#the philosophical discussion about “evolution” in this episode is honestly as good as the first episode about the “inception of fire”

[doctormastertardis]

GANATUS: They are Daleks.  TEMMOSUS: Yes, but we've changed over the centuries. Why shouldn't they? The once famous warrior race of Thals are now farmers.  DYONI: But the Daleks were teachers, weren't they, Temmosus?  TEMMOSUS: Yes, they were. And philosophers.  GANATUS: Perhaps they are the warriors now. 

[the-invisible-self]

I copied the text of this article below for anyone who is unable to read it behind the content blocker:

Summary: In the second season of Netflix’s series The OA, its creators question the relentless technological progress of our time, but the result is somewhat scattered.

The OA

Article by Sanja Grozdanic

In early 2017, soon after the release of the first season of The OA, its co-creator Brit Marling spoke at length with her friend Malcolm Gladwell about the series for Interview magazine. During the conversation, Gladwell asked Marling why she is so drawn to fantasy and speculative science fiction, both as a writer and an actor. These genres, she explained, best reflect her view of the world and the deep mythology she naturally invests in everyday moments and objects.

“I think I need to believe in that version of reality because I get very scared when I don’t,” she said. “I feel very alone when I don’t feel that.”

Social isolation, technological domination and the profound discontent of a generation are all explored by The OA, a series that positions itself against the exploitation demanded by capitalism and is strung together by a storyline dense with time travel. Understandably, it has divided audiences. It has been called “absolutely insane”, “batshit” and “brilliant” – and yet has also gained a cult following and brought into focus a desire for the construction of new narratives and mythologies.

As Marling told Gladwell, “The OA is our attempt at writing and making a new human language through movement, this mythology we’re inventing.”

The series began its first season with Prairie Johnson (Marling), a woman missing for seven years who is rescued following an ostensible suicide attempt. Prairie was once blind – now she can see. She will not reveal to her family how she gained her sight, nor tell them what happened to her. She denies she was trying to kill herself, insisting she was only trying to “go back”. To where is the central mystery of the show’s first season, tagged as Part I, slowly revealed over eight episodes.

As the first season unfurled itself, I understood The OA to be an extended metaphor for post-traumatic stress disorder. In another life, in another dimension, Prairie is held captive by the show’s central villain, Dr Hap (Jason Isaacs), a scientist obsessed with near-death experiences and the power they bestow on survivors. Prairie, I believed, constructed her captivity as a trauma response – a hyper-fantasy of good versus evil, which allowed her to regain a sense of control.

The show’s perplexing narrative structure echoed a survivor’s frenzied mental state, a reading of existential crisis that I liked. When mental illness is feminised, it is often depicted as tepid and lifeless. But The OA gave weight to Prairie’s somatic condition, depicting it not so much as a defect but as a lifeline; a way to give form to what she cannot say. “Madness as a defense against terror. Madness as a defense against grief”, as Susan Sontag described it. One cannot live in such a world, but its genesis is all too human.

Part II of The OA proved my reading entirely incorrect.

In this season, the series relocates from North Carolina to San Francisco, California. It feels a fitting evolution in many ways – from the margins to the centre of technocapitalism.

In San Francisco, Prairie awakens in the body of Nina Azarova – a Russian heiress who lives in a penthouse, dresses in Gucci and is engaged to a tech billionaire named Pierre Ruskin. She has no memory of this life of material excess, but no one from her former life – of Prairie, the blind orphan – remembers her. Concerned for her welfare, a psychologist sends Nina to a facility on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay for a 14-day psychiatric hold.

At the same time, elsewhere in the city, private investigator Karim Washington (Kingsley Ben-Adir) is hired by an elderly Vietnamese woman searching for her missing granddaughter, Michelle. Michelle disappeared after winning thousands of dollars playing an app, which seems to alienate and consume its users, while tempting them with the possibility of vast riches.

Following Karim’s attempts to trace the app back to its creator, the series starts to question the ethics underlying the startling decadence and terminal decline of the Silicon Valley social order. Karim discusses the app with a tech worker who suggests crowd-sourcing is nothing more than a euphemism for free labour. “What, erase the boundary between work and play, hide your sweatshop in the cloud?” he asks her. “Exactly,” she replies.

Who will protect those most vulnerable, like Michelle, in this rigged game? How are we compromised when our most intimate, private desires are mined as data? In a sprawling converted factory, Karim finds young women held in a literal dream farm, an attempt by a tech billionaire to instrumentalise the social unconscious in a search for the secret to time travel. A dystopia perhaps not radically removed from our present.

But amid all these subplots, the point is scattered, lost between too many narrative arcs. The choice to be so laser-focused on Marling’s character feels like a misstep – particularly while the profound discontent of this season’s younger characters seems far more urgent and vital than Nina’s struggle. Those characters are sidelined. Instead, the series insists upon a love story that has long since lost its romance or intrigue. Karim, too, is denied sufficient screen time and character development.

It is clear The OA is attempting to tap into something deeper. A renewed interest in the exploration of multiple dimensions and realities, including the series’ Netflix stablemates Russian Doll and Stranger Things, suggests a general recognition of a profound cultural lack. Suspended over a void, we face several conflicting futures. History repeats itself endlessly – infinite parallel worlds with interchangeable players.

Pierre Ruskin could be Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor long dogged by rumours he wants to inject himself with the blood of young people to stave off the effects of ageing. In another, more socially minded dimension, he could have been Alexander Bogdanov – the Soviet physician, philosopher and science fiction writer who also had an interest in what blood transfusion could do, but from a communist, rather than hyper-capitalist, perspective.

The 19th century defined the idea of progress as an infinite and irreversible improvement; the Hegelian idea of cumulative progress. Indeed, the myth of progress has been the West’s ruling ideology. But for downwardly mobile millennials facing social collapse, environmental catastrophe and unprecedented species extinction, this narrative has lost its primacy, or indeed its validity.

In the final episode of Part II, detective Karim saves one of the app’s users, but in doing so only manages to seem moralising and out of touch. Though addicted to the physically invasive, impossible game that inherently negates social life, the millennial doesn’t want to be saved. Remorseless and defiant, they see no future in the present Karim offers.

With this season, Marling and her co-creator, Zal Batmanglij, show themselves to be genuinely interested in moving The OA beyond emotional landscapes to the structural conditions fomenting this discontent. As Batmanglij explained, the pair sought to make “a gangster movie without the gangsters, because it’s the idea that it’s not just killing one bad guy or two bad guys, but it’s a whole city is to blame”.

But the question remains whether a show commissioned by Netflix – a company now worth more than Microsoft founder Bill Gates and only slightly less than Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos – can ever honestly critique our present moment, shaped by the dominance of the tech giants. A successful Netflix product can be judged by its compulsive consumption; how quickly do viewers watch a season? “At Netflix, we are competing for our customers’ time, so our competitors include Snapchat, YouTube, sleep, et cetera,” said Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings. Where profit was once maximised with families and romantic comedies, in our moment of precarity it is apocalypse that is commercially seductive.

[aion-rsa]

Jupiter’s Legacy: David Julian Hirsh Couldn’t Wait to Play Blue Bolt

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This article is presented by:

It seems pretty odd to have survived a serious accident only to proclaim, “I cannot wait to do a superhero show,” but stranger still is the fact that that’s exactly what actor David Julian Hirsch is now doing as Richard Conrad/Blue-Bolt on Jupiter’s Legacy.

Born in Canada on October 26, 1973, Hirsch had every intention of becoming a lawyer, having studied criminology at the University of Toronto. Then he “foolishly” decided to perform in a New York summer acting workshop and found himself hooked. He made his TV acting debut in a 1998 episode of La Femme Nikita and became a series regular on such Canadian series as Leap Years, Naked Josh, Lovebites, and Hawthorne. Between 2001 and 2013 he appeared in about a dozen films. But it’s Netflix’s Jupiter’s Legacy that is the answer to his accident-inducing pronouncement and as you can tell from the following interview, it would be pretty difficult to match his excitement level about the show.

WHO IS BLUE BOLT?

NAME: Richard Conrad

ALTER EGO: Blue Bolt

POWERS AND ABILITIES: We don’t know yet!

NEED TO KNOW: A founding member of The Union and a neonatal surgeon when we meet him in 1929. In the present day, Richard is no longer part of the Union, and his fate remains unknown.

Den of Geek: What was the excitement level for you about being cast?

David Julian Hirsh: There were just so many interesting things going on in my life for the three months prior to being cast. It was the first time in my life that I said, “I cannot wait to do a superhero show.” It’s never something I’ve done. It hasn’t been part of the genres that I’ve worked with, which has been romantic comedy, or comedy, or basic dramas.

That’s pretty specific. What made you say “I want to play a superhero.”

Just like what Richard Conrad in a way goes through in terms of how they find him and how he hooks up with the rest of the team back in 1929, I had had an accident in my own life. Something had happened and saved me, and it was the first time I said, “I absolutely want to do something huge, something greater than me, something spiritual, something exactly like a superhero show.” 

The next thing I know, this script shows up and I just knew right away, I said, “I’m going in and I’m just going to live this.” And it was just so beautiful. It was such an honor to be a part of that and it was so the perfect time in my life to receive this role.

What was the appeal of this superhero?

I was always very drawn to the power of superheroes, but also the double lives that they had to lead between their private selves and their public selves. You live as a human, but you also live as a powerful superhero. And not only is Blue Bolt living the life of a neonatal surgeon, but he also has another double life. There are many layers to him, and as an actor that’s what I dream of. The more layers you have, the more there is to work with. The deeper you go, the more you have to understand. 

I know the first season doesn’t cover the entirety of the comic and I know it’s bouncing in and out of time, but how does he change over the course of this first season?

I don’t want to give away too much obviously, but…there is an evolution in terms of a lot of it is the origin story in terms of how we got our powers. We definitely are going to find out about all that in the first season. You’ll definitely see an arc and there definitely would be a change, but I just don’t want to give away too many of those details of what you actually see.

Read more

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I think that what I love about it is when you have normal people who all of a sudden get these super powers…It’s not like Superman who came down and had them. To actually see people that we can all relate to take on these powers is really interesting. I think each actor and each character has a different way of what these powers are going to do to them personally, in terms of how they handle power, in terms of how much they believe, in terms of how much they follow the code, in terms of all those things. 

Is it empowering wearing that costume? Exciting? Embarrassing? What is the feeling when you have to put on that spandex and be a superhero?

It’s pretty much everything you just said at the exact same time. I’ve never experienced anything like that so far in my career. And I have to say, I was explaining it to my little nephew, and he just is so excited about it. This is exactly how I felt on the first day that I actually got to go put it on. I think it was the third fitting and things were going well, I thought, and I was starting to look like a superhero and it was incredible….it was so much fun and it is so worth it. I cannot believe how good every costume looks. It’s just so much more beyond what I expected. The costume department did such an incredible job.

Is it empowering?

Yeah. I mean, the funny thing is though, you think, you still actually can’t fly. That’s the thing, you think you can when you’re wearing it and you think you could just do anything, but no you’re just a bit heavier. But it definitely feels wonderful. It’s great. Everyone should be able to experience it. I can see why it affects people because you finish the day, you’ve been training for months about how to do all these incredible moves, these martial art moves and how to fight and work with the wires. And you’re trying all these incredible costumes, and then you go home and you’re walking down the street and you’re still you’re nobody and it’s great. It’s a good feeling.

Back in your place.

The secret identity. Exactly. But yeah, that’s our job as an actor though is to constantly be put back in our place and remember who we are. That’s good.

You mentioned earlier this is your first foray into the world of superheroes. Are you ready for the scrutiny that these kinds of shows get online with fans and conventions? Because that’s like a whole new world.

Yes, it is. I’ve been to some of the comic cons. I absolutely love it. I just love the passion and absolutely, I love the fact that they’re critical of their heroes. Why not? I would be too. And I am. We should be able to handle the criticism, the good and the bad. I think it’s fun. I can’t wait for all that stuff. It’s exciting.

I think fans are absolutely, from everything I know and everything I’ve seen so far, I think they’re absolutely going to love this. If you love superhero stories, it’s just so unique. The fact that it shows the different generations and the epic span of it is just so exciting. I didn’t know how it was going to be done. And I was nervous at the beginning, and then I saw it and I just could not believe it, the sets, the costumes, and just the way the writers tied it all together. It’s just so good. 

If you were to describe the power of this show for the audience, what do you think it is? What is the driving force of this show?

I love how it talks about America. We learn about the stock market crash in 1929. It shows how America evolves. It shows how these generations have changed, how America and the world, how morals have changed and values have changed. It shows these different generations of superheroes. By using such an incredible device as superheroes and so much action and so much entertainment, I think it’ll appeal to such a broad audience. And yet it’ll it’s not just action. It’s not just superheroes beating up bad guys. It tells a lot about what’s happened in this country and where we’ve come to, and the fact that they follow a code, but that the new generation has their own way of looking at things.

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I think it really says a lot about where we are today and the different generations. I was talking to my elderly neighbor, she’s actually 89 years old, and she said she’s looking forward to watching it and she loves superhero shows, but she wants it to have some meaning. She wants to learn something from it about power. Anyway, we had a really good discussion. Honestly, I think she will love the show, just as I think a young teenager will. 

We start getting into philosophical questions like what is good? What is evil? What a great entertaining way of looking at this, with those kinds of questions. That’s what’s great about it.

Fantasy and sci-fi has always been such a great prism to examine our world anyway. So it’s a wonderful opportunity to make comments as much as you want, and nobody’s going to judge you on it.

Exactly.

What do you hope the show does for you and your career? 

I’ve always stayed away from social media, but a lot of people are saying, “Oh, you should get social media, especially now because this is the kind of a show people really want to discuss and you should talk to the fans about it.” I probably will because I definitely want to interact with the fans when it comes to this kind of a show. 

The truth is I’ve always loved martial arts and I’ve never been able to actually use that stuff in any of my work. This was the first time I was able to train. We had training before we started filming. I’d love to do more of this kind of stuff, so if it opens doors for me into the sci-fi world, then wow, that would be incredible. I personally love this show so much that I just hope it goes as long as possible. It’s just been such an incredible experience to see how much fun it is to shoot something like this. I’ve never had more fun filming something. It was incredible.

Does it allow you to tap into your childhood sense of playing pretend at all? 

If there’s one thing I felt guilty about it’s that I can’t believe I’m allowed to have that much fun at work. Now I’m not saying it’s not hard. Of course it’s hard work, but I haven’t had that much fun, just laughing and being physical. A lot of the work I’ve done, there’s a lot of sitting around on sets and all that stuff. But here I would want to go in an hour before just to look at the things that the crew has created, even the lighting, just, everything was so beyond the courtroom scenes or classroom scenes that I’ve worked on. That’s obviously a different world of acting, but this was just unbelievable. So yes, I felt like a child in awe of my surroundings almost the entire time.

And they pay you for it.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Oh, stop it. It’s just too good. May this go on forever.

Jupiter’s Legacy premieres on Netflix on May 7. Read more about the series in our special edition magazine!

The post Jupiter’s Legacy: David Julian Hirsh Couldn’t Wait to Play Blue Bolt appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[gascon-en-exil]

The interminable generation war of the Pokémon fandom is not something I’m inclined to wade into, not least because I am one of those strange individuals who play the games in part for their stories and worldbuilding. As reliably underwhelming as those attributes of any given game in this franchise may be, it’s nonetheless evident that Gamefreak puts some effort into elements of the franchise that aren’t competitive tournaments or Battle <name of building>s or gimmicky mini games. Sometimes. 

As such, in the spirit of my modest contributions to the FE and Zelda fandoms on this blog and as further proof that I am capable of judging aspects of video games aside from the desirability and inferred sexual prowess (or lack thereof) of their men, here follows my current opinions on each of the regions of the main series...so nothing about Orre or those Ranger spin-offs or whatever. And yes -  regions rather than generations, so the remakes will be grouped with their originals.

So. Very. Blaaaand. As with Archanea from Fire Emblem and the NES Zelda games I can respect the historical significance of the Kanto games; hell, unlike FE and Zelda I was actually following the series back when RBY were in their prime...and yet they are so unremarkable. Kanto feels utterly devoid of distinctive personality despite appearing in all of the first four generations, and even today there’s really nothing I can say about it beyond the relatively realistic villain team and the emphasis on modernization in contrast to Johto. Supposedly, anyway...it’s more like Kanto cares less about historical preservation which I suppose is probably the closest these games comes to commenting upon the real world inspiration for the region. Combine this with a contentious roster of Pokémon - some are great and still hold up today, some are meh, and almost all of them get disproportionate amounts of exposure and new toys in later generations, for better or worse - and an infamously loud fanbase wearing some very thick nostalgia goggles and you’ve got a setting I have no interest in revisiting. I absolutely wouldn’t put another round of remakes past GF, though 

(But having the protagonist and his rival hook up in their later years was a nice twist.)

Not much more developed than its predecessor, but the Johto games benefit immensely from throwing in Kanto as a bonus (sort of) postgame region, both for the aforementioned contrast and for the additional content. Sure, the level curve is kind of screwy, the Pokémon could be better (Johto has my least favorite starter line-up, for instance), and Kanto feels half-formed in Gen II, but it’s not bad for what it is. I like that these games are set three years after the first ones, in that it conveys a sense of the passage of time - something that would only get more vague as the series progressed. I’m not much interested in the nods to Japanese culture and folklore strewn throughout Johto, but at least the region is identifiably Japanese. Also, the implementation of elements like a day/night cycle and days of the week appeal to me, even if in practice they’re more annoying than anything else. And I know the entire internet agrees with me, but HGSS did substantially more for Johto and Kanto than FRLG did for Kanto. That’s kind of sad, honestly.

While I’m bringing up remakes, I would however like to disagree with most of the internet and say that ORAS were good remakes - good enough to where I could actually finish Alpha Sapphire when the original left me so unimpressed that I actually stopped playing the series outside remakes until Gen VI. The beloved Battle Frontier (which doesn’t seem all that interesting? Someone explain the appeal of this thing to me) may be missing and you can’t re-challenge gym leaders and various other things you can only do in Emerald, but on the flip side the story development is much improved and better paced - yay for convenient cutscene warping - and the Delta Episode provides a decent postgame capstone. What’s more, Hoenn is absolutely beautiful in the remakes, looking as lush and tropical as it ought to and no longer bogged down with water routes that are a slog to traverse or much backtracking. Soaring is a wonderful addition as well that shows off the region and cuts down on HM usage, and the DexNav is excellent for reducing the tedium of catching them all (or some approximation thereof when stupid things like event legendaries and untradeable-on-GTS version exclusives still exist).

I haven’t even mentioned the villain teams. I know full well that Tumblr is ahead of me on this one, but they are so gay. I picked up the gayer version with Matt outright professing his love for men (somewhat ruined when you consider that he’s talking to a ten-year-old...ick), but via extensive research *ahem* I’ve learned that Omega Ruby has its moments too and that Teams Magma and Aqua are best enjoyed as a pair. Their goals may be patently stupid, but they all learn something at the end of the day and can go home and have an orgy together. I haven’t even mentioned the Steven/Wallace subtext one of my mutuals cued me into, which is sweet revenge indeed for Emerald fanboys whining for years about femme Wallace with his predictable team becoming champion in that game. It’s enough altogether for me to forgive the game for constantly teasing Brendan/May - because obligatory heterosexual romance doesn’t have to wait for a little thing like puberty.

The only region for which I can’t really give a full assessment. I started a playthrough of Platinum on emulator, but the game felt so slow and clunky that after the second gym (which I’ve read is an especially dull and pace-breaking stretch) I couldn’t bring myself to play any more. I’ve watched speedruns and video reviews of this game, and they’ve only confirmed my initial opinion and caused me to hope that most of Sinnoh’s copious issues will be addressed in the inevitable remakes. The over-reliance on HM slaves (poor Bidoof...), unintuitive region layout, periods of severe environmental slowdown in the form of marshlands and deep snow, and other factors do not appeal to me at all, and while I know Platinum fixed this particular problem I assume that the Diamond and Peal remakes will not have to contend with a limited roster as they did. The characters could do with some work as well: Barry seriously needs to calm down, I still don’t know how to feel about Fantina (will she be Kalosian? What about in the Japanese and French versions where she’s apparently from an English-speaking country?), and Cyrus really doesn’t work as the charismatic leader he’s built up to be. Say what you will about the Hoenn villain teams or Team Flare having idiotic goals, but at least I can say what those are. I still got nothing on Team Galactic caring about Prof. Rowan’s evolution research or stealing energy or what have you. Sinnoh is severely in need of a second - or third, I suppose - draft. 

Confirming that Volkner and Flint are a couple would also be nice. Just throwing out ideas.

When I downloaded White and Black 2 for emulator I didn’t expect to be very impressed by these games. Unova is the MURICA FUCK YEAH region, as we all know, and I shouldn’t have to point out to my regular followers that that fact alone would be enough to unfavorably prejudice me against the place. And yet, in spite of that, it works for me. A big part of that is that Louisiana is absent from this loose celebration of the US as interpreted by Japan; there’s an oil baron dressed like a cowboy, a Californian or Hawaiian surfer bro, a gay (or straight hipster, hard to tell these days) artist with a loft gym in Castro the Village Castelia City, a Southern mammy for some casual racism that was actually too casual for international release, counterparts to Coney Island, Broadway, Hollywood, and American sports, and numerous Pokémon like the Trubbish and Vanillite* lines inspired by the shallow consumerism that passes for culture in the US, but nothing representing my own stubbornly French state. I’m actually warier about the bizarre attempts to insert bits of medieval and early modern Europe into the region via PETA-by-way-of-the-Knights-Templar (what) Team Plasma and the trio quartet of legendaries based on les Trois Mousquetaires. Did whoever came up with those not get the memo about where the series was going next?

With that said, although I’m not as enamored with N as some people his characterization was if nothing else a step up from anything that had come before. While Ghetsis and Plasma make no damn sense aesthetically until the sequels they are intimidating villains who raise serious questions about how humans treat Pokémon...that are naturally never considered in their full complexity because friendship or something. As I stated with Johto I do like the sequel model of region development since we get to see how Unova has changed over two years. I also appreciate the season mechanic that only appears in these games for lending some variety to the geography, though in execution it’s kind of a pain.

*But hey, I’m thankful at least that this is I think the only region that lets you catch (decent) Ice types before lategame. I will absolutely take the ice cream with a face.

Perfect, or rather just imperfect enough to perfectly capture the essence of France and its culture in this silly world of fantasy cockfighting. Unashamedly biased I may be, but as Kalos gets a lot of hate online I feel the need to push back against popular opinion a bit. X and Y were in my opinion the first games where GF really went all in on characterizing a region, because everything from the preoccupation with aesthetics (Character customization! Dog Furfrou grooming! Petting and pampering your Pokémon! Meticulously kept jardins à la française! Serious philosophical discussions on the fleeting nature of beauty! Team Flare...ok, never mind, they’re kind of dumb) to the discerning restaurant culture to the general ambivalence toward glorious and gloriously wasteful institutions like monarchy and their lavish châteaux feels so familiar to me. And how could I forget the Fairy type, a type tailor-made to vex the sort of posturing bro gamer sorts who somehow maintain their bro-ness while openly playing Pokémon. Could any region but Kalos have delivered that so beautifully? Well, now that I think about it, are the Japanese aware that the French are characterized as feminine in the English-speaking world? Regardless, I could go on, but this post is long enough as it is.

As I said before, Kalos isn’t entirely without flaw. Team Flare might be a hair less ridiculous than Team Galactic, but that isn’t saying much. The troupe of rivals, such as they are, aren’t much better, and others like Sycamore and most of the gym leaders are woefully underutilized. The Kalos Pokédex is overstuffed, and while I enjoy its subdivision into three regions that not-so-coincidentally recreate the Tricolore it is nevertheless a pain for those who like to fill up the Dex as they go along in a game. The developers were still clearly learning how to deal with the camera in a 3D space as is evident in certain areas like Lumiose, and certain features like the roller skates are awkward to use. Not the Exp Share, though - call me a lazy casual, but that thing makes team-building so much easier and actually incentivizes doing so rather than just relying on one overleveled Pokémon with good coverage to solo everything. Oh, and we never got a Pokémon Z, or more importantly an extension of the map that would include southern France. Poké-Gascogne, please, Game Freak.

Really, it’s hard for me to criticize X and Y because I quickly come back to everything I love about the place. I’m actually replaying X right now, inspired as I was by this project and lacking anything else to play before USUM comes out next month. Speaking of which...

I may not have any personal attachment to Hawaii, but I have to give GF serious props for taking the best gameplay and worldbuilding elements of Kalos and replicating them on an even greater scale. Alola is a vibrant and extensively-realized setting for a game, and I’m not even taking into account that we’ll be getting an AU version of it or something like that in the upcoming games. Sun and Moon fascinate on their own with their deep characterizations that touch on such surprisingly dark topics as child abuse (in a variety of forms) and the failure of community and, er, social programs, or whatever you’d call the Island Trial and the whole sending-ten-year-olds-out-to-enslave-wild-animals thing this universe has going on. 

There aren’t really any duds in the cast, either: Kukui is drool-worthy, Guzma and the rest of Team Skull are thoroughly silly and also thoroughly sad, most of the kahunas and trial captains are entertaining in their own ways (special props go to Nanu, Kiawe and his hiker boyfriend, and Acerola the fallen aristocrat who’s entirely too perky about it), Lusamine is a demented mother figure so of course I find her compelling, and Hau...taught me what a malasada is? It’s basically a Portuguese beignet, from the sound of things. Lillie is the real star however, and I don’t understand why some fans criticize the games for making the story more about her than about the player character. One of the biggest drawbacks of silent protagonists, and especially silent protagonists that never emote, is that it’s difficult for them to be a part of character-driven storylines, and in a first for the series unless you count N in BW Sun and Moon are exactly that kind of story. Lillie gets a voice and a distinct place in the world and in the lives of the other major players in the narrative, and she has a development arc that follows along with but stands independent from the standard one followed by this protagonist and all others in this series. Meanwhile, the player character...is from Kanto, and is Kukui’s cousin, and Kukui is probably fucking their mother. That’s pretty much it.

I’m a little less enamored with the Ultra Beast plotline as it’s a little too sci-fi for me, and Aether’s presence and purpose in Alola feels unexplored, but there’s still a chance that USUM may woo me on either score. I’m fairly indifferent on the Mega Evolution vs. Z-Moves argument, and I can take or leave Alolan forms - except Ninetales *pets* - but SM made one substantial gameplay improvement I absolutely adore and will hate to see be removed from future games: ride Pokémon. No more HM slaves, yay! Compound that with surfing between islands and some new areas and they’ve sold me on the next games. If the story is as radically different as trailers seem to be promising I can only hope that it’ll be just as engaging as the first time around.

So, if I had to provide a tl;dr by dint of a simplified ranking, it’d probably go as such:

Kalos > Alola > Hoenn = Unova > Johto > Kanto = Sinnoh

I’d expect Sinnoh to get bumped up a few notches in remake form, but otherwise that’s about right.

[mst3kproject]

The Creature Walks Among Us

The third installment in the Creature from the Black Lagoon series does not have John Agar in it, thank heavens, but it does have Jeff Morrow and Rex Reason from This Island Earth and Gregg Palmer from The Rebel Set. It continues the theme of the poor Gill-Man just wanting to be left alone in a nice, peaceful swamp where he can snap alligators in half to his heart's content – but western science just won't leave him alone.  So what haven't we done to the poor bastard yet?  Well, we haven't set him on fire... okay, awesome, let's do that!

As the movie begins, another bunch of assholes are setting out to hunt our scaly antihero, who apparently vanished into the Everglades instead of dying at the end of Revenge of the Creature. The biggest asshole of them all is Dr. Bill Barton, who thinks the Creature will be Perfect For His Experiments.  Barton has this Doctor-Moreau-esque theory that he can speed up evolution through surgery, and he's also brought his wife Marsha along because he is convinced that if he turns his back for five minutes he'll find her in bed with three other men.  The other assholes on the trip seem to consider this a challenge, and a couple of them try to put moves on Marsha as the creature hunt progresses.  This is as dull and annoying as all such unnecessary romance plots.

When they finally catch up with the Gill-Man, they manage to capture him – but only after he’s been accidentally doused in gasoline and set on fire.  The fire burns off the Creature's gills, giving Barton the opportunity to save him by making some surgical improvements to his vestigial lungs.  Also burned were the scales, leaving behind bare skin.  Barton takes this to mean he's succeeded in partially transforming the monster into a man, and decides to take him home in order to continue the process.  This is definitely not a terrible fucking idea, is it?

For starters, I do have to say that this movie looks pretty nice.  The everglades are beautifully dense and primordial, which is a relief after spending the previous movie mostly in the bleak, artificial landscape of Sea World.  The night shots are especially good, with artful use of filters and reflection of lights in the water, and good matching of day-for-night to actual night shots.  The Creature on fire is done very well.  And the music isn't bad, either – the familiar Creature Theme is present, and there's a nice bit where music is used to suggest that Marsha is suffering from 'rapture of the deep'.  Too bad the accompanying shots demonstrate that she's only a few feet from the surface.

If you'll remember, my main complaint about Revenge of the Creature, besides the existence of John Agar, was that the female lead was a sexy lamp.  This is actually true of Creature from the Black Lagoon as well – both films end when the Creature kidnaps a woman in white and the men have to chase him down and shoot him until he lets her go.  I'm not sure what the Creature's interest in women in white is... maybe female Creatures turn white as a signal to the males that they’re ready to mate?  Regardless of the reason, The Creature Walks Among Us looks at first like it's going to continue the pattern.  Marsha Barton goes diving while wearing a white bathing suit, and the Creature stalks her in the water as it had other heroines before her.

But Marsha herself soon starts to show signs that she, at least, has potential to defy our expectations.  For starters, she evinces a surprising amount of actual personality.  Her activities have been severely restricted by her controlling and paranoid husband, and she attempts to alleviate the resulting boredom by having a variety of hobbies and sometimes by taking reckless risks.  An early scene establishes that she enjoys hunting, and seems to be a good shot. Could it be that she will save herself from the Creature, or even save one of the men?

To my amazement, the movie seemed to spend some time setting up the latter idea.  After the swimming scene, the Creature actually takes very little interest in Marsha.  His anger is instead saved for the men who are tormenting him with surgeries and experiments.  When he comes charging out of the laboratory where the scientists have kept him sedated, he is drawn by Marsha's cries as one of the men, Grant, tries to rape her.  But it is Grant he attacks, for it is Grant who had previously harmed him.  I found myself daring to hope that the movie would end with the Creature killing Grant and Barton, then being shot and killed by Marsha when he goes after her love interest, Morgan.

Of course I was disappointed.

The movie does end with both Barton and Grant dead, and Morgan alive to move in on the widowed Marsha, but during the climax Marsha herself simply fades away.  She was in the movie not long earlier, taking a swim while the Creature watched, but as the action begins she melts into the background.  She puts in a brief appearance to scream and cry while the Creature goes on his rampage, then vanishes and does not reappear until the denoument.  Time spent setting up that she could swim and shoot was apparently just misdirection.  Instead of using the gun it placed on the mantlepiece, the movie decides that instead, we need to see the resolution to the confused romantic subplots involving Barton, Marsha, Grant, and Morgan.

Barton, as previously mentioned, believes that Marsha is a cheap little tramp (he actually calls her this at one point) and if he lets her out of his sight she'll be spreading her legs for every man and fish monster for miles around.  Grant has apparently decided that a woman with an overprotective husband is twice as attractive – and what the woman herself thinks of his advances is irrelevant. Morgan seems honestly concerned about Barton's mental state and the effect it's having on Marsha, and is the only one of the lot who appears to consider Marsha a person with problems of her own.

Weirdly, the actors playing Grant and Morgan look and sound very much alike, to the point where it's possible to confuse the two. Jeff Morrow as Barton has a similar haircut and is much the same height, so he blends in with the crowd as well.  I hate when movies do this.  Were 50's standards for male beauty so exacting that they could not hire even one guy with a halfway distinctive face?

Grant and Morgan both get a taste of Barton's jealousy, but what eventually drives him over the edge is Grant's evident unwillingness to take 'no' for an answer from anybody.  In a fit of rage, Barton murders him, and then attempts to frame the Creature by tossing the body into the pen.  This gives the Creature the opportunity to break out and kill Barton.  Marsha is nowhere to be found.

The interesting thing about this ending is that while it is a bit disappointing, it represents a complete reversal of previous Creature movies. In both Creature from the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature, the Creature himself represented a sexual threat to the female lead.  He became fascinated with her to the point where he carried her off, and the men had to save her from whatever horrible fate it was he had in mind (I like to think it would have involved a lot of frustrated waiting, wondering when she’s going to lay her eggs so he can swim over them).  In The Creature Walks Among Us, it's exactly the opposite: the Creature, albeit unintenionally, saves Marsha from the sexual threat presented to her by Grant and Barton!

This reflects another reversal, as the script finally seems to understand what the audience has been thinking since early in the previous movie – the Creature himself is by far the most sympathetic character here.  He spends most of the movie badly burned and with possible brain damage, and all he wants is to go back to the water where he belongs.  He doesn't understand that the surgeries Barton has performed on him have left him susceptible to drowning like a land creature.  We want to see him kick the shit out of these guys and while the ending, where he wades into the ocean not knowing he will drown, is tragic, it's also kind of a relief.  The water is not an escape this time, and nobody can drag him back to civilization for another round of abuse.

When I think about it, I'm actually fairly sure that both these inversions are intentional.  I suspect that at least the first writer, Arthur A. Ross, re-watched the first two movies and noticed the things Revenge repeated, and then set out to write something that would turn these specific two ideas on their heads.  I wish he'd done a little more with Marsha, who is really not much more than a plot device to motivate the enmity between Barton and Grant, but it's nice to know somebody actually cared about this story rather than simply trying to wring a little more profit out of last year's success.

The movie has another point to make, too, but it's pretty muddled. In between tinkering with the Creature's internal organs, the scientists have philosophical discussions about mankind's capacity for animalistic behaviour and our ability to overcome it with science, describing us as 'caught between the jungle and the stars'.  Much of what is said here is very poetic but doesn't come across as particularly meaningful, mostly because the actors themselves do not really seem to understand the points their characters are trying to make.  It's all hopelessly undeveloped and serves mostly to confuse and frustrate the audience, who just want to see more of the Creature.

While there are Episodes that Never Were where I really don't know why they never got picked up for MST3K, in this case I think it was actually divine intervention.  The Creature Walks Among Us is a boring, stupid movie that would have made a great episode, but that episode would have sorely lacked one thing.  There is a sequence in which strange sounds bring everybody running to the Creature's lair, where they discover it has killed a mountain lion. While I'm sure Mike and the Bots could have come up with some great Puma-Man or Pyoooma-themed lines, the perfect callback for this scene came into existence only after MST3K on the Sci-Fi Channel was over and done. The Creature Walks Among Us simply could not be properly riffed in a time when “I hear a mountain lion!” was not yet funny.