Sliders.tv → Posts by ireactions
I don't believe that impeachment will take effect in time to have any effect on Trump whose time in office is just about up. I don't believe it will make any difference. I don't believe he will run again in 2024 because he will be tried on tax crimes, fraud, sedition, sexual assault and treason whether impeached or not. But they should impeach anyway.
I could be wrong, of course. I was sure Georgia was lost to Democrats.
I really can't blame any studio for cancelling any project right now whether it's the second seasons of TEENAGE BOUNTY HUNTERS and I AM NOT OKAY WITH THIS or the final season of GLOW or GREEN ARROW AND THE CANARIES. The unfortunate truth is that filming any film or show under COVID conditions is extremely expensive, filming action shows even moreso, and with GREEN ARROW AND THE CANARIES, the contracts for all the actors and the production team would have expired after so long a wait.
It would have been very costly to regroup everyone and come to new terms under current conditions when it might be better just to assemble a new team and do a new project. Katherine MacNamara has been fighting evil with her bare hands on TV for years and I have no doubt she will find some other project in which to run, jump, dive, roll, tackle, punch, kick, swing and inspire.
It's better to do something, even symbolically and procedurally, than to do nothing and declare that the president gets a free pass for ordering his supporters to engage in a terrorist attack upon his own country because the president didn't like losing an election.
Functionally, I do think impeachment is a waste of time. There's no point, to me, in trying to fire someone who's leaving in less than two weeks. I personally don't think Trump has anything left in him. He's going to order McDonalds. Lie in bed staring at the sealing eating fistfuls of fries. Go golfing. And maybe hire that Obama impersonator to whine at him. I think Trump is done.
The world at large does not agree with me. The world at large is terrified of him and desperate to curtail him. I don't think it's going to happen fast enough to matter, but it's still worth doing.
And now, for other forms of dissent:
I'm proud to be friends with Temporal Flux and Transmodiar. They didn't support Donald Trump. Joe Biden didn't win their support, so both TF and Transmodiar wrote names in and honoured the electoral process. That really is the way to do it. And Transmodiar's view that Democrats and Republicans are fundamentally the same in making sure that the federal government insulates the rich from the concerns of the average citizen -- can we really claim that Transmodiar is wrong to say it?
As TF has noted, people have voted for "hope and change" only to continue losing jobs, losing opportunity, losing hope, living in squalor and poverty and starvation and that was with Democrats in power. Voting for Trump was a cry for help, fist pounding on the self-destruct button in the hopes that the explosion would be a distress beacon. But under Trump, we've seen an even further diminished level of governmental capacity to respond to crisis. The Obama administration would not have ignored a global pandemic or failed to engage in basic containment measures for even its own staff facilities. The Obama administration would not have held superspreader events. The Obama administration, when staring down the barrel of an incoming presidency they found abhorrent, did not refuse to engage in a peaceful transition of power. The claim that Trump's presidency is interchangeable with Obama's is -- I can understand why someone would feel that way. I can understand why someone would say it. I don't agree with it, but I don't disagree with the validity of the argument that government doesn't seem like it's designed to help anyone other than government itself. To Transmodiar, this means that government isn't here to help anyone period.
To me, it says that democracy is the worst system of government except for all others which have been tried to date. It says that democracy has people who don't believe in it but are predisposed to gaming it for their own gain. It says that the Obama administration was stymied from the start by not having all its senators seated in time, by Republican obstructionism to any economic recovery measures with the plan to blame Democrats for the failures, by the rise of social media serving to radicalize people like Kyle -- in addition to far too many elected officials being precisely what Transmodiar and TF say they are -- people who are completely disinterested in the well-being of those who elected them. I don't think that's every single politician ever, but there are a lot of them and we've seen this week that either most of them are Republicans -- or the Democrats who are like them tend not to declare that out loud.
Is fighting the political system like fighting God? I'd say that's a step too far; I'd say it's more like fighting a hostile dungeonmaster in a DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS game who is relentlessly exercising every loophole and vagary in the rules to benefit his own comfort and power and well-being and satisfy his desire for control at the expense of the people trying to play the game. And dungeonmasters who do that have a tendency to self-destruct.
In the name of observing when parties have no interest in healing: I said that the election was over and that I wouldn't talk about Informant anymore. But Informant has decided that the election is not over and declared that it was stolen because... he doesn't like the fact that his cult leader lost. Informant has also declared that he supports everyone who smashed into the US capitol to interfere with the certification of electoral votes. Informant has thrown in his lot with domestic terrorists seeking to overthrow government because he doesn't like that his cult was short by seven million votes. Informant doesn't want an elected government; he wants a coup where his cult leader is appointed for life. Informant supports insurrectionist sedition. Informant is a traitor to his country. I suppose it shouldn't come as a surprise given that Informant has previously supported the Men's Rights Activist terrorist movement and neo-Nazis and screams blue murder every time black people march but is supportively serene when white people are running around making everyone get sick because they won't wear masks.
Even Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham have standards (apparently), but I see now that Kyle -- who is unworthy of his sobriquet -- does not have standards. Kyle doesn't even want to be a Republican anymore and wants them to lose. Four years ago, Republicans had the White House, the House and the Senate. Today, Republicans have lost all three thanks to Donald Trump, but Kyle insists that Republicans have betrayed the cult of Trump and lays the blame on them as opposed to the deranged fool he voted into office and wants to stay there through intimidation and deceit.
I am ashamed that I ever considered Kyle a friend.
Lindsay Graham:
I think it’s a uniquely bad idea to delay this election. Trump and I, we had a hell of a journey. I hate it being this way. I hate it being this way. From my point of view, he's been a consequential president. But today, all I can say is -- count me out.Enough is enough. I don’t buy this. We’ve got to end it. Vice President Pence, what they are asking you to do -- you won’t do because you can’t.
If you’re a conservative, this is the most offensive concept in the world, that a single person could disenfranchise 155 million people.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are lawfully elected and will be the president and vice president of the United States on January the 20th.
It's really an incredible achievement from Cez and Agata Agl. They should be so proud of what they've accomplished. The quirky charm, excitement and joy they take in their interpretation of SLIDERS is glowingly vivid and palpable. And they richly deserve the accolades they've gotten from the actors who were in the live action show.
Slider_Quinn21 wrote:I don't want one party to control everything.
One party does control everything. Just because it has two names doesn't mean it's not one entity, out to screw us all.
I respect this point of view. It's not something I would say and it's not how I see the world -- but I understand why someone would think this, I would agree with many of the positions that come from this foundation, and it's a rational assessment even if it isn't mine.
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I feel that Democrats are in an extremely weak position and Republicans are in a weaker position. I am shocked and astonished that Democrats won the Georgia runoffs which I had a terrible feeling were lost to the GOP. But Democrats won and the Biden administration will go from having about as much power as the Queen of England to, under current congressional rules, potentially having about as much power as the Queen of England if Biden's ever short by one senator's vote. This is a considerable improvement from how it looked in November when Democrats looked like they'd have a presidency but only the House.
Now that Biden's won, I have to say -- I am not looking forward to his presidency although it's preferable to four more years of Trump, a diseased and deranged lunatic. Biden didn't support Medicare for All, isn't in favour of cancelling all student debt, has filled his cabinet with the Obama-era staffers who oversaw the rise of Trumpism, isn't the progressive figure of defunding the police I wanted and far from being Elizabeth Warren or Andrew Yang or Bernie Sanders and I am disappointed that it's President Biden.
Biden struck me as volatile, incoherent, vapid and entitled, easily provoked into screeching at people. As the presidential campaign began in earnest after his nomination was secured, however, he disappeared into his basement for months. Then he re-emerged and was suddenly polished -- having been privately coached into altering his conduct from "senatorial" to "presidential," as coached by Obama. Biden suddenly received most insults with cool, warmth, understanding and patience.
He had slipups, saying black people weren't black if they were Trump voters, snarling at a reporter asking him if he'd had a cognitive test. Then he got himself under control again. A man standing atop a truck screaming Trump slogans at him was met with a cool call of, "Don't jump!" A black college kid calling him out for his remarks about black identity before asking him what he could do for people entering the workforce received a detailed, kind answer about government investment in black-startup businesses -- without a single response to the (deserved) insult. A president speaks in a respectful, idealistic fashion with vocabulary to encourage discourse and is open to new information, dissent, alternate reasoning and perspective.
I can tell that Biden has anger management problems. His stutter is a source of frustration; he often gets blocked on a word and will replace it with a substitution that is incorrect. He's afraid to admit that he's been overly handsy with women. He is deeply hurt by some of the things his son has done and said to him. He rambles and is so fixated on good relationships that he drives bad bargains.
I can also tell that he's not really that keen to lead the country. Instead, he wants to preside over it, set the general goals and the tone, encourage and suggest and be a good spokesperson -- but only engage in executive action and rulership during emergencies. And because he would rather preside than lead, the policies he will put forward will be what you'd expect of a mediocre centrist, a Republican in blue. He's like my grandfather. I loved my grandfather. My grandfather was a hardworking, decent man who cared about people and took advice from experts. I would not have wanted Grandpa to be president because Grandpa would have been little more than a maintainer of the status quo with a few nods to progressivism.
But who would you be more likely to see some results from for student debt forgiveness, immigration, vaccine distribution, virus response, PPE distribution, American manufacturing and economic relief -- America's grandfather or America's deranged abusive father?
Transmodiar would say neither and he could be right about it. His accuracy rate for predictions has been about the same as mine which would indicate that neither of us are born prognosticators, but we occasionally hit the mark.
I have hope that the decency, gentleness, warmth, empathy and love that Biden has shown on the campaign trail, that he performs on TV and that I confess reminds me of my grandfather and occasionally moves me to tears -- I pray that it's real. I don't know if that's who he really is. But I hope it. I don't live in America. But if America goes down, we all go down.
I didn't want Biden to be president. But Trump has to go.
We are debating a step that has never been taken in American history: whether Congress should overrule voters and overturn a presidential election. I have served 36 years in the Senate. This will be the most important vote I have ever cast.
President Trump claims this election was stolen. The assertions range from specific local allegations to constitutional arguments to sweeping conspiracy theories. I supported the President’s right to use the legal system. Dozens of lawsuits received hearings in courtrooms across the country. But over and over, the courts rejected these claims — including all-star judges whom the President himself nominated.
Every election features some illegality and irregularity and it’s unacceptable. I support strong state-led voting reforms. Last year’s bizarre pandemic procedures must not become the new norm. But nothing before us proves illegality anywhere near the massive scale that would have tipped this entire election. Nor can public doubt alone justify a radical break when that doubt was incited without evidence. The Constitution gives Congress a limited role. We cannot simply declare ourselves a national Board of Elections on steroids.
The voters, the courts, and the states have all spoken. If we overrule them all, it would damage our republic forever. This election was not unusually close. Just in recent history, 1976, 2000, and 2004 were all closer. This Electoral College margin is almost identical to 2016. If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral. We’d never see the whole nation accept an election again. Every four years would bring a scramble for power at any cost.
The Electoral College would soon cease to exist, leaving the citizens of entire states with no real say in choosing presidents. The effects would go even beyond elections themselves. Self-government requires a shared commitment to truth and shared respect for the ground rules of our system. We cannot keep drifting apart into two separate tribes; with separate facts, and separate realities; with nothing in common except hostility toward each another and mistrust for the few national institutions that we still share.
Every time in the last 30 years that Democrats have lost a presidential race, they’ve tried a challenge like this one — after 2000, 2004, and 2016. After 2004, a Senator joined and forced this same debate. Democrats like Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, and Hillary Clinton praised and applauded the stunt. Republicans condemned those baseless efforts. And we just spent four years condemning Democrats’ shameful attacks on the validity of President Trump’s own election.
There can be no double standard. The media that is outraged today spent four years aiding and abetting Democrats’ attacks on institutions after they lost. But we must not imitate and escalate what we repudiate. Our duty is to govern for the public good. The United States Senate has a higher calling than an endless spiral of partisan vengeance.
Congress will either overrule the voters, the states, and the courts for the first time ever or honor the people’s decision. We will either guarantee Democrats’ delegitimizing efforts after 2016 become a permanent new routine for both sides… or declare that our nation deserves better. We will either hasten down a poisonous path where only the winners of elections accept them… or show we can still muster the patriotic courage that our forebears showed, both in victory and in defeat.
The framers built the Senate to stop short-term passions from boiling over and melting the foundations of our Republic. I believe protecting our constitutional order requires respecting limits on our own power. It would be unfair and wrong to disenfranchise American voters and overrule the courts and the states on this thin basis. And I will not pretend such a vote would be a harmless protest gesture while relying on others to do the right thing.
I will vote to respect the people’s decision and defend our system of government as we know it.
Well, on the bright side, Ossoff's win is confirmed and Democrats can now use VP-elect Harris' vote as a tiebreaker. Slider_Quinn21 may commence his victory celebration without comment from me.
(I've learned in recent years to never say anything to someone that I wouldn't want rightly thrown back in my face if the circumstances were reversed.)
I personally agree with you, but we must always be gracious in (presumptive) victory because at some point, we'll be on the losing end and we'd probably want our opponents to give us the chance to have made every effort before we conceded.
Ossoff and Perdue are still too close to call. Ossoff seems confident that he's won, his team seems confident that he's won -- but let's not be like Trumpists insisting that they won because they should never be allowed to lose.
I remember producing a first draft of an outline for SLIDERS REBORN and sending it to Transmodiar and knowing it was bad and not knowing how to shape the story (or any story) and telling Transmodiar that it was awful beyond awful and I dreaded his reaction. He told me -- and I will never forget this --
"I'm actually pretty busy right now and can't read it right away. Why don't you take a couple days and see if you can get it from 'awful' to 'adequate'?"
One of the nicest and most productive things anybody has ever said to me about anything ever.
I dunno. It seems odd to me that the BBC wouldn't comment on it -- so I think it's more likely that Whittaker's contract has come to an end and they're discussing whether she wants to stay or go. Matt Smith's contract came to an end with "The Name of the Doctor" and there was a very real possibility at the time that he wouldn't have been in "The Day of the Doctor" or "The Time of the Doctor" in which case the Doctor and Clara would have emerged from the timestream with the Doctor having shifted into an 'alternate' incarnation that he might have regenerated into previously and played by a different actor. Smith decided to sign on for two more specials.
Jenna Louise-Coleman was leaving with "Last Christmas" but during production elected to do one more season because she didn't feel Clara had spent enough time with the Capaldi Doctor.
David Tennant almost signed on for the first year of Steven Moffat's run and Moffat drafted a storyline where the Tenth Doctor would die in front of little Amy Pond's eyes; then the adult Amy would meet the Tenth Doctor before his death and Series Five would have moved towards Tennant's finale and regeneration. Tennant waited until the absolute last moment to decide that he wanted to leave with Russell T. Davies.
I feel pretty much the same way as TF does. It's unfortunate if Ms. Whittaker leaves, but it won't really matter unless Chibnall leaves too.
I'm told that the extra hands to help producers with scripts on HEROES, ANGEL, LOIS AND CLARK and FRINGE was largely due to all these shows having the budget to hire multiple full-time writer-producers -- and DOCTOR WHO simply doesn't have that kind of budget and has never had that kind of budget. During the 60s to 80s, a producer managed the show's budget, marketing, actors, resources, sets, locations and equipment and hired a script editor to lead the writing team and produce scripts that could be rendered by the resources. The script editor was never a glamourous job or a powerful position and most script editors would stay for a few seasons and then leave. But studio politics now demand that the executive producer handle both those roles. I think it's a bad system and it reflects Temporal Flux noting that Chris Chibnall was not the BBC's first choice to come in after Steven Moffat; he was the only person they could find who would accept this budget and this (lack of) division of labour.
Just watched the New Year's Eve special and... I really like Chris Chibnall as a person and as a producer, but his writing is just very witless, painfully so. The heroes (minus the Doctor) suspect a villain of a deadly plot, so they decide to... march up to him and demand that he explain his evil plans and he promptly declines to do so. What were they expecting?
Why does Chibnall have his characters behave so unimaginatively and predictably and have them engage in such futile actions -- aside from his inclination to have the heroes confront the villain for an early scene? The Doctor is trapped in a prison and... sits around making no effort to escape and she has to be rescued -- almost as though the writer simply couldn't come up with a neat way for his lead character to demonstrate the ingenuity needed to escape and also wanted to keep the Doctor contained until more of the plot had unfolded without her.
The Doctor finds her friends and she decides to... do pretty much what her friends did without her; confront the villain and demand an explanation as though people engaged in secret plots will naturally explain them in full if asked twice.
Chibnall simply doesn't have the wit or cleverness that these characters and this series demands; he doesn't know how to stage a confrontation, he doesn't have smart solutions to difficult problems, so the characters behave clumsily because their writer is clumsy. I really like Chibnall's work as a producer: gorgeous music, beautiful anamorphic lens filming, stunning location work, wonderful casting with the first Sikh woman aboard the TARDIS and the first woman to play the Doctor -- but he simply doesn't have the inventiveness, skill or innovative spirit needed to write a spacefaring time travelling heroine and her friends.
The frustrating thing is that the ideas aren't the problem as much as the presentation. Why not have the companions try to investigate the threat without the Doctor and be successful at infiltration but be unsure of what to do about whatever they discover? Why not have the Doctor not escape the prison because she wanted some time to think about the shocking revelations of the previous episode? And so on. The ideas are good; the presentation is shockingly poor.
I think Chibnall needs someone to write scripts for him from his story elements. Joss Whedon on ANGEL had David Greenwalt; Tim Kring on HEROES had Bryan Fuller; Robert Singer on LOIS AND CLARK had Tony Blake and Paul Jackson and Eugenie Ross Leming and Brad Buckner; JJ Abrams on FRINGE had Jeff Pinker and Joel Wyman -- Chibnall needs a partner.
I've never entirely understood why the BBC always has the DW executive producer be the story editor as well, maybe it's a budgeting issue, but every previous showrunner has been overstretched by the job. Russell T. Davies confessed in his autobiography that he was aware of how poor and clumsy his scripts were by the end, but it was often the best he could do when on his deadlines. Steven Moffat arranged to make fewer episodes over longer periods of time in order to cope with the workload. Maybe they could have hired some extra help.
I got distracted again, this time by work and THE KARATE KID: REBORN (or COBRA KAI, as Netflix insists on calling it).
Going to watch WW1984 later today.
As for Snyder -- I'm not really a fan of his stuff, but I certainly appreciate the physicality he gave Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman in contrast to the relative weightlessness of the Donner SUPERMAN films. A lot of Snyder's decisions are fundamentally at odds with why superhero fans enjoy superheroes. The first is collateral damage: very simply, superheroes SAVE people, so presenting Superman standing victorious around the shattered wreckage of the city of Metropolis is horrific and Snyder's blindness to how this would come off to his audience -- that's a serious failure as a director. A director has to be aware of how the audience will react to his content and the fact that he didn't think smashed skyscrapers full of people would be disturbing and his neglecting to have the MAN OF STEEL acknowledge it in any fashion is inept.
Snyder has a deeply disdainful attitude to superheroes, snarking that it's absurd that Superman and Batman don't kill. While I'm not a purist on the subject, Snyder's decision to have Superman kill Zod and Batman knife henchmen to death has a certain contempt for the source material behind it like he's embarrassed to be doing a superhero movie in the first place. This attitude is also present in his comments that he thought it was "fun" to kill off CIA agent Jimmy Olsen in BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (actual title) and that it would be "fun" to do a prequel comic book where we get to see the Joker murder Dick Grayson.
I think that a creator who feels he has to show Superman and Batman killing should simply say that these are his versions of Superman and Batman, but Snyder actively attacking the non-lethal Superman and Batman presented elsewhere shows a marked disrespect for the characters and other creators. And creators who create based on contempt and trying to denigrate other creators are fundamentally cynical and defeatist and that's also not really why superheroes appeal, at least not to me.
The best I would say of Snyder is that he is technically brilliant and he clearly encouraged Patty Jenkins to do PATTY JENKINS' WONDER WOMAN and not worry about making it match ZACK SNYDER'S WONDER WOMAN.
It's a shame. I've read on Amazon that the blu-ray set has the same DVD quality as one of the previous releases, I'm not sure which, but they were all pretty awful.
I actually have a Universal set of Season 3 (Region 1). I wanted to show my niece "The Guardian" and my Mill Creek set wasn't playing that disc correctly although after I received the Universal set, I realized my Mill Creek disc just needed a good wipe. Season 3 is the season of grief and I would actually pay someone to take the Season 3 DVD set away from me, but no one has ever wanted to go within five feet of it.
I used to wander through Best Buys back when Best Buys sold DVDs and I would always take all the SLIDERS Season 3 DVD sets off the racks and put them in microwaves or fridges to stop anyone from buying them. Maybe some day, there will be an animated LEGO DVD set of SLIDERS sold in stores if DVDs are still sold by then.
I ended up rewatching WONDER WOMAN and JUSTICE LEAGUE instead of WW1984 -- just to revisit what I feel is some very good work. Patty Jenkins has jumped aboard the anti-Whedon train, saying that Whedon's portrayal of Diana in JUSTICE LEAGUE contradicted her work in WW and WW1984.
I have to say, I don't know how fair that is. Whedon's behaviour is not defensible. But in terms of his work -- the primary contradiction for Diana actually started with BATMAN VERSUS SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (actual title) in which Diana claims that after the first World War, she walked away from humanity forever.
This is blatantly at odds with what we see in WONDER WOMAN where Steve Trevor's sacrifice inspired Diana to remain involved with humanity and also at odds with JUSTICE LEAGUE where Bruce tells Diana that she walled her off from the human race after Steve's death.
The contradiction is not Whedon's fault; Snyder set up a cynical, defeatist Wonder Woman; Jenkins decided to go for an optimistic, inspired Wonder Woman -- and imply that Diana was just having a bad week when she said what she said in BATMAN VERSUS SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (actual title). If anyone's responsible for the mismatch, it's Jenkins, although I don't think any viewers complained as the lively, societally naive but combat seasoned Diana of WONDER WOMAN was a vastly preferable depiction. Jenkins also portrays Snyder as helping her set up her version of WONDER WOMAN. If that's true, that's more Snyder being a supportive collaborator to his colleague rather than anything he produced in BATMAN VERSUS SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (actual title).
That said -- there is one thing in JUSTICE LEAGUE that Whedon did that I actually do take issue with and Jenkins probably does too -- Diana Prince wears extremely low cut civilian clothes. Low cut tops that trace the bra line, jackets that are left open to show plenty of cleavage on those tops, jackets that end right at the waist to highlight the curve of her tight pants -- and this actually is wrong as Diana in WONDER WOMAN at one point is given the chance to wear whatever civilian she wants and she chooses what's effectively a female variant on men's business attire: a long coat with a skirt-like layering, a dress shirt -- and even her combat armour is arranged to show no bared cleavage despite wrapping around her chest. Diana Prince doesn't dress for the male gaze in WONDER WOMAN, but she does do so in JUSTICE LEAGUE and that strikes me as highly uncharacteristic.
Netflix shows are infamous for overstretching insufficient material to fill in time because more episodes means more revenue. Did you feel this happened on Disney+?
I personally won't watch shows with evil protagonists or even incompetent ones.
SMALLVILLE was a show I gave up on in Season 2 because Clark Kent was so fundamentally unheroic in his ineptitude, allowing what seemed like three-quarters of his student body to be killed at a rate of four or five murders a week with no effort to warn anyone about the meteor rock mutants and their psychosis. I only came back with Season 8 because Clark (and the writers) got their act together on that. TORCHWOOD (at least in its first season) was another show where the characters were completely incompetent in handling alien threats, attacking each other while civilians died.
It can be a delicate balance: you can't have a perfect protagonist who never screws up, but SMALLVILLE and TORCHWOOD went to the extreme the world would actually have been better off if the lead characters did nothing because their involvement only continued to cover up a crisis that they couldn't seem to manage.
I was slightly on the fence with SUPERNATURAL where Sam and Dean unleashed demonic forces on Earth at the end of Season 2 by accident, but Season 3 showed them urgently trying to set this right and accepting full responsibility.
Everyone loves the movie SPIDER-MAN 2 (Sam Raimi), but I really dislike it and my primary objection to it is that Peter Parker is incompetent. Despite his webslinging prowess, he can't deliver pizzas on time. Despite being a photographer, he can't remember to take the lens cap off his camera. Despite his powers repeatedly giving out on him, he keeps trying to websling with no effort to figure out what the problem is first. It's hard to cheer on a hero who makes obvious blunders and then repeats them and doesn't do anything to alleviate them.
But I have patience for other kinds of mistakes -- like Peter in THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN foolishly using a camera with his name on it in the field as Spider-Man. It's his first movie and he's a kid. Or pretty much every character's asinine choices in every episode of GIRL MEETS WORLD because they are children. And all the characters on THE ORVILLE where characters mess up because nobody can be all perfect all the time and will make mistakes because they are tired, unhappy, distracted, etc., but not because they are bad at their jobs.
I hope it's not true that Reeves and Pattinson aren't getting along. Matt Reeves -- I don't really know his work, but Slider_Quinn21 seems to like his stuff.
Robert Pattinson is a cool guy. I think he's hilarious. His blunt assessment of TWILIGHT movies and novels as silly fantasy in which the vampires never do anything to even qualify as vampires is spot-on. His disdain for the abusive Edward Cullen character and his admission that he took the role to pay his rent is wonderful. He has a delightful story about how a female fan was stalking him, so he approached her and asked her out to dinner and spent half the dinner whining about his life and the other half of the dinner sitting alone because she had fled. He used to earn pocket money in school by shoplifting pornographic magazines and selling them to his classmates. When he got his first paycheque for TWILIGHT, he bought a $1,000 car off Craigslist. Most actors of his stature would try to play heartthrobs (like Jerry O'Connell did), but Pattinson has always gravitated to playing dysfunctional characters.
The Mill Creek release is Region 1.
What's the video quality like on that blu-ray set? The DVD video quality is ghastly on all releases due to overcompression to fit more episodes onto fewer discs.
I'm happy to contribute. A lot of people helped me with my SLIDERS magnum opus.
Out of appreciation and respect for your work, I’d like to raise the prize for you. I’d like to offer the winner of your contest the Sliders: The Complete Series DVD Mill Creek box set. I’ll have my copy sent to the winner. My email address is at the top of this message forum.
Ah, I see. I've never seen any of it. But I wondered what you would have made of trying to wrap up a show with the abrupt absence of the lead actor. A bit of a Quinn-in-Season-5 situation.
I have to say, I don't really understand why so many trade magazines are claiming that DC movies will now have "Earth 1" and "Earth 2" established through THE FLASH featuring Affleck and Keaton to bridge the two Earths when, as far as we know, Robert Pattinson's Batman will not be in THE FLASH, so what Earths are being bridged? It's probably due to some trade journalists just not really grasping the multiverse concept and not being overly familiar with so much as the TV version of CRISIS.
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I suspect that the reason DC has decided to no longer pursue a shared universe going forward: it builds the expectation of a crossover movie featuring all the individual characters together -- and that's proven highly expensive and not profitable.
It was very expensive to feature Henry Cavill AND Ben Affleck AND Gal Gadot AND Jason Momoa in one movie that also showcased the powers of Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, the Flash, Cyborg and the gadgets of Batman. AVENGERS had the benefit of having as many street level type heroes like Captain America and Hawkeye and Black Widow as it did more effects-demanding characters like Iron Man and the Hulk.
The Justice League is very costly to show on camera together with these specific actors unless it earns a billion dollars at box office and DC movies are more in the low to mid hundred million range. And since they're not aiming to do another very expensive, not terribly profitable JUSTICE LEAGUE movie featuring all the characters together, they've elected not to worry about keeping them all in the same continuity.
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I've never understood why AGE OF ULTRON was so hated. Or why JUSTICE LEAGUE was so loathed either. But that's personal taste for you!
I'm seeing it tonight. Admittedly, I've said that two nights in a row and gotten sidetracked by other things. Haha!
DC Films president Walter Hamada says that going forward, DC movies aren't going to be focusing on building ongoing continuity between their superhero movies. There will be multiple versions of Batman (with Affleck and Keaton in THE FLASH and Robert Pattinson in THE BATMAN) and it'll just be viewed as one big multiverse even as WONDER WOMAN, SHAZAM and AQUAMAN see sequels continuing from their DC Extended Universe origins. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/27/busi … ovies.html
News outlets paint this as Earth 1/Earth 2, but looking at the actual strategy, the goal seems to make sure that WONDER WOMAN movies are consistent with WONDER WOMAN movies, AQUAMAN movies are consistent with AQUAMAN movies, SHAZAM movies are consistent with SHAZAM movies -- but with no particular concern for whether or not Wonder Woman, Aquaman and Shazam will be exist in the same reality or crossover with each other -- and THE FLASH will introduce multiple versions of Batman to indicate why Batman is played by different actors in theatres and on television and why the individual character/team movies will unfold separately going forward.
I said earlier that if Trump won the election, I would write Part 7 of SLIDERS REBORN. Just in case I had to (although it seemed unlikely), I wrote an outline. The title is "Redemption." The story:
Sliders Reborn: Redemption (7)
In the merged San Francisco, Quinn and Rembrandt are deeply alarmed by reports of four coma victims who have been drained of brain fluid. Quinn and Rembrandt and Laurel (Quinn's daughter) stake out a medical supply company that's been ordering a suspicious number of syringes for a safe injection site that doesn't seem to exist; they spot Colonel Rickman (with Neil Dickson's face) who recognizes Quinn and Rembrandt and runs. Laurel dives after Rickman while Quinn and Rembrandt placidly stay in the car, saying they are over forty and should no longer be chasing people.Laurel pursues Rickman across a giant Tamagotchi parade, through an oxygen bar, past a Napster concert, a mapmaker's convention, a POG tournament but loses him in a macarena dance off. After a recharge at the oxygen bar, she staggers back to Quinn and apologizes for losing him. Quinn says it's fine; they tagged all the syringes and will track Rickman. Laurel demands to know why Quinn and Rembrandt let her chase Rickman then (QUINN: "We needed him to think he got away.") and where is Rembrandt anyway?
Rickman enters his apartment only to find Rembrandt waiting for him. Rickman immediately overpowers Rembrandt, brags about how he drained the Professor nearly dry and then jabs Rembrandt with the syringe in his usual fashion. Rembrandt collapses. Rickman injects himself with Rembrandt's fluid -- only to scream as his face begins to morph between Dickson and Daltrey. Rickman falls over, shrieking as though his body is being stretched between two points.
Rembrandt stands, says that Rickman's a creature of habit, always aims his needle at the same place on a victim -- and Rembrandt's got a subcutaneous fluid sack implanted in him there courtesy of Dr. Diana Davis. It contains fluid with a special recipe just for Rickman. Rickman gasps out a demand to know if Rembrandt's poisoned him.
Rembrandt responds with questions of his own: where was Rickman born? Why was Rickman a Colonel in the US Army with an English accent? Why was an army officer performing medical experiments on himself and preying upon victims in a military base instead of checking into a hospital for his condition? How did he even come to self-medicate with brain fluid anyway? Why was Rickman always so inept at combat and strategy and so uncharacteristic of a military man? Rickman says his mind is beyond Rembrandt's dim comprehension: Rickman's past is irrelevant, Rickman's nature is what matters: he is the apex predator, he is death in human form, a massacre incarnate.
Rembrandt says that Rickman is a glitch in reality. There is no Colonel Angus Rickman; there is a British character-actor named Angus Rickman who was playing a slasher killer in a horror movie filmed on a military base. When the Geiger Combine experiment retroactively warped reality, it twisted Angus Rickman's timeline into a mixed and matched mess of his character and his real life, driving him and the world around him insane, leaving him this wretched madman.
Rembrandt says he hasn't poisoned Rickman; he has cured him. The fluid contains modified Glow nanites (from "New Gods For Old") that will stabilize Rickman's spacetime superposition, revert him to Roger Daltrey and reposition him within the merged San Francisco as whoever actor Angus Rickman would have been in this reality. He may be a madman again in which case the sliders will stop him; he may be a quiet civilian, a drama teacher at a school, perhaps a star of San Francisco theatre.
Rickman, feeling his identity and memory begin to shift, tries to hang on, snarls at Rembrandt that he would rather die than be reverted to whatever he might have been before. He says he killed the Professor, why won't Rembrandt just kill him? Rembrandt says that they are the same: they are sliders, they are the victims of a cosmic event, and this city of sliders is a chance for everyone to be reborn.
Rickman's face stabilizes into the visage of Roger Daltrey and then he loses consciousness. Around him and Rembrandt, the apartment reforms from a bare, stripped down space into a pleasant home with posters of Angus Rickman's plays and movies and TV shows and bookshelves full of volumes on acting and stageplays and scripts. Rembrandt examines what becomes a printed autobiography of Rickman's career as a musician, actor, writer and teacher filled with photos of a benign, smiling Rickman.
Rembrandt moves a sleeping Rickman to a sofa, puts a blanket over his resting form and quietly exits the apartment, leaving his former foe to reawaken to a new life and a new beginning.
This is probably one of my quirks, but I generally don't subscribe to the idea of the good old days. There were no good old days, just days where the problems were different. To look at SLIDERS: even the sacred first season was a time of episodes being aired out of order, scripts being at odds with actors (like Quinn being written as Tobey Maguire but played by Jerry O'Connell), bizarre efforts at ongoing arcs that were never going to make it to air intact in the 90s when people didn't watch every episode, and the inability to decide whether Quinn and Wade were a couple or not from week to week is frustrating.
A much-enjoyed period of DOCTOR WHO and THE X-FILES for me: it was when the properties existed as media tie-ins: novels and audioplays for DW and comic books for THE X-FILES. There was some brilliant material that really redefined the series on paper -- but it'd be foolish to see those eras as the way forward for both franchises when the material was addressing devoted fans as opposed to a general audience and would have only ever served a steadily diminishing number of devotees as the years passed. Was it fun? Yeah! Was it really a good situation for DW and TXF? No, the spin-off media was just keeping the brand on life support.
I have the same feeling about the STAR TREK novels by William Shatner which resurrected Captain Kirk in the 24th century and recreated the original trio of Kirk, Spock and McCoy in the TNG era and had some wonderful stories: nine novels and a one book prequel -- but that really only played to diehard fans despite the merits of the writing, and it was best to get Kirk, Spock and McCoy back onscreen with Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban in the roles.
Even my personal golden age of SLIDERS (REBORN, which was very personal, only 24 people really participated in it) was a time of intense stress: a nervous breakdown on a roadtrip that led to an eight month delay, a very painful developmental process of exhaustion, a desperate need for it all to be over at the 22 month mark, and then a fun final two months that left me missing it all emotionally but being intellectually aware that the end needed to be the end for my own sanity and well-being. I have a lot of fun listening to the podcast about SLIDERS and re-reading the delightful correspondence over the project and it never fails to cheer me up, but I have to be selective in not reliving the nervous collapse it induced and this was fan fiction.
Another minor issue with SLIDERS in its original conception: SLIDERS often took the view that mid-90s America was the 'correct' route for society and characters acted like any divergence from that was due to a moral or social failure -- at least in the Pilot and "Prince of Wails" and "Fever." There was a certain arrogance in that and to its credit, SLIDERS soon punctured that air of self-righteousness with "The Weaker Sex" and "Luck of the Draw" where those Earths have conquered famine and war even if their methods may be offputting and at odds with the sliders.
And this may or may not be why I am so awful at alternate history (all of my efforts just become alien planets) and social satire (all my efforts just become straight commentary), but that's okay. I'm a sitcom guy, not a sci-fi guy. We all have our strengths and weaknesses as creators.
Trump signed the package. *sigh* He tries to do one decent thing (for the wrong reasons) and has no backbone or follow through. That said, I have to ask pilight and Temporal Flux: was it worth it to get the package through to maintain unemployment benefits? Or are the benefits so scant that continuing them or severing them would have made no difference at all while pushing through useless financial support to seafaring vessels and academic research that has no bearing on the recession at all? I simply don't have the perspective to venture an opinion on this, so I would defer to yours for this one too.
That’s okay. A wise man once told me that he wasn’t the final arbiter of taste and I will say the same for myself.
On loopholes:
I find that most fantasy fiction involving battles between good and evil involve loopholes. By this, I mean a story will generally establish that the heroes are underpowered against an overwhelming force with no way to victory -- but then, it turns out the enemy's supposed invincibility had some caveat. The unstoppable Death Star has a weakness where one well-aimed shot can blow up the entire space station. Captain Kirk regularly encountered godlike entities whose power were dependent on some machine that could be exploded.
The most pleasing example of loophole victory I enjoyed recently was in SUPERNATURAL where Sam and Dean Winchester are two blue collar animal control workers who have been fighting evil for 14 years and whose villain for their 15th and final season is God Almighty himself, a being of boundless power who can erase Sam and Dean from reality on a whim and the boys defeat him by clever use of osmosis to siphon God's power into his kindhearted grandson.
Another clever loophole was in RISE OF SKYWALKER where Rey is told that if she kills the Emperor, his consciousness will transfer into her body and so when the Emperor attacks her with Force Lightning, Rey reflects the lightning back at him and he kills himself, sparing Rey from being used as a host -- which for some reason, IMDB seems to consider a plothole.
SLIDERS REBORN has a loophole at the end. The central conceit is that in REBORN, the multiverse is broken: the only branching point for parallel Earths now is the day of the first slide and there are no subsequent splits before or after that single date. Smarter-Quinn wants to destroy this damaged multiverse so a new one will replace it and Quinn has to stop him; at the end, Quinn and Smarter Quinn have the chance to choose a new branching point and they choose the very moment in which they are choosing a branching point, which repairs the multiverse to have infinite branching points and preserves the existing realities. Transmodiar said that this would have simply wiped out the existing multiverse and Slider_Quinn21 says it's extremely clever, and sometimes, if I've had a bad day, I re-read Slider_Quinn21's email saying it's clever and I feel better.
I was watching Rob Benedict talk about playing CHUCK and he says that, as is obvious from a rewatch, he was not informed that his Chuck character was actually God or that his Chuck character would be revealed as evil at the end of Season 14 and be the villain of Season 15. Therefore, his acting in one episode could never hint at any revelations in future episodes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRd35H7Eu9w
But it's so interesting: Benedict says that he viewed Chuck as a character perpetually discovering himself: thinking he was a troubled writer, realizing he was a prophet, then realizing he was God, then realizing he was a villain. Benedict explained that a lot of that was because he wasn't told anything about his character beyond each individual script for each individual episode. But the result: Benedict played Chuck as 'God' having brainwashed himself into genuinely thinking himself a human named Chuck with 'God' as a sleeper personality that gradually reasserted itself, first with an aloof divinity at the end of Season 5, then as a blend of Chuck's assumed human identity but with God's power in "Don't Call Me Shurley," but finally with God's true personality at the end of "Moriah" as a cruel voyeur who torments his children for amusement.
It's as good an interpretation as we can get and I commend Mr. Benedict for his rationale and finding a way to believe in what he was performing as an actor who would perform a script with no idea what his character would be doing in the next one.
I think we’ve done a lot over many seasons to differentiate our God from any one that anyone out there in the actual world worships, if that makes sense. He’s a character on a show, he’s not meant to be a representation of any deity that anyone is in any church praying to.
I think that when you’re writing a writer -- there’s a real danger to making it too authorial. Chuck’s a character. He’s not meant to be me or anyone else on this staff. He’s meant to be a character we’ve created over a number of years.
And the type of writer he is -- I don’t think that’s a very good type of writer.
A good writer will tell you that if you write good characters, they’ll go their own way and talk to you themselves. Chuck is the kind of writer who just wants his characters to do what he wants them to do and he gets frustrated when they -- because they have a little bit of agency -- kind of refuse.
I don’t think he’s a particularly good writer. https://www.themarysue.com/interview-su … drew-dabb/
Conversation with the niece!
ME: "You'll recall that after that time with that thing and the dogs, you agreed that you would watch JUSTICE LEAGUE with me and comment on it while we ate a pizza."
LAUREN: "Yeah. You just never called it in. And now you can't because we're socially distancing! Ha! Although I guess someday you could when we're not."
ME: "Are you aware that JUSTICE LEAGUE will now be four hours long? And with the theatrical cut, you'll likely have to watch this movie for six hours while providing commentary for the entire time while eating a pizza."
LAUREN: "Oh God."
And now for Tech Talk, with Quinn Mallory:
For the longest time, my niece was understandably furious with me for buying what were essentially netbooks: little $200 tablet-laptops with 10.1 or 11.6 inch touchscreens that could detach from the keyboard and Atom or Celeron processors that could only be used for light office work and web browsing. I used them for word processing and messaging and spreadsheets and website maintenance when I didn't want to be at by (very powerful) desktop computer and wanted to work at the library or the living room or at a friend's house.
My niece would be mad because these machines always failed within a year: they would stop powering on. The charging ports would break. They would inexplicably get the display stuck upside down. Wifi wouldn't work when Bluetooth was on. The keyboard would start inputting random characters. The touchpads would fail. "Stop buying these pieces of junk and get a good laptop!" she'd shriek at me.
I'd protest, "I don't need a good laptop. I have a great desktop with an i7 processor and 32GB of RAM and two solid state drives -- " (really a laptop permanently plugged into a monitor and keyboard and mouse that's too heavy to move around much). "I just need a small laptop for work on the go."
"BUT YOU HAVE TO BUY ONE EVERY YEAR!" she howled at me. There was a long period where, after the last netbook failed, I simply got a keyboard for my iPad. And this past year, with all the work from home, I've come to depend on a Chromebook to tether me to work when wandering away from my desktop.
The Chromebook, a Samsung Chromebook 3 with a matte IPS screen (that I had to install myself) was great -- but with the shift to working from home, I realized that all the (limited) Chrome apps and (slow) Remote Desktop access didn't replace my need for a Windows 10 laptop that could run LibreOffice and Adobe Photoshop and InDesign. Despite working from home, I often had to go to different rooms for Reasons and I needed a small laptop to keep work with me. I didn't need anything fancy, just something light in hand and on the wallet -- preferably one that fell within the stipend that my job had granted me to buy some hardware for working from home. But how would I avoid all the previous pitfalls?
QUINN: "You know what your problem's been?"
ME: "Being a cheapskate when it comes to buying a secondary laptop? Being a weirdo who needs a secondary laptop?"
QUINN: "I'm not going to confirm or contradict that -- except to say you've bought laptops that were trying to be tablets and tablets that were trying to be laptops and it isn't working. I mean, look at the Egyptian timer: instead of just trying to be a tracker-trigger for the next window to open a gateway, it became a reverse homing beacon, a coordinate repository, a sacred object in a funeral ritual, an express train to Los Angeles -- and it kept glitching and seizing because the hardware got overstretched. Just choose one specific use-case. You need a laptop within a price point. So get a laptop within the price point. Don't try to get a laptop that's also a tablet."
I was reviewing all the laptop options at an electronics chain called Canada Computers where I'd bought all my previous one year wonder tablet-laptops (this was when they were still offering in-store purchasing amidst social distancing). I went over to their small and light laptops and noticed that, as always, there was a stack of 'open box' / 'refurbished' laptop boxes stacked under the display counter, as there had been every year that I'd bought a cheap laptop from them that lasted a year.
QUINN: "You know what this means?"
ME: "Discount prices from buying a refurbished item? Yes!"
QUINN: "No, you moron. There have to be like TWENTY of these open box laptops. That means people bought them, hated them and returned them. Pretty much every laptop in this store has at least four open box laptops; that means this shop is selling garbage that people just bring back. Did you buy all your old laptops here?"
ME: "Yeah."
QUINN: "This store is your problem. You need to go somewhere else."
ME: "But the refurbished discount! So entrancing!"
QUINN: "Stop! Back away from that pricetag! I swear to God, if you buy a computer from this disaster fire of a retailer, I will have to hate you. I will hate you on a physical level if you do this."
A Best Buy had opened up the road, so to review my options and went there, and noticed that the majority of the laptops were much more expensive than the ones at Canada Computers and where Canada Computers had 5 - 6 cheap little laptops (and numerous returns piled up on the floor), Best Buy had exactly ONE cheap little laptop for sale.
QUINN: "Now, Best Buy's not the be-all, end-all of computer hardware. If you want RAM or flash memory or solid state drives or enclosures or cases or fans, that's clearly Canada Computers' bread and butter. But Best Buy -- they sell consumer gear, not hobbyist hardware. Best Buy sells preassembled units and they're not going to stock lemons that they have to take back; they only have worthwhile merchandise because showroom space is valuable."
I bought the cheap little 11.6 laptop from Best Buy and it's been precisely what it needs to be. It's slow, but I've disabled all non-essential Windows services to keep it from freezing and but a secondary machine doesn't need to be a speed demon so long as it's capable of opening any and all Windows 10 applications. The battery lasts 10 hours. The wifi and bluetooth haven't glitched, the keyboard hasn't gone haywire, the touchpad works. I was getting bad laptops before because I was going to a bad store for laptops whereas Best Buy, having survived the Amazon apocalypse on retail through price matching and raising the scale of the Geek Squad and being hyperselective in what they show in their show room, has somehow survived and also thrived.
A fair and sensible assessment.
Thank you.
Trump has crashed the COVID relief package.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/2 … ost-450343
On one level, Trump is calling for something good: larger cheques to people whose need is desperate. On a more realistic level, Trump is agitating for more attention because the nation is slowly but surely turning its eyes towards President-elect Biden and Biden's shockingly conventional and status-quo upholding cabinet picks which are everything Transmodiar warned against but may or may not be a political reality of contending with a GOP Senate.
Trump doesn't care about helping anyone. He just wants to be in the news, life is just a reality show to him. But it may lead to a government shutdown as the Trump-stalled stimulus is tied to the spending bill that would keep government in operation.
I think it's important to highlight what a massive endeavour any virtual season of fanfic is for everyone involved. There's a lot of time, talent and work put into these passion projects and nobody gets paid. You do it at a loss. And there is a lot of love and fondness and obsession with the series and its characters to make this happen. My therapist referred to SLIDERS fan fiction on this level as the equivalent of a master's thesis.
I haven't been following any STAR WARS stuff since RISE, but if Slider_Quinn21 and Grizzlor are happy, I am also happy. :-)
What did SliderQuinn21 think of the final season of HOUSE OF CARDS?
Thank you for finding, editing and sharing this. It's wonderful to see John and Cleavant in their prime and at the height of their powers. Even though I don't like the Season 3 costuming and hairstyling and makeup, it's incredibly flattering towards all the actors. There's a wonderful sense of ease and friendship between all the actors.
The strength of their chemistry convinces you that these untrained civilians have repeatedly beaten the odds and survived anything and everything and will continue to do so with their onscreen fates often seeming like a temporary situation rather than a permanent conclusion. I think this is why fans kept battling for more seasons of the show and had faith that the status quo would somehow miraculously be restored.
"Season's Greedings" is a pretty solid episode. Aspects that irk me like Quinn on a date with Kelly Welles when Wade is having a breakdown are more due Jerry's absurdly flirtatious performance than the script. There are two aspects that seem a bit too toned down from a modern perspective: the issue of consumer spending and debt is due to people purchasing items they don't need and can't afford. But from a 2020 perspective, people are generally in debt because their wages don't cover the cost of living. It's ridiculous that McDonalds and Walmart earn billions while having their frontline employees paid so low that they live on food stamps. "Season's Greedings" suggests debt is a matter of willpower and brainwashing and that's simply not the case.
"Season's Greedings" also has the sliders toppling the slavery of debt by destroying all the records which is charming but naive; what computer couldn't have its files restored? What corporation wouldn't have extensive backups of its debts? But people didn't really understand computers as commonly in 1996 as they do in 2020 and "Season's Greedings" would only have needed a mild rewrite here and there to address the issues of debt for survival and computer records. It's fine.
It's a pretty decent episode. It's interesting how Torme held it up as a symbol of everything that had gone wrong with SLIDERS, talking to me about how he hated how the episode ended with everything wrapped up in a bow and happy without any twists or turns or points of thought and how the sliders step into an offscreen vortex at the end to save money, but because of what came later in Season 3 and 4 and 5, "Season's Greedings" looks pretty good now.
Also, I've come to realize from talking to my film student niece: it's hard to make anything. If you make a bad TV show or film, you're probably average. If you make something okay, you're probably good. If you make something good, you're probably brilliant. And if you make something great, you may be a genius.
There are rumours (but I can't find full confirmation yet) that Tobey Maguire will reprise his role as Peter Parker in DR. STRANGE II: MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS which will lead into AMAZING SPIDER-MAN III featuring Maguire as Spider-Man as well as Emma Stone as Gwen Stacey -- so it's possible that the massive number of cameos and multiple versions of the same characters in AMAZING III will have all the groundwork laid out in the DR. STRANGE sequel first.
I don't recommend VIP. It is not a good television series. However, I recommend the first season of SHE SPIES, which is strangely a very similar show to VIP -- a comedy action series featuring three beautiful women fighting crime every week -- but where VIP was crippled in many ways by budget and casting and limped along despite its difficulties, SHE SPIES leaps boldly and succeeds.
SHE SPIES is about three ex-cons sprung from jail to work as secret federal agents in exchange for pardons. All three are beautiful women and reformed conwomen. Cassie (Natasha Henstridge) is an espionage-oriented spy, Shane (Natashia Williams) is a fighter and Deedee (Kristen Miller) is a hacker and their handler is Jack (Carlos Jacott). SHE SPIES is a silly action show with absurd plots and the actresses perpetually in ludicrous outfits -- but SHE SPIES is good, clever, brilliant and fun.
The first is the budget: SHE SPIES is a low budget cable show and cannot pull off crazy action, so SHE SPIES smartly declares upfront: Cassie, Shane and Deedee, as ex-cons, are not permitted to carry firearms, effectively eliminating gunfights from the show. Spared the need for squibs, the show has more resources to commit to locations and hand to hand combat.
Second: the characters break the fourth wall. They have inconsistent levels of awareness that they are in a TV show, at one point complaining about the credits, often declaring that they can sense the presence of the audience watching them, regularly complaining about the male gaze and their contrived spy operations and their ridiculous disguises.
"You think this just happens!?" their handler Jack protests at one point, saying the women do not appreciate the amount of effort it takes to make "three beautiful ex-cons" the perfect agents for espionage situations and describing the aggravation of constantly securing the costumes and disguises. In another episode, Cassie (Natasha Henstridge) tells some young bystanders to leave a dangerous scene by saying, "SPECIES is on cable tonight," the movie in which Henstridge was the star.
And third: SHE SPIES has real actresses and isn't handicapped by its lead performer being someone with no performance ability outside of still images. In addition to all three being amazing actresses, all three do a great job of selling the action sequences and high kicks and hard punches and that's even with the necessity of stunt doubling.
SHE SPIES is a terrific criticism of the male-gaze oriented action comedy while still mildly getting away with being one -- or at least it was for its first 20 episodes.
Quite inexplicably, the second season abruptly did away with all the fourth wall jokes, the hyperawareness of the characters existing in a silly spy show, the rapid fire quips and played SHE SPIES absolutely straight. Without a sense of comedy to acknowledge the absurdity, SHE SPIES became a blander version of itself -- still well-acted and well-performed, but pitifully generic. Without laughter, the fight scenes became rote and dull; the plot twists became formulaic and obvious; the characterization became shallow and empty -- except it had always been but now, the show had silenced its ability to point it out. The production was still a professional product and certainly watchable, but it wasn't worth watching.
The whole show is on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwL4I4F … YMyj-lAnUj
It'd be nice to get a CHARLIE'S ANGELS reboot in this vein someday.
Do Americans really want to do this every time someone doesn't like losing an election... ?
"You the man, coach! When I grow up, I want to be just like you! A single, childless adult who parties with kids." - A teenager to the now grown up jock Slater at a high school party.
I just watched the entire SAVED BY THE BELL revival. I've only seen maybe 9 - 10 episodes of the original show, probably when I had chicken pox and had to stay home for a month as a child and was watching a lot of TV. I was impressed by how the 2020 incarnation of SAVED BY THE BELL updated the series to a modern format, recreated some of the original energy of the series but updated it to 2020 with an ironic, self-aware angle, how it embraced social justice issues of education and racism and inequality with charm and wit -- and how it picked up on all the characters over two decades after they were last seen on TV, showing their families, jobs, ambitions, and overall situations.
Mischiefmaker Zack Morris has become the inept governor of California; Kelly peddles self-help books; Jessie has become a psychiatrist and published author and high school counsellor and former big man on campus Slater remains stuck in high school as the gym teacher and become an arrested adolescent.
The best part of the show's scenes with the original cast (who are all parents and teachers to the new students) is the deadpan references to all the absurd episodes of the original show.
It really goes to show how, for a show to have a proper revival with the original cast, it is important that the original cast when we last saw them were not shot and blown up after getting their brains sucked out. Or sent to a rape camp off camera before being turned into a computer that exploded. Or merged with another character and then lost forever. Or sent into an unstable vortex, fate unknown.
Slater to Jessie, high school social justice warrior turned adult school guidance counsellor
I think I owe you an apology. I feel bad about how I treated you back in high school. You were always standing up for things for things that you believed in and I kept telling you to calm down.But you were right to be angry.
We all made fun of you, but you were the only one who really knew what was going on. Styrofoam is bad. Drilling for oil on a football field is bad. A school sponsored bikini contest is bad. I shouldn't have been telling you to calm down. I should have been yelling right there with you.
Game over for the Texas lawsuit.
I've been watching the first season of V.I.P., a wonderfully ridiculous (in)action comedy from 1998 (when Season 4 of SLIDERS was airing) featuring Pamela Anderson as a hot dog stand worker who blunders ass-backwards into:
(a) a date with a leading man celebrity actor to a Hollywood movie premiere
(b) accidentally rescuing the cowardly actor from a murderous gunman on live TV
(c) playing along with said actor telling TV reporters that she is his bodyguard to explain why he hid behind her and used her as a human shield when threatened
(d) joining an actual team of bodyguards who hire her as a figurehead while they do all the actual work and pretend that she's a martial artist/markswoman/combat strategist when her skills extend to counting cash and grilling hot dogs
V.I.P. is not 'good' by any conventional standard of quality, but it stands out to me because it is clearly being made on the same production model as Season 4 - 5 of SLIDERS: filmed in Los Angeles on a barrel-bottom scraping budget. Enclosed sets with windowless room after windowless room. 'Action' that consists of interchangeable shots of actors firing weapons off camera. A female lead hired for her surgically augmented chest and presented in an action show.
Yet, V.I.P. somehow manages to be better than the worst (meaning it's better than Season 5 of SLIDERS) despite many of the same limitations. V.I.P., while often bound to interior sets, battles the beige dullness of SLIDERS in Season 5. Walls are painted purple and blue with lights and bizarre 60s pop art livening up the sets. Clothes are vivid pink or shiny silver and other rich tones. V.I.P. is colourful, at times garishly so, but the creators are aware of the budget shortfall and putting up a mighty fight, insisting that every shot of their show decline succumbing to bland grayness of SLIDERS episodes like "Please Press One."
V.I.P. also attempts to work past its difficulties with action. It is budgetarily restricted to the lead actors and various guest henchmen firing weapons vaguely off camera and no one getting hit until the plot calls for an end to the fight, much like inaction non-masterpieces like "The Dying Fields" and "Heavy Metal. But there is some effort at strategy with the heroes often coming up with feints to draw their enemies into traps or waste all their ammo on decoys or distract with flash grenades and smoke bombs. There's an actual attempt to create an arc in the action instead of just having the actors shoot guns and stall to commercial.
The characters of V.I.P. are broadly scripted and badly defined, much like SLIDERS on the Sci-Fi Channel giving very generic roles to Quinn, Colin, Rembrandt, Maggie, Diana and Mallory. Yet, the show has cast surprisingly well outside of Pamela Anderson, hiring actors who are actually very good to play the 'real' bodyguards around Pamela Anderson's 'fake' bodyguard. The tall and regal Molly Culver gives her Tasha Dexter character a crisp professionalism and a strategic sense of movement and decisiveness and comes off as an ex-spy. The short-haired and muscled Natalie Raitano plays Nikki as a bruiser with a boxer's swagger and a mischievous aggression. And the token male of the group, Shaun Baker, gives his Quick Williams bodyguard character a charmingly unthreatening male glamour and playfulness who loves impersonations and pretending to be a hapless civillian when he's not.
The primary deficiency of V.I.P. is, oddly but unsurprisingly, lead actress Pamela Anderson. She's the co-creator and producer of the show. It wouldn't exist without her. And yet, a few episodes into Season 1, it is painfully clear that Ms. Anderson is simply not an actress and her skills are so weak that she makes Kari Wuhrer look good.
Kari Wuhrer may not be the master thespian, and she had deeply embarassing moments in Season 3 like "Dinoslide" where she couldn't hold a rifle convincingly (which is more on the weapons trainer than on Wuhrer). However, Kari Wuhrer has the basic skills: she can deliver dialogue and hit the points of emotion and exposition. She can perform the character's onscreen actions within frame, she can react and build rapport with other performers and she can carry a scene.
Pamela Anderson can't seem to do these things. I never thought I would see an actor fail to walk down a hallway unconvincingly, but Anderson can't do it; she is visibly struggling to stay within the center of the frame and each step is guardedly hesitant as she's afraid to throw off the shot. She can't decide whether or not to swing her arms and holds them at an awkward middle-height. She has absolutely no thought or technique in how she delivers lines, at one point saying, "Okaabuhhahhhwannarsss" which I had to listen to four times before I realized she was saying, "Okay. But I want a raise." There is no thought to emphasis and her enunciation is shockingly poor.
Anderson is also pitifully incapable of carrying a scene; she can't bounce off her other actors because she doesn't seem to react to them, suggesting she's somehow been composited into the shot in post. She doesn't generate a friendly chemistry or rapport with guest stars with whom she's called to create a bond; she is a vacuum of anti-screen presence. Kari Wuhrer would never be so inept.
Anderson is good on camera when she's in slow motion, walking silently towards the audience, presenting a steely scowl as her supposed bodyguard character only to collapse into laughter as she gets close to the lens. She can do a music video. But once she's given any actual dialogue or any point of narrative or emotion to convey, she becomes a mess.
Kari Wuhrer was, for all her issues, an actress capable of acting. Pamela Anderson, however, is on camera because she has been surgically redesigned for the male gaze. This is another problem that Kari didn't have, or at least not to the same degree. While Kari Wuhrer had C-cup breast implants, Seasons 4 - 5 generally costumed her in blouses and jackets that didn't show off her cleavage except in specific occasions and even the sports bra of "Slidecage" was quite tame. Kari Wuhrer could still be presented as a woman who wasn't a Hollywood actress.
Anderson in V.I.P., however, has DD-cup breasts. Even in normal clothes, she looks like a surgical experiment. Her implants don't sit naturally on her body as any sort of plausible formation of fatty chest tissue; they don't rest against her form. They protrude and burst as a separate addition to her figure. It seems unlikely that her minimum wage hot dog stand worker character could afford the $15,000 for cosmetic surgery in addition to the lifetime of medical maintenance and upkeep. Kari Wuhrer, with C-cups that could be de-emphasized, played a lot of centerfold pinup girls, but she could also play a soldier, a hairdresser, a journalist, a police officer or a doctor or a hot dog vendor.
The unfortunate truth is that Kari Wuhrer and Pamela Anderson have bodies that were designed by men, for men and for the male gaze and for the camera to show them in full with their chests to be the most prominent part of their figure in a full body shot. Despite the popularity of these images, I'm not sure that most women would want to look like either one of them, to be the center of unwanted male attention and harassment, to be unbalanced on top, to have back issues and difficulties with posture. And despite Wuhrer and Anderson having made a lot of money, I'm not sure that many actresses would want to limit themselves to only playing characters meant to appeal to the male gaze. And outside of that, their bodies aren't really all that impressive; neither had much musculature. Neither were actually that fit. Outside of the augmentations, they simply acquired a lean skinniness through what looks to me like deprivation and liquid diets at the time. Women and girls should not look to them as role models of health or athleticism.
But amusingly, V.I.P. seems to understand this problem entirely and addresses it by having a worthy female role model onscreen. V.I.P. repeatedly compares Molly Culver's actual bodyguard character with Pamela Anderson's fake-figurehead bodyguard role -- and contrasts them accordingly. Molly Culver's Tasha Dexter wears suits -- fitted by 90s standards, a bit loose and big by modern standards, but she dresses like a professional, moves like an Olympic athlete, and fights like Bruce Lee. In contrast, Pamela Anderson's Val dresses like a teenaged cheerleader, is all hands in the air and uncoordinated in her gait, and can't actually fight at all. Tasha speaks with a measured, cool, dry delivery; Val babbles in an at times unintelligible mess. Val's onscreen beauty is presented through dresses and tops that wrap around her chest and emphasize strained straps and the full roundedness of her breasts. Tasha wears clothes that drape and flow in smooth, clean lines with Tasha being a picture of active and calculated athleticism.
Molly Culver is a really good actress in all the ways Anderson isn't and the highlight of her scenes is her exasperated frustration where the public at large lauds Val as the world's greatest bodyguard when Tasha is the one who is everything Val only pretends to be. Pamela Anderson may be the lead, but Molly Culver is the star.
(For all I know, Culver has as much silicon or saline in her as Anderson, but the show puts her in power suits, so I can't tell.)
What's also interesting to me is that on some level, Pamela Anderson herself must know this and encourage the show -- her show -- to do this. As the executive producer, Anderson would have had full control over who to cast. And she deliberately surrounded herself with extremely talented actors who are skillful in all the areas where Anderson is not. V.I.P. presents Anderson's character as a fake, an impostor, a phony supported by the real talent of her supporting cast, another choice that would have been Anderson's to make. In terms of the V.I.P. television series, Pamela Anderson backed other women and supported their talents.
In contrast, Kari Wuhrer during her time on SLIDERS did not support other women, actively harassing and bullying her female co-star into quitting and making catty remarks about her in the press.
Anyway. Season 5 of SLIDERS could have used V.I.P.'s set dresser and action choreographer. And I assume that Pamela Anderson as Maggie Beckett would have been even more bizarre than Kari Wuhrer, but given that Anderson was content to play an inept goofball to let real actresses take the lead on her own show, it's safe to think that Anderson wouldn't have driven Sabrina Lloyd off the show.
Don't watch V.I.P. It's only interesting in terms of 90s TV and subverting the genre and production conventions of the era. An era that has passed (thank God), because today, if men want to see surgically altered women, they have the internet; they wouldn't go to V.I.P. or SLIDERS for that kind of content and it'd be a waste of time, effort and resources to court that kind of audience. Television now presents action heroines in terms of physical proficiency and athletic ability from Megan Boone on THE BLACKLIST to Jaimie Alexander on BLINDSPOT and it's a shame Maggie Beckett wasn't rendered this way.
It occurs to me that we could write a script called PARALLELED or we could still get UNPARALLELED. But we'd all better do it fast because there are only two of these titles left to us!
"The justices are not going to have the slightest interest in entertaining a sprawling lawsuit brought by an unaffected third-party state — one that, if Texas got its way, would forevermore thrust the Supreme Court into the thick of electoral politics."
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/10/politics … index.html
Well, you know what this means. It means that Temporal Flux, Slider_Quinn21 and I should combine our talents and write and sell a screenplay called PARALLELED before someone else gets it because with PARALLELS as a TV movie and PARALLEL as a feature film, the title PARALLELED is all that remains. We should all join in together and snap that up before someone else get it. Temporal Flux will apply his satirical sense of inverted, skewed without skewering comedy. Slider_Quinn21 will bring his sense of emotional momentum and his crisp exposition. And ireactions will buy the Fade In screenwriting software license to type it all up and export it to PDF.
Well, then that's 18 states supporting an absurd and incoherent lawsuit, the basis of which is that voter fraud was somehow widespread in 2020 because there was no evidence of voter fraud and therefore no evidence that there wasn't voter fraud. As Transmodiar might say, "You can't prove a negative" -- which isn't true, but the underlying point still stands -- the absence of evidence is not evidence. Biden doesn't need to prove his votes weren't fraudulent he's not the one alleging fraud.
And, to my surprise, Trump's judges are not falling in line for their benefactor. Across the board, Trump-nominated judges are striking down his ridiculous lawsuits.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ … ump-444023
Why is the Texas attorney general doing this? He's under investigation for corruption and he's hoping this hopeless lawsuit will win him a presidential pardon.
https://www.cbr.com/spider-man-3-andrew … ten-dunst/
The third MCU SPIDER-MAN film will apparently feature Tom Holland as Peter Parker, Zendaya Stoermer Coleman as MJ, Alfred Molina as Dr. Octopus (reprising the role from Sam Raimi's SPIDER-MAN II), Jamie Foxx as Electro (reprising his role from THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN II) and Andrew Garfield (!) also as Peter Parker and Kirsten Dunst (!) as Mary Jane Watson (!?!!).
CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS on the CW seems to have emboldened a certain devil may care craziness. It's ridiculous. As ridiculous as, I dunno, a SLIDERS story where Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo have a rematch against the Season 3 monsters. But here we are.
It's a ridiculous case. Texas has no chance of getting this case forward because their case is dependent on claiming there were tens of thousands of fraudulent signatures -- and there is absolutely no evidence of that whatsoever. (Absence of evidence to the contrary isn't evidence.) They can't establish evidence of injury or just cause for this lawsuit to go anywhere. (Not liking the results of a vote is not injury or just cause.)
I think, although the CW wouldn't permit Chuck's death in Season 11, they couldn't force the issue in Season 15. What could the CW do to SUPERNATURAL? Cancel it?
God is a difficult character to write. One of the best renditions of the character, JOAN OF ARCADIA, was cancelled in Season 2 and that's always been a shame.
In terms of SUPERNATURAL, I think the show has largely done a decent job, but due to the show being extended to three times its original lifespan, Chuck's characterization and reveals and overall arc are not entirely airtight.
If the intention from Season 4's "The Monster at the End of this Book" had been for Chuck to be eventually revealed as God, certain scenes in "Monster" would not have been present. Chuck is shown alone and experiencing psychic visions of future episodes and seeks to warn Sam and Dean only to be intimidated by the angel Zachariah who informs the agonized Chuck that even if he killed himself, the angels would simply resurrect him.
This doesn't actually track with later episodes where Chuck is decidedly not omniscient with regards to future events. He predicted and planned for Dean to execute Jack with the Equalizer gun and was taken by surprise. And his supposed omniscience didn't allow him to predict Jack siphoning his power; in fact, Jack is a massive blindspot even in his omniscience for present and past events. SUPERNATURAL's prophets are also less precognitive than their title would suggest; they predict inevitable events but not outcomes, much in the same way a mechanic predicts that you'll need an oil change eventually.
Had Chuck been planned all along to be revealed as God, "The Monster at the End of this Book" would have left it vague how Chuck receives his 'visions' (because he doesn't receive any) and rather than have Zachariah frighten Chuck, perhaps Chuck would have fallen asleep and Zachariah would read his next manuscript malevolently. Alternatively, a future Chuck appearance could have revealed that Chuck suppressed his true identity as a 'sleeper' personality not to be reawakened until after "Swan Song."
And had it really been planned all along that Chuck is a sadistic voyeur, I think "Swan Song" would have altered Chuck's monologue slightly, saying that "endings are hard," but then intoning that some endings aren't endings at all, just one door closing while another one opens as we go from Dean eating dinner with Ben and Lisa to Sam somehow restored and watching at a distance -- hinting that Chuck is determined to maneuver events to keep Sam and Dean hunting monsters for even longer.
"Don't Call Me Shurley" would also have needed a slight adjustment: rather than have Chuck indifferent to humanity's impending doom at Amara's hands but ultimately return as a loving father who took a step back, the episode would have needed to present Chuck as a viewer. With "Moriah"'s revelation coming in the future, "Don't Call Me Shurley" could have had Chuck declare that he didn't want his favourite show to end, but it looked like it was ending and he was simply going to keep his distance, survive Amara's onslaught, and then start a new TV show/reality and try again. Metatron would chastise Chuck for his indifference and then declare that if Chuck truly believed in his story and creations, he would get involved in the story even if it might mean Chuck might not exist afterwards to tell a new story should Amara win.
Chuck would respond to Dean saying Chuck abandoned humanity by saying, "I know you think I'm some all powerful deity to be worshipped, but I'm not. I'm just a dad who had to take a beat and let my boys make their own choices, find their own way and fight their own fights -- but I'm here for you now with this fight."
Dean might have protested, "A father's there for his kids! He inspires them! He helps light their way even if he can't carry them, but you just left us in the dark!" And perhaps Chuck would say he'd try to make that right and then at the end of Season 11, he'd declare, "You're right, Dean. I did leave you alone. A parent shouldn't do that. Amara and I want to fix that now," and that would have Mary Winchester return.
But then "Moriah" could reveal that Chuck is actually not the passive viewer he claimed to be. He is the showrunner. And anyone who inflicts this much grief on his children so that he can have more episodes of his "favourite show" is the villain.
There is a degree of wiggle room in that what we see onscreen as Chuck is a facade; the face and charisma and warmth of Rob Benedict is a shell inhabited by a much more complex personality who wields Benedict's affability and emotional accessibility for his own purposes and with Season 15's Chuck using the Benedict skin as a subtly toxic and indirectly cruel blade against those who trusted in Rob's gentle screen presence.
And the writers certainly mined past decisions well and did their best to earn it and play fair with it and did their best not to blatantly contradict the past except in areas that were always open to suspicion of onscreen events. But Seasons 1 - 12 were certainly not building to a grand showdown against Chuck; Rob Benedict was not playing Chuck as God pretending to be normal in Season 4 - 5, nor did he later play Chuck in Season 11 as Chuck as a sadist masquerading as an exasperated father who came back to save his kids.
Ultimately, Chuck's turn to villainy is a retcon, albeit an inevitable (if unexpected) retcon.
Something interesting about Chuck.
In Season 11's "Don't Call Me Shurley," Chuck expressed irritation with humanity and a desire to give up and let Amara destroy it all. Chuck pointed out that the angels, despite being given their freedom, had chosen to continue pursuing the Apocalypse. Castiel had become a mutated angel of his own accord. Dean had pushed for Death to restore Sam's soul; Sam had insisted on restoring Dean from a demonic existence that ultimately led to Amara being unlocked.
Chuck declared he was done watching his children fail and that he was done -- until Metatron, an unlikely advocate for humanity, demanded that Chuck stop seeing himself as an awkward human being and as God Almighty and respect humanity's perseverance, creativity and indomitable spirit at which point Chuck decided to get involved. Chuck resurrected the dead, approached the Winchesters, brought Kevin's ghost to the bunker and sent him to heaven and won the Winchester's (hesitant) trust. Metatron would later sacrifice himself pleading for humanity to be spared.
Informant watched these episodes and declared that Chuck hadn't really been depressed and hadn't given up on humanity and was just pretending to be an indifferent God to inspire Metatron to get back on track. In terms of the actual onscreen events, this was Informant's usual attitude to God; that only Informant's view of a Christian God is permitted to be considered, worshipped or depicted in fiction -- to the point of declaring with no onscreen evidence whatsoever that Chuck was play acting in his exasperated frustration with Sam, Dean and Castiel.
Except... as of "Moriah" in Season 14, it turned out that Informant was absolutely right about one thing -- Chuck was indeed playacting in Season 11. "Moriah" asserts that Chuck has been deliberately forcing Sam and Dean to the center of every apocalyptic crisis because SUPERNATURAL is his "favourite show" -- and given that Chuck would not have wanted his favourite show to end with Amara destroying all reality in Season 11 (or end at all), that means Chuck's indifference to Sam and Dean in Season 11 was indeed feigned.
However, Season 15 asserts that Amara really was a threat to the world and Chuck and exists independently of him. Season 15 also has Chuck, when left to his own devices, utterly sincere in his view of himself as a writer, seeking out former fangirl Becky for inspiration and encouragement in his writing. So how much of Chuck's behaviour in Season 11 was sincere, how much was counterfeit, and why did Chuck lie or pretend to be uncaring that his favourite show could end with Season 11?
This is a question that may or may not have an answer. After Season 5, SUPERNATURAL was generally written one season at a time. In addition, Chuck being the final villain of the series was not intended; in fact, Chuck's true identity was an area where even Eric Kripke himself was decidedly noncommital. He didn't tell Rob Benedict until late into Season 5 that Chuck was God, meaning Benedict played Chuck's terror of angels and awkwardness at fan conventions as absolutely genuine. Chuck's absence from Seasons 6- 11 outside a brief cameo in Season 10's "Fan Fiction" maintained the vague uncertainty.
And in Season 11, Chuck was unquestionably intended to be a force for good by the writers under showrunner Andrew Dabb; the original plan was for Chuck to be killed off after "Don't Call Me Shurley," upping the stakes even more with the boys losing their most powerful ally -- except the CW intervened on Chuck's behalf, declaring that killing off the character of God was courting entirely too much religious and metaphysical controversy for their taste.
The decision to make Chuck a villain tracks with various characters questioning God's motives from Seasons 1 - 13 -- except that having Chuck potentially malevolent was never a serious plan. It was simply an obvious and worthwhile avenue of drama when writing for a largely offscreen character who wasn't around to defend or justify his actions. It's only with Season 13 that SUPERNATURAL began actively laying the groundwork for presenting Chuck as a villain, first by showing a parallel world where he'd abandoned humanity to an angelic apocalypse, and then in Season 14's tenth episode, "Nihilism."
Michael said:
Me and my brother -- my Lucifer -- when we fought in my world, we thought that God would come back. Give us answers: why he'd gone, what we'd done. But instead, do you know what happened?Nothing. No God. Nothing. And now, now that I'm in here -- now I know why.
God -- 'Chuck' -- is a writer. And like all writers, he churns out draft after draft. My world? This world? Nothing but failed drafts. And when he realizes that they're flawed, he moves on and tries again. Because he doesn't care.
There is a thematic inevitability to God being the final enemy for the Winchester brothers. But retroactively, what was Chuck doing in Season 11? Humanity was genuinely under threat as was Chuck himself; did he decide that, if he had to insert himself into the story, he would wait until the most dramatic moment and risk his favourite show being obliterated? Was that why he pretended to be disenchanted with SUPERNATURAL? Declaring Seasons 6 - 11 to be "all reruns" when the truth was he'd been fervently watching every episode the entire time?
And in his gentleness with the Winchesters -- was that sincere? Or was he playing the role he thought would work best for his story? The role of a cautiously distant but loving father who had, for better or worse, felt he had to stop being a "helicopter parent"?
It's also most interesting: Chuck wins the Winchester's trust by sending Kevin's spirit to heaven. But Season 15 reveals that Chuck sent Kevin to hell. Why? From a behind the scenes standpoint, Season 15 wanted a familiar face to explain the situation and Osiric Chau was available to reprise his role. But from an in-universe perspective, why did Chuck say he was going to give Kevin an "upgrade" to heaven but instead send him to hell?
It's possible that there simply isn't an answer outside of the writers having written Chuck season by season and having had one intention in Season 11 but chosen to alter their plans after that and that's the only explanation we'll ever have.
*sigh* So busy lately...
I was very satisfied with the SUPERNATURAL ending. The only thing that I would have changed would have been for the CW to announce that they would have WAYWARD SISTERS next year after all.
That said, I was surprised when my niece, a big SUPERNATURAL fan, told me that she was deeply disappointed with it.
Historically, she has strongly disliked Eugenie Ross-Leming and Brad Buckner scripts for being filled with forced, plot-driven occurences with characters making nonsensical choices to serve the plot, and she felt that "Inherit the Earth" had Ross-Leming and Buckner's worst tendencies from a contrived and rushed means of defeating Chuck to a random and unearned betrayal from Michael and a ridiculously haphazard deceit from the Winchesters.
She was also dismayed by Jack being a God who would do absolutely nothing as though inaction and indifference were somehow to be admired. "You can tell that SUPERNATURAL was started by a Jewish writer and finished by two Christian writers," she said, and she was also unimpressed by Jack's claims that he would be present in all aspects of life but absent in any practical sense.
She thought it was a waste of dramatic potential for Dean to have no further development on Castiel's apparent death. She was also disappointed by "Carry On," noting that the episode seemed to be struggling to fill its timeslot with two musical montages and she disliked the idea that the point of life was to die and reach the afterlife.
I talked a bit about how Charlie and Kevin's deaths were to show how hunters lead dangerous lives and that Dean, once no longer having his life written by Chuck, suffered the same fate as so many other hunters and that it made sense. I said I felt that Jack might not write events for drama as Chuck did, but to me, the definitive Jack-scene is "The Bad Place" where Jack attends a Narcotics Anonymous group and regards the attendees with interest, enthusiasm, respect and without any judgement, pleased to be present, requesting assistance but not forcing it -- and that I imagined Jack using his omniscience to be there for people in a conversational sense but never a dictatorial one -- although I confess that this is not in the show, based in my fondness for the TV show JOAN OF ARCADIA where God makes requests and offers advice but does not coerce, threaten or offer anything in return. ("I don't bargain; that would be cruel.")
My niece replied that while my responses were very logical, she was more concerned with the themes of the series and she felt that the finale didn't fulfill them, although she said that it was more about the 15 year journey than the finale at the end of it.
I just really wish, for her, that WAYWARD SISTERS had been picked up. She loves SUPERNATURAL conventions and travels around the continent to attend them, but she doesn't go for Jared and Jensen. She goes for Kim Rhodes, Briana Buckmaster, Ruth Connell, Rob Benedict, Richard Speight Jr. and it's a shame that Rhodes and Buckmaster never got their show.
My hope is that Trump will be in jail by 2024.
What happened here?
Looks like they moved in the kids’ table from Thanksgiving
It's a bill signing desk, normally used when they need extra space for guests
And it's a desk sized so the person sitting behind it can share the spotlight with others. But when that person sits behind that desk alone, you see how small and weak that person is.
Joe Biden is not the candidate I wanted, but he has been becoming more of the candidate I wanted. It's interesting to look at his outburst with a plant worker who accused him of being part of a conspiracy to shutter second amendment rights. "You're full of shit!" Biden shrieked at him, ranting about how he owned guns himself for hunting and howling, "I don't work for you!" When a student asked him why Democrats should support him during his weak primary performance, Biden snapped that democracy is a caucus and a discussion (as opposed to a competition) and asked her if she'd ever even been to a caucus. When she hesitantly (and untruthfully) said she had, Biden shrieked at her that she was "a lying, dog-faced pony soldier" (?!?).
The back chatter is that when Obama formally began coaching him, the advice was to stop losing his cool like this. "You're not running for Senate, but for President," Biden's former boss allegedly told him. "Don't be senatorial. Be presidential." What does that mean?
In practice, it means that later, when a black kid asked Biden what he could do for black people and mocked Biden for saying that any Trump voters weren't really black -- Biden responded with a full and polite answer about giving black-owned businesses startup funds to encourage other investors to chip in, childcare that would allow black families to work and build wealth -- and no anger at the jibe or resentment at the mockery which he so richly deserved. It means that when a college student asked Biden why young people should support him, Biden responded by telling him that this current generation of youth is the generation that is the most educated informed and also the least prejudiced and ignorant, and that Biden would try to serve as a transitional president to their leadership.
I watched Biden saying after he won that Democrats should find ways to unite with Trumpists.
For all those of you who voted for President Trump, I understand the disappointment tonight. I've lost a couple of times myself. But now let's give each other a chance. It's time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, see each other again, listen to each other again. To make progress, we have to stop treating our opponents as our enemies. They are not our enemies. They're Americans. They're Americans.
This is a silly fantasy. This is saying that we should be kind to the arsonist burning down our house, that we should have a listening ear to the racist shrieking that Chinese people are making good Christian Americans sick, that we should treat Men's Rights Activist terrorists as having a legitimate point of view in declaring that women are required to provide sex to any man who wants it. That we should be concerned with the well-being of the person who refuses to wear a mask during a pandemic.
But this is also the job: a president sets the tone he wants people to find. A president's job is to treat you like the absolute best version of yourself, the most honourable and self-sacrificing and empathetic incarnation of your being -- even if you aren't there yet, even if you may never get there at all. A president speaks to you as though you have conquered your failings and weaknesses so as to remind you that can choose to do so. And a real president sits at that tiny desk and allows himself to look smaller to make space for the other people around him. A real president does not sit there alone.
I hope it goes well. I love STARGIRL.
**
I don't think TITANS is a bad show. It's compellingly acted, drivenly filmed, intensely scripted and even absurdities like Dick Grayson being tried, convicted and sentenced in a few days work for a dark superhero reality. It's probably fine. It's probably just not for me. There's definitely an audience for more nihilistic superheroes with WATCHMEN, THE BOYS and now TITANS. As Transmodiar once said, I'm not the final arbiter of taste.
Turnout was estimated to be high due to a highly partisan election year and few undecided voters. 23 million shouldn't be a surprise.
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