taking shiritori to a ridiculous extreme ending in the destruction of the universe (temporarily). But this is really about her wholeheartedly embracing servitude and her on-and-off sadism? That’s it, isn’t it? Do bird wing ears really count? If they do, then where is Mavis Vermilion?

3. Tomoe - Kamisama Hajimemashita

Ah yes, the world famous silver-haired wolf spirit that falls in love with a mortal girl, Tomoe. Who doesn’t feel an instant pang of of compassion when faced with a stray dog? To be honest he’s pretty cruel to Nanami so I’m a little surprised to find him on the hated side of this list, but I’m just now realizing that animal eared characters seem to fall into either servile or tsundere categories and even when he’s being evil, Tomoe’s got a look. Like a classy Inuyasha.

2. Inuyasha - Inuyasha

Speaking of. Wolf boy was destined to show up on this list. He’s got one of the most popular anime franchises in history named after him. Maybe the most famously tsundere male characters ever penned. He’s got a tragic backstory, a big sword, and even his brother is cute. He’s awkward and gullible but, at the end of the day, just wants to be loved. Pretty adorable for a 200-year-old. You can even make him sit.

1. Holo - Spice and Wolf

While Inuyasha is half wolf spirit, Holo is a wolf god, so this arrangement makes a great deal of sense. You have to hand it to her, she made a unlikely hit out of a light novel series with a pretty inauspicious premise. It takes a lot of personality to make medieval trade so fascinating but Holo pulls it off even without the personal drama between her and Lawrence. While another god may be the most famous apple fanatic, she’s definitely cornered the animal ear market.

Hated

5. Hatsuse Ino - No Game No Life

Surprised at this one mostly because Ino even got the votes to place him anywhere at all? I guess he didn’t leave a big impression on me. He didn’t exactly do anything that I could imagine inspiring such ire, at least in the context of all the other stuff going on in No Game No Life. The polygamy thing is weird but pretty low on the totem pole of that series. He even invented the popular game Gal Gun. He plays dirty, but that’s nothing new either.

4. Nashetanya - Rokka -Braves of the Six Flowers-

Ok, she’s definitely evil, but why? Great character design, great personality, and an awesome power. Think about it, if she hadn’t set up the locked room mystery, we wouldn’t have even had Rokka at all and it was a great series! She didn’t hurt any of her companions (directly) and she’s trying to stop an endless cycle of sacrifice meant to safeguard the world from horrible monsters. She’s like Yuna in FFX! Yuna got a sequel and Nachetonia gets this disrespect?

3. Catherine - Gintama

I know she used to be a career criminal but she’s a whole new catgirl now. You can’t hold her past against her. Or is there some other reason you don’t like her?

2. Inuyasha - Inuyasha

I get it, Kagome and Inuyasha got off to a bit of a rocky start with all of his death threats and calling her his dead girlfriends name. In fact a lot of the trouble with their developing romance can be blamed on him, from being caught up on his memory of Kikyo to being the one to snub most of their potential kisses for literal years of our lives. I start to get annoyed if it even takes until the end of a 24 episode series. I’ll give him this, though. He only said “Kagome!” name 568 times while Kagome belted out “Inuyasha!” 971 times. Maybe she’ll be on some future list.

1. Toby - Fairy Tail

I don’t care if saying this makes me a hypocrite but putting Toby here is totally fine. Just looking at the guy gives you a feeling of mild discomfort. Mashima created the perfect uncanny valley between man and dog. No amount of personality could save him from the curse of his physical appearance. He even gets outsmarted by Natsu. I can’t think of a single nice thing to say about him. Sorry Toby fans, if you even exist.

For those keeping track, that's four dog boys, one wolf girl, two bunny women, only a SINGLE catgirl, and a birdy lady. Most of these characters seem remarkable for being overly affectionate or your archetypal tsundere, but the cats and dogs are all wrong so I'm not sure if there's any important patterns to be found.

Didn’t see your favorite on this list? Want to know where they appear among the most loved and hated on their kind? Head over to Anime-Planet’s list of characters with animal ears to see where they rank or comment below with your most favorite fang. Tune in next week, where the subject will be the most infamous of hairstyle, the pompadour!

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Peter Fobian is an Associate Features Editor for Crunchyroll, author of Monthly Mangaka Spotlight, writer for Anime Academy, and contributor at Anime Feminist. You can follow him on Twitter @PeterFobian.

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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