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Okay, Trevorrow's EPISODE IX has been leaked, reviewed by a YouTuber and confirmed as genuine by Trevorrow himself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ShS32kJclU

I’ve watched BATWOMAN, SUPERGIRL and GREEN ARROW AND THE CANARIES, but Slider_Quinn21 and Temporal Flux had so many interesting points that I want to respond to the CRISIS stuff first.

On Parallel Universes and Stacks
While I personally don’t get too much into the ‘science’ of fictional realities, I thought CRISIS did some interesting things stylistically. Slider_Quinn21 remarked upon SMALLVILLE feeling out of place; I’d argue that in a multiverse-spanning adventure, each world should be quite different.

Language
The pastoral, rural look of the SMALLVILLE sequence with the gentler editing and slower pacing was very different from the more propulsive styles of ARROW and THE FLASH (on a good day). The score lifted from Mark Snow’s original soundtrack, with Snow’s subtle synthesizer being significantly different from the bombastic Arrowverse music.

And when we saw Earth-1996 with Brandon Routh’s Superman, the music again switched to the 70s orchestral style of John Williams. Each universe had its own filmic language, its own specific flourishes, its own interpretation of the DC mythology – and despite being remarked upon sparingly, there was a certain instinctive sense of reasoning to Superman looking like Tyler Hoechlin and Brandon Routh and Tom Welling because each actor fit the surrounding style of visual storytelling that was specific to each Earth.

Meaning
The fact that it didn’t make logical sense or ‘scientific’ sense, to me, was less relevant than the fact that it made emotional sense.

And with Ezra Miller appearing – I feel like that’s something unique and special to the Arrowverse showrunners. In the past, superhero adaptations have had a certain dismissiveness to the source material: 1966 BATMAN played it all for mocking laughs, Zack Snyder has decried the benevolent, non-lethal Batman of the comics as childish, SMALLVILLE presented Superman’s father as a villain.

Inclusivity
But the ARROWVERSE, starting with THE FLASH, cast the previous Flash actor to play the new Flash’s father and paid grand tribute to the 1990s show, even having some of the original actors play older versions of their roles (Mark Hamill as the Trickster, Amanda Pays as Tina McGee). And CRISIS, despite not making rational sense in showing Ezra Miller and Brandon Routh and Tom Welling and Burt Ward and Ashley Scott and Dina Meyer, declared that all versions of these characters are valid and true and meaningful – and that, to me, is far more important than what Ezra’s Barry was doing in the Speed Force. By featuring all the Season 3 monsters, it was declaring that they too are part of SLIDERS and they all have a place in the SLIDERS mythology because they are stories and every story ever written is a SLIDERS story and – sorry, I’m getting off track.

Batwoman
I thought something was really off in this week’s BATWOMAN – specifically, the blocking and arrangement of the actors. Despite a very strong script where Kate Kane is confronted by a heteronormative press that assumes Batwoman must be a straight girl, a powerful moment where an angry and outed lesbian assumes Batwoman couldn’t possibly understand her grief, and a beautiful moment of the kid apologizing to Kate for assuming she was straight – the episode doesn’t make a lot of visual sense. And, as I said above, while superhero shows don’t need to make rational sense, they need to make stylistic sense.

How the hell does Kate stop a runaway train with a grapple gun? The average train car is going to weigh 80,000 pounds and trains would have at least eight cars. Even if the steel cable held, the grapple hook would have ripped out of any surface it adhered to long before the train was yanked to a halt. And how does Slam Bradley spot a streak of metal flying towards Kate’s head and move fast enough to knock her out of the way?

When Kate and Alice are grappling in the school hallway and Kate tells young Parker to run, why does Parker run towards Alice and past her, politely allowing Alice to hit her in the head and knock her unconscious? Why then does Alice drag Parker away but leave Kate to locate them in the one part of the school their in and how does Kate immediately arrive without needing to search?

Why does Kate stand at a distance from Alice holding Parker hostage when Alice is holding an unwieldy power saw that is far too heavy to move quickly and which Kate, even at a distance, could quickly jam with a batarang or rip away from Alice with a cable? Why does Kate allow Alice to hold Parker captive?

Why does Slam Bradley see a school being evacuated due to a bomb threat and then RUN into the school to tell the already evacuating people to evacuate and then follow them out the very entrance he came in?

The direction is so amateur and unprofessional and the script creates a lot of physical requirements to make the scenes above work and the editing and blocking don’t address the problems but in fact blatantly emphasize and add to them.

The acting was great, though, particularly Ruby Rose’s stunned silence at Parker snapping at Batwoman that Batwoman couldn’t possibly understand being closeted but then outed. And when Beth shows up at the end and Kate slams Beth into a table and tries to rip off a mask that isn’t there and starts shrieking, “Who are you?” I felt tears come into my eyes and wondered if this was an escaped Alice having another mental episode.

Supergirl
SUPERGIRL, however, suggests from the multiple Brainiac 5s, that the Beth at the end of BATWOMAN could be from a parallel Earth that’s been folded into Earth-1. It’s interesting: despite Oliver restoring the multiverse and all the lost realities and the SMALLVILLE reality as established by the CRISIS finale and showrunner Marc Guggenheim – Supergirl and her friends are operating on the assumption that all Earths were folded into Earth 1 and that there is no more multiverse.

It was neat how SUPERGIRL acknowledges that it has an easy out to reset the Kara/Lena friendship much as SMALLVILLE regularly used amnesia, but SUPERGIRL declines and has Lena retain all her recollections. It’s a very enjoyable episode although I question the use of random pop music for fight scenes, a trait SUPERGIRL seemed to develop with this year’s premiere.

It’s interesting how SUPERGIRL demonstrates that the Arrowverse continuity is now subjecting superheroes to situations I never expected to see outside of comic books. Supergirl remembers an entire life that won’t sync up to her surroundings, something Superman has had to endure after numerous reality warping crossovers.

Superman confessed in the SUPERMAN REBORN (hmm) plotline that he remembers multiple versions of his origin story becomes he’s been combined from so many different timelines; that he’s never entirely sure if his parents died when he was a child or an adult or if they’re even alive today. It’s obsessive, detail-oriented geekiness that I assumed wouldn’t ever be present in a mainstream TV show, but the Arrowverse is delving into the cognitive dissonance of superheroes with lives of lengthy continuity issues.

There was a hilarious issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN once where Harry Osborn reveals to Peter Parker that he was once the Green Goblin and Peter exasperatedly reminds Harry that he already knew that and Harry apologizes, saying that with all the amnesia and mindwipes and voodoo, it’s hard to remember who knows what. There was another delightful, multi-year arc where the Norman Osborn gets angry because he once knew Spider-Man’s true identity but it’s somehow been erased from his mind by a magical spell mixed with a global nanotechnology enmeshed with Inhuman genetic rewriting.

I never expected to see anything like that but here we are in SUPERGIRL where Kara goes to tell Lena all about the Crisis only to discover Lena already knows.

Uh. I thought Dreamer and Brainiac 5 broke up because of Brainy’s compulsive gift-giving. But I’ve had so much going on in Real Life that I may have forgotten the episode where they reconciled.

Green Arrow and the Canaries
As a backdoor pilot, I am very concerned that GREEN ARROW AND THE CANARIES (a) has a cliffhanger that could go unresolved should the CW decline to order it to series and (b) has a somewhat convoluted continuity with the Mia Smoak we know inhabiting a world that is mismatched to her memories. That said, I really enjoyed GREEN ARROW AND THE CANARIES and fervently hope for a series.

My niece recently remarked that every TV show I obsess over (BLINDSPOT, THE BLACKLIST, THE INSIDE, WYNONNA EARP, BATWOMAN, SHADOWHUNTERS) is about a woman with a traumatic past who now fights crime and now ARROW is rebranding itself as the kind of show I like to watch and with Kathryn MacNamara (of SHADOWHUNTERS) as a bow-wielding warrior with a troubled past and a crimefighting present.

I love the Dinah and Laurel-2 partnership that’s been established so beautifully over the past several seasons of ARROW and the Mia Smoak character is spectacular with her sardonic rage and savage combat skills which MacNamara embodies with such disarming charm and physicality.

I assumed that when the multiverse was rebuilt, Oliver/Spectre placed Laurel and Dinah in 2040 to help Mia... unless I'm wrong and the characters are meant to be 20 years older than the actors.

That said, I confess – I actually needed a few minutes to remind myself of who JJ and Connor were and which Laurel this was and where we’d last seen Mia in the 2019 episodes of CRISIS – because I’ve had so much going on in Real Life that I’d forgotten exactly who these people were and had to remind myself by going on the Arrowverse Wiki. Which is bizarre: it declares that Laurel-2’s father was an “unnamed man” and links to an entry for “Unnamed Man (Laurel-2’s father)” – when one would think we could assume that it was a parallel version of Quintin Lance.

Ooooh, LEGENDS is back!

I have not responded yet because I have been so busy on a video editing project that I have not watched BATWOMAN and SUPERGIRL this week. I will when I have gotten some time later tomorrow night.

(Urgent, important information. ;-) )

Chromebook running!

It is indeed a shame, but let us take comfort in knowing that Informant is in a better place (well, a better place for him) where he can express his views and declare them to be the consensus of his community.

I'm sure he'd be happy to see Eileen back and view that as relief after Charlie reappeared in the series (as a double) to his infuriation as he loathes Charlie. And there was a point in the third episode where I'm sure Informant would have despaired of the glacial pacing; I myself asked my niece if we were going to spend the entire 20 episode season in Harlan, Kansas as the boys spent three weeks meandering about the supposed outbreak of hell which turned out to be less global and more municipal.

Over in the STAR WARS thread, I remarked that THE LAST JEDI was an eccentric outlier and that expecting it to be the template going forward for the STAR WARS series was like expecting SUPERNATURAL to make every episode a metatextual comedy episode instead of having just a few a year. However, SUPERNATURAL's final season seems to have decided to wrap a metatextual comedy plot around the arcs for the year with very serious and dark stories framed in Chuck's comedy which itself has taken on a crueller sharpness.

The three part premiere and the way the story just stalled and waited -- it reflects a certain narrative desperation. God is an enemy and has unleashed hell on Earth -- except the budget clearly struggles to show even a small town under siege. The sight of monsters roaming in broad daylight should be terrifying; visually, it looks like a SUPERNATURAL cosplay contest.

So the show steps back, declaring that God has been weakened by Sam shooting him and that while God threw a (three week) tantrum, the status quo remains and Sam and Dean are free to battle monsters of the week.

Resurrecting Eileen is an interesting choice. Fans were enraged that a character with a disability and such an important area of representation was killed off and not even given any dialogue or interaction in the episode where she died. SUPERNATURAL resurrects the character and salves that wound well, much as bringing Felicia Day back to the series if not the original Charlie was well-appreciated in Season 13 and 14.

And then we get to the middle episodes and mid-season cliffhanger. We finally see God in his true identity without the Chuck affectation of harmless friendliness and without the sense that the Chuck persona is a Halloween costume worn by an omnipotent being trying to pass for human -- and God goes to hang out with Becky and he remains Chuck but sadistic.

Chuck is revealed to be an insecure, lazy, uninspired, desperate-for-approval writer who just happens to be able to rewrite reality itself while lacking the power to override individual decision and free will even if he can kill or disappear people on a whim.

His perpetually allowing Sam and Dean to face off against Leviathans and archangels and Metatron is revealed as a lack of inspiration or imagination: he doesn't write stories; he instead creates conflicts and then observes and documents, but now that his playthings have become aware of his approach, they are resisting his manipulation and have also reduced his power.

We see Chuck engaging in SUPERNATURAL villainy: murdering an entire casino of people, dispatching underlings to torment Sam and Dean and move them into position for his plot -- and the writing emphasizes how Chuck's plotting is sloppy and obvious because he's a selfish and awkward little man who is merely in the position of God -- but he's still no less threatening because of how even at half-power, he dwarves Sam and Dean and his pettiness is matched with invincibility. I'm intrigued to note that due to either a lack of power or the writers not wanting to kill their leads, he's threatening Sam and Dean rather than erasing them and moving on. I'm looking forward to seeing how it all turns out.

Well, I think it's somewhat relevant that I have bought a new computer for the sole purpose of posting on this message board. (It cost two figures and it's been held up at customs.)

I guess, for me -- I already know my own capacity for savagery, cruelty, violence and debasement, and I don't need Nazi stories for that. That's not to say such stories shouldn't exist.

**

Another instance of ambiguity that I really like that is somewhat related to SLIDERS -- the TV show DOCTOR WHO (a British version of SLIDERS that pre-dates SLIDERS) was cancelled between 1989 and 2005 aside from a 1996 TV movie. Leading up to 2005 was a run of DOCTOR WHO novels featuring the eighth Doctor from the 1996 film. While the novels sold well and sustained the license and the brand, the show's return for 2005 was announced.

The eighth Doctor novels had a conclusion announced with its finale book, "The Gallifrey Chronicles," to be released after the 2005 TV show aired its first episode. There was a dreadful fear, at least for me, that these eighth Doctor novels that had been a part of my life for nearly a decade, would be wiped clean off the slate as the TV show was to feature a new actor as the ninth Doctor. Later on, the 2005 showrunner declared that he had no wish to contradict the novels although he would be unlikely to sequelize them either, and a later showrunner would point out that a time travel show like DOCTOR WHO cannot have a 'canon'; all the TV shows and spin-off material are true even if they contradict each other.

That said, I opened "The Gallifrey Chronicles" with great trepidation, fearing that the eighth Doctor and all his adventures would be treated dismissively or end abruptly. Instead, "The Gallifrey Chronicles" was a summation of the eighth Doctor's career in his books, spanning different eras of his time in his novels, validating the importance and value of each companion and all their adventures -- and then it ends on a cliffhanger. There are a number of loose threads where the Doctor will have to resolve them after the book's conclusion assuming he survives. And on the last page, the Doctor is about to leap into a volcano to face down an alien invasion that remains unfinished by the book's last page. It's unclear: is this where the Doctor dies and regenerates into the TV show Doctor? How do we go from "The Gallifrey Chronicles" to the first episode of 2005?

It's deliberately unfinished because the author, Lance Parkin, was making the point that just as "The Gallifrey Chronicles" had no end, the Doctor's adventures have no end and continue right into the TV show even if the Doctor now has a ninth face and exists in live action rather than prose. It was a comforting non-ending ending and I of course ripped that off for the "Slide Effects" script by resurrecting Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo but leaving them still lost, still sliding, still searching for home (albeit without Logan St. Clair chasing them or a Kromagg tracker or Arturo dying of a terminal illness). The last sentence of "The Gallifrey Chronicles" describes how the Doctor is staring down the volcano opening "and he leaps... " which, of course, I also stole for "Slide Effects"' last line.

Spyfall: Part Two.

*facepalm* A faceful of *facepalm*

Spyfall was an extremely mediocre episode. The production values are superb, all the actors are engaged, the series is beautifully shot -- but the writing is so devoid of imagination, wit or anything resembling a point regarding any worthwhile subject at all. Spoilers.

I assumed that DOCTOR WHO, if pastiching James Bond, would subvert and question the conventions of those films. Instead, it simply re-enacts them in an empty and often illogical fashion and the middle of the episode flat out forgets the Bond elements and has the Doctor running around in an outback ghost story. When it does dive into Bondian material, it plays it completely straight: Ryan and Yaz infiltrating a building, the Doctor and friends swanning about a fancy party, then a motorcycle chase followed by pursuing a plane. And none of these sequences make any sense and suggest that Chibnall doesn't have the imagination to write the Doctor well.

Why does the Doctor, attending Daniel Barton's to spy on him, confront him overtly and cause him to run? If she wanted to surveil him, why did she draw attention to herself?

Why does the Doctor then let Daniel Barton run away before declaring that she and her friends must capture him? If she wanted him confined, why didn't she trick him into getting into the TARDIS to question him?

Why do the Doctor and her companions then pursue a fleeing Barton on motorcycles? They have a time and space craft; they could have looked up the nearest VOR facility and TARDISed there and been waiting for Barton before he made it.

Why do the Doctor and friends race across a hangar to leap aboard a plane instead of returning to their time and space craft and materializing it aboard the plane moments before it takes off?

Why are these errors here? It looks like Chibnall wanted the specific setpieces in there and they are indeed beautifully filmed, performed, edited, scored and the effects are terrific -- but the connective tissue between them is a tangled script of clumsy choices that speak to Chibnall lacking the style, inspiration and perspective needed to write a time traveller.

It's really unfortunate, because DOCTOR WHO subverted the superhero genre in "The Return of Dr. Mysterio," noting the silliness of the disguises and secret identities and giving the superhero a decidedly de-masculinized job as a nanny and bringing the Doctor's trickery and cunning into a formula that usually relies on force and physicality. DOCTOR WHO also showed the Doctor present throughout the superhero's life, from their secret origin to their awkward teens to the adult career.

DOCTOR WHO taking on James Bond tropes could do the same: it could even observe how Bond is a secret agent who uses his real name and draws attention to himself constantly with a playboy lifestyle that makes a public spectacle of covert operations and is entirely at odds with the less than glamourous life of espionage. Instead, it plays it so straight while forgetting all about the Bond theme for lengthy sections to the point where it's a non-committal affectation rather than a meaningful style.

Good cliffhanger, though.

It’s hard to say what the plan was because Colin Trevorrow has declined to elaborate on what his version of EPISODE IX would have been. I find it unhelpful to look at Trevorrow’s filmography: SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED is a sweet little indie romance film with hints of science fiction. JURASSIC WORLD is... uh, I’ve never seen it. I can’t see Trevorrow continuing with Rian Johnson’s approach, however. And I don’t think Abrams threw out Trevorrow’s material. Kennedy said that IX had been planned as Carrie Fisher’s film much as VIII was Mark Hamill’s and VII was Harrison Ford’s. Which means that Trevorrow’s material was discarded because it relied upon Carrie Fisher being alive to perform in it.

I think that the original intent was that THE FORCE AWAKENS would be a safe, reverential entry made by remix artist JJ Abrams followed by an iconoclastic, high cinema entry from Rian Johnson followed by... something. Unfortunately, what we got was a safe, reverential opening act, an iconoclastic, high cinema middle chapter — and then a safe, reverential closing entry that seems like an urgent reversal, but that has more to do with Kennedy electing to hire a safe, reverential director to come in after Trevorrow.

Palpatine is an awkward reversal on RETURN OF THE JEDI and I'd agree his presence is to give the Disney trilogy a definitive conclusion by undoing RETURN OF THE JEDI's ending to repeat it. I think Abrams had intent that Rey would be Palpatine's granddaughter, but with Disney setting a schedule for STAR WARS episodes to be released every two years, he didn't expect to direct anything after THE FORCE AWAKENS. In fact, the two year schedule and the desire to have Abrams direct THE FORCE AWAKENS meant he couldn't act in a Kevin Feige type role for the subsequent films or direct the second one, much in the same way Rian Johnson was asked to direct THE RISE OF SKYWALKER but was too busy with THE LAST JEDI.

In addition, Disney wanting of a summer blockbuster finale to the Disney trilogy conflicts with expanding on Rian Johnson's ideas. Even if THE LAST JEDI ended with claiming that it would be new characters who would defy the First Order, it's John Boyega, Daisy Ridley and Oscar Issac who are on contract to return and the studio was going to make full use of their actors for their final films. Therefore, THE RISE OF SKYWALKER acknowledges that the Force is strong within two former stormtroopers, so it makes a token nod to THE LAST JEDI but doesn't focus on it.

In the future, it might be best if one person creatively oversees the writers and directors whether that person is Abrams, Johnson or someone else.

Personally, I feel that Rian Johnson is such an eccentric visionary that it would be foolish for anyone other than Rian Johnson to continue and elaborate on his approach, so what we have is Abrams making an action movie that includes references to Johnson's material but doesn't make it integral to Abrams' movie. That said, I don't feel THE LAST JEDI is dismissed; at the end of that film, Luke declared that he wouldn't be the last Jedi and that the Resistance would be reborn, so Luke saying, "I was wrong" in RISE is continuing that.

I am okay with THE LAST JEDI being an unusual outlier bookended by two more conventional entries. I think it's cool that we have a very reverential opening in THE FORCE AWAKENS, a wider exploration of settings and themes in THE LAST JEDI and then a return to conventionality in RISE.

I don't disagree with the tennis metaphor, but I don't feel that Johnson and Abrams are on different sides; they just have different tools for expressing similar sentiments ("Rey is nobody from nowhere and has to define herself on her own terms" / "Rey is the granddaughter of Darth Sidious and has to reject that and define herself on her own terms") and it can feel like they're in opposition because their styles are so dissimilar.

Without being in any way denigrating to Abrams, I would say that he makes ice cream whereas Johnson makes crème brûlée. They're both good.

Slider_Quinn21 made a list of all the ways THE LAST JEDI dismissed THE FORCE AWAKENS and I have updated his list to reflect THE RISE OF SKYWALKER (spoilers follow):

The Rey/Luke scene where Rey holds Luke's lightsaber out to him:
TFA - Treated like a huge deal/cliffhanger.
TLJ - Treated like a joke.  Luke throws the lightsaber away and walks off.
ROS - Rey throws Luke's rebuilt lightsaber towards a fire, Luke catches it and remarks that a Jedi's weapon should be treated with more respect.

Anakin's Lightsaber
TFA -This is the key.  Why is it back after so long?  How did it get here?  Now that Luke has it, what will happen?!?
TLJ - Luke doesn't care about it.  Ends up destroyed.
ROS - Leia has rebuilt the blade and presents it to Rey to indicate that she is a worthy inheritor to the family legacy. Rey later tries to destroy it again, but Luke tells her that he was wrong to throw it away as he did and wrong to turn his back on the galaxy.

Kylo Ren's Costume:
TFA - "Here's your new Vader!"
TLJ - Treated like a joke.  Snoke specifically says that the helmet and the costume is dumb, and it seems like Kylo did it on his own because he thought it looked cool.  Kylo destroys the helmet and never wears it again.
ROS - Kylo rebuilds the helmet but keeps taking it off and ultimately sheds it as he switches sides.

Rey's Parents:
TFA - A huge mystery.  Maybe *the* mystery of the entire new trilogy.
TLJ - They were no one.  Doesn't matter.
ROS - Rey's parents were no one; her grandfather was Emperor Palpatine (possibly procreating in yet another one of his Force-augmented genetics experiments as he created Anakin), planning to use Rey as a younger vessel to house his consciousness and continue his reign of terror.

Maz:
TFA - This character knows everything.  Knows everyone.  She holds all the secrets if you know how to ask.
TLJ - She doesn't have time for this movie.  Get your deus ex machina somewhere else.
ROS - Provides exposition to cover what Carrie Fisher's limited dialogue couldn't explain; that Leia is giving herself over to the Force in an effort to save Rey from Kylo Ren.

Hux:
TFA - Here's your new Tarkin.
TLJ - Except he's a total idiot.
ROS - And ultimately self-serving, not interested in the First Order except for his rank and class, and fed up with Kylo Ren's leadership.

Phasma:
TFA - She's a badass.  You'll see.
TLJ - Not really.  Maybe dead?
ROS - Really dead.

Snoke:
TFA - This dude is the ultimate evil.  Very mysterious.  Fear him.
TLJ - Wears a dumb-looking gold robe.  Cut in half.  He doesn't matter.
ROS - And was ultimately a clone (and one of many) whom Palpatine used as a puppet for his own voice and actions as the actual Palpatine was a damaged, flawed clone form dependent upon life support systems that kept him isolated to a single location.

Rey:
TFA - Everyone loves Rey, and she's great at everything.  Always rescues herself.
TLJ - Luke wants nothing to do with her.  Suspects she might be evil.  She struggles with her training.  Has to be rescued by Kylo in the Throne Room.
ROS - Is the granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine which Luke and Leia sensed and knew all along and is why she had her astonishing control of the Force and machines and weapons with zero training. Can access dark side powers like Force lightning, but also light side powers like Force healing. Becomes the living embodiment of all Jedi in all history and chooses, with Luke and Leia's blessing, to declare her name to be "Rey Skywalker."

Finn and Poe:
TFA - Finn is an insider with so much knowledge of the First Order.  Can use that to take them down, and Poe is the only guy daring enough to help him do it.
TLJ - Finn's plan is ridiculous and doesn't work at all.  Nearly gets everyone killed.  Poe's plans are reckless and gets tons of people killed.
ROS - Finn and Poe have learned to work together and when to take chances and when not to; they've also learned that while they couldn't ask the galaxy to come to their rescue as a doomed resistance, they can lead the galaxy if their fight offers the chance to truly make a difference. Also, they note that certain tactics in TLJ like the Holdo Maneuver were unique to certain individuals and are unlikely to be replicated.

Nostalgia:
TFA - Star Wars is the best!  Here's a reference!  And another!  Look, a bigger Death Star!  The Millennium Falcon!  Anakin's Lightsaber!
TLJ - "Let the past die.  Kill it if you have to."
ROS - Here's a reference and another and another, look, Star Destroyers with Death Star weaponry, the Falcon, Anakin's lightsaber and the voices of Samuel L. Jackson, Liam Neeson, Hayden Christiansen, Ewan McGregor, Olivia D'Abo, Ashley Eckstein, Jennifer Hale, Frank Oz, Angelique Perrin and Freddie Prinze Jr.! But also some small roles from various non-Jedi and Finn to indicate that the Jedi are not the be-all, end-all of the Force as TLJ established -- although we'll definitely stick to Jedi characters AND have Luke Skywalker tell Rey that he was wrong to say that the Jedi should end and that it's important that she preserve the Jedi and face down Palpatine.

A lot of fans seem to consider THE RISE OF SKYWALKER a repudiation of THE LAST JEDI just as Slider_Quinn21 felt THE LAST JEDI was a counterargument against THE FORCE AWAKENS.

I personally feel a bit torn about it. I really liked THE LAST JEDI and RISE OF SKYWALKER and I don't feel that the two movies are against each other, but they are bringing in different perspectives and have very different goals and while RISE OF SKYWALKER hits different notes from THE LAST JEDI, I personally feel that those notes are mostly in harmony.

The vast majority of the world disagrees strongly and I don't want to go full Informant and say that everyone else is wrong; I'll just say that I like Rian Johnson a lot, I like JJ Abrams a lot, but they don't make the same kinds of movies and I have space in my heart for both.

I’ve heard a lot of weird rumours, some likely, some from the desperate. There are SMALLVILLE fans insisting Welling will be back because Marc Guggenheim said there was a scene with three Supermen — which appears at this writing to be the scene with Brandon Routh playing Superman and Ray interacting with Tyler Hoechlin. There are SMALLVILLE fans insisting that Welling’s voice has been in the trailers delivering lines that, in the aired episodes, were spoken by Grant Gustin. That said, I imagine that a quick shot of Welling and Durance seeing red skies fade could easily have been done during Welling’s one day of filming.

I think having the older Barry sacrifice himself in our Barry’s place works from a plotting standpoint, but it feels awkward because the older Barry first appeared in ELSEWORLDS but had no arc or relationships with the regular cast, so his sacrifice doesn’t hold weight unless you were a big fan of the 1990s FLASH. It also highlights another problem: the Monitor killed all the heroes on Earth-90 and all the civilians in his effort to ‘test’ heroes — but CRISIS has presented this genocidal character as a hero. Hopefully, CRISIS can patch this by restoring Earth-90 if not the John Wesley Shipp version of Barry.

It's possible that Lois and Clark adopted. It's also possible that time runs differently in different dimensions which "As Time Goes By" and "The Guardian" established and which should naturally apply to the Arrowverse BECAUSE.

I don't think Earth-167 is gone for good; CRISIS opens with the TITANS universe being destroyed and the second episode had BLACK LIGHTNING's universe erased as well. Except TITANS and BLACK LIGHTNING are still producing new episodes, so one would think that CRISIS Part 5 will restore them all.

Some thoughts on CRISIS casting *spoilers*

Kevin Conroy's Bruce Wayne did not sound like Kevin Conroy doing his Batman voice, but he's considerably older than when I last heard him. Kate recognizes Kevin Conroy as Bruce, but remarks that he isn't the Bruce she knew which seems to be the show both leaving it open to having Conroy play Bruce in BATWOMAN or having another performer in the part. Except Luke Fox is played by the same actor at the same age on Conroy's world and on Earth 1, so............

I've seen some displeasure at CRISIS showing Brandon Routh's Superman having lost his entire supporting cast to the Joker and Tom Welling's Clark having given up his powers.

However, that seems an inevitability of the production. Kate Bosworth and Frank Langella would have been unaffordable for a TV production, so CRISIS had to account for their absences. In a nice moment, CRISIS reveals that after SUPERMAN RETURNS, Lois and Clark found their way back to each other and got married and that Clark and Jason became father and son. (Hopefully, James Marsden's Richard character wasn't vaporized like he was in X-MEN III.)

And Tom Welling had visibly aged and put on an average amount of weight for an average middle-aged man and was no longer doing the bodybuilding he used to, so CRISIS had to account for why Tom's version of Clark was clearly no longer superhuman. They had to work with the actors they had; they didn't have SUPERMAN RETURNS' Lois or Perry and it would've been odd to have Sam Huntington's Jimmy without them, and they didn't have Tom Welling in superhero shape.

Also, despite the showrunner saying that he considers the SMALLVILLE: SEASON 11 comic books to be canonical to CRISIS, that's unfortunately not the case. SEASON 11 dealt with the multiverse and multiple Earths quite extensively with Monitors and a Crisis of its own, and that cannot be reconciled with the Arrowverse version of CRISIS. In addition, SMALLVILLE: SEASON 11 had Clark becoming extremely well-acquainted with the multiverse, so Clark's ignorance of the concept in CRISIS indicates that this is not in the same continuity as the post-show comics; instead, both the comics and CRISIS exist on parallel tracks as potential outcomes for what happened after "Finale."

There's a lack of acknowledgement towards the casting -- nobody comments on why Tom Welling doesn't look like Tyler Hoechlin -- which becomes strange when everyone comments on how Brandon Routh's Ray and Clark look the same. Not even a line about how "universes take different shapes; so can the people in them." But intriguingly, Bitsie Tulloch's Lois and Brandon Routh's Clark feel an instinctive connection to each other, almost as though despite different forms and actors, the fundamental soul of the characters are present.

One thing that struck me about Kara Danvers' look in SUPERGIRL -- the actress has a very distinctive face. I always noticed how one iris -- in the left eye -- is expanded and significantly larger than in her right eye. On a talk show, Melissa Benoist described how she was wrestling her very large dog and tripped on some stairs and hit a potted plant, she said with a cheery, self-deprecating goofiness. I thought it was cute.

Benoist had a tough time when SUPERGIRL first premiered: private photos of her being intimate were leaked which didn't do anything good for SUPERGIRL's family friendly image, but thankfully, our society has advanced sufficiently that Benoist could refuse to be shamed out of her career. Benoist was later reported to be cheating on her husband Blake Jenner with SUPERGIRL co-star Chris Wood (Mon-El), but it was later revealed that Benoist had filed for divorce from Jenner well before she'd even met Wood whom she would later marry. Throughout all of it, Benoist had a distinctly enlarged left iris.

Then recently, Benoist posted a video on Instagram where she said all this.

Well, congratulations. But just in case, I'm going to start writing an essay on Top Ten Contributions From Slider_Quinn21.

I tried Gillette Skinguard, a new razor with only two blades, dual lubrication strips and two skinguards between each blade to flatten the skin to create more distance from the blades. It's quite impressive. Because my facial hair grows flat against my skin, I have to shave against the grain or the blades glide right over the stubble and leave it untouched, but there can be tugging, pulling and tiny cuts where the hair has been almost yanked out. The Skinguard, however, has absolutely no discomfort whatsoever and creates the same results as a Mach3 blade, and it feels like I ran a piece of smooth plastic over my face.

**

I'm in the process of converting my Fade In scripts for SLIDERS REBORN into Google Docs which will be much easier for people to read on mobile phones. I keep finding uncorrected typos and plotholes as I go. "Reunion" has Quinn running from the police with a bag of illicit peanuts. But later in the script, it's established that via his 2015 slide system, a vortex will automatically find him wherever he is on a parallel world once the window is ready, with or without the timer, and return him home. So why does he run? Why not just surrender to the cops and let the vortex extract him from the back of a cop car or a holding cell? I wrote this script and I cannot answer this question except to say at the time, my thinking was, "It's a SLIDERS script; it has to have a chase scene."

Just got home from A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD, a film about a reporter interviewing saintly children's entertainer Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks). The movie treats Rogers as a supporting character who is never anything other than his tender, gentle TV persona.

However, there's an intriguing scene where the reporter asks Rogers if he ever feels burdened or tired at being someone in whom everyone confides their problems. Rogers responds with -- breaking out his favourite puppets and talking about playing the piano. On one level, it's a deflection; on another -- I had the odd sense that the extrapolative algorithm used to simulate Fred Rogers' behaviours and responses had run out of data to propose a likely response and therefore defaulted to pre-programmed phrases and mannerisms.

NEIGHBORHOOD has elected to avoid elaborating on Fred Rogers outside of autobiographical details and recorded, documented accounts. It refuses to put words in his mouth that he wasn't known to have said; it offers a pastiche of the man but refuses to go beyond those boundaries, resulting in a portrayal that is truthful but occasionally finds itself sputtering and regurgitating.

I find this fascinating because when pastiching the sliders, I know all about them. Quinn's favourite food is lamb chops with a green bean medley; he fell for Daelin watching her care for a dog that reminded him of Bopper; his flannel shirts are Michael Mallory's clothes which Quinn grew into; Quinn got into athletics because he estimated his cognitive functions were 40 per cent faster with regular cardio and because that way, he could eat anything he wanted; Quinn's beer of choice is Trumer Pils. Slider_Quinn21 couldn't figure out who to vote for in 2016 and I wrote a scene where Quinn gave his opinion and Slider_Quinn21 said he found it convincing. Wade was a sickly child who once had an allergic reaction to the glue in her shoes; her improved health in her twenties drove her to adventure (this is TF talking, but yes). Rembrandt's ridiculous suit in the Pilot was actually a mis-delivered dry cleaning item that Rembrandt reluctantly wore onstage only to later declare it was his idea and forget that it was an accident. The Professor's mother gave him his first bow tie. But I'm (dimly) aware that I don't know these things about THE sliders; I know these things about ireactions' sliders.

Ensembles are difficult to write and I have a great deal of sympathy for Elizabeth Banks. The Angels are on covert missions and separate paths, yet they're supposed to be a team. SLIDERS had the same problem and would handle it by splitting the quartet into duos and mix up the pairings.

CHARLIE'S ANGELS, like SLIDERS, has four characters (Sabina, Jane, Elena and Bosley) but neglects to do this. The four are only together during hurried briefing scenes. During missions, they have earpieces, but they just shout situation updates without banter. The movie has them largely separated and the only pairing is a very, very, very short sequence with Sabina and June dancing.

I'm not a wholehearted fan of "Double Cross," but in that episode, the sliders repeatedly fail to stop Logan until the end. To avoid making the sliders seem incompetent, veteran screenwriters Tony Blake and Paul Jackson have the sliders win small victories without defeating Logan: the Professor identifies Wade's impostor, Quinn bargains for Wade's release, the Professor survives near incineration -- even as Logan is gaining control of sliding and encountering little meaningful resistance to her plans for multiversal domination. Then the ending has Quinn leaving Logan lost in the interdimension. The villain keeps winning for most of the story, but the heroes keep surviving increasingly levels of deadly threat to win at the end.

In contrast, CHARLIE'S ANGELS never has the Angels in much danger of anything and never shows them using cleverness or teamwork to survive. When their MacGuffin is lost or when their mark escapes, the Angels don't have any achievements to balance their losses and they seem like failures.

Writing action oriented ensembles requires craft and skill and I say that as someone who ran face-first into all of these problems when attempting SLIDERS scripts. Thankfully, Transmodiar and Slider_Quinn21 were available to walk me through how to address these problems. Transmodiar cautioned against having the sliders separated for too long and said that if one slider were alone, the other three should be together. Slider_Quinn21 helped revise scenes so that the sliders were conversing over Bluetooth so they would feel like they were together even if they were physically separate. Maybe they should have revised the new CHARLIE'S ANGELS.

... what is TITANS about?

If TITANS is about Dick Grayson overcoming the darkness of his time as a street level vigilante, why is he fighting dark gods and aliens in Season 1? If TITANS is about a team of teen superheroes, why are all team members now adults? If TITANS is about adults living in the shadow of their shared past on the team, why has the show at the outset introduced other teenaged superheroes who don't have a shared past yet?

If TITANS is about a teen girl facing supernatural forces, why are her allies an alien princess and a decidedly non-supernatural police detective? If TITANS is about heroes, why are the only actual Titans so unheroic that they want to abandon Rose Wilson to be murdered by her father?

If TITANS is about the second generation of Titans in Conner and Raven and Beast Boy, why is the focus so firmly on the original team of Dick, Hawk, Dove and Donna Troy? If TITANS is about an alien princess, why is it called TITANS?

TITANS is a good show. Every episode has a clear, central, crystalline clarity of what it is: TITANS is a moody, grim show about unhappy, self-destructive people engaged in their grudge matches and vendettas, but the individual character arcs collide with each other without any real purpose or identity for the show. I don't know what TITANS is about, and it's thanks to its strong sense of tone, pacing and atmosphere that it feels coherent. It isn't.

It took 20 years for the Richard Donner cut of SUPERMAN II to come out on DVD, so maybe we’ll get Snyder’s cut in 20 years on telepathic psigraph in 6D.

Well, I liked what Ezra Miller said about how the DC Extended Universe is really a DC multiverse, hence Worlds of DC. As for SUPERMAN RETURNS -- Temporal Flux once spoke fondly of the TRANSFORMERS cartoon. I watched three episodes of it and each episode was so formulaic and near identical that I couldn't make it to a fourth. Grizzlor laughed at me for that, saying that of course it came off that way; I'm not a child and it's not the 80s. SUPERMAN RETURNS was a godsend when it arrived in 2006.

From 1997 to 2005, all the SUPERMAN movies in planning were ghastly: producer Jon Peters wanted a '90s' SUPERMAN who reflected the stylings of whatever was trendy and cool which, in his mind, was cyberpunk. He wanted Superman to wear a black costume, to be a ferocious killer, to be played by Sean Penn in full psychopathic mode. He didn't want Superman to fly. He didn't want Superman in red and blue. (Why even make a Superman movie?)

There was great dread among Superman fans for what Hollywood would spit out. This was even more severe due to SMALLVILLE which was the current vision of the character for the 2000s and it was an inept DAWSON'S CREEK with Clark killing villains and being unheroic and dull.

SUPERMAN RETURNS came out and it was slavishly reverent to SUPERMAN (1978), the most well-liked, well-known incarnation of Superman, and all this reverence was a salve to SMALLVILLE and the terror that Jon Peters threatened.

Looking at the movie without its original context, SUPERMAN RETURNS is a weird little misfire on so many levels. In being reverential to SUPERMAN (1978), SR fails to present Superman in a meaningful 2006 situation.

Why does Superman resume his life as Clark Kent? The only relationship he has is with his mother; in Metropolis, he's not close to anyone and is viewed as forgettable and irrelevant. The reasoning in 1978 was Superman wanting access to information about emergencies around the globe, but in that case, why does Superman in 2006 need anything more than an iPhone?

In mimicking the 1978 setup, RETURNS also calls upon Routh to be Christopher Reeve's Clark Kent, but Routh's performance is completely different. Reeve played Superman and Clark as two separate people whereas Routh performs them as variations on a core personality. Routh can be a good Superman, but he is completely mismatched to playing Reeve's Superman and SUPERMAN RETURNS insist they're the same person when they clearly aren't. The recasting also affects Lois: in 1978, Lois was Margot Kidder as a tough, capable, sardonic, endlessly entertaining female lead. In 2006, she's Kate Bosworth who is bland and vague and at 21, far too young for the role.

In addition, we see Superman's exploits around the globe and... he stops bank robberies. There is barely any sense that Superman is addressing problems that humans can't solve themselves; even the threat of Lex Luthor earthquaking the United States apart is due to humans failing to incarcerate Luthor for his crimes. There is no sense that the world has in any way suffered for Superman's absence in a way that the world can't handle itself unless it's too incompetent to do so.

The movie is also vague due to bizarre choices in editing: why was Superman absent for five years? Why did he feel a dead world was more important than a living one? Did he know Lois was pregnant? How much of SUPERMAN II and the memory erasing kiss still stands? Does Lois remember Superman impregnating her or does she think she was raped by him? Bryan Singer's disrespect for the concept of consent is disturbingly present, especially in Superman stalking Lois being played as benevolent.

In the original script, it's explained that Lex Luthor faked a signal from Krypton so that Superman would go look for survivors; that the planet had become a giant mass of Kryptonite which hurt Superman and damaged his ship, turning what should have been a very brief absence into a five year disappearance. It's also explained that (after SUPERMAN II), Lois and Superman had a romantic and sexual relationship but that Superman didn't tell her he was Clark Kent. All this was lost in favour of reverential Richard Donner homages.

Ultimately, I think SUPERMAN RETURNS made a huge mistake in having Superman absent and then return to find the world doing fine without him. I think SUPERMAN RETURNS should have had Superman absent for five years. Then he comes back to find Lex Luthor is President of the United States, Lois Lane is Luthor's spokesperson, the Daily Planet has been reduced to a 12 person team of bloggers led by Perry and Jimmy, Metropolis has become a slum and America seems superficially normal if as troubled, but in reality, it's become a fascist dystopia and President Lex has been waiting for Superman to return to kill him. The movie could end with Lois turning out to be spying on Lex to bring him down, Luthor impeached, the Daily Planet restored and all being well until Luthor, in his dying breath, tells Lois that Clark is Superman and that he's been laughing at her the entire time, leading to Lois deciding to mount a revenge plot involving VR contact lenses and Martians and awards ceremonies and such.

I wrote a summary of Routh's career once. http://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?pid=7938#p7938

Routh fell, but it's arguable that his rise from bartender to blockbuster was so abrupt and sudden that his descent was just as quick and inevitable. In an interview on Collider ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTGfkvhFr5s ), Routh said that playing Superman meant he'd skipped a big step in auditioning for work and he hadn't developed those skills.

He confessed that after Superman, he resented having to compete to play Technician #3 and Cop #2 and he had to over time accept that he couldn't search for another trampoline to the top; he would have to climb the ladder slowly and incrementally and for the first time. He took guest roles. He took recurring roles. He joined ensemble casts. And he rebuilt his life. Currently, his net worth is $12 million and he's happily married and he adores his son and no, he isn't a movie superstar anymore, but he's a superstar in other ways.

The same can be said of Christopher Reeve, and Reeve in many ways decided not to pursue post-Superman stardom. He turned down many, many, many roles despite the money and notoriety, sometimes because he didn't want children to see Superman's actor playing serial killers and such, sometimes because he to maintain a Massachusetts to London line of transportation to see his children.

Reeve invested what movie earnings he had appropriately so that he never had to take roles for money after SUPERMAN and he focused on advocacy and social justice. After his accident, Reeve devoted his life to medical research and when he passed away in 2004, he died with $3 million in the bank despite not having walked in nearly a decade.

I can't say Reeve lived a happy life because what happened to him was horrific, but he made the best of it and tried to live up to the role of Superman even though he hadn't played the role since 1987.

I thought Welling looked fine in the photo I saw of him with Tyler Hoechlin. Definitely not as sculpted as he could be, but he's lost some of the weight he gained (deliberately, I think) as Cain on LUCIFER. Welling is unshaven and wearing Clark's flannel and a worn golf shirt on top of his jeans and the clothes are very loosely fitted to Welling. In contrast, Hoechlin is wearing the Metropolis uniform for Clark: a very slim-fit business jacket, shirt and trousers. I wonder if the scene was shot to contrast Clark on the farm, relaxing and being a farmer, with Clark visiting from Metropolis and in reporter mode.

There is stuff Welling could have done to youthen up for the scene -- he could have shaved. Spent a week getting cucumber masks and retinol treatment on his face, especially the eyes, to plump some of the age lines. Or he could have worn a muscle suit under the long-sleeved flannel. Dyed the silver from his hair and grown it out as well to offset his face. But Welling has served the superhero genre with honour, so I say let him be.

It's also interesting to look at what happened behind the scenes of T3, SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES, T4 and T5.

With T3, there was no creative drive to make a third film, just a desire to cash in on the success of T2 with a new PG-13 product. The screenwriter of T3 and T4 has actually blogged about the process: despite T3 being a heartless money grab to exploit T2, the writer didn't even *like* the second TERMINATOR movie and deliberately wrote T3 to annoy the studio by presenting John Connor as a wealthy Silicon Valley supervillain now seeking to make money off a Skynet takeover. Naturally, the studio balked and the writer grudgingly stripped out his more offensive elements until what was left was an empty retread of T2.

There's a troubling attitude in franchise fandom that only certain creators can handle a franchise correctly whether it's Gene Roddenberry for STAR TREK or James Cameron for TERMINATOR. I think the more nuanced truth is that film and TV are in the business of selling tickets and ads with the content being a secondary concern, but the creators producing the content need to devote themselves to serving the content by identifying the story they want to tell and telling that story with commitment and craft. T3 was made entirely to serve a balance sheet.

With T3, the studio and the writers were completely uncommitted to telling any particular story with a third TERMINATOR; they just wanted to be paid for having brought one into being. Which is why THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES disproves the idea that only specific individuals can handle the TERMINATOR franchise: CHRONICLES didn't have James Cameron or Arnold or Linda Hamilton or Edward Furlong -- but it had Josh Friedman's complete devotion to telling his story. The dialogue was punchy and sharp; the action was gripping and had a human cost. Cameron was a fascinating Terminator whose Summer Glau appeal and loyalty to John masked a shocking inhumanity as she casually abandoned civilians to die if they weren't relevant to keeping John safe.

However, Friedman's devotion to telling his story was often in foolish defiance of ratings and format. CHRONICLES was hit by a writer's strike that cut the first season short, losing viewership. Friedman's second season was so alienating to new viewers that it couldn't grow its audience and was cancelled on the 13th episode -- only for Warner Bros. to save it by lowering their license fee. Friedman received nine more episodes, almost certainly the last nine of the series -- and his devotion to telling his story had him decide to end the show on a cliffhanger.

Which I think speaks to another part of putting out a good product: in addition to being committed to executing the chosen story well, there needs to be some thought to the audience that will be watching this material. Josh Friedman served his story, but he didn't serve his fans.

SALVATION is similar and different to T3: it actually had a story, but it backed away from telling it. The original plot of SALVATION: during the Skynet-human war, a human-Terminator hybrid named Marcus tries to help the human resistance by searching for and saving John Connor from a Skynet plot. Connor is a largely offscreen character and the story establishes him as a rising legend who inspires humanity to resist. When Marcus finds him, he fails to save him -- but a dying Connor begs Marcus to carry on for him. Marcus alters his face to look like John Connor and to assume his role in the resistance.

The script was pretty solid -- and then the creators asked Christian Bale to play Marcus and Bale refused and said he wanted to play John Connor and that he wanted more screentime and that he wanted his character to live. SALVATION was changed to meet these stipulations and the result was a pointless movie that didn't move the TERMINATOR story in any particular direction and featured a lead character in Bale's Connor who had no impact on the plot. SALVATION served Christian Bale instead of SALVATION.

Much of the drama regarding T3 and T4 is detailed in the writer's blog: https://johnbrancato.blogspot.com/2009/ … horse.html

And then GENISYS (2015). Setting aside the poor casting, I'd say the greatest problem of GENISYS is that it is designed all around time travelling back to the original 1984 movie and then changing the situation. It's a rebootquel and STAR TREK (2008) made it clear how this can work. However, at the midpoint, the action abruptly jumps from 1984 to 2017 and it makes no sense. In 1984, Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese have over three decades to work out Skynet's plan and stop it; in 2017, they have days. This nonsensical decision is inexplicable.

The reason this happened: it's pretty clear that even as GENISYS was being scripted, the studio and director and producers were unwilling to present a 2015 movie that was set in 1984. They didn't want to do a period piece. They didn't want to go to all the time and trouble and expense of maintaining the aesthetics and technology of 1984, so for simplicity of production, they detached themselves from serving the story they had in their hands.

DARK FATE is... certainly not the innovative, inventive cinematic event of T2 in 1991. It doesn't have anything all that new; it's not a visionary work. But it does care about the fans with the painstaking effects work to bring a 1992 era Linda Hamilton and Ed Furlong to the screen for a scene and giving a senior citizen incarnation of Hamilton a leading role. And it is absolutely committed to serving its chosen purpose as a female-driven chase movie.

I am not a huge fan of TERMINATOR or James Cameron, but after Informant -- I mean, after some random dude with whom I have no prior association whatsoever declared DARK FATE to be a failure because it was political under the "get woke go broke" hashtag -- well, I quantum-leapt to the cineplex to see it. Anything that pisses off this person -- whom I absolutely do not know in any way, shape or form -- I absolutely have to see. :-D

**

I am not a huge fan of TERMINATOR or James Cameron, but I see the talent and craft even if the final product doesn't serve my personal obsessions. DARK FATE is a chase movie and Cameron/Tim Miller designed it to create characterization and relationships in shorthand and on the go.

We don't get a conversation where Grace and Dani share their values; we get a shot of Dani resting her head on Grace's lap. We don't get an arc where Dani shows her leadership skills; we get a quick moment of Dani shepherding her brother to work and protesting his replacement by a robot.

We don't see Sarah Connor staggering through life with alcoholism; we get Linda Hamilton wordlessly conveying that she exists to blow up robots and sleep before doing it again. Cameron's approach doesn't rely on dialogue or even necessarily action and decision to convey character; he depends on actors to sell you on it while often putting them in highly reactive roles as they deal with their ship hitting an iceberg or their being hunted by an AI.

In the original TERMINATOR, Kyle Reese is defined less by the script and more by the performance that Cameron and Michael Biehn produced: the performance wordlessly conveys to you that Reese is a starving soldier who has long lived without any kind of comfort or luxury, who is terrified of the Terminator and Skynet, who is traumatized by war and barely holding it together to perform his mission -- which is why Jai Courtney's blandly heroic performance was so offensive to fans. Courtney made Reese so confident, so at ease, so certain whereas Biehn's Kyle Reese was fundamentally broken but not letting it stop him from doing his job.

I am not a huge fan of this approach, but it is a perfectly valid approach.

**

To be honest, I felt about Legion the way Slider_Quinn21 feels about the First Order and the Empire in STAR WARS; it's a re-branding. However, as someone who admires the first TERMINATOR (without enjoying it) and both admires AND enjoys TERMINATOR 2, I didn't feel DARK FATE besmirched John Connor or Edward Furlong. The amount of effort taken to put Furlong in DARK FATE was insane with Cameron reporting that most of the de-aged footage was unusably poor.

Ultimately, DARK FATE asserts that John succeeded; he stopped Skynet and it didn't come back, but other people kept creating AIs and one of them would inevitably turn against their creators. And DARK FATE declares that the future is always dark and that our heroes will forever have to delay, forestall and prevent it; they will keep pushing it backwards forever and ever. So I felt okay with that -- but narratively, Legion and Skynet are really about the same and I didn't think DARK FATE differentiated the two sufficiently.

I think that DARK FATE needed to present Legion as a more seductive or manipulative form of evil; rather than blowing up humanity, it creates situations to make them turn on each other. We see a bit of this, but as Temporal Flux points out, DARK FATE is ultimately following the T2 formula of a killer robot chasing down humans.

**

I like all of Slider_Quinn21's ideas. That maybe Sarah could have been trying to change the past and save John from the Terminator. That maybe Dani could have been Danny to add a man to the mix since Arnold Schwarzenneger is barely in this movie. I think Cameron/Tim Miller just wanted to do a really intense chase movie without a lot of sentiment or conversation, largely driven by a distinctly feminine energy that's in contrast to RISE, SALVATION and GENISYS being driven by men. And they succeeded creatively and have crashed and burned financially.

I kind of feel the length thing, but... I just really enjoyed watching Mackenzie Davis beat people up. It's my thing. I also enjoy watching Sarah Michelle Gellar, Summer Glau, Ashley Scott, Ruby Rose, Melanie Scrofano, Jaimie Alexander, Brie Larson, Carrie Anne Moss, Lena Headey and Linda Hamilton beat people up. I think I enjoy that more than I enjoy watching or reading Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo snarking at each other.

Temporal Flux is absolutely right to say that JUDGEMENT DAY, RISE OF THE MACHINES and GENISYS have all featured humans fleeing a cybernetic assassin who is just barely held off by a reprogrammed robot Arnold Schwarzenegger; SALVATION varied this a bit with Sam Worthington playing the robot(ish) protector. Perhaps DARK FATE, in addition to being the fourth installment in a role to be the first in a trilogy that could be left unfinished, was yet another chased-by-a-robot movie and the audience had seen enough of those. Also, DARK FATE tries to sell itself in ways that GENISYS already attempted to the disappointment of the audience. Maybe they weren't willing to take the chance of being fooled again.

I'd argue that every pre-DARK FATE sequel to JUDGEMENT DAY has suffered from being either inauthentic, incompetent or incomplete or some combination of all three. RISE OF THE MACHINES is, like Season 4 - 5 of SLIDERS, a cheap copy of the original content, in this case JUDGEMENT DAY.

JUDGEMENT DAY had grand and lavish action sequences from James Cameron who has an incredible grasp of geography, motion, location, editing, pacing and timing. It also had a grippingly troubled female protagonist in Linda Hamilton, a hilarious dynamic between the rascaly Edward Furlong and the taciturn Arnold Schwartzenegger.

In contrast, RISE has blandly pedestrian action and a blandly present Claire Danes. RISE also presents a John/Terminator relationship that rings false. Nick Stahl's John is ineffectual and weak, perpetually cowering and overwhelmed by simple acts like breaking and entering that the young John performed with confident ease, and Stahl performs John with a one-note nervousness. He reflects none of Furlong's wit, cunning, rebellion and daring and simply isn't John Connor. And Schwarzenneger is back as the Terminator, but this is a different machine with the same face; this Terminator never bonded with John in T2.

Despite RISE claiming to be the further adventures of John and the Terminator, this isn't the T2 John and this isn't the T2 Terminator. It's inauthentic. The best that can be said of RISE is that it dares to show (a fairly sanitized) rendition of Skynet's victory at the end (even though RISE had alternate footage filmed so that another Terminator would have shown up to defeat Skynet had the studio balked at the ending).

SALVATION is incompetent. The story is nonsensical with Skynet inexplicably augmenting a human, Marcus Wright, with Terminator powers to infiltrate the human resistance despite this human (inevitably) switching sides. John Connor has once again been recast as Christian Bale who exists to run around in various action sequences that don't affect the core plot for Marcus and Kyle Reese. The ending simply resets the movie to the beginning of the situation with Marcus Wright dead and John Connor continuing his leadership of the resistance.

The reason for all this: Connor was supposed to be a mostly off-camera character, but Christian Bale declined the role of Marcus and insisted that he play John and ordered that John have (superfluous) scenes added to the film for him to perform. In addition, the original script had Connor dying and Marcus Wright changing his appearance to look like Connor to maintain the legend of the man, something Bale also had altered. The ending was also changed: the original intention was that Skynet would reveal that it was enslaving humanity to save it from its own destruction, but this was also lost in shifting the film from Marcus to Christian Bale.

THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES is, despite being an excellent TV show, somewhat inauthentic and incompetent. The recasting is actually pretty good with Lena Headey and Thomas Dekker doing a great job of performing new versions of Linda Hamilton and Ed Furlong and the scripts are also splendid. However, CHRONICLES seemed determined to create unresolved plot thread after unresolved plot thread and was dead set on creating a cliffhanger finale for Season 2 that had next to no chance of ever being resolved (and remains unresolved) when a more competent TV show would have crafted the final episode to work as both a season finale and a series finale in the likely event of cancellation.

And GENISYS is completely inauthentic, shockingly incompetent and again incomplete. The original TERMINATOR featured a troubled, war-scarred Michael Biehn as Kyle Reese. GENISYS recasts with Jai Courtney and Courtney is a charisma-free vacuum whose performance has no thought, no detail, no effort and no depth. Courtney's Reese is a bland hero; there is nothing of Biehn's rebel soldier, nothing of Biehn's madness or grief or loss or desperation as survivor of a borderline extinction. And then we have Emilia Clarke as Sarah Connor except Clarke captures nothing of Linda Hamilton's 80s demeanor in TERMINATOR and also nothing of Hamilton's angry war veteran in JUDGEMENT DAY.

GENISYS claims to be returning to the roots of the original TERMINATOR and yet presents impostors once again. Furthermore, despite showing the original version of Reese being dispatched by John to save Sarah (which is why John meeting Kyle doesn't match the SALVATION depiction), GENISYS doesn't explain where the "Pops" Terminator came from to rewrite the events of the 1984 film. It's presented as a mystery to be explored later, but it comes off as sloppiness. And the film works in revisiting/remaking moments of the 1984 film -- except it then inexplicably has Sarah and Kyle time travel to 2015 on the eve of Skynet being activated. At no point does the movie explain WHY Sarah and Kyle would decide to throw away 31 years to find a way to stop Skynet other than the filmmakers not wanting to continue recreating the 1984 setting -- which also makes the 'mystery' of Pops look less like an ongoing question and more of a plothole -- one that will never be resolved as GENISYS will have no sequels. Inauthentic. Incompetent. Incomplete.

GENISYS sold itself as being a return to the series' roots (by returning to the 1984 movie to choose an alternate path) and advertised itself with James Cameron claiming he loved GENISYS, a claim he'd later withdraw. I suspect that Cameron was thrilled to see GENISYS refilming moments of his 1984 film and was so overwhelmed by these overtures that he only later came to see that outside of these recreations, the surrounding movie featured bland impostors of his creations in a clumsily plotted and unfinished story.

Fairly or unfairly, DARK FATE is part of a franchise that presents unfinished, confusing stories with stand-ins for the real characters.

DARK FATE, like GENISYS, it claims to return to the roots of the series, sidestep the sequels (but only after T2 whereas GENISYS replaced even the original TERMINATOR) and is endorsed by James Cameron once again -- except with GENISYS, all of that turned out to be utter BS. The fact that DARK FATE managed to recapture authenticity, competence and completion doesn't seem to matter because such things can only be appreciated by an audience that sees the actual film and as they'd been burned on three previous occasions, one can understand them not returning for a fourth. That's despite the authenticity being real this time: we have Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor; we have Ed Furlong as John Connor. These aren't recasts; these are the same faces we saw in TERMINATOR and T2.

And DARK FATE is a return to competence. While James Cameron did not direct this movie, I feel he might as well have much in the same way HALLOWEEN 2018 recaptured the style of the 1974 movie despite Carpenter neither filming it nor having final cut. DARK FATE is plainly a movie that Cameron had made on his behalf the way George Lucas directed RETURN OF THE JEDI through Richard Marquand. Despite never going to the set, Cameron managed its scripting and oversaw the editing and DARK FATE captures all of Cameron's strengths while also amending some of his weaknesses.

Where RISE, SALVATION and GENISYS were pedestrian in their action, Cameron's gift for pacing, shot sequencing, motion and geography are plainly present in Tim Miller's direction. DARK FATE is a relentless chase movie akin to a Season 2 episode of SLIDERS and Miller and Cameron ensure that each action sequence presents a new variation: a terrifying car chase, a battle in an auto factory, a battle within a crashing airplane, an underwater escape -- each sequence presenting a different form of physicality.

Also, Tim Miller infuses DARK FATE with a beautiful feminine energy. Mackenzie Davis' Grace can be unstoppable and indomitable, but she conveys the pain and shock of each blow and how near collapse she is as she performs another astonishing feat. There's a tenderness and tactile sense of identity to Grace in contrast to Schwarzenegger's implacable brutalism. And also, DARK FATE is complete. It doesn't end demanding a sequel, instead ending on a closing note that indicates that should there be a sequel, there'll be a great one, but if there isn't, the adventure continues. It's what SARAH CONNOR's finale so singularly wasn't.

It's a shame that GENISYS was made; had DARK FATE come in its place, it'd have been the first sequel to declare itself a return to authenticity, and had DARK FATE been on track to earn the same $440 million that GENISYS made, it would have been considered an adequate success. And looking at DARK FATE's sister movie, HALLOWEEN 2018 was also a 'deboot' that had the original leading lady reprising her role as a lead character -- except HALLOWEEN 2018 was a return to the original film's roots as a low budget indie movie made for 10 million dollars and earning 255 million at box office.

In contrast, DARK FATE is not a return to TERMINATOR (1984) being made for 6.4 million but instead yet another attempt at T2's blockbuster earnings with a blockbuster budget. Admittedly, a 12 million dollar version of DARK FATE would not have Linda Hamilton or Arnold Schwarzenagger and likely not have the computer generated deaging effects to recreate a young Linda Hamilton and Ed Furlong as Sarah and John, so maybe DARK FATE just came too late. It should have come out in 2015 before GENISYS poisoned the idea of going back to the original well.

To be honest, the actresses I know aren't really NAMES. They star in commercials, one woman shows, short films, stageplays and they have civilian identities managing fast food restaurants or doing intake at psychiatric hospitals or performing dental cleanings. I'm having dinner with two next week, one of whom played a police station receptionist with two lines and was also in a wet wipe commercial, and the other one is focused on stage work.

That said, maybe I should get them to autograph some stuff now and hand over various personal artifacts so that if they hit it big, I can sell their stuff on eBay and then I can achieve my lifelong dream of writing a six part series of SLIDERS screenplays that resurrects Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo and gives them a happy ending with Slider_Quinn21 to edit all the script pages. Oh. Wait. That already happened. Well, I'll just relax a bit for now then.

Well, I feel I've done my part for queen and country.

However, as you may know, one of my quirks is to platonically befriend actresses, one of whom recently celebrated her 23rd birthday. She informed me that she'd been celebrating her 23rd birthday for over a decade and a half via a combination of diet, exercise and skin care and that she expected to continue celebrating her 23rd birthday until retirement or finding another line of work. (I think this is the part where Slider_Quinn21 tries to identify who I'm talking about and I tell him I've changed the details to obscure who I'm talking about.)

I expect that I shall celebrate the fifth anniversary of the twentieth anniversary of SLIDERS by finishing up a website for SLIDERS REBORN five years after it first came out.

The CW and Warner Bros. TV are developing a SUPERMAN television series featuring Tyler Hoechlin and Bitsie Tulloch as Clark and Lois. Interestingly, they're aiming for adapting a recent run of comics, the post-SUPERMAN REBORN (hunnh) where Superman is married to Lois and together in Metropolis, Lois and Clark are raising a 10-year-old son named Jonathan Samuel Kent who has inherited Superman's powers, Clark Kent's hapless innocence and Lois' inability to stay out of danger.

This means one of two things: WB has given up on a new Henry Cavill movie or recasting him for now and is letting the CW do whatever or WB has really loosened up since the days when they ordered that the Suicide Squad on ARROW be killed off and blocked Harley Quinn from appearing on the show.

The post-SUPERMAN REBORN (hunnh) era of comics (2016 - 2017) is interesting too from a comic book narrative perspective because it resembles all those Season 6 fanfics that have Rembrandt meeting the original Professor who then helps him split the Quinns who then reveals that the Earth Prime in "Genesis" wasn't their home Earth followed by the discovery that the Wade in "Requiem" was a clone and rescuing the real Wade followed by by Logan St. Clair catching up to the sliders and holding Henry the Dog hostage followed by the sliders defeating the Kromaggs using a combination of the Slidewave, the "New Gods for Old" nanites and the Professor's slide rule followed by the FBI appearing to guide the sliders to their true home followed by world peace and global nuclear disarmament followed by -- well, you get the idea.

The New 52 had 'rebooted' the DC Universe in September 2011. In August 2011, Superman had been happily married to Lois and in his late 30s. Suddenly, SUPERMAN featured a single, mid-20s Clark Kent who'd never dated Lois and been Superman for five years. ACTION COMICS was set five years previous and had a new origin for Superman. The loss of Lois and Clark's friendship and the confusion over what had and hadn't happened between the origin story in ACTION and the present day stories in SUPERMAN led to multiple writers repeatedly quitting the books, unable to find a tone or a direction for their work.

The first writer, George Perez, said DC couldn't even tell him if Clark's parents were alive or not in the new continuity. Eventually, the books found their feet, but the muddled two years caused sales to crash despite the eventual excellence of arcs where Superman starts dating Wonder Woman and then the spectacular TRUTH where Superman's secret identity is exposed to the world. I wrote up quite a summary several years ago:

http://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?pid=3288#p3288

The New 52 Superman would eventually find creative success, but it wasn't a financial success. The idea that a single, young Clark Kent would sell better had proven false. DC Editorial began laying groundwork to reverse the New 52: the LOIS AND CLARK mini series revealed that the original Superman found himself in the New 52 universe from the start along with Lois. They assumed new identities as Lois and Clark White and Clark observed his alternate's adventures and avoided interfering. In this peaceful retirement, Lois also gave birth to a son, Jon, who is now 10 years old.

At the end of the New 52 run, the New 52 Superman dies burning out his powers. In the DC REBIRTH relaunch, Clark White resumes the role of Superman and explains to the Justice League that he is from a parallel universe and he can't replace their lost friend, but he will serve them as best he can. Another complication occurs: a man who looks exactly like Clark Kent and is only human reappears, claiming that the New 52 Superman put him in witness protection and assumed his identity.

Telepathic scans reveal he has all of Clark's memories (but none of Superman's). This undoes the Clark/Superman identity being revealed. In addition, the New 52 Lois Lane absorbs the New 52 Superman's powers after his death, but then she promptly dies. To investigate, Lois assumes her double's identity and resumes work at the Daily Planet. There was a year of these stories: Lois Lane impersonating herself, Clark White carefully avoiding and investigating Clark Kent, little Jon confused by all of this.

In 2017, there was finally the climax, SUPERMAN REBORN (hunnh), where Kent is revealed as the fifth dimensional prankster, Mr. Mxyzptlk trying to help Superman regain his life in his mischievous way. The New 52 versions of Lois and Clark are shown to be alive after all but as disembodied energy that were split off from the original Lois and Clark due to the New 52 reboot. In REBORN (hunnh), both versions of the characters are merged, resulting in a combined timeline of 1985 reboot and the New 52 reboot.

The New 52 adventures are rewritten so that some of them happened, but during the past 10 years, Lois and Clark have mostly been away from the Daily Planet and Metropolis, taking some time off to raise their son. No one remembers there having been two Supermans; the Superman/Wonder Woman romance has been erased, the entire supporting cast has known Jon Kent all his life, and Clark White is able to resume his life as Clark Kent once again. Like I said, this is the SUPERMAN equivalent of all those Season 6 fanfics.

I grudgingly respect DC spending a whole year's worth of SUPERMAN and ACTION COMICS having Lois and Clark White slowly regain their lives as Lois Lane and Clark Kent and merging the New 52 and 1985 timelines -- but Jesus. There's a reason why most readers and writers haven't been able to finish their Season 6 SLIDERS fanfics.

I assume that a CW Superman series will skip past all of that.