diary of a dialup dinosaur

(continued from here)

I loved the physicality of the show -- and not just the fights, which were remarkable for showing the expenditure of energy and what happens after it runs out. Or, rather, not just the physical fights. Life and its cruelties wear people down on this show just as surely as the action. But what I really loved was how some of the relationships played out:


* The most compelling romance in the entire series is the villain's. The coming together of Vanessa and Wilson Fisk is so delicately handled between the two of them, with all of the awkwardness and fear that new relationships hold no matter how old you get. And once they are together, the dynamic between them -- him careful and fearful, her self-assured and unbreakable -- is different than their dynamics with everyone else, which happens in real life, but rarely on the screen where characters get flattened for simplicity. Fisk controls everything and everyone in his world and, in that context, makes plans for Vanessa, telling Wesley that her agreement doesn't matter... But when it comes down to it, Fisk doesn't tell Vanessa to do anything, let alone compel her. He asks and hopes she agrees. Vanessa doesn't compel him, either -- she supports him, she comforts him, but she doesn't control him. They are vastly different people to the rest of the world, but within their relationship, they are equals.

(Vanessa really doesn't have a single choice taken from her over the entire course of the series by anyone and many of her choices are hard ones. She is my favorite female character of the series and, as I said previously, Ayelet Zurer killed it in the role.)

* Matt and Foggy and Matt-and-Foggy and how their relationship is shown, how it is sundered, and how they go about repairing it. Matt and Foggy don't have a bromance; they're not in the flush of anything. They have a profound friendship that they rely on, that they find mutually rewarding, and that they take for granted because it has been there for so long. When it is sundered, it is not because of some new complication or because of a woman -- and the writers could have easily have made the Matt-Karen-Foggy triangle much more problematic than they did -- but instead because of lies that reframe the entirety of their history together. And we get to see their pain, the betrayer and the betrayed both reeling under the force of what has happened and not able to reach out to the one source of comfort they've always been able to rely on because right now that is the source of their pain. Their rupture isn't quickly resolved, instead it radiates out and yet even in the worst of the misery, they don't seek to cause each other more pain. Foggy's treatment of Matt, even when he is feeling most betrayed, is remarkable. He keeps Matt's secret at a cost and he continues to provide DVS commentary for Matt by reflex even after he realizes it's not necessary, which in turn Matt never points out to him. When they come back together, they agree that the status quo ante is not possible and that they must build something new instead. And they go about doing just that, a process made easier by all of the shorthand and familiarity of the old.

( cut for brevity -- and spoilers, I suppose )

I watched this past week's Agents of SHIELD, my latest attempt to get into the series, and I suspect I've failed again. It's not that I don't care about what's going on or what happens to the characters, it's that I find myself Monday Morning Quarterbacking everything. It's hard to watch a show when you spend the entire time going "why are you doing that when you could have been doing this?"

A few observations nonetheless: ( Mockingbird, Hunter, Mac, Ward, Trip, and what could have been. )

* The baseball team is near the end of its misery for 2014, Young Master deGrom's chances at Rookie of the Year notwithstanding. Thankfully, NHL training camps begin this week, leading to 82 chances for frustration and then a playoff season of inevitable heartbreak. I love sports.


* I started this and I'm afraid it looks like I'm teasing with it because it's got more than one part and I don't have immediate plans to write more, but I've put both bits of 'Preserved' (the 'Bucky goes home and was never a Howling Commando' concept) on one page over at AO3 because they are two halves of the same thought.

I'm not saying never; I may get an idea for this next week. But I also kind of suspect that this could be the MCU version of SGA's Orpheus, which (a) took me forever to complete and (b) got me hate-mail when I did because I didn't warn for the unhappy ending. And I'm honestly not sure if I want to put up with that again if I'm not really sold on the story arc.


Because I am more active on Tumblr these days, but miss the ability to actually converse:

* Two brief comments on Outlander, which I am enjoying greatly: Claire's unstigmatized drinking and 'who got marital rape in my happy Forced Marriage trope?'

I'm not confusing Outlander with great drama or great anything, but it's fun and it's gorgeously shot and that would probably be sufficient as a diversion. But it's also the story of a woman of strength instead of a strong woman, especially a strong woman idealized by male standards, and that's something I maybe didn't anticipate enjoying as much until actually confronted with it.


* Not by me, but worth the read: a technical but readable (de)construction of the Winter Soldier's metal arm.


* Archie McPhee's Endless Geyser of Awesome. Aptly titled collection of esoterica silly and beautiful and occasionally both.

* Olympics! I am watching next to nothing of them, partially by choice -- I hate the format of 25 minutes of talking heads and sob stories, 15 minutes of competition, and 20 minutes of commercials per hour -- and mostly because I get no television reception. I have gotten to see some of the hockey games, although not the starts of most of them because I'm not getting up at 7:30am on a weekend for any non-medal game. But today was full of excitement, with Team USA winning handily and Team Canada winning not-handily -- that strong cold breeze from the north mid-afternoon was all of Canada exhaling after Weber scored -- and Team Russia imploding while Vlad Putin watched and then turning on each other like sharks in a swimming pool. The Finns are sneaky good, yo. They do this every single Olympics and then four years later, nobody remembers and we're all surprised again.

Thursday is USA-Canada in the women's gold medal game and Friday is USA-Canada in the men's semis and Canada is heavily favored on both sides and they are going to be so unbearably smug if they live up to those expectations. Everyone says that the Canadians are the nicest people and, by and large, they are. But they are also the sorest winners in hockey you will ever see. Which is why everyone not Canadian was rooting for the little Latvian engine that almost did.


* Pitchers and catchers have reported, which means it's the annual reminder that my baseball team looks incredibly promising... until the position players show up. Ah, Mets, what would we do if you were a real baseball team again?


* Watched a bunch of first episodes because there's no NHL:

1) House of Cards. Holy crap, was that good. Everyone is awful, but it the best ways. It's vicious and cold-blooded and I don't even mind Kevin Spacey breaking the fourth wall. I'm not going to stay up all night to watch the rest in one sitting, but I look forward to finishing it at a more stately pace.
2) Political Animals... I didn't really need to see Hillary Clinton fanfic and it was far too soapy for me and I didn't even finish the first episode. It's really well acted, I will admit, but that just makes it a really well cast soap.
3) Black Sails: Apparently, this series is boring all of the critics to tears because it's a pirate show set on land and has board meetings and ship-cleaning as plots. The pilot has pirate-y action and Toby Stephens -- who looks more and more like his mother every year and I don't mean that as a compliment -- but it also has Luke Arnold's John Silver and he bores me to tears and he's not pretty enough to counteract that, although clearly I am supposed to think so. I was hoping this could be Deadwood: the Pirate Years or the flip side of the Master and Commander universe, but it's really, really not.
4) Luther: been meaning to watch this forever and finally did and like it so far, two episodes in.


* Guardians of the Galaxy trailer looked good. They had to take a somewhat different tack with this than the other Marvel movies because nobody knows who they are, but that's fine and it worked. (They might have had me at "Oooga Chaka," but I'm Gen X.) And, as I said in another forum, Marvel will make a couple hundred million dollars over costs with a movie featuring a talking tree and an uncouth raccoon while DC thinks Wonder Woman is too difficult to film.


* Apparently Loki/Winter Soldier is trying to become a thing as a pairing and... good christ, why?

Boob Toob week two: probably the last time I'm going to be caught up because NHL hockey started on Tuesday, my team starts on Thursday, and all bets are off from there.

* Agents of SHIELD: this was not an improvement.

Okay, so back in the '90's, I used to watch syndicated shows like Soldier of Fortune and Pensacola: Wings of Gold and other completely ridiculous action series that would be on Saturday afternoons on the local channels. I bring this up because if you take away the Marvel property references and the CGI budget, you've more or less got the same thing. Except SoF at least had Mark Sheppard and AoS doesn't. It's stock, it's bland, it's not well acted, it makes me think of a syndicated show that unironically cast Dennis Rodman as a badass operator. Nobody says or does anything that their archetype wouldn't do and the plot progression (I use that phrase generously) is paint-by-numbers predictable. They're actually putting the 'tell 'em what you're gonna do, do it, tell 'em what you just did' in the script, like someone gluing the instructions for the Ikea table on to the surface after it's done. "You guys aren't a team, we need to learn to be a team and here's my metaphor" *implements metaphor, acts like a team* "Hey, guys, we're a team now because we implemented that metaphor! Have a beer!"

It's not good.

What I'm also starting to suspect is that Coulson is like Loki -- the ingredient that makes every dish better and more interesting, but can't be eaten on its own. Like salt. Loki is fascinating when bouncing off other characters and Coulson is great as the deadpan straight man for folks like Tony Stark or Maria Hill, but left alone in the spotlight, they lose whatever it is that makes them special. And there's absolutely nobody on AoS that can pick up that slack since they're all bland tropes.


* The Blacklist: still enjoying it because Spader chews scenery like Galactus.

I ran (almost literally) into Isabella Rossellini on the Upper West Side about when this must have been shooting and I gotta tell you, they did not choose flattering outfits for her on this show because in person, she looks fabulous. Not that she looked bad here, just that the high-neck caftan was unnecessary.

The rest of it was Spader being Spader. Reddington is so much fun to watch, wearing his ruthlessness proudly and hiding his humanity well, and that moment when he casually says that the FBI works for him, now... I kind of wish the actress playing Elizabeth Keen was a little stronger and capable of more nuance, but she's at least got good material to work with.

One thing I really appreciate the writers of this show doing is giving the audience credit for a modicum of intelligence. They do a lot of showing and not telling, especially with the backstory. Last week, it was the story of Lizzie's scar told twice, once posited by Reddington and once offered to young Beth, that put together make a whole. This week, they showed us Reddington's guard's brand after the fact and without words, giving a bit of depth to a background character (without first introducing him as a victim) and giving us and Agent Ressler a possible motivation for Reddington that runs deeper than the glory of victory.

* I have a very poor record keeping up with programs, but I like to watch the pilots of shows that interest me. What I've seen so far:

Sleepy Hollow: A show I will be happy to follow in animated GIFs on Tumblr, where people more dedicated than me clip the best parts and leave the stupid and the silly behind. Because there is a lot of stupid and silly here, like CW-levels of stupid and silly. But Nicole Beharie is wonderful.

Agents of SHIELD... I think if this were anything but what it was, I would have thought a lot less of it. The badinage was good and it comes with an acceptably built universe preinstalled, I just wish they hadn't stuck strictly to stereotypes after they cast Ming-Na and then ripped off elements of every single CBS procedural. You have the blandly good-looking James Bond guy who wants more macho missions and who needs to be taken down a peg and given a heart, the socially awkward UK-import Wonder Twin Geeks who are admittedly adorable, and the attractive hacker with the heart of gold whose anarchic tendencies are really just a cry for paternal attention. And Coulson, who is essentially playing Leroy Jethro Gibbs. I know the pedigree of the show and the pilot, but I thought for all of that, it was very uninspired in places. I'll keep up with it for a bit, but if this devolves into Monster of the Week without a good grand myth to back it up, I am going to drop it. Haven already exists and the mythos there is worth the stupid.

Blacklist. This? I loved. Layer upon layer upon layer and everyone fights dirty and there are unexpected moments of grace and humor to keep it from being too dark because it's not meant to be so dark. Three-dimensional spy chess. Our ingenue agent is established as an ingenue and then quickly becomes competent, if inexperienced. She starts off as a mouse and ends up stabbing the cat in the neck. It's a good start.

Also, holy cow is James Spader going to make a fabulous Ultron.


* I have finished watching Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes. I like Justice League/JLU better, I think, but probably because I have deeper attachment to the DCU characters. Especially in the final seasons of both shows, when they became Cameo of the Week episodes. But JL did more with what they had overall. That said... any other superhero cartoons on Netflix worth watching?


* I have a plot for the sequel to Thaw, but I need to finish the outline and then probably write a chapter or two to see if I can pull off Natasha's voice for more than 1300 words. And to see if I can live with the game-changing I am planning on doing. And I need to come up with a title, since I can't use the working one and I don't want to continue the theme of the previous long stories because once something has Freezer Burn and you Thaw it, the next step is usually the garbage because it tastes off.