#to sam just randomly becoming the protagonist with no hook

[thatgirlonstage]

Hi, idk if you've watched season 7 yet, but as the originator of the "Sam Holt and the Galaxy Garrison are Evil" theory, how do you feel about the way they were portrayed?

[Sam Holt Is Evil theory]

Oh, I’ve seen Season 7 all right. I watched it the day it dropped. It’s WHY I’ve been on a Voltron hiatus.

Fair warning: this post is long, and I’m wearing an analysis hat, not my “here to have a good time” hat. It’s not wank per se, but, uh. I haven’t thought the writing in Voltron is the BEST lately, so it’s not really favorable analysis.

Let me be clear that I knew full well in S5 that the Sam Holt Is Evil theory was dead, I wasn’t still waiting for a reveal or anything like that. I was not judging the S7 Garrison against my theory. That said… I still like my idea better.

The strength of the evil!Sam theory always rested on two things: 1. the fact that Sam was, without explanation, getting deliberately less attention than Matt in Pidge’s quest to find her family, and 2. the way it would lead into the narratively inevitable attack on Earth. For the first point, I think we can now conclude that the creators knew they wanted to use him as a bargaining chip against Pidge/the Voltron team, so they simply shunted him aside until he became useful to the plot. In the end, it was just lazy writing. The second point is a little bit harder to discuss directly, because I came up with the possibility of evil!Sam way back before S3 had even aired. Obviously, a lot has changed - suddenly pulling a “the Garrison was evil the whole time!!!!” in S7 would have been major whiplash and totally unjustified. But the reason I say I still like my idea better, is because we could have built towards the conflict on Earth more smoothly and with more rising tension if we used Sam as a nexus. We could even have still sprung “Earth is in danger” as a surprise on the Paladins, using Sam/the Galra/the Garrison’s perspective to inform the audience of what’s happening while keeping the Paladins oblivious and us biting our fingernails in anxiety as a result (unless the goal was that the attack on Earth would be a surprise for the audience too, but… anyone with a lick of sense for foreshadowing could see an eventual “Earth is in danger” plot coming from S1 and certainly from the end of S6, plus they aired Sam’s distress message in the trailer, so they shot themselves in the foot pretty thoroughly from the word go if that was the idea).

Except for Sam, we didn’t go into S7 with any investment in any of the Garrison characters, so suddenly cutting to two whole episodes with ONLY them made the whole thing drag. Plus, we knew where it ended up, so those episodes just felt like the story ground to a halt for forty minutes. Sam didn’t really develop or change at all, and except for Veronica all of the new characters were pretty much just 2D cutouts. They were given a trait - the angry one, the quiet one, the socially awkward mathy (let’s be frank: coded autistic) one - and left at that. I didn’t care if any of the Garrison team died, because I don’t know shit about them. Actually, the only character that I felt did get some complexity (again, aside from Veronica) was Iverson. I liked him in this season, I liked that they showed he may be a gruff army general but he’s willing to recognize when he’s mistaken or in over his head, that he’s not a NICE person but he might be a GOOD person (I took his character in a similar-ish direction in my fic Written in Sand, so maybe I’m biased, but that feels like the right characterization for him to me). If we’d started to build a connection back to the Garrison earlier in the show, or even, discard my theory, if we’d even just seeded in some of the flashbacks earlier and shown more of the Garrison team, I think I would’ve cared a lot more about them.

Veronica is a well-written character, I like her. The difference is, I think, she’s clearly a character the writers came up with and the Garrison became the vehicle for including her in the story, rather than writing out a plot line and rolling out stock characters to populate it, which is what the rest of the Garrison team feels like.

Okay, now the elephant in the room: Admiral Sanda. She’s the show’s conclusion to the tropes I was reading when I came up with the evil!Sam theory. There was always going to be danger from within the Garrison; from the perspective of raising stakes, it just makes sense. And, I’m going to be honest: I detest Admiral Sanda. I detest that they tried to give her a last minute redemption, I detest that she was the trigger for the climax of the season. She’s very much another cardboard cutout - the hardline army general who thinks they know best and makes the wrong call so the day has to be saved by the plucky youngsters who still believe in hope. Nothing about what she did was surprising - I’m pretty sure when they “revealed” she’d sold them out to Sendak I just yelled at the screen “NO FUCKING DUH” because they’d been telegraphing that since her introduction. It’s not a twist so much as it is the writers using her to increase the danger against the Paladins, when it feels like Sendak should have been enough of a threat on his own. And her redemption moment is so hollow and pointless because… well, fuck, as much as I hate the guy, at least with Snape you’ve got SOME kind of investment in him by the time he dies just because you’ve gotten to know him. Even if that investment is vehemently hating his guts. I don’t know a blessed THING about Admiral Sanda except that she’s a hardline army general who thinks she knows best and made the wrong call. Does she have friends? Family? How old is she? What was her childhood like? Crucially, WHY does she think that making a deal with Sendak is the only way to protect the Earth, when to all appearances literally everyone else has decided to trust Sam and Voltron?

We the audience come to the show with a certain meta understanding of how these kinds of stories will go. We know Voltron will win. We don’t know exactly how, or how long it will take, or what sacrifices might be made, but darkness never falls over the land completely. Sauron was never going to win, Voldemort was always going to be defeated, summer was always going to return to Narnia. So characters like Admiral Sandra have to be dealt with carefully, because we the audience know they will be proven wrong. We may be able to distantly understand their position, but if we’re expected to empathize with her or find her decision difficult, we need MORE than a superficial “what if Voltron can’t win?” as justification for her actions, because we know the answer is “but they will.” As it stands, she just looks like an idiot for believing Sendak. The reason why I liked Sam as the traitor is because it brings personal stakes into it - even if we must make him hold the idiot ball to make it work (and I would argue we wouldn’t have had to, if we’d taken more time to explore WHY the Garrison might side with the Galra), it’s still affecting. Imagine Sanda’s death scene, and replace her with Sam. Suddenly it’s fucking gut-wrenching, right? (Not to mention making Sam a much more complicated character than he ended up being. Sam is... fine, he’s just kind of bland).

I guess tl;dr I found the Garrison sections dragged because they didn’t take the time to properly introduce and build up to the characters that suddenly took center stage for a significant chunk of the season, while the whole idea behind the Sam Holt Is Evil theory was that narratively, it could’ve brilliantly brought Earth and the Garrison back into the story as important forces and build up to the ultimate confrontation on the Paladins’ home planet without actually having to go back to Earth, at least not immediately. I liked Veronica because she felt like a full realized character, but no one else did (except Iverson a little bit).

As a sidebar, evil!Sam/Garrison was built on the assumption that the Garrison already knew something about the Galra at the very least by the time that Shiro turned up back on Earth - and I think the reveal that they really were just ignorant the whole time leaves plot holes, but if I start to go down the “let’s talk about the plot holes in Voltron” path we’re going to be here for a week.

[ramblingsrantsreviews]

Daybreak (Netflix, 2019)

There’s no easy way to describe Netflix’s new show Daybreak. It’s part teen drama, part teen rom-com, and part post-apocalyptic nightmare. The best way to describe it, as many professional journalists have, is teenage Mad Max meets Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Now, I’m not a fan of Mad Max or anything to do with the apocalypse or post-apocalypse and yet, I found myself drawn to this story — mostly because I wanted my brother and dad to stop pestering me to watch it. I was surprisingly shocked when the pilot captured my attention and willed me to press that “next episode” button Netflix. Yep, I was hooked.

Daybreak is an adaptation from a graphic novel of the same name written by Brian Ralph. The tv series which was created by Brad Peyton and Aron Eli Coleite, tells the story of Josh Wheeler who is on a quest to find his girlfriend (ex-girlfriend?) Sam Dean in the aftermath of the apocalypse that left only teenagers (and 10-year-old girls?) alive.

With no adults to bring order to the town of Glendale, the high school students do what they do best — create cliques. The cliques, or tribes as they’re referred to in Daybreak, are all controlled by one dominate tribe — The Jocks. Sounds like high school, doesn’t it?

Our protagonist, Josh, has decided the best way to survive the apocalypse is to keep to himself, avoid all tribes and not be a dick. Except, he doesn’t want to be completely alone. No, he wants and needs to find his true love, Sam Dean. Of course, hunting down your true love in a town you’re relatively new too and that’s crawling with Ghoulies (Daybreak’s version of zombies — who are all adults who repeat their last sentence over and over again) is not an easy task for a loner. Despite, his better judgment Josh does end up cultivating his own tribe of sorts out of the misfits roaming around Glendale. Together they form the tribe Daybreaks.

Get the gist? Good.

Now, here’s Dani’s Desk review of Daybreak.

Spoilers ahead. Proceed with caution.

Favorite Episode: Episode 2 — “Schmuck Bait!”

While I admit the pilot was interesting, the only reason I tuned in to the second episode was because of the cliffhanger in the pilot. Episode 2 is what really got me hooked on this show because I wanted to learn more about our core characters.

This is the episode where we start to understand who our characters are. We get to see Josh begrudgingly start to bond with his former bully Westly, who has taken on a new outlook on life that has to lead him to become a rōnin searching for redemption, an Angelica, the 10-year genius and pain-in-the-ass Josh occasionally babysat. Also added into this found-family mix, is Eli Eli Cardashyan (yes, it’s pronounced the same way. No, they’re not related) who has claimed the Glendale mall as his own sanctuary and is not happy about the other’s presence. And I can’t forget about the “Witch” who is better known as former-biology teacher Ms. Crumble who has somehow survived the apocalypse and isn’t a total Ghoulie like the rest of the adults in Glendale.

What’s so special about this episode is that we get a sense of who these characters are and the struggles they’ve been facing on their own. Let’s face it, no one wants to be alone especially in a post-apocalyptic world that run by teenagers. It also really sets up the different stories that are going to be explored over the course of the 10 episodes.

This episode is the starting point. The characters are nervous around each other. Some still want to be alone (Josh), others desperately want to belong to a tribe (Angelica) and some just want their mall back (Eli). This is the episode that sets up the before so that the conclusion, in the end, will show us that these characters have undergone a change.

Least Favorite Episode: Episode 10 – “FWASH BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!”

This is the final episode of the series and honestly, it should be my favorite. Obviously, it’s not. Is there action? Yes. Is there a resolution? Yes. The biggest problem I had with this episode was that it didn’t answer any questions.

Daybreak poses lots of questions over the 10 episodes. Who started the nuclear bombing? Why did only teenagers (and Angelica) survive? Is it the same everywhere? Why did the adults turn into Ghoulies? Why didn’t Ms. Crumblr or Mr. Burr turn into Ghoulies? With so many questions, it’s an unfortunate disservice that the conclusion of Daybreak doesn’t answer one of these pressing questions.

Favorite Character: Ms. Crumble / The Witch

For viewers of this show, this might be a shocking surprise. Ms. Crumble certainly wasn’t destined to become anyone favorite’s character. If anything, she was the comedic C plot to an already comical and dramatic a and b plot. And yet, here I am declaring her my favorite character.

Ms. Crumble is intriguing because she’s unlike any character we’ve ever seen before. Josh is basically this decade’s Ferris Bueller. Angelica is a modern Hit-Girl. Ms. Crumble is something totally different.

She’s also the character that really sticks to her values and inequity. Every other character slips up. Josh becomes a dick. Westly plans to kill despite his road to redemption. Even, Angelica gives up on her goal of creating a tribe with Josh and Westly by her side. Ms. Crumble, though, never goes back on her word. She has a few close calls but it never happens. She never eats a child.

What’s even more interesting is she could have been like Principal Burr. She had every reason to turn on the teenagers who tormented her for years and forced her to change her name to Ms. Crumble, but she doesn’t. She loves kids. She wants to help kids. Even with a blood-thirsty urge to consume her former students, she doesn’t.

She also has the single greatest line of dialogue I have ever heard. “My shit is like a Health Valley granola bar that feels solid, but when you open it up, there’s shit everywhere.”

Don’t get me wrong, she does have some faults — like her involvement with Principal Burr before the apocalypse, but her highs far outweigh her lows.

Least Favorite Character – Samira “Sam” Dean

Yeah okay, I know what you’re thinking. Shouldn’t Baron Triumph/Principal Burr who killed and ate students for no reason or Turbo who killed classmates out of jealousy and rage be your least favorite character? Probably. Don’t get me wrong their terrible characters, but they’re not necessarily terribly written which is why my least favorite character is golden girl Sam Dean.

Sam Dean is a textbook manic pixie dream girl. For most of the story, she’s MIA leaving us only to see her as Josh sees her. So maybe my statement is a little unfair. It’s not that she’s a manic pixie dream girl, it’s just that Josh sees her as one. But that’s not the only problem.

Sam Dean is Principal Burr’s go-to student. She’s the self-proclaimed “human sorting hat” when it comes to figuring out where kids belong in the social circles of high school. She’s the nice girl on campus and the it-girl after she makes a viral video of her randomly complimenting her classmates.

But is she really the nice girl we think she is? No, she’s not.

She lashes out at Josh and blames him for her new homecoming queen status since he’s the one who posted her video that went viral. Why else would she have asked him to film it if she didn’t want it to be posted?

She lets Baron Triumph out because she’s convinced he’s the one who can bring order to the students — despite the fact that he’s the one who’s been eating them!

And to top it all of, she goes around whining that no one knows who she really is but doesn’t bother to show them who she really is. Even Josh, her boyfriend who claims he’s in love with her, doesn’t get to know the real Sam Dean.

So yeah, Sam might be Josh’s manic pixie dream girl but she’s also her own manic pixie dream girl. Clearly, she has an idea of who she is that no one else does.

Since no one knows who the hell Sam Dean is, not even herself, her ending is confusing and slightly shocking. Is that who the real Sam Dean is?

Complaints:

Lack of answers.

Again, I don’t understand how a show that presents so many questions can leave so many unanswered. We literally do not know why anything is happening or how it’s happening. I get it, writers want to leave things open for a second season and we need cliffhangers. While that is the truth, they still could have answered at least one question.

And yeah okay, there’s Principal Burr’s crackhead theory that the teenagers are the only ones who survived because they got their HIV vaccine but it’s played for laughs. I certainly didn’t take it seriously. Nor would I be happy if that truly was the reason why all the teenagers were able to survive.

What’s the deal with Turbo? How did his face get messed up? Why doesn’t he talk? When he does talk, he bleeds, why?

Exceptions to the Rules.

Daybreak does an amazing job of establishing the world we are now in and the rules for that world in the first episode. And then, we’re presented with all these exceptions to the rules without an explanation.

If Jayden Hoyles was held back several times in high school, wouldn’t he be an adult? If he’s an adult he should be a Ghoulie. Why isn’t he? I certainly don’t know because it’s never even addressed.

What about Angelica? She’s just a 10-year-old kid. How did she survive? Are their other kids out there trying to survive without their parents? What about babies?

How about Principal Burr and Ms. Crumble? They were both adults that survived the apocalypse. And yet, they’re nothing like each other. Yeah, Ms. Crumble comes to the conclusion that she’s the way she is because she has suffered a traumatic brain injury but is that the truth? Regardless, how are they able to continue to survive?

The reason for the Nuclear War is never addressed.

It seems like a disservice for the show to not even mention or even search for the reason why the nuclear war occurred. Yes, the kids know it was all the adults’ fault but what caused it? Given the times we are currently living in, it would have been fun and interesting to see the kids come up with ideas on why the war started that parallel things happening in the real world.

Praise:

Direct Addresses.

I’ll admit at first I was skeptical of the extent that Josh broke the fourth wall. It was a carbon copy of Ferris Buller’s Day Off (and even borrowed some of his taglines) and seemed like a crutch the writers’ used to explain what was going on. Thankfully, it moved away from a crutch and became an amazing device.

I really loved that each character got their own version of a Fourth Wall Break that fit their personality. Josh had the standard, Ferris Buller one. It fit his character and eased us into this device in a way we were comfortable with. Our resident wild child and wannabe gangster Angelica took a different approached and borrowed from mob movies by narrating her episode with voiceovers. Westly’s episode was narrated by Rza, the de facto leader of the Wu-Tang Clan, and relied on Japanese animation to help get his point across. Ms. Crumble used flashbacks in the form of a zany multi-cam format to get her story across and Turbo addressed the camera directly relying on doodles on screen since he is mute.

Soundtrack.

Simply put, the soundtrack was amazing. Go stream it on Spotify!

Overall, Daybreak was entertaining but the conclusion left me annoyed and wishing for at least an hour of my time back. The series certainly ends with a hope for a season 2 but I’m not sure if I’d be invested enough to tune in.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Also follow here or on Wordpress to stay up to date with all my reviews, rants and rambles. 

Daybreak is streaming now on Netflix. You can catch the trailer for it here.

[elizabethrobertajones]

Am I the only one that feels a tiny bit uncomfortable at calling a white guy the pinnacle of humanity? And the center of the universe? I think TFW are all fine,complex characters and I love them but they are not really... good people. The Winchesters are not the best humanity has to offer, at least I hope so. And I feel this show is starting to embrace The Chosen One narrative which sucks because free will and all. Also hard to watch if you don't want to see everything as Dean-centered. IMO.

*shrugs* I mean it sounds bad out of context but in the show they literally have wrapped the entire narrative around Dean and put him at the centre of some sort of cosmic mess, which he’s deeply entangled in. It’s not like I think Dean is the actual centre of our universe or anything or representative of our universe, but I just cba to put disclaimers on everything… (Although when I do put disclaimers I always feel ridiculous saying like of course I don’t believe this outside of a very specific context and in general I’m often analysing what the show is saying not that I *think* it should be etc etc, and then someone asks and it’s like oh right maybe putting a disclaimer on everything is necessary >.>) 

I mean in the context of the show, Dean is the centre of its narrative and therefore its cosmic story and therefore its universe, and I find that interesting from the POV of a Dean fan and a writer who is really really interested in narrative and cosmic stuff (since my own stories feature unwittingly centre of the universe protagonists in the sense that they get tangled up in massive cosmic stuff and become a part of a huge narrative, and that’s the way I’ve been looking at it because I’m really meta about these things in my own head, and of course my own main characters are variously diverse and all female because I’m being the change I want to see in the world etc etc etc) 

Anyway the show has always favoured the chosen one narrative, but it was on Sam not Dean, and it was a pretty good rejection of it in some ways but he still did have a whole hero arc and died for our sins etc etc, and then gradually that shifted over to Dean until the Mark of Cain stuff which put him right in the centre of it all, and 11x23 was completely unsubtle in his role. 

The show is depressingly white for enduring characters, and it’s something we just kind of have to look past if we’re going to keep investing in it, that it by necessity is going to have these two white guys in the centre or it’s just going to be a different show.

For what it’s worth it sounds like American Gods is amazing, and does not have a generic white dude lead, and the book was one of the parents of this show anyway, so all in all probably something we should be watching as well if we can :P (I’m going to wait for a DVD anyway but I have read the book so I can vicariously enjoy the gif content etc on my dash for now >.>) and I think if I remember correctly that Shadow has a pretty similar role, cosmically, so that is a great start for balancing things out before going back to enjoying SPN for what you actually like about it. 

I always find it easier to appreciate something which does what I WANT to see elsewhere and support that project TOO, and enjoy SPN or other bland things like Marvel movies or whatever, just because I *enjoy* them. I mean, if SPN wasn’t problematic and a total puzzle box of a show of WHY do we like it DESPITE all its glaringly obvious flaws you can start picking up circa, like, Bugs or Route 666 which are both badly written AND racist episodes in the first season and can offer some forewarning of the show’s issues even if the show itself side-eyes those episodes later… I wouldn’t write nearly so much about it if it was EASY to enjoy like something where I watched it and it was deep and moving and left me content. But I’m emotionally hooked on SPN and I believe there’s a fascinating narrative in there and the show gets to do some things i find weirdly innovative or fascinating with story and characters, possibly just because it’s been running on so long it gets bored enough of itself to do something like randomly un-fridge Mary or whatever… There IS a worth in this show but it’s not in its representation and treatment of issues which other shows seem to get intuitively and a lot of those problems were laid down so early you have to go back as far as “this could only be genuinely fixed by casting 2 diverse actors back in 2005 to play the Winchesters” and like, idk, have them be what Max and Alicia are immediately from the get-go, of not just men, not just straight, not white, etc etc.

I mean, I think we all know SPN has some huge glaring issues, but no, Dean Winchester as the representation of Humanity and the centre of the universe is such an inbuilt “yawn of course it’s a white man because the whole show is white men” thing is just… well this is the show we’re watching and you have to take it or leave it now, but this is what it is. 

(And by “leave it” I’m not being critical like “hurr why are you watching if you hate it” i just mean, if it bothers you that much, don’t engage with it but also maybe pay attention that the people talking about it WILL also criticise the show on these exact points but don’t want to make every single post ever with the “i know this show has huge flaws in representation going right back to day 1 and no offence to J2 but if we wanted the show we say we want they shouldn’t have been cast but here they are and so here we are and it’s too late we care about this stupid genre show” every single time we want to discuss the narrative and anything to do with their characters… I mean it’s just pointlessly exhausting to me because I didn’t START watching this show intending to critique it, it was trashy fun TV to watch with friends and I got hooked, and 10 years later I’m still freakin here but the world has moved on and there’s things that are much more common discussions than when I was 18 and maybe NOW I’m more discerning about leaping into a bland white dudes lead franchise or spending emotional energy on them but that’s going to do nothing about how I feel about Supernatural or the bland white dudes it represents, because in a way my choice to discern about it was never a thing… Like yeah I have that disclaimer but UGH having to think about it all the time when I want to have fun?)