#it's so different from regular old movie adaptation fans vs book fans

[to-the-batcomputer]

i appreciate comic people who are niceys to non-comic people

[youssefguedira]

if i really wanted to i could contrast the old guard 2020 and diabolik 2021 as comic book adaptations and the different ways they approach both adapting their source material i.e. diabolik as an adaptation is both paying homage to its source material constantly and regularly reminding you that it is a comic book adaptation whereas the old guard is more trying to make a regular action movie based on a comic book, drawing occasional visual parallels that won't be recognisable unless the viewer is familiar with the source material. both are also adapting the story in some way for film, but diabolik stays much more strictly to the book it's adapting while the old guard makes a lot of changes (afaik there's almost nothing from the comics verbatim) but keeps the core of the story and essential scenes in. something interesting there about diabolik reminding us of the series' origin as comics probably due to a) its long-running history and b) cultural icon status (source: me and my powerpoint) vs the old guard falling into what i might call the current style of comic book adaptation where the focus is on appealing to a wide audience, comics fans or not, to the point where you might not even know it's based on a comic outside of marketing. but also essentially i think a comic book adaptation should match the tone of its original, which they both do: the old guard is a darker, more serious, more "adult" comic, and so it follows that the adaptation largely follows that tone (save for one or two parts that to me feel very recognisably comic book style), whereas diabolik is, albeit technically also for adults, a different genre / tone. and then there's something else to be said there in the evolution of comics considered adult, e.g. diabolik considered adult in the context of its first publishing because it contained crime and killing but generally becoming considered one of the more tame examples of the subgenre it spawned, vs the old guard being adult in terms of current standards via depicting sex / nudity / swearing / violence far beyond the scope of diabolik, which is pretty much unchanged. anyway these two things are not really connected beyond "both being comic book movie adaptations released in the 2020s featuring notable italian luca marinelli in a somewhat major role as a character who says vaguely ominous things and largely emotes through microexpressions" but it's fun to think about sometimes

[kamenriderlogik27]

Saber headcanons part 3: Mei as a student + current Mei

- Grew up in Osaka, but moved to Touma’s neighborhood due to her parent’s job relocating them. 

- Actually attended the same high school and grade as Touma, but the two were assigned to different classes all three years. 

- Because of this and the fact that they hung out with different friend groups, they never really had proper opportunities to really meet or talk to each other even thought they knew of the other’s existence.  

- The first time Mei saw Touma, he was hanging up recruiting posters for his first attempt at creating a book/writing club. 

- watching her new friends fan girl over him piqued her curiosity and she wondered what kind of person he was. 

- The next time she saw him, she attempted to start a conversation, only to catch Touma in the middle of walking while reading. He was so focused on his book that he couldn’t hear her and just walked away. 

- *que shocked “wow... so awkward” and “what the hell?!” Mei face.* 

- Her next few attempts always ended in failure as either She or Touma would either be too busy to talk or their respective friend groups would pull them away last minute. Thus she just gave up and let life move on. 

- Was the kind of student that tended to become friends with everyone she spoke to, yet was super unlucky with love. 

- Had a crush on and confessed to one guy each year. Always ended up getting rejected due to them only liking her as a friend. 

-  Had a “Kokkuri-san” Phase after the 2nd rejection, and was obsessed with finding out who and where her soulmate could be. The only result she ever got was the word ‘blue’. This phase quickly ended after her 30th ‘blue’ result. 

- Does she ever end up crushing on Kamiyama Touma? nope, never. To her, that boy is odd, really nice and handsome, but odd. 

- Always opted to play out with her friends than study. However, she’s pretty good at cramming last minute, so her grades aren’t too bad nor really good.   

- During her second year, she tried her hardest to study for her mid-term exams because her parents promised to buy her a new cell phone if she brought her grades up. She ended up staying up all night though, and crashed right in the middle of her test. Let’s just say she never got that new cell phone. 

- When they became seniors, she overheard Touma talking to his teacher while delivering something to the faculty room. The way he spoke about his dream of becoming a novelist and doing what he loved to do the most really moved and inspired her to start thinking about her own future. 

- Even though she wasn’t a really good student grade wise, the only subject she had a knack for was Japanese due to her grammando parent(s)’s nagging and constant drilling in grammar corrections and rules. 

- Due to her friend’s suggestion about what she can do with her abilities, Mei decided to major in Japanese literature and aimed for an editing job since she thought that it’d be an easy job + a good pay check. 

- Her first assignment as an editor was to fetch the first chapter draft from one of the company’s newbie authors. 

- When she knocked on the author’s apartment door and Touma was the one who answered, Mei was shocked to say the least.  

- Believing that he doesn’t know who she is, she tries to pretend as if it’s their first meeting. But, to her surprise even more, Touma is the one that says “Oh! Aren’t you Sudo Mei from *soso* high school?” and smiles that huge, excited smile of his. 

- Turns out that he’s seen her from a far a few times during school and always admired her extravertedness and ability in making friends on the spot. 

- He mentioned how he once even passed by her classroom and watched her stick up for a fellow classmate that was being bullied by a few boys. He complimented her bravery during that situation and tells her that he’s really excited to be working with her. 

-  Though Mei finds it a bit awkward at first, the more they work together and see each other, the closer get and become really great friends. 

- She cried when Touma won an award and loves to gloat to her friends about how she helped him become a best selling author. 

- Although she personally doesn’t read a lot, other than what she has to read for work, she does find teen romance novels a lot of fun. However, she’d always end up looking for comedic manga that’s easy to read and cheap. 

- Secretly wishes she could hit it off as an Instastar, but knows she doesn’t have the imagination to come up with new, trendy ideas. So, she resigns with just posting pictures and videos of things, places and people that she loves. 

- Regarding the Book vs Movie argument, Mei loves watching movies and will vote for movies without hesitation. Unless the book/movie adaptation in question is a product from her own company. THEN she’ll stand by on the “the book is better” side. 

- After meeting Rintaro and learning about the SOL, she started watching samurai and any European knight films she could find, as a way to study and learn about swords, swordsmen, and fighting. 

- She keeps asking Rintaro to teach her how to fight. Which Rintaro is 100% totally against, saying she’d be safer staying out of their battles. However, After a short conversation with Ogami-san, he quickly changes his mind and offers to teach her self defense moves right away. All while murmuring to himself “The perverts won’t know what hit them...”. 

- Because she wants to spend more time with Rintaro as well as help him experience more of regular life, Mei forces takes him to the movies to watch an action film. They buy popcorn, soda, candy and spend time looking around the theater. Everything goes well until the movie actually starts and she forgets to remind him that they have to be quiet while the movie is playing. 

- They get kicked out half-way through, which Rintaro feels really bad about and blames himself for forgetting the most important rule while watching theatrical film. To cheer him up, she takes him back to the book store, sets up the old TV and DVR set that Touma has stored away, and puts on the first Lord of the Rings film. 

- “There!” Mei pulls up two bean bags and hands Rintaro a bowl of popcorn. “Now we can watch a movie and talk at the same time! Ask me anything you want to know and I’ll try my best to answer!” This becomes Mei’s favorite, most treasured memory. (Rintaro’s too)    

- Mei cleans when stressed. Which is just a nice way of saying that she’d rather clean than stress about all the work that she has yet to do.

-  After Rintaro got really injured while protecting Kento from Calliber, Mei’s eyes opened to the fact that Rintaro, Touma and any of the other swordsmen could easily disappear from her life without her knowing. This new fear is what makes her take as many pictures of the boys (especially Rintaro and Touma) as she can, and posts them to her insta account.  

- Her favorite scent will always be either freshly baked sweets or freshly brewed coffee. 

- The new saber rider that’s using an ice concept and holding Rintaro’s Nagare is actually Mei. (That’s my wish anyway.)

[hellzyeahwebwielingessays]

The Problem with Spidey as ‘Iron Man Junior’

Proponents of the MCU version of Peter Parker have often defended his characterization as logical and necessary in context. But is this really the case?

Tl:dr version: No it is not.

Forgive some laziness on my part because I’m going to be presuming everyone’s familiarity with the comic book iteration of Spider-Man and his MCU adaptation for the most part. To say there is a divide between many fans of former vs. the latter would be an understatement.

Detractors (which I count myself among) typically sum this up as the character being reduced to ‘Iron Man Junior’. In general this refers to MCU Peter Parker’s hero-worshipping of Tony Stark/Iron Man, their father/son relationship and the similar emphasis upon high technology in their hero identities. A connected point of contention is Peter’s aspiration to become an Avenger.

This was outright confirmed by Tom Holland himself in an interview for the then upcoming ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’.

"I think the difference now is that Peter Parker finally has an all-time goal, and his goal is to become an Avenger…Everything he does, even though he's doing it for the right reasons, is done so that one day he can become an Avenger and prove himself to Tony Stark. And I think we've never really seen Spider-Man with that kind of motivation before."

Defenders of this take upon Spidey have argued that this portrayal makes sense in context.

After all, Peter Parker is a teenager who’s grown up in a world where the Avengers are beloved, especially Iron Man. Plus in the comics (under J. Michael Straczynski’s pen) there was a time when Peter and Tony shared a father/son relationship. Tony even equipped Peter with a high tech costume as he did in the MCU. Spider-Man early in his career attempted to join the Fantastic Four in ASM #1 and later the Avengers in ASM Annual #3.

The problem is these defences just don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Let me first be upfront about my philosophy towards adaptations.

I in no way shape or form demand nor expect adaptations to be 1:1 panel to screen translations of the source material. I fully respect that changes are a necessity.

One of many 22-page comic book stories put out every month in the 1960s inevitably needs to be altered when jumping to a 90+ minute live action film in the 2010s.

Even the characterizations need to be altered where necessary if the source material is found wanting. *side eyes Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy*

However, my attitude is that adaptations should at minimum respect the spirit  of the source material no matter what. To do otherwise defeats the object of adapting the work in the first place. If a film is just borrowing superficial traits (names, costumes, powers, etc.) and but not representing the spirit of the character, then creatively speaking it might as well be an original character.

This is the case with the MCU version of Spider-Man. A fundamental component of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s original vision for Spider-Man was that he was in essence the anti-Robin.

At a time when teenaged characters were sidekicks (Dick Grayson), supporting characters (Rick Jones) or the ‘kids’ in teams (Johnny Storm) Peter Parker was unique as a totally independent  teen hero. Of course that independence only applied to his life as Spider-Man, but that was part of the point. Spider-Man was his escape and release from the pressures and hang ups of his regular life, which included his doting yet coddling aunt.

A critical part of this was that he was a self-made  man. No elder mentor guided him in the use of his powers, helped him create his equipment or provided any sort of advice/accountability for Peter. He did it all himself. He was a loner.

On a meta level this is partially why Stan Lee (and for the longest time consequent writers) showcased Spidey not jiving with super teams. It was done to emphasis Peter’s independence and thereby his uniqueness within the genre. Even if that’s not so unique anymore (even in film), it’s still a baked in component of teen Spidey’s story. An essential aspect of who he is as a character.

As is his working class status.*

In fact these things go hand-in-hand. Just as Peter had to shoulder an ‘adult hero’s’ burden as Spider-Man (noticeably Lee didn’t dub him Spider-Boy or Lad as would’ve been common back then he also had to struggle for every penny. With the death of his uncle and his aunt’s poor health the burden of household provider fell on his shoulders.

When you take all this into account, having him fanboy over the Avengers and have a superhero mentor (let alone a billionaire one) is an aggressive misreading of the character.

The best way I can illustrate this is with an analogy from the opposite end of the spectrum. Imagine if you will a movie depicting Dick Grayson’s transformation into Robin. Except Batman was wholly absent. Not even an off-screen presence.

That  is how poorly MCU has missed the point  of Spider-Man.

And it was never necessary.

Contrary to defenders of the MCU, making Peter an Avengers/Iron Man fanboy was not the only logical direction to go with the character.**

Yes, in Peter’s world most kids would revere the Avengers and Iron Man. But in the real world not every kid or teen likes the Avengers characters or movies. Just as not every major pop culture phenomenon has ever been universally  embraced by contemporary kids/teens. In the 1980s not every kid loved the Transformers or the Ninja Turtles. In the 1990s not ever kid loved the Power Rangers or Pokémon.

Of course, most kids did, just as most  kids like the Avengers characters today. Similarly most  kids in the MCU by extension would look up to the Avengers. However, if anything this could actually help generate a more spiritually faithful rendition of the character. Consider that on literally the first page of Amazing Fantasy #15 Peter Parker was mocked by his classmates for being an outsider. A bookworm who didn’t know the difference between a cha-cha and a waltz.

In the context of the MCU wouldn’t Peter’s lack of familiarity or interest in the Avengers make for an appropriate updating of that characterization?

Let’s also consider that in the context of the regular 616 universe Spidey held little reverence for any of the heroes who had preceded him. This included Captain America and other WWII heroes as well as the Fantastic Four and their leader, the world famous scientist Reed Richards. Peter would’ve surely known who Reed and Cap were but as originally depicted by Stan lee himself, he wasn’t falling over himself during any of their early encounters.

So there was already a precedent in the comics for Spidey to not be dazzled by famous A-list heroes, meaning it’d be totally believable in the context of the MCU. Indeed this was likely part of the point of the character. Just as being Spider-Man didn’t improve his outsider status within the high school hierarchy so too was he an outsider among his super hero peers. The nerd to the Avengers jocks if you will.

But what of those comic book sources that say otherwise? Surely ASM #1, ASM Annual #3 and JMS’ run on Amazing Spider-Man corroborate the MCU’s take upon the character.

Yes and no, let’s tackle them one by one.

In ASM #1 it was made explicit that Peter wanted to join the F4 for purely practical reasons. His family needed money so he hoped the F4 could provide and income. When he learned otherwise he departed as quickly as he’d arrived.

In ASM Annual #3 Peter was far from eager  to join the Avengers and was equally unimpressed with them as a group.

He actively sabotaged his own chances to join at the issue’s conclusion.

As for Straczynski’s run…sigh…strap in.

At face value this run does indeed seem to support the MCU’s rendition of Spidey. However, the support it offers falls apart due to two factors.

The first is that, well…Peter and Tony’s relationship was pretty nonsensical.

I’m no Iron Man expert so I do not know how old the character would be roughly. From my impressions of the character though circa 2006 he wasn’t even in his 40s yet. Peter by contrast was 30 years old when you do the math. Unlike Tony he’d had several very serious romantic relationships and was back then happily married (barring a brief trial separation). He and his wife had lost a child and even believed one another dead at one point or another. Peter at the time was also working as a teacher to teenagers where he was clearly framed as their elder authority figure.

What I’m saying is that Peter was if anything more emotionally mature than Tony at this time. Or at least he was mature to the point where he was not going to view Tony as his father figure given the minor age discrepancy.

The relationship was clearly engineered with the pre-determined endgame in mind. That endgame being the ‘Civil War’ storyline wherein Peter would unmask upon Tony’s request and subsequently become a fugitive in defiance of Tony’s unethical practices. The latter would entail Tony threatening Peter and the pair coming to blows.

This brings me to the second factor. The totality of Peter/Tony’s relationship was designed to be a testament to how it was ultimately a bad thing.

Tony wasn’t the man Peter believed him to be.

Tony didn’t have Peter’s best interests at heart.

Tony was willing to spy, threaten and even attack Peter.

And along the way Peter and his family lost their home and the safety of Peter’s anonymity. The end result was Peter’s life becoming a shell of it’s former self, with his loved ones in serious danger. In fact you could view his fugitive status as a way to recreate the ‘good old days’ when Spider-Man was feared and hated by the public and authorities.

Had Peter retained his independence rather than surrendering any part of it to his ‘father figure’ Tony Stark, much of this could’ve been avoided. If nothing else Peter might’ve been able to unmask privately rather than publicly.

Whilst the MCU addresses the first factor via de-aging Peter, it has no answer for the second. It borrowed from the JMS run superficially and ditched the greater subtext regarding how Peter shouldn’t  have formed a relationship with Tony.

I’d like to conclude by addressing the most obvious counterpoint to everything I’ve said.

If Spider-Man were more comic faithful wouldn’t it undermine the entire point of him being in the MCU? The appeal of the concept was seeing Spider-Man interact with the wider MCU. From the audience’s POV seeing yet another Spidey flick confined to using Spider-Man exclusive elements might as well have been produced solely by Sony.

The problem with this argument though is that it doesn’t consider the myriad of possibilities available. Spidey could interact with the wider MCU and still be in character.

I’m no writer but off the top of my head:

Spidey could have defied the Sokovia Accords and thus been wanted by the authorities (a neat updating of his traditional ‘outlaw’ status), consequently coming into conflict  with Iron Man

Spidey might have still dueled the Vulture and interacted with Tony as he did in ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’. However, instead of gradually realizing he should be a ‘friendly neighborhood’ hero, he could call Tony out for ignoring small scale crime which indirectly ‘created’ the Vulture in the first place

Following ‘Avengers: Endgame’ the dissolution of the Avengers combined with the huge uptick in the population and displacement of citizens might’ve caused far more street crime that Peter would have to deal with. The remnants of H.Y.D.R.A. might’ve exploited this to gain a foothold upon which to rebuild.*** That might’ve warrant an appearance from more grounded heroes like Hawkeye or Ant-Man

An environment like this could’ve been exploited by Quentin Beck to frame Spider-Man, exploiting his already shaky public reputation and make himself look more appealing by contrast

Or Hell just do ‘Nothing Can Stop the Juggernaut’ but with the Hulk as Roger Stern planned to do in the first place

I’m sure many of you could suggest infinitely better ideas.

In conclusion, no matter how you slice it, there were better options than rendering Peter Parker Iron Man Junior instead of Spider-Man.

*Peter, as depicted in ‘Captain America: Civil War’ was clearly not well off financially, yet consequent depictions of Peter in the MCU have de-emphasized this to the point where you could argue they are very probably not working class anymore.

This makes sense internally as a billionaire Tony Stark has no reason to take Peter under his wing but allow him to still dumpster dive for equipment. Giving the boy at least some modest financial stability would be a logical step in building a relationship with him and giving him more time and energy to put into his scientific and heroic pursuits.

Whilst I don’t exactly agree with everything said here, this post dives into the subject more deeply.

**And even if it was, if the context demands Peter be rendered so unrecognizable then maybe it was just creatively reductive to integrate him into the MCU the first place.

***They have after all had connections to organized crime in the comics.

[mariochiefsonic-117]

Word of God Worldbuilding

Why the more major the thing the creator said about a fictional world without explanation is the more likely I am to ignore it, or I somehow make a post about modern fandoms, and death of the author without mentioning J.K. Rowling and wizard poop.

There are two fandoms I will be talking about that have had things stated by it’s creators about it’s world with major implications that weren’t well expanded on or seemed contradictory to the work itself, Sonic the Hedgehog and Steven Universe.  Sonic has two things that for an almost 30 year old series were only revealed when it was like 26 and has caused some controversy in it’s fan base those being the two worlds between animals and humans and the Classic/Modern split.  While Steven Universe has the more minor in the long run no Holidays and no WWII. Let’s start with the blue one.

Human and Animal Worlds

The Sonic series started and has always been about Sonic the Hedgehog’s battle against the human Dr. Eggman/Robotnik whether that battle was shown to us via video game, comic book, Saturday morning cartoon, anime, animated movie, or coming soon at time of writing Live-action movie a few things were consistent Sonic was fast, Eggman had robots, Sonic won, and unless other-wise stated Sonic and Eggman were from the same world.  In an interview with Iizuka the current head of the Sonic franchise in the build up to Sonic Forces it was revealed that the fans had that last one wrong, which raises a number of questions.  If the human world and Sonic’s one filled with walking talking animals is separate how did Eggman enter Sonic’s? How did Sonic enter the human one? Are There Chaos Emeralds in both worlds or are they shared?  Why is Angel Island in the human world in Adventure?  How is Rouge the agent of a human world agency?  How did Gerald make Shadow a hedgehog?  If humans and anthro animals are from different worlds then why were there ancient anthro echidnas in the human world?  Why Silver is from a future Soleanna if it is a human city in the present?  How much interaction between the two worlds are there? How do they travel between worlds? How does Blaze’s world fit in to all of this? and In the games were it’s just Sonic and his regular friends vs Eggman which world is it?  Also considering SEGA’s recent opposition to the words Mobius and Mobians what do we call the animal world and it’s residents?.  Sonic X, which first really introduced us to such a concept answered some of these questions but told us it was unsustainable, still left some unanswered and from the start established itself as an alternate continuity.  The live-action movie will be doing something similar but there are a lot of live-action adaptation that do that so it doesn’t count.

Classic/Modern Split

Sonic has had two distinct design styles, normally referred to as Classic and Modern (a distinction first seen in Super Smash Bros. Brawl) and in Sonic Generations were seen as past and present versions of each other.  Modern Sonic, and both versions of Tails and Eggman would agree with that stating though out the game that there were visiting their past, with the Final Boss known as the Time Eater.  But again Iizuka would say other wise, that they were actually other dimensional counterparts.  A statement contradicted by the games themselves, as Sonic Adventure (the first game to have the Modern style) has Amy reminisce about the events of Sonic CD (a Classic game) and of course the entire premise of Sonic Generations, some people could try to say that a timeline split occurred thanks to Generations but that doesn’t work either since according to Iizuka Mighty the Armadillo and Fang/Nack don’t exist in the Modern world which they would in the events of a timeline split.  Two throwaway lines that are nonsensical in context in Forces doesn’t fix a contradiction to the game that created the distinction in the first place.

Steven’s Universe

Now Steven’s part in this rant is actually a part of something I wanted to write about the issues of World-building when narratively sticking solely to the perspective of a character who is used to the world.  The writers have stated that they insure everything shown onscreen is experienced by Steven in fact there is only one episode that doesn’t feature him, but the focus character of that episode is his fusion so he’s still there.  Steven’s Earth at a day-to-day level is almost exactly like ours but a map of his world shows massive hole where Russia should be, half a Africa is part of South America, Australia messed up, Florida is an Island, Cuba is the size of half the Caribbean, Central America is Islands, there is an island chain between South America and Africa, India is cut in half, Japan is connected to both itself and the main land, among others.  It is in the crews words though that Holidays don’t exist and WWII never happened and while the first can be mostly ignored, the show still having episodes set and themed in a manner matching relevant holidays (a horror themed fall episode, a fall set episode featuring a feast with out of town family, and multiple winter episodes about togetherness one of which with a reference to the nativity).  The second is eyebrow raising for a number of reasons mostly due to the modern world being what it is due to WWII and it’s fallout, but WWII is widely considered to have been the direct result of WWI and it’s fallout making one wonder if WWI or the Great Depression happened.  Neither of these nor the implications of the massively different world are ever expanded upon in the show and as long as we stick with Steven probably never will be.

I don’t exactly have an ending to this outside of don’t just tweet out worldbuilding without thinking of the fallout.  Honestly I tend to ignore the in show worldbuilding about Earth in Steven Universe too, due it both being so incomplete and not really relevant to the story as a whole.

[nathanielwharton]

My 2018 in Pop Culture

Same plan here as usual. This is what meant most to me last year in pop culture.

Top Forty Things From 2018

40. King Kong on Broadway I wrote about this as an adaptation of the Kong story over at SportsAlcohol.com, but here I'll just say that while I was really disappointed with this as a musical, the execution of Kong himself on stage was breathtakingly rad.

39. Rhyming "is nae" with "Disney" in Anna and the Apocalypse In theory, I don't have much of an appetite left for a zombie comedy, having been well and truly sated by Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, and the wave of imitators that followed them. I felt like I'd seen all of the moves that are possible with that particular genre mash-up, and then I read about a Scottish zombie comedy that ALSO threw in the musical and the Christmas movie. So it was almost with a sense of grudging obligation that I accepted the inevitability that I'd see Anna and the Apocalypse. It won me over. It's got a winning cast, catchy songs, and a surprisingly effective melancholy tone. But I have to admit, the moment that really won me over was a moment in the song "Hollywood Ending" where "is nae" ("is not" in a Scottish accent) is rhymed with "Disney."

38. The Conners/The Roseanne Revival This was a real roller coaster in 2018. I was excited and apprehensive about the revival, and only slightly relieved when it began and was mostly pretty good. Still, there was an uneasiness with the way that the Roseanne character had been conceived for the revival and that basically exploded thanks to the behaviour of the real Roseanne. Still, overall I've enjoyed the revival and The Conners, and while I'm sad about what happened to TV Roseanne and real Roseanne(for different reasons)

37. "The Queen" episode of Castle Rock I liked the show pretty well overall, but oh man did this episode stand out. For most of the run, I'd just thought it was a cute bit of casting to have Sissy Spacek playing what seemed like a strangely minor role. Then this episode happened. It's a real acting showcase for Spacek and it satisfies with suspense and emotion in equal measure.

36. Kurt Russell performing "Santa Claus is Back in Town" in The Christmas Chronicles I'm a sucker for a Christmas movie, and this one is agreeable enough. There is some attempt at telling an emotional story that might hit you if you're in the right mood, and there is pleasant hint of Gremlins in the movie's portrayal of Santa's elves, but mostly it is a pretty satisfying expansion of the thought, "what if Kurt Russell was Santa Claus?" Russell is a hoot in the role, and the movie hits a peak when his Santa ends up in jail and breaks out into a jailhouse rendition of "Santa Claus is Back in Town." Downloaded and added to my Christmas playlist.

35. Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert This new wave of live musicals on TV hasn't always resulted in a great show (I honestly have forgotten a lot of the Peter Pan and Rocky Horror broadcasts), but sometimes they end up with some really cool television. Grease Live still reigns as the champion of these things, but this production of Jesus Christ Superstar was exciting and energetic and featured some neat ideas in its staging. It's shows like this that keep me hoping they'll continue to try these live musical shows.

34. The Death of Stalin Wrote about this for SportsAlcohol.com.

33. Isle of Dogs The visceral aesthetic pleasure of this film might outweigh the delicate emotional effect all of Anderson's films tend to achieve, but even if the complicated story and worldbuilding in the film kept it from succeeding for me fully on a first viewing, it did get me to want to watch it again (and again).

32. Keira Knightley in The Nutcracker and the Four Realms The movie as a whole is a good enough time in the way that all of these lavishly produced live-action Disney fantasy movies tend to be. But Keira Knightley, as the Sugarplum Fairy, single-handedly drags this movie up a notch with her fantastically daffy performance. To explain all the ways that her performance delights would be to spoil what happens in the movie, but I'll just say that she finds a few different registers to play in the film and she is amazing in each one. Think of this snub when you watch the Academy Awards.

31. The Favourite A three-hander where each leg of the triangle is different and spectacular. Turns out that acidic dialogue works just as well in the Yorgos Lanthimos world as alien affectedness, and the cast he's got for this one hurl barbs with aplomb.

30. Ash vs. Evil Dead Series Finale The third season of this show lost a bit of a step for me, not quite balancing the goofs and the horror quite as deftly as the show had done at its best. But it really brought it back around for the last couple of episodes. The finale in particular had some surprisingly big action and an ending that felt perfectly Evil Dead. If that's the last we see of Ash, it feels right.

29. DuckTales The first season wrapped up with some good adventure and some ambitious emotional storytelling. And the second season has seemed, if anything, even more confident so far (including an excellent Christmas episode).

28. Eighth Grade What a lovely, humane, gem of a movie.

27. The Old Man and the Gun I was head-over-heels in love with this one like halfway through the opening scene. If it had ended after that scene, I might have been satisfied, but the rest of the movie was truly wonderful too.

26. A Series of Unfortunate Events Season Two There's no twist for book readers as great as what they did with the Parent characters in the first season, but this second season of the show continued to be really great.

25. Rusty Lake: Paradise & Rusty Lake: Paradox This year I played all of the Rusty Lake/Cube Escape games, and it's probably a good thing that it takes a while between game releases or I might just burrow into these Twin Peaks inspired puzzles and not come out.

24. The last 20 minutes of Halloween I pretty well loved the entirety of this 40-years-later sequel, but the last twenty minutes or so were just next-level great. Basically, once everybody gets to Laurie's compound, this film was as scary as I wanted and as fist-pumpingly thrilling as I didn't know I could have expected.

23. Lost in Space Season One Might have loved this if it was just the one thing after another space survival show, but when you layer on an intriguing mystery and then add on Parker Posey's slitherly Dr. Smith? Yep, loved it.

22. The Haunting of Hill House Mike Flanagan has been doing cool horror work on smaller movies for a few years now, and I'm glad he seems to have found a patron in Netflix. The broader canvas of Haunting of Hill House allows him to do pretty much everything he's so good at, and even allows for some new tricks (like that "one long shot" episode, or the creepy background ghosts that go uncommented on in the story).

21. Creed II Creed was so great, and the notion of Stallone returning to the Ivan Drago well so worrisome, that I was a little apprehensive that this one would disappoint me. What a great surprise, then, that this was basically a best-case scenario for how this could have worked out. Even the Drago stuff is pretty compelling! I'd love to see more with Adonis and Bianca sometime, and I certainly still love Rocky himself, but for this round of playing with fire, I am satisfied.

20. Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters & Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle The first two (out of three) animated Godzilla films hit Netflix last year and they were much more curious and idiosyncratic than I expected when they were first announced. Slowly paced, with an intentional disregard for the expectations of kaiju fans, they take a brilliant concept and proceed to use it to explore the perils of various belief systems. Each of these ends on a cliffhanger, so the success of the whole thing might depend a bit on how Godzilla: Planet Eater wraps things up, but for now it's a fascinating experiment.

19. The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs I can't say I sat around missing the horror host thing (I also love and regularly watch the family-friendly Svengoolie), but I was still surprised by how enjoyable and how nostalgic I found the experience of sitting back down with Joe Bob to watch a trashy horror movie. I didn't watch this as a marathon, but it did make for a bunch of swell weekends catching up with some movies I'd never seen and a charming film buff I hadn't seen in a while.

18. Bad Times at the El Royale Everything about this, from the cast to the aesthetic to the story, was just right up my alley. There was a moment late in the film where Maggie and I turned to each other, our jaws literally dropped, and we burst into nervous laughter.

17. BlacKkKlansman Wrote this one up over at SportsAlcohol.com.

16. Three Identical Strangers This documentary knocked me out. It's an amazing story with a bunch of incredible twists and turns and fascinating characters. It also poses some really intriguing questions and left me with a lot to think about. Don't read anything about it, just see it!

15. Disenchantment As a big fan of The Simpsons and i (and knowing the similar arcs they followed pretty well), I was pretty excited for a new Matt Groening animated show, and the first season of Disenchantment might have surpassed my expectations. It's funny, visually appealing, and takes some effective swings at the kind of emotional storytelling that it took the earlier series a couple of seasons to really nail. The finale sent me scrambling to the internet to see if it had been picked up for more episodes.

14. Nancy by Olivia Jaimes As a regular and avid comic strip reader, I propose that I was more blown away than most of the internet by the new Nancy. I regularly checked in on the soggy Gilchrist version of the strip, so imagine my surprise and delight at the change! It is neat to see a newspaper strip make any kind of impact in the culture again. Plus the strip is really fun!

13. Star Wars Star Wars: Rebels came to a close with a run of really exciting episodes and a really excellent finale. The comics continued to be really good. And Solo: A Star Wars Story showed up with smaller, not so fate-of-the-galaxy stakes and still just nailed the iconic characters it was digging into in exactly the ways it needed to. In a year where Star Wars fandom was showing itself to be home to a lot of the same toxicity as other fandoms, Star Wars itself kept up its end with lots of fun stuff.

12. The Last Best Story I thought I had a good idea what to expect from a high school newspaper riff on His Girl Friday, and this book certainly (thoroughly, delightfully) satisfies that. But I wasn't exactly prepared for the emotional depth and lovely observational detail in Maggie's book (I mean, I probably should have been, but it still sneaked up on me). I finished and just wanted to read it again.

11. "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat" episode of The X-Files This second (and seemingly final) revival season of The X-Files boasted a more confident ratio of hits to misses than the previous one (even the nutso mythology episodes showed a stronger grasp of how the show works and what it means in the current moment) but the highlight, again, was a virtuosic episode written and directed by Darin Morgan. It was brilliantly funny, very X-Filesy, and sneakily provided a hilarious alternate series finale for fans in the event that Chris Carter would botch the actual one a few episodes later (luckily, he did as well as I might have hoped, really).

10. Arrested Development - Season 5, Part 1 I disagreed with most of the complaints people lobbied against the fourth season of Arrested Development, but I do think the batch of fifth season episodes released last year did fall prey to some of the shapeless storytelling and clunky greenscreen they were accused of before (I thought the fourth season did wonders with having the characters separated, while they flailed to meaningfully integrate Lindsay in the fifth season). And because episodes weren't as clearly defined in their storytelling, it left some of the character stories feeling both too dragged out and thinly developed (thinking here of Gob's struggle with his sexuality and Tobias's relationship with Murphybrown) by the time the half-season ended on a slight cliffhanger without really building significant momentum. But for all that, I love these characters so much and the show particularly really does right by the way that Michael and George Michael try to navigate their relationship with each other after the events of the fourth season.

9. Mary Poppins Returns This movie had impossible shoes to fill, and you can tell that everybody involved took that seriously. I saw this one twice. The first time, I really enjoyed it. The second time, it made me cry.

8. Marvel Cinematic Universe Black Panther was so fantastic, Avengers: Infinity War felt like a really special theater experience, and Ant-Man and the Wasp was a delightful trifle with an amazing, playful gut-punch of a stinger. Really, I had a great time will all three movies they put out this year and I loved the ride they took us on all the way through to the final text card in the Ant-Man credits.

7. Surprise, it's The Cloverfield Paradox! Sure, this is easily the least of the Cloverfield movies so far (it's still a fun haunted-house-on-a-space-station movie with an overqualified cast), but I don't imagine there'll be a more fun way to see one of these. I was already feeling that familiar Cloverfield excitement as the online marketing game started spooling up, but I pretty much leapt off the couch when Katie and I saw the Super Bowl ad that announced it would be dropping soon on Netflix, and freaked out even further when I looked on Netflix and saw the tag that it would debut after the game ended! We stayed up and watched it that night, and I went to sleep in the glow of a new Cloverfield. Gonna be hard to top that for excitement next time, but I'm looking forward to seeing them try.

6. Support the Girls Basically a "day in the life" movie about a manager of a Hooters-style sports bar, this movie (starring a perfect Regina Hall) is warm and human and reassuring because of the way it eschews the normal reassurances of this kind of thing and just plays it real. It's a beautiful movie.

5. GLOW I loved the first season of GLOW, and I think this second season is even better. It digs a little deeper into the supporting cast, doubles down on its resonance with things happening in the culture right now, includes that delightful episode within an episode, and ends on a perfect and delicate emotional note.

4. American Vandal Here's one of those shows with a perfect first season taking a shot at a follow-up, and they nailed it. Whatever trades are made in taking on a case with less personal involvement for our investigator leads are made up by the incisive observational writing (and hilarious bathroom jokes), this time throwing race and class into the mix. I'm sorry we won't get to see them take on another case and format, but these first two seasons are perfect.

3. Ready Player One I am in the tank for pretty much any Spielberg movie (I've loved the dramas he's done in the last few years) and here he's made a movie with cameos from King Kong and Mechagodzilla. I enjoyed the book this was based on, but I loved the movie even more. The visuals and action (and that amazing Shining sequence) are terrific, but the way that they restructured the game tasks build to make a moving argument for the ways even popular art are used for communication and connection, and Mark Rylance's portrayal of the Wonka-esque Halliday makes it all land.

2. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs I wrote about this one over at SportsAlcohol.com. I loved it.

1. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts One & Two To be quite honest, this would be hard to beat in any event since I got engaged to be married between Part One and Part Two. Luckily, the show was a really special event even beyond that personal association. A surprisingly moving epilogue to the Harry Potter stories (and more satisfying in performance where the performances of the actors makes up for some of the ways the supporting characters seemed more thinly conceived in the script than they did in the books), it was also a dazzling theatrical experience. The variety of tricks employed to bring the wizard world to the stage meant that just as you figured out how they pulled off one big effect you were met with three other nifty flourishes. I dig Rowling's continued noodling around in her wizard world through things like this play and the Fantastic Beasts films (I enjoyed Crimes of Grindelwald) as a way to tell new stories and explore nerdy minutia without undoing the lovely bow of that original series of books. (Side note: Because my pleasure reading time has been so heavily curtailed as I get through this first school year, I'm only about a third in on Lethal White. Really digging it, but don't feel like I can include it on this list properly.)

Top Twenty Things I'm Excited About in 2019

Godzilla: King of the Monsters Never would I have believed that we'd be getting a big-budget American Godzilla film that would prominently feature Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah as the third film in a shared Godzilla/Kong movie universe. Now it is happening, and everything they've released to do with the film (trailers, posters, etc) have looked incredible. Gonna be hard to top this one for excitement this year.

Marvel Cinematic Universe Captain Marvel looks like a lot of fun, I'm sure Spider-Man: Far From Home will be great, and I'm pretty interested in whatever Marvel Studios ends up doing for the Disney+ streaming service, but the main event this year is obviously Avengers: Endgame. Whatever form this big finale for the first decade of MCU stories takes, I cannot wait to see it.

Star Wars As with Marvel, there's plenty to look forward to this year, with The Mandalorian presumably accompanying the debut of Disney+ along with the revival of The Clone Wars, but the biggest deal will of course be Episode IX, the grand finale of the main Star Wars saga and the story of the Skywalkers.

Arrested Development The original run of the series was nearly flawless. The fourth season is, in some ways, even more ambitious and special. And even though the first half of this fifth season was, to my eyes, guilty of some of the baggy, formless storytelling that season four had been accused of (and splitting the season like this meant that the first half felt weirdly unsatisfying), it still had a ton of joke that I really loved and developed the relationship between Michael and his son in a way that I did find satisfying after the fourth season cliffhanger. Excited for more of the show and crossing my fingers that it nails the landing.

Stranger Things III This one drops on my birthday! Setting the story in summer sounds fun to me, and I'm pretty excited to see these characters again after a year off.

The Twilight Zone The original series is a deep foundation of my pop culture world and I even found things to like about the UPN revival in the early 00s, so I'm predisposed to be interested in this. But giving it to Jordan Peele (also so psyched for Us) seems like a masterstroke and the trailer they just released is so perfect (both for the obvious love it displays for the original and the new energy it promises) that it's driven me to distraction. Cannot wait for this.

The Addams Family I was obsessed with The Addams Family back when the two Barry Sonnenfeld films came out in the 90s. I loved the 60s sitcom, the movies, and the animated series (and more recently was bitterly disappointed by the Broadway musical). But most of all I adored the Charles Addams cartoons. This latest animated film has been kicking around in some form of development for a while now (there was a time when it was reported that they were trying to get Tim Burton to give it the stop-motion treatment) and I'm a little apprehensive that it ended up with Illumination Studios. Still, a new animated Addams Family film is a must see.

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance This sounds pretty special, and in any case it is exciting to get an ambitious new puppet project from the Henson Company delivered right to my Netflix queue this year.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood & The Irishman A new Tarantino film would be on this list no matter what, so those photos they released a while back were most exciting to just get a look at what he's going for aesthetically. And of course I'm intrigued and excited to hear that Netflix is throwing money at Scorsese to make a crime film starting De Niro, Pacino, Keitel, and Joe Pesci.

The French Dispatch Not sure if this one will actually hit this year or end up seeking out some awards-friendly release next year, but it's a Wes Anderson film about journalism with a predictably great cast. Exciting whenever it comes out.

Knives Out Rian Johnson writing and directing another mystery film with this cast? Let's do this now.

Little Women Lady Bird was sooo good that I'd be pretty into whatever movie Greta Gerwig made next, so the incredible cast she's assembled for this follow up is just icing.

The Righteous Gemstones When Jody Hill and Danny McBride make another HBO show, I'm going to watch it. Make it about a family of televangelists and make John Goodman the patriarch, and I can't wait to watch it.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters Volume 2 The first volume was a surprise highlight of 2017 and it was a bummer to see this follow up slide further and further back on release calendars. Hoping it finally arrives this year, but the original was so wonderful that I'm ready to wait as long as it takes.

Missing Link There are other animated movies I'll be really excited for by the time they come out this year (Toy Story 4 and Frozen 2 will surely be huge events) but I'm probably most excited that Laika is back with a new feature.

Star Trek It looks like, as an attempt to get people like me to actually keep up their CBS All Access subscription outside of the two months they're offering new episodes of Star Trek Discovery (and I am pretty psyched for this second season!) they are planning on keeping us in new Star Trek as often as possible. An animated Trek comedy! A new series about Picard! More of those very cool Short Treks! I'm pretty into seeing what they have in store this year.

Looney Tunes Cartoons After years and years of grousing about Warner Bros' treatment of the Looney Tunes characters (even when they have something that kinda works, like Wabbit or New Looney Tunes, it has felt like they're on the C-list; and no, Space Jam 2 does not make me feel better), I'm intrigued by this series and am anxious to see some footage to see what they're cooking up.

Penny Dreadful: City of Angels I loved the original series, I'm a sucker for stories set in America in the 30s, and  I like the cast they're lining up, so I'm definitely into this.

Amazing Stories I don't even know if or when I'll get to see this (we already have so many streaming services and if I'm adding another one this year, it'll be Disney+), but I love the idea of a new Amazing Stories and if Spielberg directs an episode or two it'll make this a must watch somehow.

[reminiscent-bells]

best-ofs, 2017

putting in a break here, this is real long

best book I read: The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

It seems trite to pick this in a year where every Tom, Dick, and Harry was comparing the Trump administration to Atwood’s novel and when Amazon was putting on a big-budget adaptation (which, for the record, I have not seen). The effect that this had on me, though, cannot be understated. Sad, wry, and all-too-familiar in places, this is a masterpiece that deserves to be up there with 1984 and the rest of the great nightmares.

honorable mention: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell

I’m not much of a historical fiction person, but this masterfully wrought story of a Dutch clerk and a Japanese midwife in early-1800s Japan is well worth your time.

best comic: Batman, Volume 1: I Am Gotham, Tom King, Mikel Janin, et al.

King and his collaborators’ work on Batman since DC’s most recent relaunch seems to be on a trajectory to match or even surpass the Grant Morrison era in the pre-New 52 era, a reshuffling of the core cast that will pay huge dividends down the line (if DC actually makes a wise long-term decision for once, which, who knows). Despite his tendency to learn a little too hard on certain stylistic tics, I think King might be the best writer working in superhero comics today.

honorable mention: Detective Comics, Volume 1: Rise of the Batmen, James Tynion IV, Eddy Barrows, et al.

Yes, two Batman titles in one year is a bit of a cheat, but this is so fun that it’s hard to pick something else. Tynion turned up on a panel discussion on the great comics podcast Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men where he was introduced as the writer of “DC’s new X-Men title, Detective Comics”, which is exactly what this is - a team of misfits and outcasts cobbled together by a reticent, demanding mentor...who in this case is Batman. This is easy to miss out on with all the fireworks over King’s work, but give it a shot.

best comic (non-2017): MIND MGMT, Volume 2: The Futurist, Matt Kindt

Kindt’s work on the beginning of his psychic-X-Files saga MIND MGMT was good, but the second collection reveals it as a ship-in-a-bottle in the middle of a much weirder, wilder museum - there are few volume 2s that build on the success of the first as much as this one does.

honorable mention: BPRD, Volume 3: Plague of Frogs, Mike Mignola, Guy Davis, et al.

The first few collections of this series, following Hellboy’s teammates after he quits the secret BPRD organization, kind of flounder, but Davis and Mignola really hit their stride here with this sequel to an earlier Hellboy story that grows into a hybridization of Mignola’s earlier work and a Stephen King novel.

best movie: Blade Runner 2049

This also feels like kind of a cheat given my love for the original, but there was simply no other movie that had my gears turning after I walked out of the theater like this one did. The plot elements of this, of course, have been speculated on endlessly since Ridley Scott released the Final Cut of the original film, but My Guy Dennis Villeneuve manages to introduce enough new elements and uncertainty in the mix to keep you guessing - I found myself continually questioning what I really knew about anything that had happened or was happening. It was always going to be impossible to make a movie as good as Blade Runner, but Villeneuve came closer than anyone could dare.

honorable mention: Star Wars: The Last Jedi

I have my misgivings about the Finn and Poe portions of this, which feel like they mishandled the two more than a little, but the Rey/Luke Skywalker storyline is, as a whole, a barn-burner, building on both Rey and Luke’s characters in extremely satisfying ways. It was easy to imagine where they might go from Rey and Luke on the island at the end of The Force Awakens, but I don’t know if I imagined they’d go here, which is what makes this so great.

best album: I See You, The xx

I gave this a pretty casual listen on Spotify when it came out as I was kind of a marginal xx fan - I enjoyed their first album but didn’t really care for Coexist. I was totally blown away and listened to it all the way through several times (this is something I rarely, if ever, do with big pop/pop-ish releases). Virtually every track on here except for the extremely forgettable closer is perfectly performed and produced, from the playful, somewhat taunting “Dangerous” to the self-doubt-as-anthem “On Hold”. Should go down as their best album to date.

honorable mentions: Piety of Ashes, The Flashbulb / Sleep Well, Beast, The National

I couldn’t decide between these two, so here’s a twofer for you. Benn Jordan’s style as The Flashbulb has shifted along a spectrum of sweet spots between acoustic music and electronic music, and he seems to have somehow found the sweetest one yet in Piety of Ashes, which alternates between intimate material you might have expected on Arboreal or Love as a Dark Hallway (”Starlight”, “Goodbye Bastion”) and big, broad electronic pieces that feel like Jordan uncovered something he could always do that was just off-camera (”Hypothesis”, “As Water”).

When I first heard Sleep Well, Beast my comment to a coworker was “I only like some of it now, but I think I’ll like it more as time goes on”. This was a rare example of me actually showing some predictive ability, because this has really grown on me with time (maybe its intent as commentary on life in the Trump world as something to do with this). Highlights are the sad, sweet “Nobody Else Will Be There”, also-sad-and-sweet, but in a different way “Carin at the Liquor Store”, and the driving dark heart of the entire thing, “The System Only Dreams In Total Darkness”, which has been a constant play for me this fall/winter.

best TV show: Twin Peaks/Twin Peaks: The Return

A triumph for David Lynch and Mark Frost in every sense of the word. The era of “prestige TV” feels like a cheap trick by HBO, AMC, et al. to get us to watch the same old stuff with a slightly higher budget after 18 hours(!!!!!) in, around, and beyond (and I mean beyond) Lynch’s little town in the Pacific Northwest. Kyle MacLachlan deserves about 400 awards for his triple (quadruple?) role here.

honorable mention: Mr. Robot

I think Sam Esmail failed to stick the landing again (I wasn’t a fan of season 2), but the earlier parts of this season are maybe the highest highs the show has ever hit - Elliott and Mr. Robot fighting over his body in the bowels of the ECorp fortress from the end of season 2, Darlene struggling to extricate herself from the FBI, and the terrifying-yet-awe-inspiring scene of Angela laying out her plans to Mr. Robot as New York comes back to life at the end of the first episode. This isn’t always the best show, but boy, can it ever be good.

best video game: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

This is to video games as Lynch’s third season of Twin Peaks was to television: a throwing of the gauntlet to every competitor to dare and match this. Where other games would put physics puzzles in their own little sandboxes, BOTW applies its physics to just about everything and lets you see how far your tools can take you. Where other games would put everything on the map in perfectly zoomable, filterable control for you, BOTW challenges you to build the map yourself and actually get out there and explore. I’ve gone back to this in the harder Master Mode with the release of the last DLC, and there’s still nothing that can touch this. This is destined to be a touchstone for decades to come.

honorable mentions: The Talos Principle/Batman: The Telltale Series

The Talos Principle is everything I wanted The Witness to be that The Witness wasn’t: thoughtful without being heavy, clever without being impossible (well, mostly not impossible, there are a few of those puzzles I don’t think I could have cracked on my own). The writing is sharp as a tack, featuring a variety of philosophical discussions between your character and a whip-smart AI. A really excellent puzzler.

Batman: The Telltale Series marks yet another appearance of the Batman on this list, but what an appearance! Telltale throws out several sacred cows of the Batman behemoth, but instead of making something malformed and uninteresting, it feels like the freshest Batman has been in ages. I eagerly await every new episode of this, because I never know where they will go next.

best podcast: Important If True

This is yet another “feels like I cheated” entry, but the Idle Thumbs guys’ work on Important If True deserves to be recognized. They could have simply recycled the Robot News segments from Idle Thumbs for this, but instead they went for something much wilder, taking people’s advice on what wishes to ask for from a genie, going through breakdown procedures for old Chuck E. Cheese competitor restaurants, and speculating on a Jessica Fletcher vs. Jaws matchup (as in the shark). The most wildly funny podcast going now. Recommended episodes: “Fight Garbage With Garbage”, “Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins”, “A Wish Upon a Star”

honorable mention: Waypoint Radio

With the Idle Thumbs guys winding down to a monthly schedule (sorta), Vice’s Waypoint staff’s podcast has readily stepped into the hole left behind by the Thumbs for regular doses of industry coverage. It’s great to see Danielle Riendeau and Rob Zacny getting more exposure outside of the Thumbs ecosystem, and Austin Walker, Patrick Klepek, and Danika Harrod are this sort of perfect perpetual motion machine at the heart of everything. Recommended episodes: “The Orange Casket”, “R.I.P. A.I.M.”, “Someone Explain To Me The Alien Alloys Before I F'ing Explode”

[reactingtosomething]

Reacting to X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga (1994)

The Living Embodiment of “Bitch, You Thought”

The Setup: Caroline Siede is a TV and film critic whose work has appeared in The AV Club, Quartz, The Mary Sue, and Vox, among others; an occasional theatre and film director, including of a web series Kris wrote; a superhero enthusiast in general and an X-Men superfan in particular; and to our great honor and everlasting vague surprise, a friend of Reacting to Something.

Kris remembered from this (excellent) X-Men: Apocalypse tweet storm that Caroline’s favorite fictional character ever is Jean Grey. Somewhere between then and the news that Jessica Chastain might join Sophie Turner, Jennifer Lawrence, et al. in X-Men: Dark Phoenix, he learned that Miri is also a big X-Men fan. And Miri is the only RtS regular who didn’t work on that web series, so this two-part Guest Reaction on X-Men cartoons basically had to happen.

Spoilers ahead, I guess?, for a decades-old story that practically redefined its medium and is on track for its third screen adaptation in our lifetimes. Post-chat notes and comics trivia from Kris in italics.

MIRI: Hi! This is Miri

CAROLINE: Hello!

MIRI: Ready?

CAROLINE: I am!

MIRI: Excellent!

My first instinct is to talk about [X-Men: The Animated Series], then [X-Men: Evolution], then some general yelling about how the two compare. What do you think?

CAROLINE: That sounds perfect to me!

MIRI: Awesome. Shall we be chronological about it?

(Secret motive: I have many feelings about the fashions in the Animated Series that I cannot contain for much longer)

CAROLINE: Ahaha. Well let's go for it then!

Had you seen any of the series before?

MIRI: None. At least not that I recall--there may have been reruns that I don’t remember at some point.

And did you watch it all the way through?

I was super interested by the story structure. It has seasons, but each season is a collection of 4ish episode stories. Was there a narrative for the whole season, or not really?

CAROLINE: Not at all. It was a big part of my young childhood but only in the sense that I watched it on TV a lot and loved the characters. I doubt I even cared about or followed the plots.

MIRI: Gotcha

CAROLINE: Again, I'm not exactly an expert. But I believe the storytelling arcs were pretty self-contained with character stuff bleeding over across the seasons

But this Dark Phoenix arc was of course a direct follow-up to the earlier Phoenix arc

MIRI: Cool. Seems like a similar structure to early seasons of Doctor Who

Yes, let’s talk about Phoenix/Dark Phoenix

First of all, I think it’s safe to say that Dark Phoenix is the living embodiment of “Bitch, you thought” memes

CAROLINE: Ha! I also just want to throw it out there that Jean Grey is my all-time favorite superhero

And yes, Dark Phoenix is an (insane) badass

MIRI: I had never seen a version where the Phoenix is a separate entity rather than a part of Jean that had been walled off inside of her

CAROLINE: Although I do believe that's the comic book origin story

I think TAS is fairly close to comic book canon

But the "internal" Dark Phoenix thing seems to have become the movie and TV norm now

KRIS: Though in general I don’t think of myself as a stickler for comics canon -- having come to comics, I think like many millennials, through various 90s cartoons -- this Phoenix thing does bum me out, partly for how big a deal the Phoenix Force is to the Marvel universe at large, along with characters like the Shi’ar who were introduced in that story. The Avengers vs. X-Men event that spun into 2012′s very successful Marvel NOW! relaunch (one of the things that made recent Marvel comics accessible to relatively casual readers like me) was built around the Avengers trying to permanently end the existential threat of the Phoenix.

MIRI: Interesting. My deep love of the X-men comes solely from the Evolution cartoon. I have no true history knowledge

(Don’t @ me, twitter)

CAROLINE: I'm kind of in the same boat with TAS although I do own a massive encyclopedia of X-Men comic book trivia

MIRI: I hope that sits proudly on your coffee table

CAROLINE: Of course! But I think with everything from character design to storylines, TAS pulled pretty directly from the comics

K: The character designs are specifically the Chris Claremont/Jim Lee era of “Blue Team” and “Gold Team,” recently re-invoked in two of the many X-Men titles spinning out of the recent Inhumans vs. X-Men crossover

(The Phoenix stories are from an earlier, Lee-less Claremont run.)

MIRI: I DEFINITELY want to discuss costumes at some point

CAROLINE: Agreed! But one other thing that really struck me about the Dark Phoenix is just how epic in scope it is.

MIRI: The structure does also feel more comic book-y to me--stories told over a few issues, then a new story,e tc

Oh yes, let’s definitely stay on her for now

Yeah, I was shocked to end up IN SPACE

K: The Shi’ar are pretty wild

CAROLINE: I think that's an element of comic book storytelling that doesn't really get adapted onto the big screen 

I mean obviously the MCU is massive

But their crossovers are a huge event

Whereas comic books (and cartoons) can just get epic whenever they feel like it

This one went from a sexy pirate story to a massive interstellar gladiator battle.

K: I don’t know Caroline super well, but I feel confident saying that Space is one of her Top 5 Favorite Things

MIRI: Sidebar: Katherine Janeway and Jean Grey are into the same types of romance novels/holodramas, pass it on

But to your actual point--I was really surprised when they defeated Dark Phoenix at the end of the third episode. I thought the whole thing was going to be an earthbound mutant battle, and then suddenly there’s a space empress!

I like that freedom, which is definitely not a part of most of the film/tv versions.

CAROLINE: Yeah! The stories can literally go anyway. It's really fun to watch. 

We even get a little Thor cameo

Albeit briefly

MIRI: Right!

That kind of reminder that it’s all out there and connected is nice, and in this format doesn’t overburden the story

CAROLINE: But I also think the Dark Phoenix arc does a good job grounding all that craziness in character drama

MIRI: Overall yes, but I don’t entirely buy the motivations of the (Dark) Phoenix

They lose me a little with the fact that Jean and Phoenix are both super great/good beings, but combined they’re evil

Like, there are also exhilarating happy emotions. Why isn’t she eating ice cream and having orgasms and looking at puppy gifs online?

CAROLINE: I agree that the plotting is messy as hell, but I always love stories about strong women being afraid of their own power. So I'm kind of willing to overlook how little sense it makes

MIRI: Fair! And the emotional ties within the Xmen work very nicely

CAROLINE: I think that was far and away what I cared about most

The Hellfire Club got a little boring after a while

But I love watching the X-Men be friends

Which I think TAS does really well

MIRI: I actually thought the whole “Kill me Logan, while I’m in control enough to let you” think worked a bit better in X3, but obviously it had this to build off of

Yes, I liked the friend dynamics! I’m a huge sucker for characters actually liking each other

CAROLINE: Umm, I reject the notion that anything about X3 worked on any level.

MIRI: hahahahahahahha

That is your right!

And I wouldn’t ever want to have to defend my point, because that movie is a shitshow

K: I certainly won’t defend it on a storytelling level, BUT I actually still think the set piece at the Grey house holds up pretty well as a standalone-ish thing (my objection to this version of the Phoenix still holds), not least because The Last Stand has one of the best Marvel movie soundtracks, composed by John Powell. The geography of the house is also used in more interesting ways than most action set piece locations.

CAROLINE: I loved little things like Rogue leaving Scott and Jean alone as soon as they got romantic

MIRI: Wolverine and Scott even seem to care about each other while they’re both in love with Jean, which is very mature

CAROLINE: The relationships (at least among the X-Men) feel lived in and real

MIRI: I didn’t want to love this Rogue because I am deeply committed to loving the Evolutions Rogue, but I found her super charming

She’s just always ready to be enthusiastically upset

She  cannonballed into Apocalypse’s calf and it was surprisingly effective!

CAROLINE: She's a huge standout of TAS for me

MIRI: Also she can just fly all the time, apparently? I love it

CAROLINE: I love Lenore Zann's voice acting

Yeah she's basically Superman

But she also can't touch anyone

It's a little weird but it's SUPER fun to watch

K: Rogue’s mutant ability is life-force/memory/power absorption (as also seen in the movies and in X-Men: Evolution), which is usually temporary. In the comics, the one time it stuck was when she got in a fight with Carol Danvers, at the time Ms. Marvel, and absorbed Carol’s powers of super strength and flight. (Carol later picked up additional, “cosmic”-level powers and went through several codename changes.)

MIRI: Is it possible for me to love her voice but hate her accent? Because that’s where I am

CAROLINE: Sure! Although I love both. And her and Gambit together are aces

MIRI: I liked her dropping him into the lake

And ‘What is this, catch the x-men day?’ (I'm misquoting, but that moment)

CAROLINE: It's an incredibly different characterization than the one we got on the films

K: I think this is from the first Phoenix Saga, but I couldn’t pass it up

MIRI: VERY

CAROLINE: *in the films

But I enjoy both

MIRI: Yeah, I think the adultness is a factor here, though certainly not all of it

CAROLINE: For sure! I guess this is really the only major X-Men series not to have a "teen" element

MIRI: It actually made me kind of uncomfortable that none of them were kids. Which is weird, but I’m SO used to the Xavier Institute version of it all

CAROLINE: They do have Jubilee running around sometimes

She's a POV teen in the premiere

But for the most parts they're just kind of The Avengers or something

MIRI: I’m not opposed to that. I was just legitimately shocked for a minute

CAROLINE: Overall I was surprised by how *adult* the whole series felt

Obviously it's aimed at kids

But it's complex and mature and about adulthood

I feel like a lot of kids shows kind of try to talk down to their audience?

But this one doesn't for the most part?

MIRI: Wow, that’s a really interesting point. I can’t think of any kid shows now that have primarily adult casts

Except the Wildkratts, which I am probably spelling wrong but is quality educational programing

CAROLINE: A LOT of stuff happens in this arc. And while there's a lot of hand-holding in terms, it also goes pretty deep

Including exploring the nature of a relationship between two older leaders dedicated to their people

Which, just, isn't what you would think of as kids fair

MIRI: I also like their look at relative morality in the face of a terrible decision

CAROLINE: (Also I meant to say there's a lot of hand-holding in terms of plot BTWs)

MIRI: Scott wants to save Jean, of course! And that’s The Right Thing to do, but everyone involved wants to do the right thing

CAROLINE: Yeah! A very adult conflict

MIRI: And they’re not really demonized for being willing to sacrifice Jean to save billions

Honestly, I think the Empress is in the right. I also think I would make the same decisions as Scott

K: Empress Lilandra is the character Jessica Chastain is reportedly in talks to play in Fox’s forthcoming Dark Phoenix movie

CAROLINE: It's a weird mix of mature thoughtfulness that's also super stilted and dated.

MIRI: That’s a perfectdescription

CAROLINE: Because I do think it feels like a pretty stitled series, especially to modern eyes

MIRI: Very

We expect a lot more realism in our storytelling now

CAROLINE: Not just the 90s aesthetic, but the actual storytelling

For sure.

MIRI: And economy of storytelling

CAROLINE: Although there is that here too sometimes. It's hard to pin down 

Also I was legitimately so touched when the X-Men all gave of themselves to save Jean

MIRI: Team as family gets me every time

CAROLINE: That's some great team storytelling right there

MIRI: And they worked together nicely

CAROLINE: And the kind of stuff X-Men does best

MIRI: They all get their moment, but the team work is always present

Also I like that Rogue can and does pick up every single one of the X-Men in this episode

CAROLINE: Ha! I love her so much

I really love all of them. I think the characters are all super vibrant

At least in the X-Men

I was super bored by the Hellfire Club

MIRI: I honestly could not tell you who any of those people were if it weren’t for the more recent men movies

they were boring and not distinctly drawn

(In a character sense, not an animation sense)

CAROLINE: Agreed

I remembered the Hellfire Club being super cool but now I'm not sure if they're better in other episodes or if I was just easily won over as a child

MIRI: I could definietly see them being better in episodes where they’re the focus

CAROLINE: Changing topics: Wolverine saying, "Where's that blasted salami" is maybe the best X-Men moment of all time

MIRI: I liked Emma’s little fuck you about Phoenix being the new queen

Hahahahahaha that was good

I would argue that his claws are way too spaced out for neat, even slices

CAROLINE: There's something weird going on there for sure

MIRI: Maybe really near the knuckles?

CAROLINE: Maybe he has secret salami powers too

MIRI: I’m going down a dark path of thinking about how much grossness is brought into his body when he retracts the claws after fighting or slicing salami

I mean I know he heals so it’s fine

But ew

CAROLINE: Oh god

MIRI: Right?

CAROLINE: Dark times

MIRI: I’m sorry

CAROLINE: Dark Phoenix times

MIRI: hahahahahhahaa

Nice

CAROLINE: I think the only voice actor I really didn't like is Scott's

MIRI: I could not deal with Xavier’s

CAROLINE: Which is a bummer because he carries a lot of this arc

MIRI: It weirded me out

CAROLINE: Yeah Xavier isn't great either

But it's hard to compare to Patrick Stewart

MIRI: It’s very unfair of me to expect it

I know this

CAROLINE: Who is so throughly Professor X in my head

MIRI: Yeah, between TNG and X-men, he looms damn large in my formative genre culture landscape

M: TNG = Star Trek: The Next Generation, which I was basically raised on

K: Caroline is also a huge Star Trek fan, and last year wrote a Vox explainer/viewing guide for the uninitiated.

CAROLINE: Totally

Should we talk costumes?

MIRI: Yes!

CAROLINE: They're the best

MIRI: First of all, it’s a fun metric on cultural shifts because at least 75% of these guys would be read as gay in the present day

Jean’s mask at the end is really stupid looking and I loved it SO MUCH

That and Wolverine’s mask were just so classic/iconic looking

CAROLINE: Well to be fair that's not her normal outfit in the series 

MIRI: Right, it was her super early costume, right?

CAROLINE: She was giving us a little Marvel Girl throwback

Yeah

MIRI: Ohhhhh I totally forgot she was Marvel Girl!

K: Not to be confused with Ms. Marvel, the codename Carol Danvers took in the 70s, and has since been adopted by Kamala Khan. (Carol, an Air Force pilot to be played by Brie Larson in the MCU, is currently Captain Marvel to the superhero community, but Colonel Danvers to the US government. Although maybe Larson’s Carol will just be a Captain Danvers, to avoid general audience confusion?)

CAROLINE: But her regular costume is also kind of ridiculous 

K: That’s not a bunch of skin showing, it’s just a confusingly flesh-toned bodysuit. I always liked the crystal (?) in her headband thing though.

M: This isn’t even her “regular” costume but it is something that could not be ignored.

K: It’s not her Phoenix costume but it’s what she wears for most of the series

They LOVED their headgear on TAS

MIRI: Which is presumably why she doesn’t have a hero name, right?

CAROLINE: I believe so

K: I tried to find an official answer, but didn’t dig up anything from a publishing perspective. Story-wise, it didn’t have anything to do with either (the first) Captain or Ms. Marvel. As far as I can tell, Jean first stopped using the codename Marvel Girl when she started calling herself Phoenix, and then some time post-Dark Phoenix, she decided to go by her civilian name. Maybe just because it had been a while since they were really writing her as a “girl”?

MIRI: I liked all of their dark head covering headband things that didn’t cover their faces or hair, but did cover the rest of the head

I don’t know what to call them

CAROLINE: It's a true X-Men staple

And it's so weird to see Gambit without his

MIRI: Like, when I think about it too much I have logic questions. But I love them and don’t want them changed at all

CAROLINE: The costumes are also all straight out of the comics.

K: Mostly designed by Jim Lee in the late 80s, possibly explaining all the shoulder pads. For better or worse (as an admitted non-expert, I think a bit of both), Lee is one of the most influential artists and publishers in the medium, and currently one of the top folks at DC.

MIRI: Storm’s earrings are killer

CAROLINE: Really everything about Storm is amazing

Another voice performance I love

MIRI: Yes! I loved her narration of her powers

CAROLINE: Haha! Same

So dramatic

Arguably too much so but it totally works

MIRI: Yes! I sat there thinking that I should be annoyed by it, but I just wanted more

I did not love that Rogue’s costume was apparently so shrink-wrapped on that I think I could see her internal organs

CAROLINE: I mean it is but I'm just so into her whole design

I really forgot how much I loved her on this series

MIRI: Yes, the design of the costume is great!

The mullet-ness of the white in her hair is not a styling choice I would make, but she’s free to do her

CAROLINE: Oh also Jean's Phoenix hair is AMAZING

MIRI: I also really liked the space aesthetics

CAROLINE: Keep the powers just for that!

MIRI: Ooh, yes! Both the updo and the big loose look

The guys’ lips were all the same color as the rest of their faces and once I noticed it I couldn’t stop noticing it

CAROLINE: Ha!

I will say, as much as I love many other iterations of the X-Men, these will always be the iconic X-Men looks for me

As I think they are for many people

MIRI: That makes total sense! They’re not entirely for me, but they definitely did resonate

Before the MCU became such a thing, these looks were a lot of the merchandise you saw

And they are just so distinctive

CAROLINE: I LOVE seeing people cosplay in these looks

It brings me such joy

MIRI: I like that they have commonalities without all being in the same exact uniform

Omg, yes!

Even without this era being A Thing for me, I can think of multiple killer Rogue cosplays I’ve taken notice of with this look

CAROLINE: Okay so should we start talking about an era of the X-Men that is a little more iconic for you?

MIRI: Sounds good! But first, I want to say that I feel like you shouldn’t power wash the ancient hieroglyphics tablet nd that was uncool even for villains to do

Also I need a gif of Dark Phoenix saying “I admit nothing”

(Dark Phoenix, Mother of Dragons, the unburnt, breaker of chains, Khaleesi of the great grass sea)

CAROLINE: I need so many GIFs

Mostly the salami one 

In Part 2, Miri and Caroline turn to X-Men: Evolution.

X-Men: The Animated Series is streaming on Hulu.

You can follow Caroline on Twitter, and support her on Patreon.

You can also follow us on Twitter, where we mostly retweet critics (including Caroline), screenwriters, and general pop culture reporting. 

For now we leave you with perhaps the greatest superhero opening titles [Kanye] OF ALL TIME [/Kanye].

[cwdcshows]

Supergirl - S5 Ep5 - Dangerous Liasons

Is this Obsidian commercial taking place in Pleasantville....? So did Kara clear bringing William into the DEO to connect him with the information they've learned related to his story? Also, she wants to take him into a government agency that doesn't officially exist; something that raises all sorts of questions of legitimacy and oversight, especially when they usurp the authority of other agencies by posing as FBI agents or other recognized law enforcement.  Wouldn't that be something that William might have some qualms about and perhaps want to disclose to the public?  

I mean, sure, I guess that's kind of the point of making him sign something saying he won't, but that hasn't necessarily stopped a good journalist determined to expose important truths in the name of transparency and accountability.  Just as importantly, Kara says that he has to sign the NDA saying he won't say where here sister works; and at first I assumed that in spite of how Kara worded it, that such an agreement would probably be a little bit more explicitly worded to keep William or someone from publicly acknowledging the existence of the DEO.  I looked up to see if there was actually a difference between a Non-Disclosure agreement, which is specifically what Kara called it, and a Confidentiality Agreement, which is more of what I assumed he would be asked to sign.  While they are at their core essence the same thing, an NDA is generally applied to keeping personal information secret, where as a confidentiality agreement is typically much broader and can require a more proactive level of protect of whatever is to remain confidential; and from that perspective the former fits with Kara's description of not wanting to disclose where Alex works. Within that very specific and narrow definition, if taken at full face value, William couldn't "disclose" the nature of how the source of his information came from someone working at the DEO. But could he conceivably leagally reveal the existence of the DEO if it were unrelated to his story and without mentioning Alex Danvers or her involvement with the organization?

Again, NDA vs Confidentiality Agreemen are two sides of the same coin; and whatever Kara calls it, William would probably be expected to adhere to it a greater degree of secrecy, but I still think it would pique his interest as an investigative journalist to learn about a secret military organization that works for the US government to monitor and occasionally detain extraterrestrials and was involved with essentially deposing their former president. So why exactly did Hope and Lena need to induce J'Onn's brother Steve into a human form before they conducted their test?   Oh, it was to save money on CGI and because the Martian CGI looked fake as shit?  Got it. Also Steve was wearing boots in his Martian form and is barefoot when induced to take on a human form; and I'm not sure I really have much of an observation about that other than it being kind of weird.  Martians are generally depicted as using their shape shifting to produce their clothes, as well as their physical appearance; which means that however Hope and Lena induced this human form, they also somehow picked out his clothes and made a conscious choice not to give him shoes.  So what kind of detail did they have to go into in selecting the rest of his physical appearance?  I mean, J'Onn looks the way he does because he looks like Hank Henshaw.  Papa Martian Manhunter ostensibly took some arbitrary form that mirrored his sons to some varying extent.  Did they have to decide how long his hair should be?  If you had a beard? If he was ticklish?  How tall he was? Did they make his human form anatomically correct or is he just smooth like a Ken doll?  Did they debate size? It'd be great if it turned out that Lena just decided to make Steve look like character actor Phil LaMarr.  Turns out, she's a big fan of Mad TV. So Lena and Hope can access Steve's mind enough to force him to morph into a human form, because Lena has a thing for Hermes Conrad, but that's as deep of access as it goes before his telepathic defenses kick in?  Seems like Steve needs to priorities the parts of his mind other people can tamper with, so someone can't make him morph into a bug they can squash.  He's just lucky that so far Lena just wanted a chance to meet the voice of John Stewart. Kara, why would you tell Alex what Kelly is getting her for their anniversary? (I'm not calling it a "date-averssary, it's just a regular anniversary) But back to the point, doesn't Kara know how presents work; the recipient isn't supposed to know what it is before they get it.  Sure, it would make sense if Kara told her she helped Kelly work out what the present should be in order to let Alex know that Kelly was in fact getting her something in case Alex wasn't planning to get a present, but she shouldn't have ruined the surprise. Why is William even in the interrogation room if they weren't going to let him ask questions?  It looks like there's literally a two-way mirror behind him, meaning they could have been on the other side of it to observe; which would also presumably be safer for a bunch of reasons for civilians. And wouldn't whatshername recognize Kara as the woman she blew out the window in the last episode?  I mean, she could reasonably infer that Supergirl saved her, but it seems suspicious that the super secret DEO brought the same woman in with another dude and they both happen to be reporters. Wait, so William's friend was killed by Doc Ock?  Man, Sony will climb into bed with anyone to make a couple of bucks. Why would anyone leave anything Lex Luther made intact or active?  I suppose some of it might be too advance for easy or safe disassembly or disarmament, but it seems irresponsible to just leave his doomsday devices or advanced weaponry laying around, even if it is supposedly under arm guard. "Martian biology prevents brother from fight brother." The Martian version of talk shows must be even more violent than ours; it's not even a talk show, they just straight for the fight to see what happens. "Q'Uarus and M'Morin fought for 20 minutes without side effect, T'Gor, you are not Q'Uarus' father.  Also, your actual son is dead." "Do what Lex Luther failed to do.  Change the world...." (Old lady walks away without specifically outlining what Not-Ock is supposed to do.  Not-Ock discovers that the laser could actually be modified into a universal, unlimited clean power source and begins freely distributing this discovery throughout the world; paid for by selling a line of mechanical arm back-packs, which hugely successful.  The rest of the fortunate he amasses he spends on ending world hunger and homelessness, ushering in a new era for humanity, as he shares his simple philosophy embraces by all - "Do what Lex Luther failed do. Change the world." 45 years later, Not-Ock is on his deathbed, a day soon to be marked as a global tragedy, as they lose one of the most influential men in the world; when the door to his hospital room opens and a woman well over 100 enters, being pushed in a wheelchair.  She rolls up next to his bed, takes his hand and says, "Do you remember what I told you all those years ago in the alley?" "Yes," he replies, "Did I do it? Did I change the world?" "Yes," she responds, "you did.") Huh, Kelly didn't strike me as the type to "get freaky"..... Ah, well, obviously Russell is going to turn out to be Not-Ock..... Wait, does J'Onn, a Martian, believe Noah's Ark actually happened? "That's a huge wave!" You know that guy called his parents after wrapping that part and said, "Mom, dad, I made it.  I'm an actor.  Are...are you proud of me?" And they responded, "No." They must really be pinching pennies for crisis to have J'Onn flying around in his human form in the arctic, sportin' the casual dad on the weekend look. I can definitely imagine a few scenarios how Lena might use this new ability to control minds on Kara to get back at her, but none of them are appropriate to post in a public forum.  I might write it down in a book that will eventually be adapted in a movie starring Dakota Johnson.....  I think I'll call it something clever like, 20 Shades of Kryptonite or Lena Luther and the Secret Room in the Fortress of Solitude. You know what I think happened?  I think Alex already bought the fancy riding helmet for herself and when Kara told her that Kelly was going to buy her the same thing, she came up with this "riding partner" idea as a way not making Kelly feel bad for buying her something she already has; while also not actually needing to buy her a present - which is actually kind of genius.