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| Vengeance! |
'The Laws of Inferno Dynamics'(1) brings us to the end of the Ghost Rider
subset of Agents of SHIELD's fourth
season. With Eli rapidly growing in power, Coulson persuades Mace to bring in
the big guns: Yo-Yo, Robbie and, of course, Daisy. Eli sets a trap for them by
coating the walls of a passage with caesium, but Robbie strolls through the fire
to find that he has managed to create a plutonium replica of the Los Alamos
'demon core'; an atomic bomb, in other words. Also, each time he uses his
powers, the world gets a little wonkier. Coulson leads a bravura assault while
Daisy struggles to contain the quakes. Although badly wounded, Robbie unleashes
the Rider on Eli after it becomes clear that he plans to scrub the world clean
and create life anew. Aida(2) uses her Darkhold knowledge to open a gate which
Eli, the bomb and the Rider drop through, and Quake is exposed to the public,
obliging Mace to undisavow her and claim she's been working undercover against
the Watchdogs on behalf of SHIELD. Mace also brings the LMD programme in house,
but PR guy discovers that Aida has knocked out Agent May and replaced her with
a duplicate, and gets his neck snapped for his trouble, which can't be a good
sign.
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| Also, d'aww. |
The Ghost Rider weirdly muddies the waters of Agents of SHIELD, because suddenly they know magic exists and
Coulson has even heard of the Rider before, yet they roundly rejected
Clairvoyance a season before it turned out that there was a clairvoyant
Inhuman. The story has been okay, and if Eli was a little low key for a major
villain, I can't help but approve of them wrapping an arc in a quarter season,
given how overstretched the season-long plots have traditionally become. It's
an approach that worked well for Teen
Wolf's third year, and would probably have been a stronger pitch for its
fourth and fifth. Similarly, it did great favours for Gotham's sophomore year, if only by ditching some of the more
irritating villains (by which I mean Theo Galavan) halfway through.
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Ana Ularu is okay, but I am constantly disappointed by her failure to be 12
Monkeys' Emily Hampshire. |
In 'They Came First', Dorothy and Lucas travel to Glinda's fortress
while the Wizard tries to root out witchery in the Emerald City and now-Queen Langwidere
is a dick to Jack, who is apparently into that. The last of these is purely
fluff so far, featuring a sexed up version of the classic 'oil can' scene,
because we totally needed that. West tries to save a young witch from a mob,
but shit goes down, buildings asplode and to keep order the Wizard decides it
is necessary to set fire to the entire High Council of nuns, because heaven
forefend we get through an episode without some institutional violence against women. It
is suggested that witches are themselves the Beast Forever. Oh, and someone
realises that the knife Jack nicked from Momba when Tip was rescued suggests
that she is Ozma, Princess of Oz, which was either obvious AF or means nothing
to you.
In the A-plot, Dorothy busts out her inner witch to save young Sylvie from
wolves. Sylvie has been fitted with earplugs for… reasons, and Dorothy removes
them as part of a bonding process. She also gets it on with Lucas, and suggests
that they should both come back to Kansas and join her in a land which welcomes
the poor, the hungry, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free; especially
those with violent tendencies, magical powers and no documentation. All she
needs to do now is prevent Glinda's war against the Wizard, by hook or by crook.
Unfortunately, as soon as they reach her fortress she's all 'memory returned'
and next thing we know she's got her tongue down Lucas/Roan's throat and Dorothy
is all kinds of betrayed because – title quote! – 'they came first.'
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| I predict that this happy domestic scenario will in no way implode. |
Emerald City continues to
struggle hard with, among other things, its sexual politics. I think that the
idea is that women have the power in Oz and men like the Wizard fear this, but
nevertheless, it is principally men who domineer and women who machinate. The
transfer from a relatively children's novel to sprawling adventure epic also
has the effect of leaving the protagonists – Dorothy and Lucas – unusually short
on agency, with one essentially willing to uncritically undertake any course
that will enable her to get home, and the other completely at the whim of his
unreliable memory. They are, hands down, the least interesting characters in
the show, surpassing even Jack and Langwidere, whose deeply unhealthy
relationship at least has something of the grim fascination of a car crash.
Next we come to a bit of a Timeless
marathon, although actually I watched them over an extended period intending to
do an end-of-series review until I realised I could put them in my newly
inaugurated roundup.
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When you go back to the wild west and people are like 'dude, have some
respect for human life,' you should know you took a wrong turn somewhere. |
'The World's Columbia Exposition' sees the show pin its colours to the
mast in the War of the Currents, labelling Edison and Henry Ford as key
Rittenhouse members whom Flynn sets out to murder. In order to prevent interference
he decoys Team Lifeboat to a hotel transformed into a serial killer's death
maze (true story) and captures Lucy, who manages to recruit assistance in the
form of Harry Houdini to prevent the assassination and rescue Rufus and Wyatt.
Then in 'The Murder of Jesse James', the crew travel back in time to stop Flynn
saving the life of Jesse James by assisting legendary lawman Bass 'The Real
Lone Ranger, but he's black' Reeves and his native American partner Grant
Johnson. They discover that Flynn has no intention of letting James live; he is
just using him to find someone in Indian territory; former timeship pilot and
Rittenhouse oppose Emma Whitmore.
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| "A soldier, a scientist and a stewardess(3) walk into a bar..." |
With Flynn having given Wyatt the identity of his wife's killer, Wyatt persuades
Rufus to help him steal the lifeboat and prevent the killer's conception in
'Karma Chameleon'. He promises no harm, but ends up accidentally killing the
man's father during a storm, only to learn that the killer was lying: He killed
two other women, but not Wyatt's wife. Anthony contacts Lucy and offers to
destroy the mothership if she does the same to the lifeboat, in order to keep
time travel out of the grasp of Rittenhouse, but Flynn rumbles him and Anthony
is killed. Lucy and Rufus realise that the man who threatened Rufus was Lucy's
biodad.
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Rufus is all flustered about meeting Baker, and asks Lucy not to tell his sort-
of-girlfriend Jiya, which a) is kind of tacky, and b) raises the issues of how
time travel affects a 'three for free' policy. |
In 'The Lost Generation', Wyatt is arrested and replaced with the super
decent Dave Baumgartner, who is killed by one of Flynn's goons as the team try
to rescue Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh turns out to be a Rittenhouse legacy –
like Lucy – who has been charged with becoming famous and then being a big old racist
douche. With the help of Josephine Baker and Ernest Hemingway, Rufus and Lucy
rescue Lindbergh, who plans to ditch Rittenhouse but turns out to have stuck to
that for only a short time. As Rittenhouse-controlled NSA agents take over the
time machine project, Agent Christopher busts Wyatt out of chokey and together
with Lucy and Rufus they undertake to continue the fight against Rittenhouse by
any means necessary.
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| The big joke this week is that they have the wrong costumes. |
Finally, in 'Public Enemy No. 1', Flynn helps Al Capone to evade his
tax charges and kill Eliot Ness in exchange for abducting the Mayor of Chicago
to learn when Rittenhouse will next meet up en masse. Dispatched to assassinate
Flynn's mother, Lucy and Rufus tranquilise their new muscle and steal the
Lifeboat, leaving a worm in the project computers. Jiya is arrested after
receiving a call from Rufus, but is able to cobble together a computer with
parts while in custody to ensure her friends aren't tracked. Although at first
intending to save Lucy's sister, the team determine that they can't let Flynn
mess with Capone's history. After Ness's death, Lucy suggests that they work
with Richard Hart, a prohibition agent and secretly Capone's big brother Jimmy
(true story) to gain access to Capone, who shoots Rufus before being killed by
Hart. Mason asks the NSA for access to the same data the Machine uses in Person of Interest. As the team jumps
out, Rufus collapses at the controls.
Timeless has done the needful
and changed up its game, although the jump of the week structure was already a
bit stale. Wyatt's hair-trigger temper and failure to make and execute a simple
plan – there are many better ways to prevent conception via time machine than
trying to cock block the future father; I came up with several during the
course of the episode, some of which didn't even involve fire – prevent his
failure being all that sympathetic, especially given that it involved the death
of a guy who seemed pretty decent. Similarly, Rufus has not only left Jiya in
the lurch, by then calling her he has dumped her right in it, so a bullet in
the collar seems little more than karma. Flynn may be a monster, but he's still
in the top three for most sympathetic character in the series (number one is
Lucy's unrealised sister.)
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| Not doing yourself any favours, Danny boy. |
Iron Fist struggles gamely on
with 'Under Leaf Pluck Lotus' and the inevitable Claire Temple cameo. A group
of posh-slutty saleswomen introduce an exciting new line in synthetic heroin to
the city, and Danny determines that it is being imported via the pier the Hand
wanted Rand(4) to buy. With Ward refusing to act without proof, Danny goes to
Colleen for backup, bringing takeaway, which for him means ordering from his
dad's favourite restaurant and paying for them to bring the food, tables and
chairs to the dojo, because he's rich and clueless and so hilariously
endearing, right?(5) This is where he meets Claire, who is taking private
lessons from Colleen because of course she is. Danny and Colleen spy on the Hand
shipment, but it turns out that they are not bringing in drugs, but the chemist
who makes them. Danny 'rescues' the chemist, and I use sarcastic quote marks
because this rescue involves the man being stabbed in the chest and hauled back
to the dojo to be treated by Claire.
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| "Basically, Danny, you're just not as interesting as I am." |
Moving on to 'Immortal Emerges from Cave', the Meachams move to deal
with a viral video of Danny apologising for not-technically-illegal pollution
from one of the company's factories and Ward is suddenly pitifully addicted to
prescription-strength painkillers. One of the better scenes of the series comes
when Danny basically hijacks Ward to trawl around warehouses looking for the
chemist's daughter, who is being held hostage, but they find the body of the
chemist's guard and an invitation to a duel. While Claire and Colleen take the
chemist to hospital and the Hand swipe him from under their noses, Danny fights
three battles under the watchful eye of Madame Gao. The first is against a pair
of brothers, the second an entomologist who
fights using poison needles and high school seduction moves(6), and the third a
psychopathic blade fetishist and karaoke enthusiast. Gao ultimately calls a
halt by reminding Danny that the Hand doesn't do honour, but reveals a) that
she was born in Kun Lung and b) that she is a way more ultimate a weapon than he
is.
Iron Fist is struggling, and
not because no-one likes a billionaire post-Trump. It's because the show fails
to make Danny likeable, fails to overcome its inherent cultural appropriation
(seriously, Marvel; it's cool having Method Man weigh in to Luke Cage, but if RZA is your authority
on the history of Chinese martial arts, then you're in trouble,) and fails to
make the conflict interesting. Danny Rand's wealth takes the fight off the
streets. With Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage we saw the street-level struggle, but Iron Fist lifts us right up to the level
where Elektra briefly and tediously took Daredevil
and the result lacks emotional punch. We don't not care about Danny Rand
because he's a billionaire, so much as because we only see him fighting for abstracts
– his name, his company, Kun Lung – and not for people.
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| Straight up the fuck is this shit? |
Also… we need to have words about the entomologist assassin, because damn that was some nineties shit right
there. An Asian American ninja poisoner in a black corset and fucking chopstick
buns vamping her way in close to deploy her needles o'death? The only thing
more disappointing than that particular portrayal is the fact that Danny fell for it. Sweet Christmas, Rand; if a
pouty chick in black shows up for a duel to the death and suggests you could
just make out instead, you say no.
How hard is that one to wrap your head around? And how is it that you were
trained to be the destroyer of the Hand but without any preparation for the fact that some of your opponents might be
women? What the hell?
Iron Fist. It's disappointing.
(1) Points for trying on the title, at least.
(2) It is apparently Aida, not Ada, which makes me a little sad.
(3) They do make the point that in the 1980s they were still called stewardesses.
(4) At this point, I kind of expect to learn that the Hand are using
Rand because when they take over they only need to change one letter.
(5) Wrong.
(6) Fortunately for her, Danny has the emotional maturity of a high school freshman.
