Tom Holland SM films have been about growing up. This one’s even more so.
Spider-Man: No Way Home is a complicated film, on one level. There are multiple fight sequences, as well as a lot of talking sequences, some big passages of time, some thorny conundrums that get handwaved aside, and some others that last until the bitter end.
The last SM movie ended with Peter Parker being outed by Alex Jones fill-in J Jonah Jameson both as Spider-Man and (thanks to villainous shenanigans) as the murderer of Mysterio and the wreaker of havoc across London.
The movie manages to quickly get past that, but it also has impacts through the entire film. Even though the cliche of “wanted by the police” isn’t lingered over, the repercussions of the event continue to last, leaving Peter’s life a never-ending media circus. But, as we’ve had hammered home over the years since the last SM film, public belief doesn’t necessarily align with truth, meaning that even when Peter is exonerated, he remains under attack by JJJ and by a substantial portion of the general population.
Worse, the biggest villain fought against by our her for the first quarter of the movie is the college admission process, and MIT decides that all the excitement means they will take a pass not just on Peter’s application, but on his girlfriend MJ’s and his bestie Ned’s. Which in turn leads Peter to go to Doctor Strange to see if the Sorcerer Supreme can set things aright.
He does not, but in the process the universe is broken, and beings from other worlds start to shift into ours, in particular some arch-enemies of previous Sony Spiderverse films.
It’s all a glorious muddle, yet the narrative through-line is maintained amidst various super-battles, with Peter trying to take care of his friends and family … and learning that great Spider-Man lesson not yet uttered in this go-around.
Ultimately, SMNWH is a story about growing up, of coming of age — not solely because Tom Holland is becoming a more mature actor in appearance, but also (to not be meta) not just in personal courage and heroism (Peter has already demonstrated that). This is a movie about that moment of maturity when one learns to extend the application of one’s virtue beyond just a circle of friends and family. That includes the willingness to lose everything in order to save others, even those who might not deserve it.
Throw in a great soundtrack by Michael Giacchino, some really nicely done SFX (including battles of CG figures that look more and more realistic), a variety of cameos from elsewhere in the Multiverse, and a ton of witty banter and general geekery, and it’s a delightful capstone to the Tom Holland trilogy of Spider-Man films.
(So, of course, they’ve announced a fourth film. We’ll see what they do with it.)
P.S. There are two post-credit scenes, one to placate Sony, one to placate Marvel. Neither are great, but worth waiting for unless you really, really need to pee.
The lovely parts are far greater than the muddled, poorly-structured whole.
So … The Book of Boba Fett.
Sigh.
YES THERE ARE SPOILERS HERE FOR THE SERIES, AND BITS AND BOBS OF THE FINALE. YOU SHOULD WATCH IT FIRST (YES, YOU SHOULD, EVEN IF IT HAS SOME SIGNIFICANT FLAWS).
You know the drill.
This was a marvelous, stirring, my-younger-fanboy-would-disbelieve-we’d-ever-see-it collection of incredibly cool, thoughtful, interesting, thrilling, exciting, lore-filled, great bits and ideas …
… that were greater than the eventual sum of their parts.
To start bluntly, dramatic pacing on this show was for shit. Backflashes and presentflashes and huge sidequests and where-the-hell-is-the-titular-character chunks of story dominated the whole series. Loading down the saga with backstory and exposition can be done … but it has to pay off. And inserting massive peripheral tales that have nothing to do with the core narrative would rightfully have any writing group pulling out the torches and flensing knives.
Hey, know that graph of how a novel is structured? Essentially a cascading series of rising actions, ending in a big climax and then a denouement?
Look! A plot structure!
This series was just a constant stream of static.
Slow moments. Fast moments. Small moments. Big moments. All thrown into a blender with no actual pacing, aside from the Disney+ “The final episode will be full of pew-pew-pew action.”
And even in that final episode, which was, to be sure, mostly the huge blow-out action sequence that people were looking for …
… we get interrupted mid-stream by an extended sequence of gratuitous Groguness.
Yeah, things are getting unbearably tense in Mos Espa … so let’s break for several minutes of cute Grogu action!
… the titular character, master of a dozen deadly weapons, spends much of his time during the big action sequences not doing much more than hanging with a (beautifully rendered) CGI figure, yanking on chains.
He … mostly sits up there.
… the denouement is an utterly flat collection of much of the cast, and then some meaningless Mando stuff, and then a mid-credit scene of a supporting character with supporting character and ROLL REST OG CREDITS.
Honestly, I didn’t recognize him on first watch.
Whu–?
(Okay, I’ll give a shout-out to the secondary characters. The Mod gang. The Gamorreans. The Freetowners. Krrsantan. The Mayor. The Mayor’s Chief of Staff. They were all finely done. But they weren’t the real focus of series, even if I’d have loved to see more of them.)
We ended up in this series spending so much time with fun stuff and cool stuff and interesting stuff and backstory stuff and lore stuff and fan service stuff that … it feels like they forgot it was supposed to maybe … be a story … nay, a book … a book of … well, let’s grab a name at random, say … Boba Fett.
I honestly don’t know if they decided halfway through the plotting that they had run out of ideas and therefore threw in a bunch of other stuff (Sarlacc! Mando! Grogu! Cad Bane!), or if there was never a story to begin with, or if this was a way of sneaking in a Season 2.5 of The Mandalorian past the Disney overseers … but …
Really, truly, the idea of …
a bounty hunter, the coolest bounty hunter (and bodyguard and button man) ever, deciding they didn’t want to work for stupid, short-sighted, inept, venal bosses any more, but wanted to become their own boss, a boss unto themselves, building something that was theirs, and in the process learned the challenges, perils, pitfalls, challenges, seduction, and ultimately oblige of power …
… that is an awesome story. And that’s what the trailer promised us.
Boba Fett, and the uneasy head that wears the crown
And that’s what … we got a watered-down half-a-story of, mixed up with a cloudy brew of guest figures, parallel stories, and fan-cruft.
Heck, imagine the difference if we took all that irrelevant Mandalorian time and added in some internal conflict to the Boba Fett story.
For example, Fennec Shand repeatedly bumps heads (if lightly) with Boba Fett about taking a more forceful, bloody, and criminal course of being a mob boss. Hey, Spice is profitable! That could have given us some real conflict. Is she going to argue when he says, “No”? Is she going to consider her options? Is she going to set up a side gig? Is she going to (even seem to) consider betraying him? Will the Pykes approach her, thinking she’s a weak link? Will she show she’s her own person … and ultimately make the right choice for her own reasons?
Nope. A kick-ass character and great actress, she just spends most of her time in the series giving us recaps of the situation (overlapping the “Previously” intros), nodding politely to Boba’s orders, and then being a deus ex assassin at key moments. A huge waste.
Just me … and my … shaaaaadow!
Or consider, if you wanted to drag the Mandalorian into the mix (which his own series laid the groundwork for), we could create some dramatic tension from that. Does Din Djarin really support Boba Fett’s ends (or his understanding of Boba’s ends) or is he supporting Boba, reluctantly, out of a sense honor? How far does that go? Does he protest Boba’s course? Does he actually show that possible internal conflict? Conversely, does Boba Fett really trust him? Does his see how his own sense of honor/obligation lines up to Mando’s? What do these two characters have in common, and where do they have differences, and how can we let that actually drive some drama between them?
Nope. Instead, we get “I am Lawful Neutral, so I will follow your orders to the death.” “Dude, you really believe that?” “It is the Way.” Ho-hum.
“Because they’re cousins … identical cousins …”
Hell, as far as that goes, even Boba Fett, the titular character, after getting a burst of character growth in the extended Tuskan flashbacks (very nicely done) … spends most of the series in an enlightened mob boss state. From the time in the present when he sits on Jabba’s throne to the end of the show … he doesn’t actually seem to grow or change. He’s the “I am the boss. I will rule with respect. I will protect my people” guy. He doesn’t get any internal conflicts, he doesn’t clash with anyone but obvious enemies, he doesn’t question his course. He just cruises along. His only challenge is a bit of naivete as to what it takes to run a city as a mob boss. That’s the only internal “conflict” he faces. Which is … a bit boring.
Boba really doesn’t tick any of these boxes.
While the Mando 2.5 miniseries bits were a huge gimping disruption, I did enjoy them for themselves. Playing with the Darksaber (when it could do things); running into Luke, and Ahsoka, and Grogu; learning that Luke is, yeah, just like we learn in the third trilogy, going to be a Jedi dick of a teacher … all of that was informative and fun. It was all great.
And it was totally inappropriate to this series. It had nothing to do with Boba Fett. It had nothing to do with the overall gang war of Mos Espa. It was simply a bridge to (we assume) the desired starting point of Season 3 of The Mandalorian.
(It also led to some of the worst telegraphing. “Oh, hey, I, the Mandalorian, am now flying around in a Naboo starfighter, but the little dome area where an astromech droid used to go is now just an empty dome, so very, very empty, I wonder what will ever fill it …?”)
I’m shocked, SHOCKED, to find Grogu here!
Sigh.
This series really could have been so much more. So many of the elements are beautiful. The Tuskan sequences were lovely and meaningful both for Boba and for Star Wars lore. (What? The Tuskans aren’t just blood-thirsty, superstitious wogs? Mind-blown!) So many of the figures used — the Pykes, Krssantin, Cad Bane, even call-outs to Mando bits like Cobb Vanth and Mos Pelgo and Peli Motto — were neat in and of themselves, and could have all fit into a rich Boba-focused narrative saga.
For that matter, Boba’s part of the story could have been about the conflicts he felt, his personal urges toward violence, what he learned from his time with the Tuskans, how that intersected with his vengeful motivations dating back to his father’s death, and how those drives still did (and, to his realization, didn’t) apply to the present … maybe his growing uncertainty about his reasons for taking on the role of daimyo of Mos Espa, and how that ultimately translated into his taking on responsibility for the lives of the people there.
But the show decided, for whatever reason, to try to do too much, and too little, to show some lovely lore, and to short-circuit the character growth … and ultimately turned out to be a fun-to-watch, frustrating-to-contemplate, disappointment.
I don’t regret watching any individual element, really. But I definitely consider the series, the Book, as a whole … a fail.
Bester is here for the Teeps, and Lochley’s secret is finally revealed.
A-Plot: The past finally catches up with Byron and his Telepath gangcult commune, as EarthGov sends Psi Corps bloodhounds, led by Bester to apprehend them as criminals and send them back. With Sheridan trying to play nice with Alliance members (like Earth), and Lochley not having any legitimate reason to stop them (and, further, having previously had not-horrible interactions with Bester), there seems to be little way to stop it from happening.
Well, except for Lyta Alexander, who’s been helping steal liberate drugs for the Teeps, and whom Byron continues to woo to join his cult commune. She’s not your average telepath, having had her powers goosed by Kosh waaaay in the past. And, indeed, she manages to stop Bester and his goon squad at least once — but cannot reliably do so, especially when he gets his requested support from station security.
Fortunately, after Bester has captured all the teeps and is going to head back to Earth with them, Lochley pulls a deus ex bureaucratica, using a new medical regulation (from Franklin, with the toner still damp) that requires thorough examination and quarantine of any folk who have been in Unknown Space, like the vagrant teeps have been, before being allowed back on Earth. That frustrates the hell out of Bester, but assuming he still has an ally in Lochley, he’s willing to come back in sixty days to pick them up.
Lochley, in turn, while not carrying the animus against Bester that Sheridan and Garibaldi do, isn’t by any means a fan, and it’s clear that while she can’t “let” the Teeps escape B5 before Bester’s return, she will not be at all disappointed if they find a way to do so.
Sad, lonely, isolated Lyta is sad, lonely, and isolated.
But while the Telepath plot here gets solved by Lochley, it’s really Lyta’s story, and there’s a lot of heartbreaking moments as Lyta watch the teeps run down and captured, one by one, and Byron tells her he’s turning himself in to be with them, even if it means his likely death. You can see the increasing isolation she’s under — cut off from Kosh, not a member of the Corps (despite still wearing a badge), not a member of the command team any more (and relegated to sneaking station supplies to the Teeps), but also not a member of the Teep cult colony. In every scene, it grows more and more painful …
Until, at the very end, as Byron is reunited with his cult family, and they all sit around and sing a slightly creepy song about love and harmony and finding “a better place” …
And we will all come together in a better place
A better place than this
My love will guide you
My love will hold you
My love will show you the way
There will come a tomorrow
Where we’re free from our sorrows
And our love will show us the way
We are sister and brother
And we will all come together in a better place
A better place than this …
… she takes off her Psi Corps badge and, a bit uncomfortably, goes to Byron’s side.
This will not end well.
And it shouldn’t. Zack is already on the record thinking that Byron is going to be trouble, not because of telepath prejudice (he and Lyta had a thing going on at one point, remember?) but because Byron is so clearly aiming to be a martyr. Byron himself is clearly about one batch of Kool Aid from a self-inflicted tragedy. The guy is just so plainly manipulative that it’s terrifying seeing Lyta sucked into his orbit.
Some reviews try to complain that Byron and his cult band of merry teeps are being forced on us as heroes. I disagree, at least so far to date: I don’t trust the guy, even if he’s as sincere as a saint.
B-Plot: The Mystery of Lochley is Revealed! Delenn chats with Lochley, having been given the skinny by Sheridan the previous night, though nothing specific gets said. Lochley’s a bit peeved that Sheridan didn’t warn her, but also feels vaguely apologetic to Delenn. Meanwhile, Garibaldi is hanging out around the corner, taking notes.
But not for long, since in short order he’s in the brig, having stormed into Lochley’s office to punch Bester in the snoot — understandable (even to Lochley), but not to be allowed (even if she has to threaten the security team she summoned before they lay hands on their former boss).
In short order, she and Zack discover Garibaldi has been riffling through Lochley’s personnel files on the computer, so she goes down to his cell (quite a nice and sizeable room, to be sure) to hash it out — which annoyingly turns into Lochley answering all of Garibaldi’s questions.
She explains her chumminess with Bester from a past experience where he took out a rogue telepath who had killed two of her people (who had found out he was using his telepathy to win at gambling). And she explains that Sheridan chose her because it would be politically valuable to have an EarthForce officer who was on the “other side” in the war, but one he could trust both not to stab him in the back, disagree with him when needed, and back him up likewise.
As to how Sheridan would know that …
LOCHLEY: We met fresh out of Officer Training School. We hit it off, fell crazy in love, got married, realized we’d made a terrible mistake, fell crazy out of love, and split up. You see, in a relationship. you gotta take turns being in charge, but, we both wanted to be in charge all the time. We had arguments that could peel paint off the wall.
They remained friends and respectful of one another and knew they could trust one another.
It almost feels a little anticlimactic, esp. since the scene feels rushed and info-dumpy, and Lochley’s spilling all the beans that Garibaldi asked for comes across more as weak than reasonable.
(It also feels … unrealistic. None of her records — or his — indicate her marriage to Sheridan? The press — directly or via politicians and partisans in EarthGov — haven’t learned about this? It’s a kind of clever idea, but it makes no sense.)
Other Bits and Bobs: Londo is shifting into the next phase of his life, preparing to return to Centauri Prime to support the ailing Regent, and anticipating becoming Emperor — the prospect of which he’s increasingly melancholy and pessimistic about.
Things get a bit more exciting when the Centauri cruiser he’s supposed to be on is destroyed in an obvious assassination attempt. Delenn and G’kar are concerned over Londo’s safety, so Delenn decides he needs a non-Centauri bodyguard — and that G’kar is the perfect choice. The Narn is initially taken aback, but the idea of his being a necessary part of the Centauri court tickles his funny-bone, and by the end Londo and G’kar are heading off the Centauri homeworld, bickering about who gets the aisle seat.
Meanwhile, the criminally-underused Franklin is given by the writer the Alliance a new side gig: research head for medical care of Alliance species, with an emphasis on diseases and the like that can jump to other species. It’s actually a good tie-in to some of his original research (which he dumped when he learned that EarthForce was going to use it for bio-weapons). And it means he’ll get more opportunities to do something in the show than hang out in MedLab and look distressed.
Meanwhile: So JMS briefly belonged to a religious cult/commune when he was in his early 20s, after escaping an extremely abusive and isolating household. A lot of that experience feeds into the Byron / Lyta / Telepath saga — Byron as charismatic leader, the group behavior, even the song they sing.
No, nothing at all creepy or cult-like here.
And knowing that makes it clear that there will be no happy ending here, for anyone — we know that Psi Corps is awful, and Bester a nasty piece of work, but in his own way Byron is as manipulative as the Psi Cop, and his band of teeps is as much a trap as the Corps.
The only question with someone like Byron is how many of his followers he’ll take down with him.
I can’t let a Bester episode go by without commenting on Bester. He is his usual maddening self — gentile and oh-so-pleasant sharing jokes and tea with Lochley, snarky and smirking whenever he knows he has the upper hand (and wants to rub it in), and, at a few moments, almost desperately eager in wanting to take Byron in and being told he can’t (yet).
Don’t you (like Garibaldi) just want to punch this guy?
Bester is not Walter Koenig’s most famous role, but it should be, and any time he’s in an episode, like this one, it’s a treat.
Most Dramatic Moment: Despite the reeeeeally annoying (and creepy song), there’s a lovely moment from the director, John C Flinn, where Lyta approaches the Teep colony, and sees them with their candles and their singing and their camaraderie and family … through a plastic grid, separate and shut away from them and emphasizing for the final moment how cut-off and alone she is …
Lyta, on the outside, looking in.
Most Amusing Moment: Lochley realizing that, with all the other things that have been going on, she’s forgotten to order Garibaldi released from holding.
LOCHLEY: I also have this nagging feeling that I’m forgetting something.
CORWIN: I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Good night, Captain.
LOCHLEY: Good night, Lieutenant. [beat] Oh no! [into link] Lochley to security.
SECURITY: [over link] Security here.
GARIBALDI: [over link] I said, let me the hell out of here! [Sound of something getting thrown]
LOCHLEY: You can release Mr. Garibaldi now.
GARIBALDI: [over link] About time.
Honorable mention to most of the dialog between Sheridan and Lochley. She still feels stiff with the other characters — trying to be the hard-ass Ivanova type in a way that Tracey Scoggins just cannot pull off with her perfect makeup and hair — but her banter with Sheridan is almost always loaded with gems that are delivered neatly.
SHERIDAN: I’m caught in a web of my own good intentions.
LOCHLEY: Well, the road to hell is paved with them, sir.
SHERIDAN: I know, but why does it have to go through this office?
Or, as Lochley’s explaining why, legally, she has to cooperate with Bester:
LOCHLEY: How am I doing do far?
SHERIDAN: Annoyingly logical.
LOCHLEY: Thank you.
SHERIDAN: It wasn’t a compliment.
Most Arc-ish Moment: Londo has a chat with Zack. The security chief doesn’t understand why Londo is moping about — being emperor sounds like a sweet gig. But Londo has forebodings, both from Centauri premonitions about the future, and from family history — he will be the second Mollari to be emperor, and that one ended badly, too.
“This is where it begins to go bad for all of us.”
Yeah, this is where it all starts to go bad for Londo … and everyone in his orbit.
Overall Rating: 4.3 of 5.0 — After two episodes that were largely filler (entertaining in their own way, but still not really progressing anything), we finally get some plot movement around the Telepaths, the Alliance, and an array of personal stories. It’s the best episode of the season so far.
Wherein we learn more about being a Ranger, none of which is pleasant
A-Plot: A delegation from the Rangers goes from Minbar to B5 to chat with Delenn, the Entil-zha. Two of them are older gents, instructors — Turval, from the religious caste, and Durhan, of the warrior caste — and they bring with them two trainees, Tannier from the religious and Rathenn from the warriors.
Along the way, they get entangled with a new gang boss in DownBelow, Trace. The New Boss has Big Plans, and he’s doing some demonstration killings to show people who’s in charge.
Bullying Gang Boss Leader is a Bully
Unfortunately (for all concerned), recruit Tannier gets involved in one of Trace’s incidents — and ends up being seriously curb-stomped as another demonstration. That leads to Delenn taking the whole matter away from Zack and station security, and handling it via the Rangers. “Those who harmed him,” she tells Lochley, “now have power over him. He must take back that power, or he will never be whole again.”
Tannier, barely back on his feet, is given a chance to duke it out solo with an increasingly panicked New Boss. The recruit ends up taking the guy apart, resolving both the New Boss problem and giving Tannier back the self-respect and self-control he’ll need as a Ranger.
DURHAN: Where is your fear now, Tannier?
TANNIER: Gone, Master.
TURVAL: And what do you feel? Anger? Do you feel triumphant? Happiness? Joy?
TANNIER: Pity.
DURHAN: Why?
TANNIER: Because this is all he will ever have and all he will ever know. Because his name will be swallowed by silence. Forgotten. His name belongs to no one.
TURVAL: And who does your name belong to? History? The world?
TANNIER: No. It belongs to me.
And then we get some neat little bows, and Security moves in to clean up the mess.
“Don’t mind me, I just beat up this dude who beat me up.”
There’s a lot of this that seems to play well, if a bit preachy. On reflection, it does make the Rangers seem a bit more, um, cult-like, and with a fondness for violence as a way of resolving problems. That is, in part, their remit, but it’s also an extension of, as Garibaldi later comments, Minbari inability to back down from a righteous fight.
That these are the guys who are running interstellar security and espionage for the Alliance is both comforting and uncomfortable.
B-Plot: The Mystery of Lochley Continues! Garibaldi is obsessing over the station’s new captain, her past, and which side she fought on in the Civil War.
This leads to a blow-up between the two (with a very uncomfortable Zack sitting by), where Lochley ends up not-confessing that, yeah, she was loyal to Earthforce, because she believed in the chain of command, she wanted to keep her crew safe, and she wasn’t ordered to do something she couldn’t in good conscience do.
LOCHLEY: I am a soldier, Mr. Garibaldi, and as such my vocabulary is rather limited. I only really understand three words: loyalty, duty, honor. If I did it your way, one of those would have to go … and then the other two would become meaningless. Just like this conversation. Good day.
That hardly satisfies Garibaldi, esp. since it reinforces the question of why Sheridan would have picked her for the job.
(Parenthetical note: some poor direction or editing here: In some parts of the scene, the crowd in the cafeteria is definitely hanging on every word Lochley says as she and Garibaldi get into it, complete with applause when she leaves; but in the main shot when she’s saying it, everyone in the background is just chit-chatting amongst themselves.)
While the scene is a little clumsy and rushed, it’s a solid, legitimate argument against what Sheridan & Co. did. JMS plays fair with both sides — which is fine, now, but back actually during the Civil War, a lot of comments were made that “just obeying orders” or “the military can’t set political policy” were treated as weaselly, if not evil. Turning around and treating Lochley’s “as long as I don’t get ask to commit war crimes, it’s not my place to interfere” as something we want to hear our protagonist saying needs a little bit more explanation at this point.
In a later scene, Lochley mentions something in passing that Delenn picks up on as indicating that she’s known Sheridan in the past. And the final scene of the episode has Delenn and Sheridan in bed that night, discussing the matter (or having discussed the matter) — with Delenn on the far side of the mattress, her back turned to him …
DELENN: I’m going to pretend that you were going to tell me this sooner or later.
SHERIDAN: I was just looking for the right time.
DELENN: Ten seconds after you thought of it would have been good.
SHERIDAN: Yeah. Yeah, maybe so.
What “this” is will remain a mystery until next episode.
Other Bits and Bobs: Garibaldi is beginning to work with Byron’s telepaths, though they seem unenthused (or perhaps just disdainful of Garibaldi and the other nats).
He’s also beginning to butt heads with Zack. There’s still a mentor/mentee and even old friends aspect to their relationship, but Garibaldi doesn’t want to listen to Zack, and there are hints here that he’s accessing station security info that Zack doesn’t approve of.
Meanwhile: This episode has one of the rare cases of an actor who played two significant (and not heavily made-up) characters: Turhan Bey, who not only plays the Religious Caste Ranger Instructor Turval here, but back in S.2 played the Centauri Emperor Turhan. This was his last credited role before his death a few years later.
In the script book, JMS recounts how a lot of this episode was driven by the curb-stomping he received when he was young, and at a time when he just got booted out of the cult he’d fallen into. A lot of the “face your fear” stuff here seems to come from this incident, even if Joe never got a chance to beat the shit out of his attacker while his colleagues stood around and applauded.
(His letting the remaining anger about that incident drive this episode is one of the reasons he feels it’s so weak.)
Most Dramatic Moment: Yeah, probably Lochley’s “Loyalty, Duty, Honor” speech to Garibaldi.
Honorable Mention to the cool dismantling of the retreating gang as they seek to escape their level of DownBelow, with thugs being picked off from the front and rear and dragged into the shadows by the Rangers. Not only is it creepy, but when the (mostly Minbari) Rangers in the shadows finally become visible in the dim down-lighting, they look positively satanic.
(The whole incident is scary — while the Mora’Dum, the “Application of Terror,” is meant to be about a Ranger overcoming their own terror, Trace, the New Boss, is clearly terrified by the whole matter, too.)
Most Amusing Moment: Gotta be the final scene there between Sheridan and Delenn.
Sheridan faces the No Win Scenario
Honorary Mention to: One of the new cross-species Ranger recruits is a Pak’ma’ra — who refuses to learn new languages, and whose dietary habits make it difficult to house him with the other Rangers.
Delenn figures out that the ubiquity of the Pakmara (and the fact that nobody wants to pay any attention to them) makes them perfect couriers for the Rangers, turning lemons into lemonade.
Most Arc-ish Moment: This episode is 98% arc-free, but there is one intriguing moment where Delenn and Turval are chatting, and he mentions how Lennier, now at Ranger Camp (though unseen in the episode) is not tackling training in a healthy fashion, driving himself to the breaking point.
Delenn, of course, knows why, but it’s not like she can talk much about it. She just asks Turval to watch over him.
It might have made this episode a lot better — and a lot more on-point — if we’d gotten Lennier rather than Tennier as one of the visiting apprentice Rangers.
Overall Rating: 3.5 of 5.0 — This episode is … kind of a waste of time, in an otherwise crowded season. There’s some minor progress on side fronts, but with Londo, G’kar, and the Telepaths all MIA, there’s just not that much there there, though what’s there is entertaining. It’s hardly a bad episode in and of itself — it just feels like an unnecessary one. Its problem is strategic (where it shows up in the series and what it does there) more than tactical (the show itself).
That’s not just my opinion. JMS has commented, “There are some stories you tell that you look back at later and wonder, what the hell was I thinking?” Between not having a core-character-focused story (after the previous not-a-core-character-focused story), and using yet another interchangeable violent crime guy trying to take over the gangs, Joe opines he would just as soon this episode vanish softly and silently away.
An unusual slice-of-life episode, as epic events and characters are observed by … B5 janitors
A-Plot: The focus in this episode are the two floating maintenance workers, Mack and Bo. The former is salt-of-the-earth building super, always with a wry quip about the little guy. The latter is also grounded, but has a little bit bigger perspective.
Over the course of the episode they have chances to observe — and comment to each other about — each of the major characters, and their relationships. It’s actually feels still part of the TNT reintroduction of the series, since there’s both a lot of show and a lot of tell.
Bo and Mack
Beyond observation, there are two parts of this plot. First, there’s the sense that the little guys (like Mack and Bo) never get paid attention to by the big guys. They’re the set changers in a kabuki play, invisible except when someone has a complaint. On the flip side, there’s also the idea that the little guys look for something more consequential than their work life. Bo, in particular, envies the snazzy Star Fury pilots out there, dogfighting their ways to glory.
So Byron (whilst they’re hunkering down with the teeps in Brown Sector) links Bo up to one of the pilots — initially terrifying, then exciting, then …
Bo suddenly seeing himself as a Starfury pilot
The vision is interrupted — but it’s a taste of a life he never had, never really grasped, making him both more respectful of the pilots and more glad of the role he gets to play on a daily basis.
A third aspect to this part of the plot is that, even as we see the little guys both feeling rare bits of appreciation and even a little adventure, we also get to observe how they see through the facade of heroism, up-close. Delenn and Sheridan’s love. Lochley’s fierceness. Franklin’s pain. G’Kar and Londo’s ties that bind. The telepaths’ humanity. It feel a bit stagey at times, but it still manages to work.
B-Plot: There’s a fleet of evil aliens looking to invade B5’s sector — let’s call them the McGuffins, because in the end who they are and what motivates them isn’t important, and they’ll never be seen again. Anyway, the station knows they’re on the way because of the Gaim. B5 has to give them, at the least, a bloody nose to teach them not to move along to another sector.
Lochley is facing her first big military challenge. B5 is a formidable force, but with the White Star fleet away (see last episode), they’re vulnerable.
Sheridan is facing the reality of not being in charge of the station any longer, but still wanting to see Delenn protected. Delenn, on the other hand, isn’t going to be the damsel locked in the tower for protection.
Garibaldi is fighting for his job, having both gotten the initial Gaim intel, but also missing out on some key strengths of the bad guys. He’s also paranoid about Lochley, trying to pin down on what side she fought during the Civil War.
Franklin is prepping for the big battle, to receive casualties both from B5 and the attacking aliens. When Bo asks why he’s willing to save aliens there to kill them, he exposits some backstory about how his own father (who visited the station in 2×10 “GROPOS”) had his life saved by an enemy doctor, inspiring Franklin to go into medicine himself.
Londo and G’Kar are in shelter, bickering, but also giving us a few glimpses at themselves through their origins. G’Kar grew up in bomb shelters, barely protected from the Centauri bombings, always eventually coming back out into the sun. Londo, on the other hand, was always saddled with layers of noble duty — he never grew up, as G’Kar put it, only grew old.
(That insight will inform the rest of the season, as G’Kar blossoms in the sunlight of freedom, and Londo becomes ever more burdened by his destiny and his duty. More on this below.)
Byron is protecting and honing his people, quoting Shakespeare (again), but still being moved enough by humanity to help Bo make the connection he’s looking for.
Ultimately, the McGuffins are defeated, thanks to a deus ex White Star return of the fleet to trounce them. The command crew are wearied but satisfied with their jobs. Sheridan and Delenn can bill and coo. And Franklin gets stuck signing the death certificates.
The B-plot, in the end, isn’t meaningful, except to advance its entwined A-plot. It would have been nice to have thrown in some plot development in what’s been a slow start to a busy season, but …
Other Bits and Bobs:
Meanwhile: JMS has noted that Mack was modeled somewhat after Harlan Ellison, who had been pestering him the entire series about doing an episode from the perspective of “the little people.” Ellison gets a story credit on this episode.
Most Dramatic Moment: Franklin, having already talked about his desire to go out and find any lives he save after the battle … ends up the episode tagging corpses overflowing out into the hallways.
You think Mack and Bo have it tough?
As Mack starts saying in complaint to Bo, “They get all the glory, we get all the mess. Well, maybe not all the mess.”
Most Amusing Moment: Mack and Bo exchange any number of amusing quips, not even counting their interactions with the series protagonists, but the best has to come as Londo and G’Kar, after lengthy bickering, kvetching, and kvelling, wander off …
Londo: [uncomfortably] I think I will see how things are going out there.
G’Kar: I’ll go too. Good idea.
Londo: What, are you afraid I won’t come back, G’Kar?
G’Kar: No, afraid you will. [They walk off.]
Mack: [to Bo] So, how long you figure they’ve been married?
Amusing, but insightful. The two are bound, if not by oaths of love, by deeper strands of destiny and personality. There are times when it seems that B5 is actually a show about those two aliens, and, even if it’s not true, it’s still close to being so.
Honorable mention to Delenn arguing Mack and Bo out of escorting her to an escape pod at Sheridan’s orders. It may be Sinclair who studied from the Jesuits, but he instilled some of that into the Minbari generations ago, and Delenn has learned her lesson well.
Most Arc-ish Moment: Much of this episode is throw-away regarding arc, but the interaction between Londo and G’Kar and their mutual childhoods is both foundational and predictive of where things are going for the two of them.
G’Kar: Ah, that explains a great deal.
Londo: Really? And what exactly does it explain, G’Kar?
G’Kar: I spent my years in one shelter after another, but sooner or later, I was able to leave the shelter and walk out into the daylight. You do not have that luxury. You carry your shelter with you. Every day. You did not grow up, you grew old.
Mack and Bo in the raid shelter, enjoying some time off.
Overall Rating: 4.1 of 5.0 –My son, who’s always had a love-hate relationship with (his dad forcing him to watch) B5, opined, as the credits rolled, that he’d be happy to watch B5 in the future if every ep was like this.
I think this comes mainly from that human, non-epic, un-pompous note to it. Even though some of the dialog from JMS feels a bit — elaborate and heavy, even from Mac and Bo — it’s still much more of a grounded episode, reflecting not just the legendary heroes (and villains), but the little guys who get whipped up into their wakes.
We’ve seen B5 from other perspectives in the past — but that was the news media, friendly and un-. Mack and Bo, even if a bit too precious and wise at times, still give us an everyman’s perspective on life on B5 that’s too often missing in the sturm und drang of galaxy-shaking drama.
Not a lot of theater-going, but an MCU rewatch helped the numbers
While I managed to get back into the theaters for part of 2020, overall film watching still took a hit from normal. This was the year that we got much more into streaming, though we still maintain a healthy DVD/Blu-Ray collection. For 2021, I recorded in Letterboxd:
44 movies watched.
14 movies watched for the first time.
3 movies watched in a movie theater.
30 movies rewatched.
40 movies liked. ❤
24 movies (re)watched from the Marvel Cinematic Universe
So MCU flicks made up over half the movies watched, both rewatches and new releases.
Highest Ranking movies watched:
5.0 – Fellowship of the Ring
4.5 – Howl’s Moving Castle
4.5 – The Avengers
4.5 – Captain America: Winter Soldier
4.5 – The Death of Stalin
4.5 – Sneakers
4.5 – Black Panther
4.5 – Ant-Man and the Wasp
4.5 – Ice Station Zebra
Lowest Ranking:
3.0 – Iron Man 3
3.0 – Thunder Force
3.0 – Aquaman
3.0 – Conan the Barbarian
Month with the Most Movies Seen: April (8)
Months without Movies: February, August
I read a fair amount this year, though less than usual.
The good news is, I keep track of the books I read at Goodreads.com.
The bad news is, I don’t always do a good job of it, though, especially when it comes to graphic novels, because those read so relatively quickly. So I know when Goodreads says I read 56 books this year, that’s arguably inaccurate.
The overall numbers are down from the past — I get into the non-fiction books below, but from a fiction standpoint, not being in the office, I didn’t as regularly take my lunchtime walk as I have previously. My bad.
Much of the year was spent re-reading / catching up on favorite book series. Two new (disappointing) installments were added to Cole & Bunch’s Sten series. I caught completely up with Gail Carriger’s various steampunk romances, as well as Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet space opera multi-series. I also caught up with the latest Charles Stross Laundry titles, and read some more Terry Pratchett (though not as much as he deserves).
From a new series standpoint, not much beyond discovering Seanan McGuire’s InCryptid series, an urban fantasy (even when in the countryside) about a family of Buffy the Vampire Slayers who are also conservationists and cryptozoologists. It’s pretty cheap fun, nice world building, and I’ll be plowing through many more of them in the New Year.
Goodreads (and my Kindle) rank things from 1-5 stars. Only three books earned that rating from me this year (with links to my reviews):
(I didn’t review HtMaW beyond the rating — I think it just hit all the notes right for what it was.)
Most of what I read-read was fiction. Non-fiction works completed were few on the ground, largely because the COVID Pandemic continued to impact both my commuting to work and longer-range driving during which I usually listen to such things.
Twenty years later, I still love these movies, especially the first one.
Twenty years ago started three of the greatest Christmases ever. Yeah, there was family, and food, and presents. But there was also, year after year, a new Lord of the Rings movie.
Holiday planning in that era always sounded like (from my perspective), “Okay, we arrive in California on Thursday … Christmas is Saturday … so can we sneak off to a matinee of the next LotR movie on Friday, or do we have to wait all the way to Sunday?”
This year marks the 20th Anniversary of Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring, the best, for my money, of the LotR trilogy. I mean, all three of them are good, but FotR hews closest to the original, and tells the best story.
I’ve reviewed the movie six times, but I want to highlight my latest thoughts, twenty years on. I love so much about this film — the visualization of Middle-Earth, Howard Shore’s stunning soundtrack, the faithfulness of the adaptation (with trade-offs to keep the movie flowing forward yet stay within the three hour range — a sad wave to both Tom Bombadil and the Barrow Downs). This particular review, I wanted to focus on one particular aspect: the second bananas.
The LotR trilogy has a remarkably solid core cast. Elijah Wood gives us a Christ-like Frodo, evolving from care-free hobbit teenager (equivalent) to increasingly tormented Ring-bearer, to post-war vet who can’t find his place back in the Real World (but fortunately has another world he can move to). Ian McKellen’s Gandalf is equal parts avuncular uncle, force of nature, and leader who’s read too many prophecies and knows too much of what’s really going on to be honest or comfortable. Viggo Mortenson’s Aragorn is the surprisingly reluctant hero with an inferiority complex (likely after having had his foster father rag on him for decade about how weak humans are). Orlando Bloom’s otherworldly Legolas, John Rhys-Davies unfortunately humorous Gimli, Sean Astin’s stalwart Samwise, Dominic Monaghan’s semi-responsible Merry, Billy Boyd’s utterly irresponsible Pippin — all are an excellent core that carry the trilogy forward movie by movie.
The Fellowship
But one of the real powers of the trilogy, as seen in this first film, is the quality of the supporting cast, the next tier who aren’t the focus of the story, but who bring a powerful richness to it.
Ian Holm (Bilbo) has such great moments as doddering fool, twisted Ring-bearer, and ingratiating friend. He adds backstory texture to the tale, demonstrates early on the corrupting power of the Ring, and foreshadows the tragedy that Frodo will face. Thank God Jackson didn’t do a Lucas and try to CG-retrofit Martin Freeman (also a great Bilbo in the The Hobbit films) into the original films.
Ian Holm as Bilbo Baggins, careening between charming and very scary.
Hugo Weaving (Elrond) has the tragic pathos and elvish ego to be utterly believable as a leader who bears the bittersweet realization the strength of the elves to stand down their ancient foe Sauron is passed, and in being the SOB/sympathy parent toward Arwen in her doomed relationship with that feckless human, Aragorn.
Hugo Weaving as Elrond, who always looks like he has a terrible headache.
Cate Blanchett (Galadriel) is equal parts tragedy, wisdom, and spookiness as the greatest of elves remaining in the mortal lands of Middle Earth. As the narrator of the film (not the original concept, surprisingly enough), she provides a perspective and insight and sorrow to the whole proceeding. A lot of it is camera angle, slow-mo, and background music, but Blanchett’s distinctive, earthy beauty and smile play such a role.
Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, mysterious, charming, tragic
Christopher Lee (Saruman) is certainly a villain. But he’s a whole-hearted one, and you can see where he’s been corrupted/seduced by Saruman, with the threat that if the most powerful wizard in Middle Earth can be so turned, what chance does anyone else have. Given that the other opponents in the film are scary, voiceless creations (Sauron, the Nazgul, the Balrog), Saruman becomes the able spokesperson for the bad guys. I regret losing his “I want to be a Third Power” subplot from the books, but Lee’s scenery-chewing largely makes up for it.
(Lee apparently really wanted to play Gandalf, and I’d love to visit that alternate reality — but I’m glad I live in this one.)
Christopher Lee as Saruman, who “delved too deeply” into the Palantir of Orthanc
But best of all, as I always conclude, is Sean Bean (Boromir), given a role much more sympathetic, less egotistical, than Tolkien provided his character. Boromir’s vice is his virtue: his caring for others, his willingness to sacrifice all in a monomania to protect those in his charge. He’s mentor and protector of Merry & Pippin, drilling them in combat, advocating for them on the ascent of Caradhras. He’s the man of action and protection, running to the door at Balin’s tomb, to see the approaching orcs (and cave troll), and grabbing Frodo when he’d run back to Gandalf at the Bridge of Khazad-Dum, and restraining Gimli from re-entering the Mines. He’s the voice of compassion as everyone mourns Gandalf’s death. Time and again, he’s the hero always at the fore, less cerebral and strategic than Aragorn, dealing with the immediate needs of his people and his cause … and, ultimately, he cares too much to not fall into the Ring’s seductive trap of power, or — once he needs to redeem himself — to survive the experience.
Tolkien’s Boromir is kind of a dick, if ultimately valorous. Jackson/Bean’s Boromir is the guy who really should be the hero of the story, and falls just short of the goal.
Sean Bean as Boromir, wrassling with Merry and Pippin, because he’s a cool guy and wants to protect the weak.
A 20th Anniversary view of FotR is a splendid way to spend an evening. To my son’s dismay, I’m willing to wait a year (as I did in 2001-2002) to rewatch The Two Towers.
A couple of things I’m interested in, plus an annoying non-movie advert.
I always fine fascinating the question of what’s advertising before which film.
House of Gucci — Gee, a shame they couldn’t find any decent names for this film. But seriously, this is definitely a movie I will not be seeing, but I very much look forward to reading all the articles about it and the story behind it.
Clifford the Big Red Dog — I will likely not go because it is waaaaay too cute, but it looks like a great film for the kids. Even if it doesn’t have The Song.
Morbius — Never one of my go-tos in Spider-Man’s rogues gallery, but this looks nicely dark and creepy. Unlikely to go, as it’s not my wife’s cuppa, but it’s definitely a fresh, horror-tinged leaning into that tormented anti-hero vibe. Better than, alas …
The Batman — I confess I am sooooooo tired of Batman as tormented, anti-hero, insane, vengeance machine, out-grim-grittying-teeth-grinding each previous version in some weird attempt to turn him into an actual villain. Frankly, I think the trend has been out of control since Batman: The Animated Series wrapped up. So, no, I don’t think I’ll be going.
Sing 2 — I did not see the first one, but, damn, if this ad doesn’t make me want to see this one.
[Regal Theaters … why the hell is there a freaking crypto.com commercial in the middle of my movie previews? Also, “Fortune Favors the Brave” is not an investment strategy, no matter how buff Matt Damon looks.]
The King’s Man — Same ad as we saw last going. Looks fun, more so than the original Millar outing.
Encanto — I feel a bit like I am seeing the entire movie, bit by bit, as Disney keeps revising the commercials. But … I will still probably go, because it looks soooooo good.
While imperfect, the questions raised and the focus on people, not powers, impressed me
No Spoilers, Sweetie
So, bottom line: I liked Eternals.
Not get-the-tatoo loved it, though there there were parts that I loved. But I had a very fine time for my money in the theater, and have no regrets over time or money.
The Good
For my money, this is one of the most thoughtful, and thought-provoking, films in the MCU. While other super-hero tales have given us moral quandaries, they’ve often been pretty binary “hero’s choices” — do I save X or Y; do I meet my date or stop the bank robbery; do I stomp the bad guy or save the falling plane?
The issues the Eternals deal with are existential ones, with questions of loyalty and love, of purpose, of destiny and pre-destiny, duty, of sacrifice, of service to God, service to humanity, service to family (or families).
While there are structural and other aspects of the film that blunt some of those questions, they are very real, and they get dealt with in different (sometimes very different) ways by different characters.
Remember how Captain America: Civil War felt a bit facile in how it teed up the superhero vs superhero conflict? This movie doesn’t. The decisions made (and sometimes regretted) are organic to the characters and their situations. This movie will always have a special place for me because of that.
This film has plenty of action and adventure, but for the most part it avoids two overdone cliches in MCU movies:
disaster porn of cities turned into rubble in the course of super-hero villain battles
giant climactic battles of Our Hero(es) vs hordes of CGI villains.
Or, y’know, both
While there is a Major Threat to Humanity that gets dealt with, ultimately the final conflicts in the film are driven not how many CGI baddies can we pew-pew to pieces, but by those moral questions above, and how the characters reacted to them.
This is a movie primarily about people, not a movie about powers.
The movie is visually lovely, both in terms of a global span of settings, and regarding some set pieces that were truly awe-inspiring.
Also on the visual side of things, given their common origins (if differing specialties), I appreciated the common motifs in their powers and technology. There was sufficient commonality to understand the ties between the characters, but enough distinction to appreciate their differences.
Thena gets all the flashy stuff, but all the Eternals’ tech / power expresses in these gold threads and circles
“I did not see that coming,” I thought to myself a good half-dozen times in the film. There are a lot of unexpected twists, most of them quite good. It is a much less linear film than a lot of the MCU.
People emote in this film. People emote a lot. Strong men cry. So do strong women. I am sure that really bugged some of the folk decrying this film, but, again, people not powers.
The Not-So-Good
This movie ramps up very slowly, and ramps down very slowly.
We get a lot of exposition starting off, lots and lots, with tons of flashbacks spanning human history, and then, once we start getting some stakes going, it takes a loooong time to get the band back together.
The individual pieces are done well, and it’s understandable the amount of time things take, given the scope of what we’re addressing, but it feels slow; I was really wondering at points how they were going to end all this, given the time they were taking setting it up. (That they were able to run to 2:37 is a big reason for this — and, since I usually complain about films being cut too short, I suppose I shouldn’t complain much here.)
(My wife, on the other hand, thought it was all well-handled to provide info on all the characters involved. So there’s that.)
On the tail end, we have a long set of denouements, many of them very talkie, some of them very hand-wavy in terms of addressing loose ends. I don’t know what I would necessarily cut there, but I was feeling a bit impatient.
In-between, being something brand-new in the MCU (and, honestly, brand-new in general, as much of this doesn’t follow anything related to Jack Kirby’s Eternals) ends up requiring several pallets of exposition to be dropped in at various times, especially as the protagonists learn things that have been hidden from them or that contrast with earlier infodumps. While interesting, and individually handled decently, it sometimes made things drag.
There are two mid/post-credit scenes, for those wondering if you need to run to the bathroom. Unfortunately, those feel very tacked on, and introduce three MCU characters for future consumption. I was not a fan of any of the introductions, to be honest. I’ll talk more about them in post-spoilers days.
While the Eternals cast is more diverse, the Celestials all kind of looked alike.
Kirby’s Celestials
As a side note, my wife noted that it was really awkward when the various Eternals hug each other, because their shoulder pads always get in the way.
The Okay
This movie has a huge ensemble — ten members of the Eternals, plus supporting players. It’s impossible to give them all equal time, let alone the time each deserves.
That said, the movie does a decent job of it. There’s a distinct narrative focus on Sersi, with narrative rings circling around her, getting their various turns. While I could use a lot more of practically everyone, most of the characters do get moments in the sun that help us to know them and appreciate them.
Rather understated, don’t you think?
As noted, this is not Jack Kirby’s Eternals, but core themes — the Van Danikenesque space gods and super-heroic basis for myths, the names and themes of the individuals, etc. — remain in place. Frankly, I’m fine with that. Kirby’s imagination was amazing, but his writing was full of bombast makes Shakespeare feel subdued.
FWIW, I don’t think Kirby would have had a problem with this film. Indeed, I think it would have inspired him to write a dozen new crazy comics.
The actual origins of the Eternals was significantly shifted from the comics, something I felt disappointment about when it got shoved in my face during the initial screen text. But what was devised in its place successfully drove the rest of the plot, so I’m good with it..
Another non-Kirby aspect I’m fine with is the diversity of the cast. As reference, here’s how they looked back in the day:
Makkari, Thena, Kro, Sersi, Ikarus’ girlfriend Margo, and Ikarus.
Lots of pasty-white (except for the one Deviant there). The same was true for pretty much all the main Eternals cast in Kirby’s day. Most of them men, too, except Thena and Sersi.
Whereas the movie gives us lots of strong women who aren’t dressed in bathing suits. Lots of races and ethnicities, as would be appropriate for beings set forth to interact with the breadth of humanity. Even (gasp) non-het sexual orientation.
None of it felt forced, or weird, or clashing with the original in context of the story. Yet sooooo many fanbois are outraged by these changes. Wonder why?
(In my opinion, if it pisses off Russia and the Middle East, that’s probably a good thing.)
This is the true kick-off of the Cosmic phase of the MCU, as show in both the very nature of this film and its tales of the Celestials and their shenanigans, and in how things wrap up at the end (esp. that first in-credits sequence). We’ve touched a bit on that theme previously, with Captain Marvel and the Guardians of the Galaxy film, but I expect to see a lot more starscapes in the MCU future.
Just a reminder that the “Knowhere” space outpost in GotG is the *head of a Celestial* that is being *mined from within.* Yeesh.
That said, this movie felt oddly detached from the MCU, and its few connections felt a bit forced. It really was very much a stand-alone film, with a couple of exceptions (one of which ended up a significant feature of someone’s motivations). To be sure, my wife, not a Marvel fan, thought that was fine, eliminating the “Oh, you won’t get this if you don’t read the comics or rewatch the movies a dozen times.”
That occurring-in-a vacuum did feel a little strange to me at times, but I also largely didn’t miss it.
Net-Net
I think this movie got a lot of early dumping upon for a few reasons:
Too many film critics dislike the popularity of super-hero films in general, and the MCU (egads! Disney!) in particular. Throw in an Academy-award winning director “slumming,” and their reaction is going to be particularly harsh.
For the fanboi crowd, Eternals is too feeling, too morally complex, and too willing to resolve problems in ways that don’t involve fisticuffs and pew-pews. (It may also have too many strong women and too much diversity for some of their tastes.)
For me, I found those all to be strengths. I mean, I like a good rock-em sock-em, comics-faithful, simplistic-redemption-arc film as much as the next person (I maintain that the original Iron Man is one of the best supers films ever).
But this film was also refreshing, in not providing easy answers, or even easy-to-judge characters. Each of the Eternals faces difficult decisions in the movie, makes (or chooses to dodge, or changes their mind on) those decisions, and doesn’t always get it right, because big, difficult, moral decisions rarely end up with a big red or green light next to them to immediately let you know you made the right one.
It sometimes takes a long time to learn you picked a Zonk behind Curtain Number 3.
Eternals is by no means a perfect move. It is (if unavoidably) verbose in its setup, and dragging in its wrap-up. It handles some elements clumsily. Some characters got a short shrift. Some of it feels melodramatic at times (though Kirby would probably smile at those elements).
But it’s a good film, a great kickoff to bigger things in the MCU and maybe some more sophisticated directions, and I’m really curious as to what happens next.
Too many critics find the MCU not to their taste, and just can’t wait for it to fail.
I haven’t read more than a paragraph (spoilers, sweetie!) of this article lamenting the “Disaster” of Marvel’s new Eternals , but I really didn’t have to, not with this headline:
There are soooooo many Serious Critics who want Marvel (and Disney) to suffer a serious failure. It’s evident here from the very beginning of the piece.
However you may feel about the place superhero blockbusters have occupied in the cultural landscape for the past dozen-plus years …
But you know how you should feel.
… there is something ineluctably sad about the way directing one has become the primary marker of success for a gifted emerging filmmaker. Distinguish yourself in your field, as Chloé Zhao did when she won the Best Director and Best Picture Oscars last year for her contemplative indie road movie Nomadland, and you are ceremoniously handed the keys to the Marvel car—a gigantic CGI-enhanced vehicle that can navigate black holes and shoot rays of plasma out of its headlights, but that always moves in the same direction to arrive at the same predetermined spot.
Or, to sum up the underlying sentiment, “It’s ineluctably (!) sad that brilliant indie movie creators aren’t allowed to endlessly create brilliant indie movies for the brilliant indie movie lovers. Then everyone would become a brilliant (or at least moderately intelligent) indie movie lover like we are. O tempora! O mores!”
O filmcrit snobbery. Because when you start a movie review, not with observations about the film itself, but with bewailing that a great director has been somehow lost to the Inhuman Unartistic Evil Hollywood Marvel Movie-Making Track, you’re not here to criticize the movie — you’re here to criticize the entire genre and its leading production house. For reasons.
Yes, it’s time for another screed about Everything That’s Wrong In The Movie Industry Today.
The idea that a director is only being pure and true to the Muse if they produce brilliant, thoughtful, low-budget, award-winning cinematic masterpieces is … well, yeah, snobbery. It makes assumptions about what is worthwhile, what is pure, what is right.
If a great, award-winning chef is offered the opportunity to make a lot of money creating a family-friendly tuna casserole — no tuna eyeballs floating in sauce, no molecular gastronomic crystalline noodle essence, just tuna casserole using what’s in the pantry — I’m betting it’s going to be a kick-ass meal regardless. Maybe not a once-in-a-lifetime culinary masterpiece that people will weep that they missed in the decades that follow, but something filling and enjoyable and probably with a bit of unexpected dazzle.
Mmmm. Tuna casserole.Is Eternals any good? Is it a tasty tuna casserole? A hearty and multi-faceted stew? Macaroni and Processed Cheez Whiz ? I dunno. I tend to enjoy MCU movies despite the chorus from one side (as above), or the chorus from the other side (“Zack Snyder would have made it even better!”). I have tickets for next Saturday, so I’ll let you know then.
I do have reasonably good expectations, based on the MCU track record, the source material, and what I’ve seen so far. Heck, that the director won Best Director and Best Picture for her “contemplative indie road movie” seems like a good sign that it could be something really good.
As I said, I have not read the full review by Dana Stevens (I’ll save that for after seeing the film). But I suspect, just from that first paragraph, that she fundamentally dislikes the entire genre, and its conventions, and its style of story-telling, especially as packaged within a corporate franchise that isn’t going to do anything too radical or profit-endangering in its various outings. And so Zhao’s outing in Eternals gets framed as a tremendous waste of time and talent when we could have had Nomadland 2 or something.
(Stevens admits she has a bad “record” on “comic book blockbusters,” and that she really doesn’t understand the appeal of the genre, though the original Wonder Woman movie made her cry. She also brags, re Wonder Woman 1984, “Look at me over here, liking a comic book movie! Never let it be said every film on my Top 10 list is a harsh Eastern European documentary!”)
Stevens is not the only person who has expressed literary eye-rolling at the hoi polloi popularity of super-hero flicks in general, or Marvel’s installments specifically. It’s been standard fare since the earliest MCU movies came out, and went into overdrive when Marvel was bought by that other cultural bugbear, Disney — especially as such movies showed an inexplicable tendency to attract lots and lots of viewers and make lots and lots of money. That’s like red meat to some film / book / cultural critics.
“Eternals” is not “Nomadland.” There I said it. Wait, should it have been?
Of course, all this begs the issue of what a “good” movie is. I don’t expect Eternals to be a brilliant “contemplative indie road movie.” In fact, that’s not the entertainment I’m looking for from it. And I can say that without maligning those who enjoyed Nomadland as out-of-touch pointy-headed intellectuals who want to tempt up-and-coming directors with low-budget, contemplative film-making.
Aside from enjoying the genre, I’m intrigued with Eternals because of some of the creative challenges it has to face, with its out-of-nowhere large cast that it has to introduce and get the audience engaged with, let alone the mythos behind it. In some ways, it’s the most ambitious MCU film yet, bypassing the slow build-up of solo films before group gatherings for a much bigger chunk of story-telling. Some few bits of feedback I’ve heard from early viewings are mixed as to whether the film pulls that off.
Beyond that, as a dyed-in-wool Marvel comics fan, I’m at least as interested in the bigger picture of how the movie, and the characters, fit into the larger MCU and the future. And I’m sure there are other folk who just want a pew-pew blow-em-up spandex Saturnalia of good-looking people fighting CGI baddies. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
Just like that hack Shakespeare and his inevitable crowd-pandering sword fights.
Rise the chorus of folk like Stevens, who cry out, “But it’s such a waste of talent! Chloé Zhao! And money! Millions of dollars of money that could have gone to something much more important and memorable and artistic!”
But, honestly, would not have. Nomadland won Best Picture, but if every movie produced was another Nomadland, would we have a movie industry as we know it? Would Disney (would anybody) have created forty Nomadlands for the price of Eternals? It seems unlikely. Nomadland had a box office of $39M in the US, very respectable for a $5M budget. But Shang-Chi made $90M in the US in just its first weekend; Black Widow made $80M (plus another $60M streaming).
There’s more to the cinema than money, and there should be. But there’s very little without money.
Do we need to issue an amber alert for Chloe Zhao?
And it’s not like Disney kidnapped Chloé Zhao and locked her in a room and forced her to make Eternals. Or is the implication that she was unfairly (and “ineluctably sadly”) tempted by filthy lucre to sell out her Muse by directing such a thing? Hey, little girl — climb into the Mickey Mouse van. We have candy!
That’s actually kind of insulting to Zhao.
Not that I think she’s not at least partially into movie-making for the money, but I can’t imagine that there wasn’t something about this project that intrigued her beyond the paycheck, just as other Marvel projects have intrigued folk like Brannagh or the Russo Brothers or Coogler or Waititi.
Eternals’ cinematography incorporates a little more natural light and open landscape than your average Marvel joint, but the demands of a $200 million corporate enterprise ultimately prevail over any aspirations to auteurship. That’s OK—a filmmaker of Zhao’s gifts has earned the right to try her hand at what, like it or not, is one of the dominant genres of the 21st century.
Yes, “like it or not,” but also we’ve somehow flipped from Zhao being sucked into an ineluctably sad Hollywood money-making machine to her having the “right” to try her hand at it. I guess that’s … progress.
For myself, I’m going to engage with Eternals as a contemporary super-hero movie, a genre I generally enjoy, rather than demanding it to be something hitting the 2050 Top 100 Bestest Films of All Time list. Indeed, I’ll see it, not as a stand-alone one-off art film, but as a chapter in a longer (if open-ended) saga. I expect I’ll enjoy it, too, even if it’s just “predetermined” to be tuna casserole.
A short-lived show about an agoraphobic Russian chessmaster who solves murders. As one does.
The “arrogant and eccentric asshole genius who solves crimes” trope is an ancient one (hey, Sherlock!), and “… but never leaves his house” is also a sizeable subcategory (think Nero Wolfe, among many others). Endgame fits pretty neatly into that setup, but is sufficiently charming and innovative to have deserved a longer run than it got.
Running on Canadian TV 2011-12, it’s the story of Arkady Balagan, an ex-pat Russian chessmaster living as a hermit in a Vancouver luxury hotel, unable to leave after witnessing the fiery killing of his fiancee, Rosemary, in front of the place. Unable to travel for competition purses, and not earning enough money from pay-to-play chess games with the hoi-polloi, Arkady backs into a career as an amateur solver of mysteries (usually murders), using his analytical skills, his ability to read opponents, his talent at visualization, and just plain old being the smartest guy in the room. Being a melancholic Russian who drinks a lot apparently doesn’t hurt, either.
Since he can’t leave the Huxley hotel (and since they can plausibly set only so many murders inside of the place), he ends up making use of the usual varied band of helpers as legmen, on- and off-premises: the game theory grad student who’s willing to be paid in games with the master, the bartender at the hotel who serves him so much booze, the savvy immigrant housekeeping staffer, the sister of his fiancee Pippa (who’s usually pursuing leads about Rosemary’s murder), and, occasionally, the obnoxious head of hotel security who’d actually love to throw him out on his ass.
This is not deeply original TV, nor the most innovatively-written thing you might watch, but it does quite a nice job of the tropes it uses. Chess lends itself to the plots in various clever ways. Arkady’s visualized puzzling things out (where he steps into the scenes he’s speculating about) is fun. And the mysteries (most, but not all, of them about murder) are pretty well written.
Shawn Doyle as Arkady does great Russian, and plays the bored, entitled, asshole eccentric in quite the entertaining fashion. The supporting players all do nicely with what they’re given, and most of them get some time in the plot spotlight over the course of the 13 episodes.
The weakest part of Endgame is, ironically, the motivating force behind Arkady’s dilemma: the mysterious daylight murder of his fiancee. This is a key element in the early episodes, with Arkady certain (to the point of alienating folk) that it was a KGB hit on him, because he’s donated so much money to pro-democracy movements in Russia, but as the season wends on, Arkady seems less and less invested in the murder, even as the plot being revealed around it gets bigger, hitting a flashpoint in the last episode. The contrast is confusing, and muddies what should have been a much more solid through-line to the series.
Endgame ran on Showcase TV in Canada, but didn’t do well ratings-wise and was canceled. It was rerun by Hulu, with hopes that it might do well enough to warrant a second season, but no go. It’s currently viewable at Imdb.com TV (through Amazon Prime), though it can take a while to find, as any search for “Endgame” keeps pulling up some stupid superhero flick.
Overall, I thought it worth the time I invested into watching through it. It reminded me, a bit, of the much more successful US series The Mentalist (the eccenric, unlikeable, genius, outsider crime-solver driven a bit nuts by the murder of his beloved). I do wish we’d had a chance to see more of Endgame, but I enjoyed what we got.
Because if they’re going to chew up a half hour of your life, it’s worth making a note of them.
Weirdly, there was a trend in these trailers … the longer it went on, the better / less-reprehensible they became. Not sure if that was a coincidence or not.
Jackass Forever — The Jackass franchise is egregious enough. Coming up with something pretty clearly scripted for the Jackass franchise is unforgivable. The trailer almost made me want to leave the theater.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage — The only good thing to come out of the Sony purchase of Spider-Man rights from Marvel is that the whole Venom / Carnage piece of the Marvel Universe has been shoved into a completely different set of movies that I can ignore. Really.
King Richard— You would think a movie about Venus and Serena Williams would actually be about those tennis stars. Instead, this seems more focused on (given the name and the Will Smith star-power) their father, which is … kinda weird.
No Time to Die— The Daniel Craig era of Bond has been a very good one, but having a trailer for the last Craig film present itself as half-nostalgia, half-this-is-the-final-Bond-movie-ever is … also kinda weird.
Sing 2— A heartwarming musical performer anthropomorphic animal song performance sequel to a movie I never watched and don’t regret not doing so.
The King’s Man — I watched The Kingsmen because I knew the Mark Millar comic book. Which meant I had little desire to watch the sequel. But this is an Edwardian Era prequel, which could be kind of amusing.
Eternals — Same trailer as seen before. I am definitely so there. But I’m also a bit worried about an ensemble movie for the MCU where none of the characters are pre-established in solo efforts. I worry about how this will fare, commercially, even while everything about it looks very cool.
Net-net? I see us going to Eternals, The King’s Man (Margie was intrigued), and maybe No Time to Die. The rest are not our cuppa.
A very good martial arts / Wuxia film that manages to find the sweet super-hero spot between Orientalist stereotypes and generic Western action flick. It’s not only a good MCU move on its own, but ties into the MCU in some very distinct and intriguing ways.
For the record, there are two end-titles vignettes — a long one after the initial “animated” credits, and then a shorter one (but definitely worth the wait) after all the credits are done.
Some vocal bros sure seem to be constantly threatened by strong female heroes.
I honestly don’t get the Captain Marvel / Carol Danvers / Brie Larson hate thing, be it in comic books or the movies. I never have. It just always feels like it boils down to horrible resentment and fear of strong women who recognize themselves as such.
That observation was inspired by yet another article — “Comic Book Fans Reject Captain Marvel | Cosmic Book News“– with that theme. “Everyone hates the Captain Marvel because she sucks and she hates men and Marvel is ruining my childhood.” But I’ve been reading this kind of “analysis” for years, ever since (a) Carol got her new name and outfit and (b) she got her own MCU movie announced, too.
Brie Larson as the MCU’s Captain Marvel
And I find that outlets that actually echo those sentiments tend to be a click-baity toxic stew of such feelings, largely just amplifying a relatively small number of hating, if vocal, broflakes, who seemingly can’t stand the very concept of a superhero who can trade punches (or energy blasts) with the best of them, but is a girl, and almost certainly has girl cooties.
(I’ve taken to asking Google News to exclude those media outlets, since I rarely find myself in agreement with any of their other pronouncements, including, frequently, how Zack Snyder is a cinematic god.)
Is Captain Marvel (comic or movie) my bestest ever experience? No. I think the character (originally as Ms Marvel) has rung through too many changes over the years (female version of a male hero, early feminist icon, bathing suit-wearing flying brick, amnesiac victim, hyperpowered cosmic hero, alcoholic … then, finally, as Captain Marvel, fearless pilot and icon for girls).
Alex Ross does a nice, if incomplete, survey of Carol Danvers’ outfits over the years
That current iteration of the character in comics has gone through a series of writers and artists and, well, series, and attracted both fierce fans and fierce detractors, but only so-so readership. I’ve bought its various incarnations because I’ve enjoyed it, but I’ve never put it at top-of-stack as the best thing of the week.
(That the comic has gone through multiple volumes and directions and creative team is much hallooed by the character’s critics, as in the original article noted, without any consciousness of how many other characters and titles go through similar things without being condemned as a threat to All that is Right and Good (and, of course, Masculine).)
But I can say, “Hey, this is only good, not great” without the need to pin down a binary “best of breed” or “dirty mongrel” … perhaps because I don’t see Captain Marvel as a threat to my ego or the rest of my comic book / movie franchise experience. I can see a comic / movie starring a strong woman — one who’s not showing a whole bunch of skin, at that — and not feel like my masculinity is being threatened, let alone attacked.
Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel was supposed to be a tentpole for the next wave of Marvel movies, something that COVID-19 put into a tailspin. It’s strong but not blockbusting performance may have also led to the next installment pivoting to not being another Carol solo film, but The Marvels, which will include two other related characters: Monica Rambeau (seen getting her powers in WandaVision), who in the comics held the Captain Marvel name for a while*, and Kamala Khan (a teen who in the comics got powers and took on the moniker of Ms Marvel).
I hope that’s all setting up a whole bunch of new goodness, not a response to dudes who think Captain Marvel doesn’t fit their toxic view of womanhood.
* Short history lesson: The first superhero named Captain Marvel was originally a knock-off of Superman back in the 1930s, published by Fawcett. DC ended up suing Fawcett over it, quashing the comic, and eventually buying the rights to the character. Meanwhile Marvel decided it should have a character by that name, obviously and created its own Captain Marvel, a Kree spy who “went native” and defended Earth. Carol Danvers was a character in his book, and eventually got exposed to McGuffin technology, and became the similarly-powered Ms Marvel. DC started up its Captain Marvel comic again, though usually not as part of its mainstream universe. Marvel, who couldn’t make a huge commercial go of its Captain Marvel, killed him off with cancer (great comic), but realized it needed to keep the name in use in order to defend the trademark. So Monica Rambeau got created to be called Captain Marvel, though she later changed her hero name to Photon. Various other Captains Marvel showed up in Marvel, until someone had the obvious idea a few years back of renaming Ms Marvel to Captain Marvel, putting an end to all that. Meanwhile, DC finally agreed to rename their Captain Marvel to the name he invoked to trigger his powers, Shazam. And now you know. And knowing’s half the battle.
Captains Marvel: Marvel’s Kree Mar-Vell; Carol Danvers; and Fawcett Comics’ Billy Batson Captain Marvel, now called Shazam.
All dramatic roads keep leading back to the telepaths on B5.
A-Plot: Sheridan is herding cats, trying to get a Declaration of Principles for the Interstellar Alliance written by G’Kar while the various IA members squabble over even the need for such a thing — seeing the IA as a way to get high tech sharing (to them) without necessarily making any sort of moral commitment beyond that mere pragmatism. The Drazi, in particular, resent being told what principles they should abide by.
Things get more heated when a planet under siege by raiders manage to get word out by Ranger of their plight.
Evil raiders, who actually are evil enough (or rendered early enough) to be included in the main titles for the season.The Ranger and his shattered White Star barely make it to B5, and the Ranger dies on the Medlab table — but not before Lyta Alexander (see “B-Plot”) reveals what’s going on.
The planet has evidently been being raided for years for crops and resources. When they tried to fight back, their cities and civilization were destroyed. The raiders are coming back one last time, and fear of genocide is in the air.
Sheridan realizes this is a first make-or-break challenge to the IA, if they really do stand for the principles he thinks they must. He makes plans to send the whole White Star fleet (since a single one got pretty trashed) to intercept the raiders. He notifies the Drazi ambassador, since the system is on the edge of Drazi space; the ambassador asks that they rendezvous with a Drazi fleet first, and then they can act together.
But some overheard thoughts by Byron (see “B-Plot”) reveals the truth …
“I spy, with my mind’s eye, something that is green. And purple.”… that the raiders are actually backed by the Drazi, and the rendezvous will be an ambush by the Drazi fleet.
“Just hold still while we rendezvou with you …”That provides Sheridan with a way to put the screws to the Drazi … and to get everyone to sign off on the Declaration of Principles.
G’Kar quickly passing out copies to be signed or (with a nod toward prosthetic gloves) stamped.Everyone wins!
Except the Drazi. What could go wrong?
Nervous Drazi ambassador is nervous.
B-Plot: B5 now has telepaths. Sort of. But nobody’s quite sure what to do with them. Garibaldi wants to use them for espionage for the Interstellar Alliance, since all the other races do. Sheridan’s hinky about that, knowing that a Telepath War is coming, but eventually agrees.
Alas, Garibaldi’s manipulative pragmatism and inherent mistrust of telepaths (recalling what Bester did to him) makes him an awful representative, and Byron (after a bit of exposition about how hard it is for teeps not to read minds, and what an imposition it is to be asked not to when mundanes are so constantly busy “shouting.”
Garibaldi punts over to Lyta Alexander, B5’s here-again/gone-again sometimes-resident TP, currently there as a commercial Psi Corps telepath. She’s had a crap day, including being inside that Ranger’s mind when he died (insert exposition here about how that sort of thing steals a little bit of any TP’s soul when it happens — and the Psi Corps legend that Bester did it waaaaaay too many times, trying to learn what there was beyond).
Don’t mind me, just losing a chunk of soul to net you some important intel, I’m fine, thanks for asking …Garibaldi pretty blatantly leans on Lyta to intervene with the telepaths and she reluctantly (and kind of resentfully) agrees.
“I promise not to ask you to do something terrible ever again … until I need to ask you to do something terrible again. Deal?”
Byron’s happy to meet her — and even happier to try and recruit her to his cause, playing on her (not unwarranted) grievances of being the person that everyone else kind of ignores until they suddenly need a telepath, no matter how dangerous or awful the job. He stokes those flames, alternating between semi-abusive control behavior, and saying some not-very-nice things about mundanes, including a mocking reading from Hamlet:
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!
And then he notes how inhuman the “paragon of animals” has been to its own kind — and to teeps, which Byron considers a different class of being.
Ultimately he turns on the charm, lets Lyta know she’s welcome there, agrees to make a couple of his people available to the IA — and, as a favor, offers to Lyta what he read in the Drazi ambassador’s head.
Byron turns on the charm.Lyta doesn’t fall for Byron’s pitch hook, line, and sinker — and, to be fair, Sheridan thanks Lyta for passing on the info from Byron about the Drazi — but by the end of the episode she’s back to chat with Byron some more about his Telepath Collective and the Workers Revolution he’s fomenting.
“Come into my egalitarian non-mundane parlour …”Yeah, this is going to end poorly.
Other Bits and Bobs: Just a reminder that, even in the far-flung future, computer systems will have crappy UI and everyone will still need spell-check.
Even in the future, UIs are terrible.Meanwhile: The original intent, before Claudia Christian left the show, was for Ivanova to be the one who gets sucked into the telepath cause and, ultimately, into Byron’s arms. That would have had a very different dynamic, just based on Ivanova having very different TP powers, and her (having lost Marcus) deciding to not push away a possible love interest (with suitably tragic results for our Russian officer).
By being forced to shift this over to Lyta Alexander, we lose some great drama — but it actually works kind of better. Lyta really is the telepath that gets pulled on-stage (by the command crew, and by JMS) only when there’s something awful she’s going to be asked to do. She’s perfect for Byron’s manipulation because so much of what he says is true.
Lyta is a weird case. She not only has some righteous resentment, but she’s also a person lost. She’s never fit in with the Psi Corps or with the B5 community. Even Kosh went and died on her. She literally has only been wheeled out in the show, and (by extension) the B5 leadership, only when it’s time to be used in some awful way.
She’s been a tool since the pilot episode.That kind of background is going to have her not terribly rational if offered a cultgroup of friendly figures led by a romantic father figure to join.
Lochley is conspicuously absent from the episode, despite all the action going on at the station. JMS has explained that writing her into the new season, on top of everything else, esp. as he had to be writing the first few episodes before even casting Tracy Scoggins in the role, left it easier to have her just be offstage, working on stuff.
As noted above, Garibaldi is working hard to run IA’s covert intelligence. The problem is, it doesn’t quite feel right. He openly voices skepticism about Sheridan and the Alliance and all the “touch-feely,” but feels he owes a debt. He’s engaging with telepaths, despite having started off the series skeptical about them and only having had increasingly bad experiences with them. He doesn’t seem to have anything to do, despite having a corporate empire to run back on Mars. Garibaldi is a key part of B5, but he’s being stuffed into a plotline that doesn’t bear close examination.
Overall: Good, but too much feels rushed. JMS was still scrambling to get the season going, writing solo and full-time while showrunning everything else, trying to restructure the season, dealing with actors who had departed and others who had returned, recreating his notes from his lost notebook, and generally going quietly nuts.
That said, there’s some appreciable and appreciated mingling between the A- and B-Plots here. The needs of the IA drive contact with the telepaths; telepaths (Lyta and Byron, in particular) in turn push forward the resolution of the raids and the signing of the Declaration of Principles. It’s neatly done, and shows a complexity in stories that JMS will lean into in this final season.
Most Dramatic Moment: The reading of the Declaration of Principles (at least the version that everyone signed).
The Universe speaks in many languages, but only one voice.
The language is not Narn or Human or Centauri or Gaim or Minbari.
It speaks in the language of hope. It speaks in the language of trust.
It speaks in the language of strength, and the language of compassion.
It is the language of the heart and the language of the soul.
But always it is the same voice.
It is the voice of our ancestors speaking through us.
And the voice of our inheritors waiting to be born.
It is the small, still voice that says we are One.
No matter the blood, no matter the skin,
No matter the world, no matter the star,
We are One.
No matter the pain, no matter the darkness,
No matter the loss, no matter the fear.
We are One.
Here, gathered together in common cause
We agree to recognize this singular truth and this singular rule:
That we must be kind to one another.
Because each voice enriches us and ennobles us,
And each voice lost diminishes us.
We are the voice of the universe, the soul of creation,
The fire that will light the way to a better future.
We are One.
This is, not surprisingly, a lengthy piece of text that fandom has spread to any number of places — wedding ceremonies, philosophical debates, and beyond. It’s a neat piece of writing, but maybe having actually been there at the Dawn of the Declaration of Principles, I seem to treat it a bit more skeptically than others do.
It’s also not surprising that various races might be a bit hinky about signing off on it. JMS has commented that the debates here are akin to those over the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution, but this document is even more abstract — the former is a petition of grievances (wrapped in the language of principle), the latter a governmental structure (later amended to include some principles/rights). I doubt you could have gotten the 13 new “states” to have signed such a E Pluribus Unum statement, let alone various races that until recently have been in all-against-all uneasy peace, at best.
Most Amusing Moment: Any time G’Kar is getting all Writerly, such as when he shooshes away the others because his Muse is speaking to him, at which point the show editors choose to put a certain credit on screen:
“Just a moment … my Muse is speaking to me …”And, especially when he recalls all the (signed!) Declaration of Principle documents because he’s improved it in rewrite.
“I revised it again. It’s better.”JMS was having, I suspect, way too much fun poking fun at writers. Most particularly himself.
Honorable Mention to Sheridan demurring Delenn’s request he read the G’Kar’s Declaration of Principles to her, when his face makes it crystal clear he so wants her to ask him once more to do it. Sheridan is always willing to do a dramatic reading or speech.
Most Arc-ish Moment: The Declaration of Principles is quintessential JMS, and the core of his message in this show.
But it would be churlish to ignore Lyta as an arc. She’s been dragged in as needed — TP on the pilot ep, narc on Talia, escapee from the Psi Corps, punching bag for Bester and gill-recipient for Kosh and punching bag again for Ulkesh, desperate refugee back to the Psi Corps, tool for activating unliving telepaths … and always forgotten and out of mind from the core B5 crew when they didn’t need her for some desperate gamble.
People talk about Zack as being the archetypal “normal person” on B5, but I could easily argue Lyta in that role: the functionary who steps on at the whim of the protagonists, only to then be dismissed and ignored when victory arrives.
Poor Lyta. Things are about to get much worse.
Overall Rating: 3.5 of 5.0 — Entertaining with plenty of arc fodder, but vaguely annoying. The Declaration of Principles bit has good humor, but dramatically feels like it falls into place too easily. The telepath conflict has interesting drama, but hits too heavily. (Rating History)
Londo’s dying. But is it actually his heart, or a guilty conscience?
This kind of psychodrama, with a character like Londo, should hit it out of the park. Instead, things get muddied a bit too much between subplots and trying to get a little too cute on a little too small a budget with Londo’s dreamscape.
A-Plot: Londo suffers a major heart attack in the episode intro. While there’s lots of pulse-pounding (so to speak) MedLab intensity, the focus is (or should be) on Londo’s internal mindscape, as he meets with mental representations of the other major players (Delenn, Sheridan, Vir, and, ultimately, G’kar), trying to come to grips with, and then avoid, dying.
If only he can actually face the figure of G’kar, haunting him from the shadows behind.
LONDO: I can’t. I don’t know what he wants from me.
VIR: Yes, you do. The thing that has eaten away at your heart until it could not endure the pain a moment longer. You must let go of this, or you will die here, alone, now.
LONDO: Perhaps that is for the best then.
Each of the characters, Ghost of Christmas-like, adds pieces to the puzzle of Londo, but it’s the last, G’kar, that draws forth the burden of guilt the Centauri has been living under — not just what he did, but what he didn’t do, as he stood by silently as the Narn homeworld was bombarded, as well as when G’kar was nearly flogged to death.
G’KAR: One word, Mollari. One word was all that was required of you.
LONDO: It would not have mattered. It wouldn’t have changed anything! It would not have stopped!
G’KAR: You’re wrong, Mollari! Whether it was me or my world, whether it was a total stranger or your worst enemy! You were a witness! It doesn’t matter if they’d stop! It doesn’t matter if they’d listen! You had an obligation to speak out!
Words we should all live by.
Londo’s mindscape G’kar is as relentless as the real one. Facing his sins of omission is the price Londo has to pay in order to survive.
B-Plot: Meanwhile, Lennier, at the end of S.4, realized that his love for Delenn would always be unrequited, now that she was married to Sheridan. Thus he decides to leave B5 and become a Ranger. This is not a pure act on his part — it meant both to remove the ongoing pain of watching Sheridelenn canoodling, but also to try to prove to her that he’s a great hero, too (even, perhaps, to have her feel guilty about both his sacrifice and, if it happens, his death).
Delenn, for her part, realizes all this, but is unwilling to confront Lennier about it, standing by to let him go. It’s a mistake that will come back to haunt both of them in the future.
Unfortunately, for me, it haunted this episode, too, drawing too much of the emotional focus from Londo’s struggle. There are too many similar beats; if Lennier’s departure could have been shifted forward or back an episode, both plotlines would have benefitted.
Other Bits and Bobs: That’s largely it. No sign of our new station commander, Lochley. No mention of telepaths.
Franklin and Londo
Meanwhile: JMS has noted a tremendous, and sad, irony, in this ep. He usually had chats with Richard Biggs (Franklin) about anything medical, as prep, and did so over lunch on this show’s medical activity. The script was still bouncing back and forth to whether it was heart failure or poison that had struck Londo down, and Biggs favored poison, as no heart problem for Londo had been previously mentioned. Joe, in turn, argued that people could have heart troubles or defects that they never knew up, until one day it hit them, often with tragic consequences.
As, it turned out, was the case with Richard Biggs, only a few years later.
Overall: Good, but the B-plot distracts, with serious emotional notes, from the A-plot, weakening both.
Most Dramatic Moment: There are actually quite a few here (in both plots). But the biggest has to be Londo finally telling G’kar he’s sorry. Too little, too late … maybe. But it’s a good clearing of the table for him (and for G’kar) as we head into the next phase of their relationship.
Honorable Mention has to go to the recap clips from 2×20 “The Long, Twilight Struggle” of Londo watching the bombardment of Narn. That still gives me chills.
Most Amusing Moment: Vir and Lennier, sharing a last few moments as the sidekicks, discussing Vir’s drink, a “Shirley Temple.”
LENNIER: What kind of drink is that?
VIR: I’m not sure. The bartender called it a “Shirley Temple.”
LENNIER: Interesting. I’ve studied many earth religions and I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that particular temple.
VIR: Me neither. But, it’s real good.
LENNIER: Well then. I shall make a point to visit it on my next trip to earth.
Honorable Mention to another Vir scene where, thinking Londo had been poisoned, he shouts out his frustration at all the assassins that seem to keep coming to B5.
VIR: What is wrong is you people? Don’t you have anything else better to do? Why don’t you get a hobby? Read a book or something?
Most Arc-ish Moment: Way too many all in line with the flashbacks, flash-forwards, and character beats. I’m going to go with something just in passing: Londo (in his mindscape) mentioning to Sheridan that he always somehow had the weird sense that the latter was there when he, himself, died. Londo, of course, mentioned foreseeing his own death at G’kar’s hands in 1×01 “Midnight on the Firing Line,” long before Sheridan ever entered the show; we actually see it in Londo’s dream sequence in 2×09 “The Coming of Shadows,” and Sheridan’s time-jumped presence (and the outcome of the G’kar/Londo strangling match) is explained in 3×17 “War without End, Part 2”. Now that’s arc.
Honorable mention to the same conversation with mindscape Sheridan, as the latter keeps changing uniform, progressing over the past years, and into the future, finally vanishing in a flash of light. Remember that moment …
Sheridan as EA officerSheridan no longer an EA officerSheridan as rebel commanderSheridan as (future) Entil’ZhaSheridan as … what?Sheridan as a departing ball of light
And Honorable Mention to mindscape Delenn’s tarot reading (the art is dodgy, but who’d have anticipated that sort of screen capture?). In any rate, it’s a lovely summary of Londo’s life to date.
And a third Honorable Mention as well to Lennier’s departure, which sets the character on his final arc extending into the season.
Overall Rating: 3.8 of 5.0 — Good ep, with a lot of excellent constituent parts, but ultimately the Lennier bits distract from the Londo bits, and the attempt to make those Londo bits a truly surreal mindscape never quite gel. (Rating History)
And 30 months later, I’m back to the rewatch, kicking off with Season 5.
The war to liberate Earth is over. How does the new Alliance actually become a working operation? And how does an unexpected reprieve to Season 5 work after the good stuff got cannibalized for Season 4?
A-Plot: The overarching plot is the changing of the guard at B5, and the first part of this is the inauguration of John Sheridan as the first President of the Interstellar Alliance. After having been dragooned into the position, he’s accepted his role and is, in Sheridan fashion, ready to dive into the role whole-heartedly.
Unfortunately, an assassin is determined to take him out, killing a Ranger in the introductory sequence …
In case you had doubts the assassin is a stone killer, as they said in the 80s… then issuing video threats …
Stone killer!… and then offing a Gaim to infiltrate the inauguration.
Stone … cold … killer!All of which is fine, and set up in nicely creepy fashion (complete with an unexplained affection for a ballerina music box).
Alas, the assassin turns out to be a disgruntled war criminal from the Clarke administration on Earth, turning the moral conundrum of “Hey, Sheridan, you led an attack on Earth that killed loyal Earthforce military” into “Hey, I’m a fanatic who has nothing to live for any more so I’m going to kill you …”
… defusing much of the emotional conflict. Yes, assassination-by-Starfury is fun, but in the end if feels like a sideshow.
Still, we get some good characterization on the hero side of things. In the face of an assassin, Sheridan, sporting a spiffy new beard to match his new role, expresses a Quixotic impulse to still mingle with the common folk (which sounds noble, until one considers how improbable that is in an interstellar polity).
Meanwhile, he also recruits G’kar to write both an oath of office and a declaration of principles for the Interstellar Alliance. The Narn’s enthusiasm for this is amusing, even if, tragically, the whole thing get short-circuited by that wascally assassin.
B-Plot: The second biggest part of the plot is the introduction of Capt. Elizabeth Lochley (Tracey Scoggins), arriving on the Acheron …
“This is Earth Alliance Destroyer Acheron. We’ve got your package.”… and taking over B5’s operations from the absent Ivanova (see below), with both the dimension of Sheridan stepping away from the station (and planning to move to Minbar), and Lochley becoming a center of B5 action.
Lochley’s introduction is treated in a straightforward and through-line fashion. Ivanova’s “reassignment” is given lip service in passing. Lochley walks in, large and in charge.
Sheridan and Lochley … which is a bit more tense scene than first-time viewers might think.There’s some good stuff here (beyond multiple lines for fan-fave Lt. Corwin). Lochley is clearly competent, she clearly takes no shit (esp. from Garibaldi), she isn’t interested in being a mouthpiece for Sheridan (for reasons to be given further on), and she’s not afraid to speak out.
It’s a good introduction, with emphasis on her engagement with the Telepaths. It’s a bit undermined by Sheridan making his pronouncement overriding her on the Telepath Colony, but we get a bit of additional tension from the question of what side she was on during the final Battle of Earth — and the implication that she might be associated with the forces that wanted to assassinate Sheridan.
It’s also undermined by her not showing up in most of the first episodes of the season. Too many balls for JMS to juggle …
C-Plot: Much of the season will be focused on the Telepath Colony on B5, led by the Fabio-haired Byron.
He’s so DREAMY!
TPs in the B5verse have always had a mixed status. There’s clearly deep prejudice against them by the normal human population, but there’s also a sense of threat from the Psi Corps against the rest of humanity that’s been running all through B5.
In this case, we have TPs who are refugees — unwelcome on Earth, but not willing to join the Psi Corps. Though several are introduced, Byron is their head and spokesperson, which create an odd (but believable) gap between the normal humans that interact with them and the speaker vs. non-speakers.
Actors are cheaper if they don’t actually have speaking lines.There are some pretty spiffy TP effects that occur here. Telepaths’ ability to project thoughts both creates an appropriately creepy introduction between Byron and Lochley, some neatly done interaction with young Teep Simon, and ultimately a tragic foiling of the assassination attempt.
In the end, Sheridan okays the TPs building a temporary colony Downbelow, overriding Lochley’s decision against it. Yeah, that will have implications in episodes to come.
D-Plot: Whatever happened to Mr. Garibaldi? Oh, yeah, he resigned from Earthforce, which makes him superfluous to B5’s operations, despite his passion to both interfere with Zach’s security arrangements and bump heads with Lochley, who puts him in his place.
By the end of the episode, he’s been recruited by Sheridan to head up the IA’s general external security, which resolves (or aggravates) the conflict with Lochley, and gives him something to do on the show going forward.
Other Bits and Bobs: Londo has a minimal presence, but a great line, warning Sheridan about being part of a regime change.
On my world, we have learned that an inauguration is simply a signal to assassins that a new target has been set up on the firing range.
Franklin’s contribution is limited to being the Good Doctor.
Meanwhile: Season 5 (“Wheel of Fire”) labored under two huge problems.
First, we got the dilemma of “This is a 5-year saga” to “This has been truncated to 4 years, so how do I distill the most important parts into the last half of S.4” to “Oh, crap, we’ve been renewed for S.5, how do I turn the remnants of what I didn’t include in S.4 into a decent season?” issue. JMS does yeoman’s duty to make it work, and S.5 has some splendid moments, but the seams sometimes show badly. (None of this was helped by JMS losing his Master Plan Notebook to B5 at a convention before S.5 kicked off.)
On top of that, there’s the elephant in the room about the departure and absence of Ivanova. Regardless of whose narrative about how Claudia Christian ended up not coming back for the season that you believe, her absence aborts any number of threads that could have been picked up — Ivanova finally coming into command of B5, Ivanova facing her telepathic abilities, etc.
Instead, we have to shoehorn in Tracy Scoggins’ Lochley, and bring back Lyta Alexander to play the TP part. Both of those are/will be handled as well as possible, and open up their own possibilities as JMS revises stuff like mad, but it adds additional complexities to a season that was already a tottering structure, to its detriment.
(JMS did intentionally set up conflict around Lochley, knowing there would be viewer resentment over her replacing Ivanova. As the other characters. whom the viewers like, warm to her over coming episodes, the viewers should, too. Clever.)
Another drag on this episode is that, with the shift to TNT for the final season, JMS (correctly) assumed a lot of first-time viewers. This episode helps establish the setting, which, perforce, slows things down a bit, too.
Overall: A solid, if not thrilling, reintroduction to the world of B5. Not an episode anyone will point to as essential, but it does what it intends to do.
Most Dramatic Moment: Given the episode’s expository nature, there aren’t any that really stand out. Maybe the Starfury showing up in the window (which ends up in the main credits as well).
Knock-knock!Or maybe the question that everyone has about Lochley, including :
GARIBALDI: By the way, just curious, which side were you on during the big fight back home?
LOCHLEY: I was on the side of Earth, Mr. Garibaldi. Weren’t we all?
Most Amusing Moment: While not being a grim ep by any means, the humor here is subtle and in passing — a few quips, that sort of thing. If pressed, I’d point to G’Kar’s unexpectedly swift swearing-in ceremony.
Most Arc-ish Moment: With a new season comes a new main title sequence, and, in my thinking, the best of the five. We lose the “The Year Is” narration (it would have been Ivanova’s turn, at last, too late), but the montage of video and audio clips (“So it begins …”) is splendid.
While driven by the “new network, new viewers” aspect of S.5, it’s still as someone who had watched from the beginning, an awesome recap of the introductory highlights.
Although, not sure about the title card. Aside from the somewhat dated CG, flipping to a sword feels … kind of off-brand.
Though I’d never noticed the FIVE stars before. Nice touch.Honorable mention to G’kar being assigned to come up with the Presidential Oath and Declaration of Principles. S5 will be about his growing into the role of Wise Man, and his writings will be a key to all that is to come.
Overall Rating: 4.0 of 5.0 — Absolutely solid episode to kick things off for the season, but so busy building those foundations that the immediate conflict — the Evil Assassin — feels rushed and stunted. (Rating History).
Previous episode: 4×22 “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars” [Hrm. Never did get to that review.]
Next episode: 5×02 “The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari” … where we get some deep insight into our favorite Centauri before things take a decided turn for the worse …
Whoosh. A rough, exhausting book to read, yet utterly engaging; one I was eager to keep reading and get to the conclusion, and then sad to have found I’d done so.
Maybe like life, that way.
Straczynski manages here to be both epic and intimate, tragic and triumphant, gritty and philosophical, artificial in manipulating the writer’s craft and narrative into almost unbelievable shapes, yet still managing to keep it all together and so utterly real in its individual parts that the shape of the story and the nigh-implausible events that occur during it seem no more remarkable and therefore no less believable. I laughed, I cried, I rolled my eyes, I stroked my chin and went hmmmm …
Even in its very tackling of subject of suicide, JMS tries, and manages, to have it both ways — both critical and accepting of the act. He seems to come down on the position of suicide is sometimes the better outcome for an individual, but because it’s not accepted (and, in fact, condemned and fear-mongered over) by society for a variety of reasons, it leads to people inadvertently lurching into it without enough thought, without the support of others. Unnecessary suicide becomes what is mourned here, suicide committed without self-awareness or self-control. Freedom, informed freedom even, is paramount here, on both sides of the equation. That’s in part why a book that ostensibly is about a band of strangers on a bus, headed toward a group suicide for their own, individual reasons, can with a straight face include a message about the National Suicide Hotline in its final pages.
JMS does all of this heavy lifting over the course of that long bus ride from coast to coast. But because a bunch of people talking about this stuff, with others or to themselves, would be boring, he brings in all sorts of complications, from interpersonal conflicts, to lies that call the whole trip into question, to people doubting whether this is the right course for them but whether they’ve come too far to turn back, to secrets that explode (or, maybe, fizzle) out, to inevitable betrayals, to even more inevitable conflict with and pursuit by the authorities. Some of it feels narratively contrived, in the “Writing Prompt #5: Somebody walks into a room with a gun” style, but because the characters feel so real and our focus is on them and their reactions to events, it all manages to work.
Even the central story-telling conceit — having it be an epistolary novel, made up of letters and emails and blog entries and voice recordings and text messages — feels like a clever artifice, while actually letting us see more clearly how the characters are actually feeling (or are willing to share in how they are feeling), a verisimilitude that simple bouncing back and forth between 1st person PoVs wouldn’t provide. Eventually it becomes part of the novel itself: providing a sense of the chaotic, creating hints of stuff we can’t see and want to, and, eventually, setting up the question of why all this material is being gathered and what will happen to it, providing an unexpectedly (and almost, but not quite, too) neat frame around the entire picture.
Is it a book I would recommend to someone dealing with suicide, either considering it for themselves or facing the death of a loved one? That’s a question I don’t know the answer to, but I can definitely see the argument for it, as it promotes the clarity of consideration that might be of tremendous help — as well as that hotline number.
Great book. It’s not one I’m going to just casually pick up and read any time soon — but it’s a book I suspect I will, with consideration, pick up again.
This bloody take on four-color teen heroes is even better, and bloodier, on-screen.
Yeah, there are spoilers here. Sorry. TL;DR: Bloody, but good.
I was a big follower of Robert Kirkman’s Invincible from Day 1 to its conclusion, and I have a complete set of the graphic novels. So I was both looking forward to, and prepared for, the animated series airing on Amazon Prime.
Sort of.
On one level, Invincible is the tale of a high school kid who finally inherits the super-powers he expected from his dad, a Superman-type called Omni-Man. The tale is full of teen angst, learning capabilities, trying to mature, dealing with girlfriends and best friends and having to duck out (yet again) to save the world. It’s conventional in a lot of ways, but well done for all that.
It’s like Riverdale, only with super-powers
The other level is a darker story, of nothing being what it seems. The various other heroes we meet are full of egos, short tempers, and bad personalities. The Global Defense Agency, run by Cecil Stedman, is big picture enough that it engages in sketchy behavior to maintain world order. And, after a relatively idyllic first episode of Mark gaining and learning about his powers, training with his dad, and getting both a costume and a code name …
… his father, Omni-Man, ambushes and kills the Justice League-esque Guardians of the Globe.
And not in a “ha-ha, secret death gas that quietly and cleanly makes them softly collapse” kind of way. It’s a bloody, brutal, flesh-crunching, ichor-spattering, dismembering sort of battle. Superman taking out the Justice League, any way he can. Which Kirkman’s original comic did, but which has a greater impact in animation than on the still page.
Omni-Man has a bad day
That sets the tone for Invincible — a lot of “normal” comic book action, but, when violence occurs, a brutality that is hypothetically realistic (what would it look like if Superman punched someone in the face with all his strength?) but also shocking in its gore factor.
This is a comic book series not for kids. R-rated, at the very least.
That said, it all works, at least for me. The tension between that juxtaposition, the mystery of why Omni-Man killed those super-heroes, and if, and how, his guilt will be unveiled, and what that will mean for his marriage and to his son, Mark — that’s hanging over the season like a sword, and when it finally drops, it is utterly a game-changer, and about has violent as you can imagine a fight between a really pissed-off Superman and an equally angry Superboy could be.
The show all also a rare opportunity for a creator — Robert Kirkman (of Walking Dead fame) — to collaborate on redoing a major opus of his for a new medium and to clean up and improve his story. Which he actually does. As I got into the series, I went back and reread those early graphic novels. Kirkman maintains all the dramatic beats and characters and challenges, but he largely improves on them, tightens them up, makes them work as a coherent tale. Distractions get trimmed. Core development gets better focus. Time frames are accelerated/compressed. Some ethnic diversity gets introduced in some key roles (on screen and in the voice work). It’s overall a better tale in this retelling.
Mark’s sometimes-girlfriend Amber gets recast to add diversity. She’s also rewritten as a better, stronger character.
Invincible is not for everyone. My sainted wife dealt with the series gamely until the final installment. Graphic super-hero violence is on display — not gratuitously, nor incessantly, but, like real-world violence (and this is sort of the point) slamming onto the scene just when you least expect it. Kirkman wants to address what it means when someone throws a bus full of people, or demolishes a building, or what happens when an alien invasion lands downtown and those aren’t convenient “disintegrators” they’re wielding.
And not all stories have happy endings.
But he also wants to give us coming of age tales, teens with power figuring out what those abilities mean, how they should or shouldn’t use them, and why, and what sort of codes of morality they’re going to adopt as they get faced with life-and-death decisions. Mark, as Invincible, is the focus here, but there’s a large cast, and everyone has moral and ethical dilemmas they have to face.
Some of the (large) cast of Invincible. Kirkman does great names.
The animation, from Korea, is top-notch, and very much in line with the original artwork by Ryan Ottley and Cory Walker. The voice talent is good (even if some of the casting doesn’t altogether work for me), and the story fully engaged me, even knowing where things were leading.
Invincible and Atom Eve, comic artInvincible and Atom Eve, animated. They did a great job with the clean style from the comics (except that Eve’s chest logo usually looked like it was a Venus symbol with an X on it, not with an electron cloud).
Looking forward to Season 2. If you have Amazon Prime, and don’t mind some impactful (but meaningful) gore, it’s highly recommended. Rating:
For all the pain and angst, the joy Mark has while flying is always a great thing to see.
