#my opinions are based on culmination of what i’ve heard from friends and clips i’ve seen on tiktok!!

[joelsdagger]

Pedro does Joel well in my opinion, and that’s from someone who very much prefers game Joel. The difference is that Pedro is working with the dogshit script they gave him. And somehow managing to make his performance a lot better than what the writing has earned from him. Pedro does HBO Joel well but we’ll never know if he can do a more game accurate Joel. It’s just the failings of the show runners which is so disappointing.

Anyway love your work, nobody writes for the loml game Joel anymore

i agree with you to a certain degree. i think he did the most he could with what they gave him, but personally, he does share some of the blame. from the articles i read, he was the one who pushed for some of the changes for joel, ie: joel in therapy, it was something that was important to him and from what i’ve read he reminded the show runners it was the whole reason he agreed to play the part. and in my opinion, pedro, neil & craig intentionally made show joel this weird, very emotionally volatile type of man, and in doing so, they tried too hard to ward off this idea that joel was a toxic masculine man (that didn’t have any feelings) that many people believed joel was (canonically on the surface he was very closed off and emotionally constipated but ultimately he wasn’t emotionally volatile and all over the place, and anyone who experienced the game in some capacity knows that). and in my opinion, it just doesn’t work, because it’s just not how joel was in the original source material. on top of that, a lot of pedro’s mannerisms and some of his acting choices for certain moments were a little over the top for me and game joel was always very subtle, let his actions speak for him and i think pedro has a tendency to overcompensate in the show. we know our joel from the games, and the one he played….it’s just not the one i know and love from the games. and listen, i adore pedro, i think he’s great, i’ve seen almost all of his work and i think he’s a very talented, versatile actor, but for joel, i do think there’s room for improvement there with certain depictions of emotions and mannerisms, and that goes for the rest of the cast too. but i also agree that it’s the script and the writers that most of the blame falls on. neil and craig fucked up royally and the whole show, entire storylines, and everyone involved are suffering for it.

i think if the games didn’t exist and if it weren’t so painfully obvious that neil is very poorly retconning his own work and if he didn’t very obviously loathe joel, i think season 1 could stand on it’s own but even from season 1 to season 2….those characters are just not the same, like at all. and ultimately, i just don’t believe game adaptations are ever good. there’s so much nuance that cannot be replicated in a live action adaptation so i firmly believe this adaptation didn’t need to happen as much as we all hoped or wanted it to work.

that’s just my opinion though i’m not trying to start discourse i’m just being transparent 😅 i just want people to know that this is a space to discuss their game to show qualms especially game joel fans who are on the same page! i love tlou and i love talking about it. just don’t take this as me thinking i’m right it’s just me expressing an opinion. if you liked it, you liked it and i’m happy you liked it! i want my blog to be a space where me, and likeminded people can openly talk about our thoughts, feelings, & disappointments about the show, it isn’t possible to not have them!

and thank you so much for reading my work and for the compliment. i appreciate you very much <33

[yeonchi]

Doctor Who Series 12 Review Part 4/10: Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror

Air date: 19 January 2020

Last week’s episode wasn’t that good, but this one is a bit better. If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard of Nikola Tesla despite having heard of the Tesla car brand or the Tesla coil, this is a good place to start.

In light of Thomas Edison’s appearance in this episode, I’ve decided to give this episode’s spoiler-free thought in the form of a Family Guy cutaway:

Let’s break all the spoilers down after the break.

Edison was a dick? Who on earth is Tesla?

When I heard that Thomas Edison would be in this episode, I couldn’t wait for the opportunity to use the clip I had for the spoiler-free thought. A lot of people seem to assume that Edison had a rivalry with Nikola Tesla, yet the most that Wikipedia says is that they are portrayed that way in popular culture. When Edison died in 1931, Tesla contributed the only negative opinion about him to the New York Times. I think that’s why people never talked about him.

At school, I don’t think we ever learned about Tesla. In fifth grade, we did a unit on notable figures throughout history that culminated in a night where everyone dressed up as a particular notable and guests had to guess which figure they were cosplaying. Luckily enough, we were all given a compendium of all the essays everyone wrote about their notables and sure enough, while Edison was on there, Tesla wasn’t even mentioned. In fact, I think the first mention of Tesla that I heard was from this South Park episode:

In 2012, Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal published a comitorial (an editoral comic, I don’t know what else to call these types of comics) named Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived. In it, he talks about how Tesla came up with the ideas for radio, radar, remote controls and other things, while Edison was basically a businessman who patented and sold ineffective inventions (DC) and inventions made by other people (the light bulb).

Soon after, Alex Knapp published an article on Forbes and Inman published a response on his website. In the episode, the Doctor mentions how Tesla would have been a billionaire if he hadn’t torn up his contract with Westinghouse. Inman notes in his response that he did so out of kindness because they were going through some financial troubles, but after looking on Wikipedia, I found that Westinghouse was basically begging Tesla to stop taking his money otherwise he would have to “deal with the bankers”. Nonetheless, Westinghouse still managed to continue funding the rest of his life, so there.

As far as primary evidence goes, the notion of a rivalry between Edison and Tesla is largely unfounded. A lot of people have had something to say about Inman’s comitorial, however me putting links to it does not mean I’m taking his word as gospel. Based on my schooling, I can agree that Tesla is an underrated figure. Over a decade ago, in fifth grade, if someone had chosen Tesla to be their notable, I can bet that nobody would ever be able to guess who he was.

On a side note, Inman was involved in saving Tesla’s US legacy, namely his laboratory at Wardenclyffe. He and Jane Alcorn joined forces to crowdfund the purchase of the site from Agfa and was successful in May 2013. Now known as the Tesla Science Center, the site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and work is underway to renovate Tesla’s laboratory into a museum. If you can’t wait for that, there’s also the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia (the airport is also named after him) or the Nikola Tesla Memorial Center at his birthplace in Smiljan, Croatia.

Burning tokusatsu references

You know that thing the Doctor put in the TARDIS to scan the Orb of Thassor? That’s literally the Orb Ring from Ultraman Orb. And yes, that needed a separate section alone because it was just that important.

I could compare the Skithra to some spider monsters in Kamen Rider, but then I found that they were actually scorpions, unlike the Racnoss. I tried looking in that direction, but none of them fit the description.

This is probably a low-ball thing, but stealing things is also a thing in Kamen Rider, particularly in the case of villain Riders (in recent years) whose equipment is made up of stolen components. Some examples include Blood, Killbus, Metal/Phantom Build and more recently, Jin (Flying Falcon).

Edison was also immortalised in Kamen Rider Ghost as the Edison Damashii, which gave the titular Rider the power to use electricity in his attacks. The secondary Rider, Specter, stole Edison’s Eyecon briefly during his “I’m gonna kill my best friend if it means I can save my little sister” phase at the start of the series. Ghost was eventually able to get it back and he was nice enough to lend Specter the Eyecon again on a couple of occasions during the series. Suffice to say, Tesla didn’t get an Eyecon, not even among the 71 extra audience-pitched Eyecons that Toei created for the Ghost movie. However, he was somewhat acknowledged with the Denki Gamma being based on the Tesla coil.

Other general thoughts

Graham and Ryan are starting to become the comic relief of this series.

What happened to the Silurian blaster? Couldn’t you have used it to defend Wardenclyffe when the TARDIS shields went down?

Tesla apparently invented the “death ray” in the hope that he could prevent warfare due to its power. Look where that got us.

At one point, the crystals of the TARDIS console room turn blue, making the interior look that way. It really harkens back to the Eleventh Doctor’s second console room from The Snowmen onwards.

So, like Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla have been in the TARDIS. But why didn’t the latter men have their memories erased while the former women did? Here’s the simple answer - Lovelace and Khan visited the future while Edison and Tesla stayed in their own time. Indeed, the TARDIS has components that no human would ever be able to understand, but they do run the risk of being inspired by them, which could have affected history. Eh, maybe it’s best to invoke Zi-O’s Rule 3 and move on.

Summary and verdict

I hope this episode (if not this review) will act as a turning point for people’s views on Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. The summary of the matter is that Tesla was a real inventor while Edison was just a patent troll. Some pretty great tokusatsu references this week as well.

Rating: 9/10

Stay tuned for the end of the week as I review the fifth episode, Fugitive of the Judoon. I’ll be doing a mid-series review as well.