Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (season one thoughts)

I know that most of you are way past season one of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. at this point (meaning you're watching season two), those of you that are watching at all, at any rate; however, since we have to wait till shows are out on DVD, we're only just now finishing up season one. But, since the DVDs did just recently come out, I suppose this is actually a decent time for a review of the season.

Basically, last year, when the show debuted, I heard a lot of whining about it. Yeah, I'm just going to call it whining, because it all had to do with misplaced expectations. People expected The Avengers on TV, but that's not what they got. No, what they got was something more along the line of Whedon's Dollhouse, another show people didn't have patience for and piled on misplaced expectations (because they were hoping for another Firefly). I'm just gonna say, when you're dealing with Joss Whedon, it's never a good idea to come into anything with expectations. I'm sure that the actual reason that Firefly failed was because Whedon fans (who mostly rejected Firefly at first) were expecting something more along the lines of Buffy and Angel. So did Fox, by the way, and marketed it as such, because that's where Whedon's fan base was at the time.

So SHIELD comes in as a slow build, because it kind of has to. It has to introduce us to a whole new cast of characters, which was something Avengers didn't have to do because Marvel had already done that with all of the individual movies. It was slow, but it was solid. My kids loved it from the first episode, including my daughter who has been known to just get up and walk out of the room if something isn't exciting enough to hold her attention.

The biggest issue with SHIELD is that it's greatest strength -- Clark Gregg as Agent Phil Coulson -- is also its biggest weakness. Gregg's Coulson is great as a side character, like he was in the movies. He's the unassuming guy on the fringes who occasionally delivers a very dry, witty line. But that Coulson is not the kind of character that can be the lead in a show. There's just not enough energy and charisma there. The only reason it worked at all is because, as the side character, we'd all come to love him from the movies and were suitably upset when he... well, you know. [I don't want to spoil it for anyone who may not have actually seen The Avengers, though I find that hard to imagine.] However, he's not the kind of guy we want to spend all of our time with. He's not commanding enough. I mean, it's fine to have Coulson along for the ride, but it's really Nick Fury or Captain America or Iron Man we want to be hanging out with.

The other real issue with the show is that Skye, the character who is supposed to be our "average Joe" window into the Marvel universe, isn't quite normal enough for us to connect with. Not in that way, at any rate. It doesn't take long to know that Skye really isn't a normal and, thus, our connection is lost, leaving Coulson as our only link, which would be okay if he wasn't the team leader.

Beyond that, though, the show is quite good. It has good dialogue and interesting characters. Even the characters who start out as those quintessential emotionless fighting machines turn out to have more to them than they seemed to at the beginning, but we have to work our way into them to find that out, as it should be. And, best for me, the show really doesn't have any one-offs. Even the episodes that seem to be one shots tie into the overall story. That it tied directly in with the events of Winter Soldier was also quite superb.

Other good things:
J. August Richards -- It's good to see him again, and I hope that the appearance of Deathlok heralds something more.
David Conrad -- I'd completely forgotten about him, but he's well cast as Ian Quinn.
(grudgingly) Bill Paxton -- I am not a fan of Paxton's, but he's done a great job as John Garrett. So good in fact... but that would be telling.
Saffron Burrows -- She did a great job making me not like her and hoping that Hand was... that would also be telling.

The final analysis is that we, all of us, really like the show. My kids love the show. I think it's great that they've centered the plot around the thing I was talking about in my Winter Soldier review, specifically the Nick Fury vs. SHIELD thing. I can't wait to see what's in store in season two... next year, after it's released on DVD.
>sigh<

Vampires: Day 5 -- Vampire Slaying

Assuming you haven't used the information from earlier this week to become a vampire or have plans to become a vampire, you may want and/or need to know how to get rid of a vampire(s) should you ever have a vampire infestation. If possible, call on a professional vampire slayer. Yes, these exist. Okay, mostly, they exist in Europe, but, still, there are people that go around and slay vampires. For a fee.

Unlike with Buffy

or Van Helsing,

"actual" vampire slayers do most of their work with bodies that need to be dug up rather than engaging in property-damaging combat. Fortunately, for you, this is the more appropriate way to go about things. Usually.

But! If you ever do get stuck facing a "living" vampire, here are some thins to know:

1. According to many legends, vampires cannot cross running water, so, if you steal the vampire's hat (no, don't ask me how to go about doing that and, yes, vampires are just assumed to be wearing hats, I guess) and throw it out into a river or stream or whatever, and taunt him about the hat, he will be unable to help himself and go after the hat. Yeah, vampires have some behavior issues beyond just the biting thing. Attempting to cross into the running water to retrieve the hat will cause the vampire to drown.
2. Staking a vampire will not kill a vampire. This is not a Buffy thing where the vampire turns to dust or, even, just dies. The staking only incapacitates the vampire, effectively paralyzing it. Once that's accomplished, other things which can actually destroy the vampire can be done. [On an interesting note, Joss Whedon wanted to do something like this in Buffy but decided that having the characters always having to deal with paralyzed vampire corpses would become too cumbersome so decided on the "dusting" as a way to deal with that.]
3. Vampires are not killed (or even hurt) by sunlight. Potentially, it may make them less strong and fast, but it's not going to cause them to burst into flame. If you will note (and you will need to have read Dracula), Dracula had no issue moving around in sunlight. [The idea that vampires can't go about in daylight seems to stem from early 20th century movies. In actuality, vampires don't cast shadows (which is related to the whole reflection thing), so filming at night was the only way to get around that.]
4. Vampires, actually, can be "killed" through physical means just like a person can. Of course, going hand-to-hand with a vampire is not the best way to accomplish that since they are faster and stronger than humans. However, a vampire is just as susceptible to swords, arrows, and bullets as anything else. The problem is in getting the vampire to stay "killed."

And this is why vampire slayers mostly work with bodies that are already in the ground. If you really want to "kill" a vampire, that's the place to do it. So...

1. The stake. The stake is used to immobilize the vampire. Ash and hawthorn have been very popular and, also, oak to a lesser extent. Most legends say the stake should go through the heart, but some say the stomach and some say the mouth. Theoretically, burying a staked vampire will prevent the vampire from ever rising, although it won't destroy it.
2. Beheading. Beheading is a much better way to kill a vampire but, still, not a sure thing. Just cutting off the vampire's head isn't enough to make sure it will stay dead. Some legends say it needs to be buried between the vampire's feet or "behind" the buttocks (I'm not quite sure what "behind" the buttocks means in this context). Others say the head needs to be carried off and buried somewhere else entirely.
3. Garlic. Garlic could be used to keep a vampire in its grave. Stuffing it in the mouth was common, but some sources say it had to be stuffed  in all orifices. I'm not sure if it means all when it says all, but, if it does, ew!
4. Boiling water. Once a vampire was in the ground, pouring boiling water over the grave would keep it there.
5. Dismemberment. Sometimes, vampires were persistent. In those cases, the body was dismembered and buried in separate locations.
6. Cannibalism. In some cases, the vampire was even more persistent. In such extreme cases, after the dismemberment, the body was fed to the family of the deceased, whom it was usually "haunting." The "victims" generally died anyway.
7. Cremation. Ah, burning. Burning  the body has long been viewed as the most effective way of destroying a vampire, yet, throughout history, it has often been the last resort. Why? I can't really answer that question, but, almost always, other methods for banishing the vampire were tried, first, before the body was finally burned.

Oh, of course, you could always appeal to the vampire's arithmomania by placing the irresistible bag of rice or sand in the coffin, which would keep the vampire occupied all night with the need to count every grain. No, the vampire's not destroyed, but, man, that sounds like a lot of fun. I wonder, if a vampire came at you, if you could throw rice at it and cause it to stop and count the grains. That sounds like the best way to deal with any vampire attack in my book.

And thus ends vampire week. I didn't cover everything, but there's been a lot of information over the course of the week, and I hope you've enjoyed it. There may even be some vampire lore worth turning into stories. The one thing I'm quite certain of, though, is that nowhere in anything I read was there any mention of vampires and sparkling. Not once. And, now, I'm scared that in 100 years people will think that vampires do sparkle just like we think vampires can't go out in the sun. What a horrible thought...
Now that is frightening!

But here are some things that are not:

1. The "Oh, How I Miss You" blogfest is coming up. Go here to read about it and sign up.
2. There's a big serial giveaway and rafflecopter thing happening, right now. Go here to find out about that. You can also find out about it at the following sites:
Susan Kaye Quinn
E.J. Wesley, Author
RaShelle Workman
Confessions of a Watery Tart

Let Me Know If Ultimate Power Needs A Magazine

It's time for another great big bowl of POP culture! And when I say great big, I mean GREAT BIG, so go get your biggest bowls and pour yourself some milk, and let's get to it.

For those of you not living under rocks, the news of the week is AVENGERS! It's actually, really, a double dose of pop culture, because it's not just Avengers; it's also Joss Whedon, who is a pop culture phenomenon all by himself. However, I'm sure that everyone is going to be going on about Joss, so I'm not going to dwell on that aspect of the movie. Much.

Before I get into it, though, I'm going to point out that Avengers broke the record for top grossing opening weekend. Not just broke it, ground it into tiny particles. If you look at the weekend records, generally a new record has only been within a few million of the previous record; in fact, 3 or 4 of the previous records fall in the $150-160 million range. However, Avengers topped the previous record by more than $30 million (also becoming the first film to have a $200 million opening weekend)! That's considerable. (Sorry, Harry.) On top of all of that, Disney released the film to nearly 40 international markets (not including Japan (the second largest movie market)) a week earlier than they released it here, so the 10-day gross for the film stands at $650 million worldwide. I'm pretty sure it's going to be the fastest movie to the billion mark.

Of course, none of that says anything about whether the movie is any good. The fact that the average audience rating is an "A+" does, though. Of course, that doesn't say anything about what I thought of the movie, which is what all of this is about, right?

So... what did I think of The Avengers? Well, to answer that question, let's take a few steps back (this is where I take some of the focus off of Mr. Whedon, because, as good as his writing was, he had an excellent foundation to work on, and what he did would not have been possible without it).

Last summer, I did a series of posts comparing Marvel's movies to DC's. In the third post, I talked about vision (not The Vision) and how Marvel has it and DC doesn't, which explains the (much) higher quality of Marvel's movies as compared to DC's (overall). The Avengers is evidence of this.

See, way back in 2008 when Marvel released Iron Man (and, then, The Incredible Hulk), it wasn't just about making an Iron Man movie. Iron Man was actually a pretty big risk for Marvel (yeah, I know, it's hard to believe that, now). Outside of comics, Iron Man was fairly unknown character. Sure, he'd had his own series for decades, but it was rarely a top selling series. Never before had a super hero movie been made featuring a character that was, basically, a second stringer. A B-lister. Could they pull it off? Most people didn't think they could. And, really, why would they even bother? They had many other better known heroes, right? But it was all part of the plan.

Marvel's goal was never to make an Iron Man movie. Or a Hulk movie. Or any of the other Marvel Studios produced movies. Their goal was to make an Avengers movie. Yes, it all started with the Avengers. Their plan, then, became to make a series of movies each featuring one of the heroes that would make up their beginning Avengers team. Why do it this way? Origin stories. The difficulty with any super hero movie is establishing the origin story of the character. Especially for a character like Iron Man who isn't all that well known.

They very carefully established the central heroes in their own stories before bringing them all together for their team movie. Yeah, I know... Hawkeye and Black Widow. Maybe, I'll do a post on them later, but let's just leave it at they didn't think they could pull off solo movies for those characters, especially with the changes (for the better) they've made to Hawkeye. [It's also why they left out Antman and the Wasp (because they did, actually, have an Antman film planned, but, currently, that project is on hold.] What they did, what Marvel did, was really quite ingenious. They've lent the same since of continuity to their movies that their comic books have (something they "invented" back in the 60s when Marvel first became Marvel Comics).

All of that to say that Marvel really very carefully laid the groundwork for this film. Making The Avengers was always the goal, and everything they've done for the last six years has been to bring about this moment.

Bringing Joss Whedon on board for this movie was, perhaps, the most natural thing in the world. After all, he is the expert in writing teams for TV and movies. There's not really even anyone else you can point to other than, maybe, the guy responsible for Stargate: SG-1, but, then, that guy has no experience with comic books. On top of the fact that Whedon is responsible for the team shows Buffy, Angel, and Firefly; he's also has movie experience and he's written for Marvel. Basically, he knows everything. He knows the characters, he knows writing teams, he knows making movies. And he's possibly the best writer in Hollywood today. There was no other logical first choice. Just be glad he said yes.

Mr. Whedon pulled all the strings together and tied them perfectly together in a beautiful little bow.

I loved The Avengers. I saw it twice over the weekend, and I'd go again if I could (but that's really the whole movie budget for May, so I'll have to wait till the DVD to see it again). Even my wife (who re-watches movies in the same way that I reread books (which is to say, she doesn't)) wanted to go see it again. It was so good that I have no favorite scene. I have no favorite line (not even the title of this post. I just thought it fit best (no, don't ask me why)). I have no favorite anything about that movie. There are too many moments to choose from. It was all great.

However, I will say that Mark Ruffalo was especially good as the Hulk. Not that he was better than anyone else, necessarily, but it was good to finally see someone nail the part of Bruce Banner. He really pulled off "nerdy scientist" in a way that Bana and Norton were just unable to. From his slouched posture to his baggy clothes to the glasses... everything was just right. I hope the do another Hulk movie with him in the lead.

Also, I think the movie set up perfectly for a solo Nick Fury movie along the lines of the Nick Fury VS. S.H.I.E.L.D. series. I don't know of any plans that they have for that, but it would be cool.

Bottom line is that The Avengers is great. It has great action. It has great humor. Yet, it never loses the seriousness of the situation nor does it sacrifice the individual characters' stories. Unless you just don't like super heroes, you should go see it. Seriously. Go now.

Who Started Your Dream?

Before I get into this dream business, Shannon Lawrence over at The Warrior Muse has gone and interviewed me. My completely unbiased opinion (>smirk<) is that it's a great interview, and you should all go read it. Actually, I do think it's a good interview, and it has some good thoughts in it. You'll get to find out a little bit more about my book, and there's some of my thoughts about publishing and the publishing industry that I may not have said on here, yet. So go check it out. Just click the little linky up there.

Seriously. Go. Now. I'll still be here when you get back.

As part of Rachael Harrie's platform building campaign, Cat Gerlach started up this little blog ring about what inspired us to be writers.

The idea is that if you follow the chain of links, you will eventually get back around to the person you originally clicked from. So pick one of these: Rachele Alpine or Ali Cross (although, I think Ali's post won't actually go up until tomorrow (the 16th), if I followed that conversation correctly) and click through. If you continue on through the links that is the other one that you haven't already read, you should get all the way back around to me. Sounds like fun, right? And don't worry: it's only a dozen or so of us, so it's not going to take you weeks to get through them all.
Oh! and there are prizes. However, I'm not going to list all of those out, because, honestly, I'm not sure what the list boiled down to. I will tell you how to win one, though: leave a comment. Each comment you leave on each blog is worth one entry, so there's your incentive to make the full round. I do think there were some good prizes in there, even if one of them is not a copy of my book (sorry, I just don't have any available, yet, but I'll explain about that next week).
Anyway...

Who started my dream?

I think my answer is somewhat atypical, at least from what I have seen from other people talking about these kinds of things. I never got "inspired" to write because of some book or some author I read. The closest I come to that is, probably, The Hardy Boys, but I wouldn't really call it a moment of inspiration. I started reading The Hardy Boys sometime around 4th grade. At some point in there, I decided I was going to write one of my own. Except that I changed the names to protect the innocent. Mainly myself. Because I didn't want to get in trouble for copyright infringement, although I have no idea why I would even have been thinking that at that age. But I was.

I got out a notebook, and I started writing. Probably Big Chief (Big Chief was really pads of paper. Colored red (not  the paper, just the covers). Because it was an "Indian" thing. No, no one thought anything about that back in the 70s), because that's what I always had back then. I don't really remember, though. I was making decent progress. But this was back in the days before I knew I could tell my mom to stay out of my stuff, and she had this annoying habit of getting into my things, so she found my "book" and read it. Her very supportive comment was, "Did you make up all these names yourself?" The book went in the trash. Especially since I hated the names. I felt that they were inadequate, and that was the thing she commented about. I didn't continue my writing pursuits.

But I was good at it. Teachers commented about my writing all the time, sometimes reading things I had written to the class. But I didn't think about writing anymore. I was a math/science student, after all; artistic pursuits were good for nothing more than hobbies.

By the time I was exiting high school, I hated math and science. Well, mostly math. I was so tired of it. I elected to major in English in college. I did this with the idea of writing. No, I can't tell you why. What I can tell you is that I had to argue with every counselor at the school about my choice. Yes, my math/science scores were that high. Not that my English scores were bad; they weren't. In fact, they were great, so that should say something about my math scores. I spent my entire freshman year at college explaining to the administration that, no, really, the English major wasn't mistake. Yes, I knew what my scores said. No, I did not want to major in math or anything related to it.

The English department was ecstatic with my decision, and I was, eventually, appointed a counselor from the English department.

My first real attempt at a novel was during a break from college while I was substitute teaching. It's about a dragon. I still have it stored somewhere in a box, and I still think it's a good story. I might one day go back to it. I can point to no inspirational moment for that novel, either. It was really more about saving the environment. With a dragon.

What I'm saying here, I guess, is that the decision to "be a writer" came more out of not wanting to do math anymore and knowing that I was good at writing. So, yeah, sorry for the big let down there. I didn't even follow through with it at the time. I was young and busy, and staying home at night to write never occurred to me. Then, I was out of college and working and still out at night and staying at home and writing never occurred to me. Then, I was moving to CA and getting married and, later, dealing with kids, and the whole writing thing had, mostly, just left my brain.

So how, then, did I end up writing a book? Well, here's the thing: A few years ago, I kept hearing about these Anita Blake novels and how good they are. Let me preface this by saying that I hate, hate, the whole vampire thing. I hated it in high school when everything was about Anne Rice, and I still hate it, today. Vampires are the bad guys. Period. End of story. I liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer for that very reason (I'll excuse Angel, because he was an exception); the vampires were bad. Evil. So, hey, here are these Anita Blake novels, and she's a vampire slayer, so I thought I would try one out.

Big mistake. And apologies to anyone that likes that trash, but it was trash. I started with the first one, because, you know, that's what you do, and it was torture. I'm not very good at putting down a book once I've started it, but I seriously considered it with that one. One thing stopped me. See, by about page 80, I had figured out the entire plot. Really. The entire plot to a 350 page novel in 80 pages including who the bad guy was. But I kept thinking that I must be wrong, because, really, no published author could be that bad. And I kept hoping that I was wrong and that Ms Hamilton had tricked me all the while knowing she hadn't.

The other thing I kept thinking was that I could do better. So much better. The thought that went along with it was that that thought was stupid if I then didn't actually follow through with doing better. It's like guys across America yelling at football players on TV. In other words, ridiculous. Anyone can say "I could do better," but it doesn't mean a thing unless you actually do that.

From that perspective, I suppose you could say that Laurell K. Hamilton was my inspiration, because it was because of her and Anita Blake that I decided to follow through with the thought of writing. I'd talked with my wife about it on-and-off for years, but that was all I did. Talk about it. I hadn't made a serious attempt since that discarded book about the dragon while I was in college. So I wrote a book. And it's better than Anita Blake.

At least, it's better than the first one. I was told, later, that the Anita Blake books don't really get good until you get to the third one, but, seriously, how does anyone get that far? After having all of my fears about the first one confirmed, there was never even the consideration of going on, so how did anyone ever get to #3 to begin with. Maybe I'm being too harsh? I mean, she is a big, famous author with a big, famous franchise from a big, giant publisher, so what do I know?

Oh, but wait, I do have to mention C. S. Lewis and Narnia. He's probably the writer that had the most influence on The House On the Corner. It was a very deliberate thing on my part to write about houses and the things you find there. It was deliberate because Lewis and Narnia had such an impact on me as a kid. I wanted to find places, doorways, other worlds. And I wasn't the only one. My friends and I used to play games wrapped around those ideas, and I wanted to capture that feeling in my own book. There's even a small nod to Narnia in House. How could I resist?

The Middleman and the History of Television

Okay, so I'm not really going to give you the history of television. I mean, how boring, right? Actually, I'm not sure if that would be boring or not seeing as how I know absolutely nothing about the history of that most predominant of items in homes. Did you know that on average there are more television sets per household than there are people? How scary is that? And that doesn't include computers which can serve a similar function. It's no wonder, though, that what we watch, how much we watch, has such a huge influence on the way we write. But that's another story.

TV wasn't a huge thing for me when I was kid. Except on Saturday mornings. I wouldn't do anything without my Saturday morning cartoons.The rest of the time, I was more interested in playing. And by playing, I mean playing outside. TV was only for when there was absolutely nothing else to do. The problem was that, as I got older, the times when there was nothing to do became more and more frequent. By the time I was in middle school, I ruled the television set from the time I got home until the news came on at 10. That was my cue to shuffle off to bed and read for a couple or few hours.

All of that changed my freshman year of high school. There's a story that goes with that (I have stories that go with pretty darn near everything), but, near the end of my freshman year, I discovered there was life outside of TV, and I gave it up. Not that I made any kind of declaration, "I'm giving up TV!" or anything like that, but I just lost interest in it, and I've never gone back. Which is not to say that I never watched TV again, but it's never dictated my schedule to me again. There was a period during college when my best friend and I were addicted to Stand Up Stand UP, Whose Line Is It Anyway? and a couple of other shows like that on the newly formed The Comedy Channel (yes, it wasn't Comedy Central, yet, in those days) which was difficult because neither of us had a TV, at the time, so we snatched viewings at my parents' house (a couple of times a week when we were there) or wherever we could.

You have to remember, this was before DVDs and the wide proliferation of TV shows available for purchase. If you wanted to watch something, you pretty much had to be there at the designated time slot on  the designated day. Or, you know, know how to program a VCR for which you had to take advanced courses in college to be able to do. Fortunately, at the time, I invested in those courses. Which are totally useless today. At any rate, it took an extra effort for any show to catch my eye in the first place, and it had to be pretty spectacular for me to bother myself with recording it. Like I said, I no longer bent to the whims of television schedules.

I bet you're wondering what kind of shows I would go out of my way to record, aren't you? I bet you're thinking that if I would go to such lengths as to program the VCR to record them that they must have been pretty spectacular. Are you getting your pad of paper and a pen to make notes about the incredibly sophisticated and deep viewing I'm about to lay out before you? Are you ready for it? The list isn't very long. In fact, there are only three shows that ever demanded such loyalty from me. Are you ready? They're Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (which I misplaced my dedication to after the second season), The Flash, and Animaniacs. Yes, I'm serious. Best cartoon ever. EVER!

The Flash was the first series that I loved that just didn't make it however much it deserved to. But a higher profile show keep using up all its blue screen time and forced delay after delay upon it so that it couldn't maintain its viewers because new episodes came out only about once every three weeks. However, Mark Hamill's two episodes as the Trickster are incredible, and it's unfortunate that the show couldn't sustain an audience.

Eventually, I moved out to CA and got married. At this point, my wife and I actually did make a premeditated decision that we weren't going to have TV in our house. It's one of those things that, if it's available, it's hard to control. It starts with just one show. I had avoided watching TV up to that point by never being home (or shut up in my room painting), but you can't really run a marriage that way, so we chose no TV.

For a long time, that really meant no TV. At all. The television set was, basically, a miniature movie screen in our house, because that's all it was ever used for. Later, there was the DVD player, and, later still, Buffy. And that's how we watch television. We hear that something is really good, so we decide we'll try it out. That's extremely easy to do these days with Netflix

My wife and I don't have enough shows to keep us viewing all year long (or even most of the year long), so, between DVD releases of the shows we follow, we try out new things. One of the disappointing things we've learned is that we tend toward shows that, for whatever reason, didn't make it. Like The Flash. And Deadwood (which may be my wife's favorite show ever). Firefly. The one we just discovered, and we knew it had been cancelled before we watched any of it, is The Middleman.

I don't have a good way of describing The Middleman in any concise sort of way. Yeah, I hear you thinking. Why would I bother with concise? When am I ever concise? Maybe, one of these days, I'll explore the genius of Kevin Smith, and, then, you will understand. Or, probably, not. Yes, I've always been this way.
Anyway...

The Middleman is about this super hero guy called the Middleman and his Middleman in training, who happens to be female. They work for an organization they refer to as O2STK (Organization Too Secret To Know), and that's just the tip of the awesome that is this show. The fact that the villains are continually saying, "My plan is sheer elegance in its simplicity," as they monologue about their convoluted schemes to take over the world (or destroy it) is frosting goodness.

It's a tongue-in-cheek look at pop culture that pokes fun at it while simultaneously celebrating it. The far too few episodes tend to revolve around a specific theme and are full of references to the pop culture landmarks that inspired them. However, don't mistake my praise for the show as being any kind of suggestion that you should rush out and watch it. In all likelihood, you shouldn't. By the second episode, I was fully aware of why Middleman got cancelled.

It's not that it's too intelligent for the average viewer, although it is. Despite it's campy appearance (yes, it does wear camp clothes, dressing itself up to resemble the Batman series of the 60s with such things as the Middlemobile), it is, in many ways, too sophisticated for the average viewer. If you can't catch the subtleties, you'll just think it's silly. To make matters worse, if you're not pretty well grounded in your pop culture lore, the vast majority of the jokes will go right over your head. There's nothing worse than a joke you don't get in a show meant to be funny. And, if it's meant to be funny, and you're only getting every 3rd or 4th joke, you tend to, well, think it's not funny. It's like being the person in the room staring at Monty Python and the Holy Grail with a glazed expression while everyone else laughs uncontrollably.

So... it's not a show I can actually recommend, but I liked it so much, I needed to write about it. The sad part is that it did have some really interesting sub-plots developing, and we'll never know what was to come of them. The only real reason I could suggest watching it is if you really wanted to know how off center I am. Either you'd get the show, and say "oh, wow, this is great," in which case you would be revealed to be off center, too, or you'd make the yuck face and think (or, maybe, even say out loud), "He likes this? What's wrong with him?"

Of course, Middleman did get a fairly good critical reaction. Like Arrested Development. But, when everything comes down to how much money it can generate, the bits on either end of the bell curve (the great and the horrible) become indistinguishable to the profit gurus. Which is just too bad, because everything becomes the same old bland mass market crap. Whit rice, white bread, and white TV. Read anything you want into that statement. I'm sure you won't be wrong.

"Danger, Will Robinson!" pt 4: Flashing Forward

Part 4: The Flash Forward

"I hate when they do that!" Those are the fateful words that started this blog series. And I do. I hate when they do that. That thing I call the "flash forward." I don't know if the device has an actual name, but this is what I've decided to call it. The other option is that television shows are increasingly told in complete flashback mode. Now that I have you completely confused, let me explain.

Over the last several years, it has become fairly common practice for shows to start with a sequence in which we immediately find the heroes in mortal danger. We're just dropped into the middle of the action with no context whatsoever. After a few minutes to either completely confuse the audience so we're saying, "what's going on?" or to bring the hero(es) to the edge of death so we're saying "oh, crap," we switch to a new scene with a message something along the lines of "24 Hours Earlier." That's where the story actually begins. That bit at the beginning is just a gimmick to generate false interest in  the viewer so that the viewer wants to watch the episode, and I call it a "flash forward." It's a substitute for actual story telling.

I hate it.

Not that I always hated it. The first few times, it was kind of novel. Neat. But it's the kind of thing that should be the exception, the rare exception, not the rule. But I see it all the time.

Now, I will say that I may be more sensitive to this... issue... than the average television viewer due to the way I watch television, which is to say, I don't watch television. As such. First, we don't have cable. Second, we don't have satellite. Third, we don't even have an antenna. This translates into us never watching anything when it's originally aired, since all we get on our television is snow unless we're using the DVD player. We tend to watch shows in bursts due to this, either on DVD or streaming on Netflix. There have been shows where they begin 50-75% of the episodes with these flash forward bits and then drop us back in time to actually start the story up. Because I'm watching them back-to-back, it might be more bothersome to me than if I was watching the show once a week.

However, because it's caught my attention, I can say that it's a cheap trick designed to rope in viewers with the thrill of quick action. And it saves the show a bit of money since they have several minutes of footage they get to use twice (once we catch back to the beginning of the episode and get to see it again in context). Why does everything have to be a gimmick to trick us into watching things? If the show is good, has well written stories and good acting, people will watch it. Theoretically, anyway. Maybe Arrested Development should have employed this technique? No, probably not.

We've been re-watching Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, lately, just to put this whole thing in perspective. In the three seasons we've watched so far, there has not been one of these flash forward bits, and I will be surprised if we come across any in the full run of the show. I don't remember any, at any rate. I do think Firefly had one episode with a flash forward, but I don't remember more than that. Not that this has anything to do with Joss Whedon in particular, because those shows were before the gimmick became so common.

Maybe I'm being harsh. Maybe TV directors just use it because they think it's cool to start the shows that way. At first, it was. Actually, no, I doubt it. Because it's so frequent, I feel fairly confident that it's the producers and the networks advising the directors to start as many episodes as possible with the climax of that episode. Grab the people and make them want to see what's going on. Of course, when the episode turns out to be a piece of trash, you just feel cheated, so it doesn't keep a bad series from getting cancelled.

So, let me just say again, "I hate when they do that!" Yes, those are the fateful words that started this blog series, and I do. I hate when they do that. I'd like to say that those are the words that would end this series, but...

The real issue is that this flash forward thing is just a symptom of a larger problem. However, that's a problem for the next post in this series. Although I'd like to fight this particular symptom, I do think it's time to start looking at the disease.

To Be Continued...

"Danger, Will Robinson!" pt 3 (The bad boy)

Story Gimmicks I Hate
Pt. 3: The Bad Boy

Everyone loves a bad boy. From James Dean to Christian Slater (for all of you 80s people) to Wolverine. From Mercutio to Rhett Butler to Robin Hood. Cowboys. Well, I could go on, but I'm trying to stick to people and characters that are fairly recognizable. Everyone loves a bad boy. Even me. Seriously. Pick one: Superman or Batman? If sales can serve as the record for which we prefer, Batman has been winning that battle for decades. Han Solo. Need I say more?

I'm not going to try to get into why we love bad boys so much. There are too many theories to cover here. But the rampantness with which they run through our current fiction is testament to how popular they are. And that's kind of the problem. They're so popular, they've become cliche. They don't even make good anti-heroes anymore.

Part of the problem is the disconnect between reality and fiction. And we want to believe the fiction. Even in life. Okay, so, I lied. Here's my take on why we love bad boys: We want to believe there's a reason behind it. Something misunderstood or broken that if we could just get in there, we could make it all better (girls, you know that's true). Because we want to believe this, this is the way we write them. We give them some redeemable quality or incredible burden. Something that excuses the "bad boy" part and makes it okay. You know, Batman's parents were killed right in front of him. That kind of thing. And, oh, vampires. They're just so easy to do, because, well, you know they're people, too. It's not their fault they need to drink blood.

On a small scale, I can deal with this. I mean, Batman is a great character. I'm not dissing the Bat. I am dissing all the hoards who have come since then that have turned him into a cliche. But I get it. I do. It's interesting. I mean, seriously, how many times has Superman's origin been duplicated? Not the being the last survivor from a dead planet, but the being raised in idyllic circumstances by completely loving parents (adopted or not). For some reason, we want our heroes tortured. We need to give them reason to do what they do. Because, you know, simply doing what's right for the sake of doing what's right isn't enough.

The problem is that, if you look around at real people, bad boys are simply just that. Bad boys. Out for themselves. There is no underlying cause to the bad boyness other then selfishness and greed. We'd like to think there is, but, no. They really are just the jerks they look like. Seriously, just how many tortured vampires can there really be out there?

Speaking of vampires (again) and how bad boys are just really bad boys, Joss Whedon possibly handled this better than I've ever seen it done. You have Buffy and you have Angel, not the original tortured vampire but (arguably) the one that really got this new vampire craze going again. Angel's a bad boy. Cool. You can see he's tortured just by looking at him. On his own. Buffy's all into him. The classic bad boy with a heart of gold. Here's where the (very clever) metaphor comes in. Buffy succumbs to his charms and gives herself up to him, and, guess what, he really is just a jerk. Using her. Tossing her aside because he got what he wanted. And that is what bad boys are really like. See, Joss Whedon just proved it, so it must be true. And he didn't even use "like" or "as."

The problem here is that in the vast (VAST) majority of fiction, Buffy wakes up the next morning to find Angel snuggling with her (instead of being off on a murderous, vampiric rampage). Because that's what we want it to be like.

I understand the fantasy nature of the writing. The escapism. If we want real life, all we have to do is get out of bed in the morning. Who wants that, right? I mean, it's so much better when we can get up after noon, right? I guess what it boils down to is this: we all want our characters to stand out. To be identifiable. But when all of the characters look the same, act the same, they are all the same. Cut from the same mold.

Now, I'm saying this as someone who has not read Twilight (and I have no plans whatsoever to do so), but I know there are two camps. Two teams. But take a look at those two characters. What's the difference between them? Yeah, yeah, I know one's a vampire, and one's a werewolf, but that's like saying one wears a leather jacket and one wears a blue jean jacket. All I'm saying is that from the outside looking in, that seems to be the only significant difference between the two brooding male love interests.

Okay back to that whole "same mold" thing, bad boys are gingerbread men. We may decorate them differently, use different colors, different designs (even though the icing all tastes the same, too), when you get down to it, they're all still just gingerbread men. Cut from the same mold. Alike. When you're tired of eating gingerbread men (and I am), it doesn't matter how you dress them up, they all still taste the same.

Addendum:
Hope over to The Flying Cheetah, today, and take a look around. You might notice that I've done a guest movie review over there. You might also notice that it's a pretty cool blog. I follow it. And, you know, I have great taste and all of that, so, if I follow it, so should you!