#that guy from the letter column who said he was going to mail a bomb to dchq was onto something . . .

[bisupergirl]

barbara's "my life has no importance save in relation to you" and kara getting erased from continuity for ~20 years because she detracted from clark's status as the last son of krypton . . . WHEWWW like at least kara got to have a heroic death (i guess !) and babs eventually made a comeback with suicide squad/oracle year one/birds of prey but MAN they were really tossed aside in such a cruel way all because they didn't "benefit" bruce or clark anymore . . .

[rachelkaser]

Stay Golden Sunday: Love, Rose

Blanche and Dorothy make up a man to respond to a lonesome Rose’s personal ad. Sophia tries to shake a stalker.

Picture It...

Sophia comes back hopping mad from a card game, having gotten on the wrong bus home. Rose is reorganizing her recipes while Blanche and Dorothy are getting ready for dates. The other Girls are concerned that she’s not been out for a while and is becoming a bit shut-in. Blanche suggests she write something in a personals column, but Rose is lukewarm on the idea. She seems to come around when Sophia also reveals she has a date for the evening.

DOROTHY: Oh Rose, honey, I have a date. Do you plan to use your silver bangle bracelet tonight? ROSE: I plan to spend the evening reorganizing my recipe file. DOROTHY: Are you going to dress for the occasion, or can I borrow the bracelet?

Two weeks later, Rose comes in with the mail, depressed. She hasn��t received a single response to her ad in the personals column. Sophia comes in and says she finally lost a guy who was following her: Willie Cheswick, a British man she met at the senior center who has a crush on her, but in whom she’s not interested. Realizing that she’s doing worse than Sophia, Rose feels even more down and rejected, leaving the kitchen. Blanche contemplates setting her up with one of her many men, but instead picks up a date for herself.

Later, Blanche and Dorothy are playing cards on the lanai, and Rose comes running in, excited. She finally got an answer to her ad. She gushes over the man who responded, with whom she has a lot in common. He sounds sweet, shy, and exactly Rose’s type. When Dorothy asks if she’ll meet him, Rose says she’s not ready for that, but she will write him back. As she runs out, Dorothy notes how happy she now looks. That’s when Blanche drops the bomb: She wrote the letter. She came up with someone named Isaac Newton and she’ll write him out of existence if Rose gets too interested.

DOROTHY: I don’t know why I let you talk me into this. I mean, it is out of control. We have to tell Rose the truth. BLANCHE: We can’t! It would crush her. DOROTHY: Well then, it’s time to ship Isaac Newton to Saskatchewan. BLANCHE: Dorothy, you can’t send a citrus farmer to Saskatchewan. How’s he going to make a living? DOROTHY: Excuse me. Next time we invent a person, let’s make sure that he has a trade that travels.

Sometime later, Blanche and Dorothy are writing out another letter from Isaac Newton to Rose, copying out Byron poems for her. Dorothy has some serious reservations about continuing this, but they’ve come up with a whole backstory for him -- he’s a citrus farmer and they plan to ship him to Saskatchewan before Rose can meet him. Sophia comes in and complains she’s still being bothered by her stalker, Willie. Then Rose comes in and says she’s decided she wants to meet Isaac, as the other Girls have given her confidence and she thinks he’s very special. Blanche immediately decides to deploy Plan: Saskatchewan.

The Girls are getting ready to go to an event, with Sophia lamenting that Willie scared off all her potential dates. Rose announces that she’s going with Isaac, to Blanche and Dorothy’s shock. Upon realizing that he’s about to move to Saskatchewan (or so she thinks), she decided to invite him before he did, and she found him in the phone book. He evidently accepted, as he’s on his way. She goes to finish getting ready.

BLANCHE: Dorothy, what are we gonna do? DOROTHY: We certainly can’t let Rose go out with a guy who said yes to a woman who just picked his name out of a phone book! BLANCHE: You say that like nobody ever does it!

Blanche and Dorothy are imploding, as Rose has called a total stranger and invited him, and they have no idea how to proceed. The doorbell rings, only it’s Willie Cheswick, who again asks Sophia to the dance with him. She at first flips him off, but acquiesces at Dorothy’s urging, though she’s not pleased at the idea. The doorbell rings again, and this time it is Isaac, a very awkward man who obviously is very confused. He meets Rose and they seem to hit it off, but Dorothy suspects that things are headed for disaster.

At the dance, Blanche and Dorothy are worriedly looking for Isaac and Rose. On the other side of the room, Isaac is telling Rose about his work as a school vice principal, which obviously doesn’t match with what Rose remembers from the letters. She tells Dorothy and Blanche that she’s concerned about this, but they don’t get the chance to tell her before she takes Isaac to dance. Meanwhile, Willie lets slip to Sophia that the main reason he’s been chasing her around is because he thinks she’s a wealthy widow. He quickly retreats when she disabuses him of that notion.

DOROTHY: I haven’t seen them anywhere? BLANCHE: Oh my god, Dorothy, what if he turns out to be some kind of depraved ex-convict who’s kidnapped Rose and is dragging her across seven states on a rampage of violence and destruction unparalleled in the annals of modern crime? DOROTHY: … then we probably should have told her about the letters.

Rose finally confronts Isaac about how different he is from his letters, but he of course has no idea what she’s talking about. Blanche and Dorothy finally tell her that they’re the ones who wrote the letters. Humiliated, Rose runs out of the room and into the ladies’ room. The Girls follow and implore her to let them explain. Rose sobs that they embarrassed her and that she feels betrayed that they led her to believe that someone cared about her the way “Isaac Newton” did.

After shooing the real Isaac out, Blanche and Dorothy tell Rose that they care about her as much as “Isaac” did, and that’s why they wrote her the letters. After a moment, Rose exits the bathroom (to the relief of the waiting women) and forgives them. The Girls cheerfully go off to be with their dates (Blanche mistakes Dorothy’s for hers) and there’s no word on whether Rose will continue to socialize with the real Isaac.

“I guess you have to stand back when you flush this thing.”

Oh how I don’t like to give out a two-slicer, but I can’t see what else to do with this episode. I rarely come back to this episode of my own accord, and watching it again as an adult with a critical eye leaves me cringing pretty much all the way through. There are a few good moments but ultimately not enough for me to do more than give this episode a reluctant two-slice rating.

ROSE: Oh, Sophia. Your card game run late? SOPHIA: They changed the route on the Number 10 bus -- didn’t even put up a sign! ROSE: That’s terrible. Where did you end up? SOPHIA: Who knows? I could only find one person who spoke English and he tried to blame me personally for the Bay of Pigs!

My big problem with this episode is that it involves two things that today we would consider extremely troubling and which I doubt were considered great even back in the 80s: Catfishing and stalking, in the A- and B-plots respectively. Everyone in the episode tries to play both of them off as harmless and sweet -- except Sophia, and even she is sort of pressured into going along with it.

The central conflict of the episode is Blanche and Dorothy trying to assuage Rose’s loneliness when she hits a slump in her dating life.  Their well-meaning advice for Rose to run an ad (for my younger readers, this was the forerunner to online dating) backfires when no one responds, so Blanche wants to make Rose feel better. Instead of taking her out on the town or setting her up on a blind date, Blanche and Dorothy instead choose to rectify the situation by inventing an absurd, non-existent friend to respond to her ad.

DOROTHY: We have created a poetry-writing citrus farmer who writes letters with a lavender felt pen. And Rose thinks he’s the most fascinating creature on Earth. Now what do you think that says? BLANCHE: About Rose? DOROTHY: About the whole bunch of us!

This is possibly one of the dumbest things Blanche or Dorothy will ever do in this series, and I think they’re both aware of it. They’re unbelievably lucky that the subject of their deception is Rose, because otherwise I can’t see anyone buying the tale of Isaac Newton, the lavender pen-using, poetry-writing citrus farmer who’s moving to a hard-to-spell area of Canada where he’ll apparently no longer be able to receive or send further communication.

I may buy that Rose would accept the person they invent without question, but the fact that she not only finds an Isaac Newton but that he agrees to go on a date with her frankly beggars belief. Isaac (the real one) is a bit of a strange guest character. He’s a vice principal (who doesn’t know who the historical Isaac Newton is) who lives in a boarding house and is so spacey that he flummoxes even Rose. I guess he’s supposed to come across as harmless so we don’t have to worry that Rose is going to be spirited away by someone malicious (as even Blanche comes to realize could very easily have happened). But he’s still an absurd character.

SOPHIA: Rose, I need to borrow a silk scarf tonight. ROSE: You have a date? SOPHIA: No, I’m doing the Dance of the Seven Veils and I’m one short. [aside to Dorothy] Sometimes I worry about her.

The part of the episode that is not addressed really is that, for all of the weird quirks Dorothy and Blanche invented for fake-Isaac, Rose still believed he was a real person and basically fell in love with someone her two best friends invented for her. That moment in the bathroom when Rose tells off Blanche and Dorothy for what they did and how they embarrassed her is very needed and deserved, and I feel terrible that poor Rose had to go through it. But still, that moment in the bathroom when Blanche and Dorothy tell Rose that they love her and wanted to show her how appreciated and heard she is, even if not in the best way, is still heartwarming in its own way. I guess.

Even if it all gets resolved pretty tidily at the end, I think there’s no getting around the fact that two out of the four Girls have committed a pretty serious breach of trust against one of the others, and the fourth was pursued (literally) by a man she had explicitly told to leave her alone. The writers have to go through some big leaps to make Rose and Sophia okay by the end of the episode.

ROSE: It was during the Korean Conflict. I was rejected as a W.A.C. I failed the inkblot test. DOROTHY: Oh come on, Rose, now how can you fail an inkblot test? ROSE: I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to cut them out!

Chalk this up to yet another episode I really wish Sophia was in more of, if only because I wish she would be the one to criticize the other Girls for their hare-brained scheme. Her B-plot of trying to fight off the advances of a 90-year-old British stalker is treated very lightly, but I appreciate that Sophia makes her feelings very clear to Willie by flipping him off to his face. He also turns out to just be interested in the money Sophia definitely doesn’t have, so at least she gets out of the situation relatively unharmed, unlike Rose.

Other than that, there’s no a lot to say about this episode, except to reiterate that Sophia needed to be in more of it. It’s one of the more sitcom-y episodes of the series, and the plot just doesn’t hang together very well. At least we got that hilarious opening gag of Sophia getting on the wrong bus and then making a jibe about the teeth of David Hartman.

Episode rating: 🍰🍰 (two cheesecake slices out of five)

Favorite part of the episode:

DOROTHY: *about Willie* He sounds kinda cute, Ma. I mean, why are you avoiding him? SOPHIA: There’s no magic, Dorothy. No sparks. You know what I mean? DOROTHY: He’s 90, you’re 80. Sparks are dangerous. BLANCHE: I know what you mean, Sophia. I would never date a man unless I felt those sparks. DOROTHY: Fortunately you carry flints in your bra.

[thebibliomancer]

Essential Avengers: Avengers #113: Your Young Men Shall Slay Visions!

July, 1973

So. I guess Vision is super dead this time.

And he was killed by young men. There was no need to take him down. I said, young men. Pick that synthezoid off the ground.

Gotta give Englehart this, he sure knows how to change one word in a bible verse to make it into a title for a comic book.

Anyways, Wanda is going to Avenge him. And then she can date Lil’ Vision.

Just a heads up, this is kind of a weird issue. Not incomprehensible. Just eyebrow raising.

We start off before Vision is super dead. The Avengers are repairing the Statue of Liberty after Gog tore it up in Astonishing Tales #18. I guess Damage Control doesn’t exist yet.

Its good to see the Avengers uncausing some property damage for a change. And just look at Vision and Cap recapitating Liberty.

Not that they’re actually good statue repairers. The torch hand falls off and falls toward Scarlet Witch but Vision flies down to intercept it and lets it break across his back.

Guess Liberty is a southpaw now.

He also leaves Cap holding the entire crown but I guess Cap has super-strength or something now.

In the heat of the moment and grateful that nothing bad happened to anyone that wasn’t a statue, Wanda and Vision start making out.

This happens to be in public where everyone can see. And it causes a bit of a to-do.

Although what causes more of one is that Cap loses his grip on the crown and Iron Man barely catches it before it smashes into the ground. All while Wanda and Vision continue to make out, oblivious of the outside world or the people that almost died.

Ah, young love!

Anyway. It happened in public so now its on the news so now Mike Williams is interviewing random people for vox pops.

Despite Iron Man’s fear in an earlier episode, the public overall seems supportive of a woman making out with a robot man! One guy thinks that the Avengers are due joy for all that they’ve saved the world and another woman is just way into celebrities in love.

But another guy with gritted teeth and oddly red eyes proclaims that Wanda and Vision aren’t people.

Meanwhile, inside Avengers Mansion, Wanda reacts to people reacting to her and Vision being together. Its not like they were trying to keep the relationship a secret so she knew the news would break someday. But she expected more trouble! She’s been hated and feared all her life so she was a bit paranoid but maybe things will be different this time and nothing ironic will happen!

Vision isn’t so sure. Crowds are extremely fickle. The Marvel public doubly so.

And Cap gives Jarvis a hand opening some fan mail. He finds some hate mail proclaiming that androids are agents of the devil and have no souls.

This hater could have done with having someone proofread.

Cap angrily crumples the letter and throws it in the fireplace.

Meanwhile, at the front door, Iron Man and Black Panther field some questions. One woman wants Iron Man to bring her autograph book to Scarlet Witch and Vision to sign.

And an old Native American woman baked a cake for Vision. Not sure if he can eat but its the thought that counts. Although, here’s a bit of a cringey thing. She baked the cake because she heard Vision had red skin which makes him “a soul brother!”

Wow, Englehart.

Meanwhile (or to be more accurate, interspersed through some of those vignettes), the guy that reported the kiss to the media and then said that Wanda and Vision weren’t people to a reporter, makes a call asking everyone to get together for a meeting.

So in an abandoned warehouse in a bad neighborhood, jerk guy meets with his people. And the meeting is because the moment they’ve FEARED has come.

A ROBOT HAS FALLEN IN LOVE WITH A HUMAN. I mean, she’s a mutant but that’s technically still a person. AND IF HE MARRIES HER, A ROBOT WILL HAVE RIGHTS? IN THIS COUNTRY??

Obviously, this will lead to humanity becoming second-class citizens under a super-race of robots. Obviously.

Look, just look.

Take it all in.

Anyway, they’re so fervent about their cause that they’re willing to die for it. By suicide-bombing.

And they all happen to be wearing bomb vests under their coats. But these are certainly unique bomb vests that these “Living Bombs” are wearing.

Geez. If this wasn’t so goofy, it would be quite tasteless. As it is its only very tasteless.

Later, the Avengers fight some people wearing green uniforms and armbands and I guess they hate foreigners. I wonder if they’re Sons of the Serpent with slightly less bad fashion sense or another group of militant anti-immigration peeps.

Guess it doesn’t matter. The Avengers beat them up. Its so not even an issue that its over in five panels.

Afterward, the crowd rushes to thank the Avengers for beating those chumps but one pushes past the rest because she wants to shake the Vision’s hand.

One in a silly, not very good disguise.

Yup.

It’s one of the Living Bombs.

And sure that history will praise her forever, as soon as Living Bomb Carol gets close to Vision, she throws off the hood and activates the head trigger and explodes right in Vision’s face.

Scarlet Witch rushes over, despairing that Vision has been killed. But he is still conscious enough to talk to her and say that he’s been terribly damaged internally.

There’s still a chance to save him! They have Ant-Man’s notes on his internals. They have one of the best surgeons and one of the best engineers on speed-dial. And they have Tony Stark’s Long Island plant with all the equipment they’ll need!

Before Thor flies off to ‘find’ Dr. Donald Blake, Wanda asks him to make sense of all this as a not human. All he can answer is that its ‘blind, unreasoning hate’ and Wanda darkly responds that that’s something she understands.

Back at Living Bomb Warehouse, the Living Bombs get ready for a second attack. Carol may have failed but the news has reported that Vision has been taken to Stark Industries for repair. And if at first Carol doesn’t succeed, try try try try try try again.

Because they have six tries left and head jerk guy swears Vision will die today!

(Whaddajerk)

So at Stark Industries Long Island plant, Donald Blake (secretly Thor), Tony Stark (secretly Iron Man), and T’Challa (not-secretly Black Panther) all prepare to joust with death.

Which is a phrase the evokes a beautiful mental image, I think.

First thing, they pop a skylight and focus the light through a prism. The Vision is solar powered so this solar transfusion will help.

Next thing, they hit a snag. Vision had been rock hard before the explosion. They won’t be able to open him up to operate like this. So Wanda talks to Vision, asks him to unclench.

And on some level, I guess he hears her because he does.

Now its just up to T’Challa, Blake, and Stark. But since its a very invasive procedure, they can’t be interrupted or the shock of the operation might finish up the job the bomb started and kill Vision.

Meanwhile, another three panels of Mantis! Hooray!

This time the shadowy person regrets agreeing to their trip to the Avengers. The Avengers will never accept them.

“He who fears the bee’s sting will never taste the honey,” she responds.

Apparently this was convincing enough because the shadowy figure agrees to keep going.

Meanwhile, back at the plot! Captain America is pacing the halls and kind of wondering something.

Where are Thor and Iron Man? Their teammate is dying!

But mostly he just wishes there were something he could do instead of pacing! Some distraction.

Like maybe the Living Bombs bursting in and shooting him with a stun weapon they stole from the Stark Industry guards?

CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, CAP.

Except he wasn’t as stunned as one might hope if one were a Living Bomb.

So one of them decides to sacrifice himself to get Cap out of the way. He runs at Cap and pushes the head plunger EXPLODING IN A GIANT COLUMN OF EXPLOSION!

Which leaves Cap strangely untouched. What’s the deal?

Hex power is the deal. Scarlet Witch apparently came out to see the fuss and used her power to save Cap.

Ooo, very like the Civil War movie except without terrible consequences!

While Wanda runs off to let her MP build back up and to warn the OR, Cap starts punching pantsless dudes in the face.

Since the current place they’re working on is more T’Challa’s field, Tony Stark runs off to ‘find’ Iron Man.

And wow, he sure finds him pretty quickly. Like he knew exactly where to look.

But anyway. Iron Man joins the fray!

He joins Cap in punching pantsless dudes. The key thing is to keep them too befuddled to hit their head detonators.

And they fail the key thing. One of the guys goes to plunge his detonator hat so Iron Man grabs him and jets through the hole in the roof.

The Living Bomb becomes an Unliving Explosion safely in the air above the Stark Industries plant.

And one minute later, Tony Stark rushes back into the operating lab. Which is good! The operation had reached a critical stage that needed Tony Stark’s expertise!

Tony Stark tells Donald Blake to go find Thor. Hey! Maybe Donald Blake will find him in the same room where Tony found Iron Man, *wink*!

So, yeah. Tony Stark and Donald Blake figured out each other’s secret identities. This deeper insight makes them the two founding Avengers with the closest relationship who didn’t get married to each other. A close relationship which ends when Tony makes a Thor clone and Thor finds out.

Anyway, its actually kind of a cute moment, given what’s going on.

With Tony working on Vision, Donald Blake ‘finds’ Thor and T’Challa just pulls on his mask. The two of them join Cap and Wanda in fighting the Living Bombs.

But this time the Living Bombs are keeping their distance and blasting at the Avengers with the stun rays.

They’re feeling down about their chances though. They’ve lost Phil and Mal and haven’t gained an inch against the Avengers.

BUT DO YOU WANT YOUR FRIENDS TO HAVE DIED IN VAIN? DO YOU WANT YOUR KIDS TO GROW UP SLAVES OF THE ANDROIDS?

Black Panther tries to do some cool acrobatic shit but gets stun blasted because he was philosophizing inside his head instead of focusing on the sweet flips.

But Wanda’s MP has regenerated and she uses her power to magnetize the wall, yanking the Living Bombs toward it.

Thus distracted, Thor pulls out his own sweet move.

He whirls and whirls and whirls Mjolnir and creates a tornado which rips a bit more of the Stark Industries plant roof off (but what is a little roof between friends?) and also sucks all the Living Bombs into the sky where they can be safely subdued without worrying about them exploding in any faces.

Except they choose ‘death before dishonor’ and set off their bombs, exploding harmlessly in the sky. With a WHOOM!, CRUMP!, KATAM!, and BLOMM! the threat of the Living Bombs ends forever.

Nobody is bringing this group back.

Tony Stark pokes his head into the ruins of his plant and announces that Vision will pull through! He’s gonna be okay!

Wanda isn’t feeling the happy news though. Vision helped save the world again and again and he’s the best man she’s ever met. But the Living Bombs only saw him as a threat!

Even her own brother hates the Vision and they were teammates!

So if its going to be the two of them against the world then look out world!

She’s had a long day. And she started it so optimistically.

So. That was the time that Vision was attacked by a suicide bomber because he was dating a human. And got stuck in a robot coma and had to have emergency surgery while more suicide bombers tried to finish the job.

This was also the issue that gave us so many explosion sounds. We have TA-ROOM!, KA-COOM!, VA-BLAMM!, WHOOM!, CRUMP!, KATAM! and BLOMM! Every explosion a beautiful snowflake of cacophony!

One last thing to say.

Despite the unpleasant circumstances, it is a bit heartening that the majority of people reacted positively to the news of Vision and Wanda being together. It sucks that there are a few negative people that thought they had to Byrne it all down and ruined a beautiful thing.

Next time is finally Mantis time. I’m very excited.

Hey, if you like this cool Avengers liveblog, consider following @essential-avengers. It is the sideblog just for this cool liveblog.