DC Roundup: Supergirl - 'Midvale' and 'Wake Up'; The Flash - 'When Harry Met Harry' and 'Therefore I Am'; Legends of Tomorrow - 'Helen Hunt' and 'Welcome to the Jungle'; Crisis on Earth-X - Parts 1-4

So, apparently a three-week DC catchup was in order.

It's like they traveled back in time to kidnap Chyler Leigh and Melissa
Benoist's younger selves; only presumably way less illegal and space-time
destroying.

We begin with Supergirl and the bucolic flashback episode 'Midvale', apparently Smallville's slightly larger sister community(1) and home to Kara's foster family. The plan is to wallow in family and help Alex recover from her narratively jarring break-up with Maggie, but the immediate result seems more to be that Alex descends into semi-sanctioned alcohol abuse and gets pissy with Kara for being all 'plenty more fish in the sea' after her own dark night of the soul following the loss of Mon-el.

The bulk of the episode, however, takes us back to when the girls were both teenagers, Kara the overachieving newbie and Alex an aspiring bitch queen. The death of a fellow student - a close friend of Kara's - leads the two girls into their own investigation, revealing an affair between Alex's queen bee BFF and a teacher and the dead boy's penchant for... Well, blackmail is an ugly word, and it's not actually made clear if he spies on the town for fun and profit, or if his motivation was to try to make the world a better place by pressuring teachers not to sleep with their students or corrupt law enforcement officers to come clean(2). The loss and the investigation bring Alex and Kara together for the first time, and the flashback works the same magic in the present, although it's not entirely clear how given that they don't really talk about it and there isn't a lot of parallel plot intercutting to link then and now.

 

Right! The telescope. That was the link.

'Midvale' gives us a fairly strong tale of the young Danvers sisters, but the world they inhabit is too isolated for the events to have much interest. Kenny Li is a sweetheart - or a blackmailing perv, but I'm pretty sure the idea is that he just sees things and wants to change that which he feels to be wrong - but we have little time to invest in him before his death, and conversely it's just too obvious that the nice-guy sheriff is the real killer because there is literally no-one else it could be. On the other hand, the young versions of our leads are on point.

Also, J'onn talks Kara out of being too powers-usey by pretending to be an FBI agent who happens to look like her mother, which is a touch creepy, and still confusing because her mother doesn't look like her mother anymore.

 

"Well, wherever he's been, he's clearly had access to grooming accessories
and a gym."

But anyway, that leaves Kara feeling a little more composed about the loss of Mon-el, just in time for 'Wake Up', in which a mysterious ship is disturbed by geology. The DEO investigate and find Mon-el and a bunch of peeps in suspended animation, including - as it turns out - a Saturnian space babe named Imra. Has Mon-el relapsed to his pre-Kara ways? Well, no; actually for him he's been away for seven years, living in the 31^st century, recovering from his lead vulnerability, and getting married. Oops.

Elsewhere, J'onn struggles to connect with his father, having been kind of closed off for a while and not knowing how to show his dad the world outside the DEO. In arc-land, Sam goes on a quest to discover who she really is. She presses her foster mother and discovers that there is a spaceship in her barn, which leads her to the 'Fortress of Sanctuary'. A hologram tells her she was designed to be an instrument of punitive judgement before having a kid messed up the timeline, but now her personality can be overwritten(3) and she can get with the tyranny.

This is a lot of variety for a total of 52 Earths, on all of which Barry and Iris
gravitate together.

On to The Flash, and a two-episode mini-arc in which Team Flash try to track down DeVoe. In an attempt to expand his working capacity and, as advised by Cisco, make friends, Harry assembles 'the Council of Wells', a collective of his alternate selves from various dimensions. In the meantime, Barry takes Ralph out on his first case, where the Ductile Detective's drive to get the job done at any cost - the same thing that got him fired when he planted evidence to get someone he knew to be guilty sent down - clashes with Barry's focus on defending the innocent. We also get some stock business with Barry and Iris asking their couples' therapist to hypnotise Ralph and get some sort of lead on who was on the bus.

As Black Bison's whole deal is getting objects to do things, there aren't many
action clips of her.

Our meta of the week is a Native American activist with the ability to bring effigies to life, hell bent on retrieving a tribal relic and punishing those who have sought to keep it in private hands. She goes by the self-appointed moniker 'Black Bison', to save the cringe of having Team Flash try to name a Native American themed villain. The abuse of power in the name of a worthy and even righteous cause is somewhat underused as a theme - perhaps because ultimately this ends up being a B-plot to the Council of Wells - although part of Ralph's ongoing development(4) lies in ultimately swiping the relic from the scene of capture and returning it to the tribe to whom it belongs on the downlow.

"There. Sure glad I don't look stupid in this."

The Council of Wells eventually overcome their collective supermass of ego and provide an address for one Clifford DeVoe, a wheelchair-bound college professor. In 'Therefore I am', we alternate between his start of darkness story - in which he designs a 'thinking cap' which his wife makes for him, and gets his brain lightly poached into a hyer-brilliant but slightly megalomaniacal state while trying to steal energy from the particle accelerator to make it work - with Barry's increasingly lonely attempts to uncover his secret identity, while others come to believe that he might just be an innocent professor and Captain Singh fields complaints against Barry for his actions, because once more we see that Barry Allen is terrible at not getting caught by obvious traps like a few home security cameras.

In the end, DeVoe comes clean, not because Barry catches him out, but because - so it seems - he can't bear to have no-one but his wife understand just how overwhelming his intellect is(5), and challenges Team Flash, who traditionally approach big bads by outthinking them, to marvel at how completely he has them figured out.

DeVoe is a real dick.

Still awkward.

We're still stalled on Arrow, so on to Legends of Tomorrow. In 'Helen Hunt' the Legends detect an anachronism in the golden age of Hollywood. Hedy Lamarr - siren of the silver screen, brilliant inventor and Professor Stein's 'hall pass' - has been bumped from the career-making role of Helen of Troy by, well, the actual Helen of Troy. Helen's mere presence seems set to escalate studio rivalry to gang warfare, while the truncating of Lamarr's career interferes with her work on spread spectrum frequency hopping, which begins to unravel future wifi technology, including the team's comms. Oh, and Stein and Jax get body-swapped by an experimental untangling formula, leading to a bit of Freaky Friday business even as Stein (played here by Franz Drameh) gushes over Hedy Lamarr.

Things take a turn for the serious when Damien Darhk appears in the role of a Hollywood agent. He agrees to a straight fight with Sara, but when she wins the medium steps in, and is revealed as Darhk's daughter, all grown up and unwilling to see her Dad killed by another vigilante. In addition, Amaya learns that water-witch Kuasa is her granddaughter, and while the Legends ultimately win the day, Mallus' anti-Legends are an increasingly sinister and looming presence, as well as being far less of a sausage fest than the Legion of Doom.

Oh, and Zari decides that taking Helen back to Troy would be cruel, so as her ongoing impact on the timeline is limited she instead drops her of on Themiscyra.

Like father, like son.

'Welcome to the Jungle' takes the team to Vietnam, where a mysterious and charismatic figure is recruiting people on both sides to some sort of new tribe and a monster is stalking US patrols. The two turn out to be one and the same, when the Colonel Kurtz figure proves to be none other than an anachronistic Gorilla Grodd. Grodd wants to assassinate a president and take over the world, which obviously the Legends are against, but Mick has problems of his own, most particularly his own father, a gruff non-com with a flamethrower and a familiar attitude.

Grodd is stopped, Jax saves the President(6) from an ambush and Mick saves his father from committing a massacre in revenge for Grodd's crimes, and begins to open up just a little as a result. Grodd seems to fall to his death, but instead is snatched through time and greeted by Damien Darhk.

And all of this leads us at last to the four part crossover event Crisis on Earth-X(7).

I've got a good feeling about this ceremony.

Heroes from all four series assemble in Central City for the wedding of Iris and Barry. Alex comes as Kara's plus one, despite the fact that this is not the wedding she was planning to be at, gets drunk at the rehearsal dinner and wakes up in bed with Sara, because of course Sara hit that. Cue a major existential crisis for Alex, who has had precious few relationships, and never a one-night stand. Fortunately for Alex - less so for everyone else - the wedding is soon interrupted when a mystery Kryponian vapourises the reverend as the opening act of a Nazi invasion from the 'fifty-third, but it's so bleak and horrible we don't even give it a number' Earth-X.

 

In the CW-verse, doubting conservative parents ask their newly-out
daughters: 'How can you be a lesbian if you haven't slept with Sara Lance?'

The attack is led by the Kryptonian and a brace of archers, one of whom is captured and revealed to be Tommy Merlyn. He mocks Olvier's attempts to relate to him as weakness, before taking poison. Meanwhile the other archer - parallel Oliver Queen, the Fuhrer of Earth-X - and 'Overgirl' - Kara's opposite number - rally their forces with the aid of transtemporal cockroach Eobard Thawne, but are once more pressed to retreat by Oliver's kryptonite arrows. The assembled teams are able to track the Nazis based on radiation leaking from Overgirl as a result of absorbing too much yellow sunlight, but are ultimately overwhelmed and everyone but Iris and Felicity gets captured. The sidekicks are imprisoned in the pipeline, the heroes are taken to Earth-X and thrown into Commandant Quentin Lance's concentration camp, and Kara is exposed to red sun radiation to soften her up, so that her heart can be transplanted into Overgirl.

Not sure about the masks, but the use of the SS logo in place of the S of House
El is horribly inspired.

Iris and Felicity delay things long enough for the rest of the Legends to stop Thawne killing Kara and to break out the other sidekicks. The heroes break out of the camp with the help of Leo Snart, Earth-X's Captain Cold, a touchy-feely, plan-oriented, openly gay hero in a relationship with Ray 'the Ray' Terrill, and join up with a group of freedom fighters led by Earth-X's Winn Schott(8). Schott is committed to the destruction of the Reich, and intends to use his world's Red Tornado to destroy the portal linking the worlds. He offers the teams time to get through, but then sends Tornado anyway, leaving the Flash and the Ray to hold off the android while the rest of the team storm the portal (a plan which involves Oliver disguising himself as the Fuhrer before blowing his cover to protect Earth-X Felicity, who is of course interned for being Jewish.)

It's that man again.

The heroes break back through and take down the bad guys, even managing to bring down the Nazi version of the Waverider, but not without cost. Professor Stein takes a bullet activating the portal, and although briefly stabilised by the fusion of Firestorm, ultimately persuades Jax to take the formulae developed to separate them, so that he will not take Jax with him. Massive props to the series for skipping the tediousness of Stein's family blaming Jax to create unnecessary conflict. Instead, they embrace him as a member of their grieving family, because the loss of Stein is painful enough for Jax, who has spent much of the mini-series coming to terms with the father-son relationship he and Stein share.

In the end, Overgirl explodes, Oliver shoots his Nazi doppelganger, and John Diggle - who was ordained as a minister to marry his brother, back before he killed him - is brought in to do the honours for Barry and Iris, and for Oliver and Felicity(9). Sara tells Alex to fly and be free. It's all pretty uplifting and then everyone goes home for what I expect to be a brutally painful round of mis-season finales.

Phew.

Oh, and Snart stays on Earth-1.

So, that was an exciting batch of episodes. Supergirl is doing pretty well at the moment, and Legends of Tomorrow has never been as much fun. Ralph Dibney is taking The Flash to some odd places. He's being played with what seems to be a lot of Plastic Man in his characterisation, and I don't know if that plus the wackiness of the Council of Wells(10) is doing the tone any favours when set alongside the scheming of the Thinker. Crisis on Earth-X was an outstanding crossover, avoiding the segmentation of Invasion while keeping its strengths, and expanding to a full, four-episode arc. Also, punching Nazis really plays to the crowd.

(1) In many ways it's remarkable that such deliberately generic place names as Smallville and Metropolis have survived to the present day.

(2) Given the lack of condemnation of his actions, I assume the latter.

(3) I really hope this isn't as total as it seemed, because otherwise the character's whole set up seems likely to have been background for a pat resolution where she either recognises her daughter and lets herself be taken down, or doesn't and kills poor Ruby for dramah.

(4) On this note, I'm glad to see that the writers aren't playing with some of the creepier 'jokes' about stretching powers, despite Ralph's slightly sleazy persona.

(5) Although in classic form, he is physically crippled and needs a life-support wheelchair from House of Davros to survive.

(6) LBJ.

(7) Italicised, because it was basically presented as a four-part miniseries, complete with its own titles.

(8) As if to cement his position as 'character the writers have least idea what to do with' James 'Guardian' Olsen was killed in the cold open of Part 1.

(9) A character plot has Felicity refusing to get engaged to Oliver, because that was where everything when to shit last time.

(10) Even excluding 'Wells the Grey', a wizard.

Star Wars: Rebels - The First Half of Season 4

I had it in mind to review this final season of Rebels episode by episode, but the Sky box had other plans and I barely managed to grab the first half - the nine episodes prior to the mid-season break - before the early episodes would have been vanishing from the On Demand lists.

Who wears Stormtrooper armour by choice?

We open with 'Heroes of Mandalore', which is the traditional two-part 'event' opener, for what that means in a season which turns out to have a lot of serial storytelling. Ezra, Kanan and Chopper are helping Clan Wren in their struggle to free the Mandalorians from Imperial rule, which is currently administered by Tiber Saxon. The brother of Gar Saxon, who was killed in a duel with Sabine last season, Tiber is a douchebag of the first water, determined to suck up to the Empire and abandon the distinctive Mandalorian customs. Representative of this, he has swapped his Mandalorian armour for that of a stormtrooper, and when Clan Wren come to rescue Sabine's father, Alrich Wren(1), he deploys 'the Duchess', the weapon whose creation caused Sabine to turn from the Empire and which she thought she had destroyed.

Accused of treachery by many of her allies, including the near-legendary Lady Bo-Katan Kryze(2), Sabine leads a perilous mission to take out the Duchess once and for all. The opportunity to do so turns out to be a trap, intended to force her to perfect the design which Tiber had to reconstruct from the wreck of the prototype. She seems to capitulate, but instead recalibrates the weapon to home on stormtrooper armour, and is only persuaded to refrain from killing the entire garrison by Kryze, who reminds her that she destroyed the weapon not just because it would be used against her people, but because it was a cowardly way to fight: The Imperial way.

 

"Today we celebrate our Independence Day!"

Sabine sabotages the Duchess, which explodes with enough force to scuttle the Star Destroyer it is sitting in. She then hands off the Darksaber to Kryze, effectively making her the leader of traditional Mandalore, before returning with her new family to the Rebellion.

As Ezra last season, it's Sabine's turn for a follicular upgrade, swapping out the punky yellow and pink hair of past seasons for a more sober magenta in recognition of her ascension to a true leadership role. There's also a shift in the relationship between Sabine and Ezra, with the latter frequently protesting - protesting, one might say, too much - that he isn't 'with' Sabine. Kryze has a conversation with Fenn Rau about Sabine's growing confidence and ability, and of course the resurrection of her own horror weapon knocks that a bit, but overall the growth in these characters is impressive for any show, let alone an animated series.

Ezra's hat collection has long been a thing in this series, and I respect that
kind of continuity.

'In the Name of the Rebellion' - another two-parter - takes our heroes home to the Rebel base on Yavin-4. Soon after their arrival, Hera leads the remains of a squad of Y-wings home, critically damaged after a failed supply mission. Mon Mothma and General Dodonna are forced to accept that Saw Gerrera's intel was right: The Imperials have a new relay station which allows them to react too fast to Rebel activity. The crew of the Ghost are thus tasked with hacking the relay to allow the Rebels to listen in on Imperial comms, although Ezra is disappointed to neither be sticking it to the Imperials more directly by blowing up the relay, or better yet going back to liberate Lothal.

The relay mission goes tits up, however, when first an Imperial cruiser and then Gerrera turn up halfway through. Saw shoots up the cruiser in his U-wing and drops explosives onto the relay dish, while the rest of the crew dogfight with TIE Defenders. Ezra - impressed by Saw's 'get shit done' attitude - and Sabine agree to accompany him to try to find out why the cruiser is making deliveries to deep space. Saw turns out to be on the trail of the same thing that was hinted at on Genosis, and believes that the key to unlocking the mystery lies aboard the cruiser. They board, and find a bunch of prisoners and a huge kyber crystal. Saw wants to learn what the Empire are doing with the crystal, and failing that to use it to destroy the ship, but Ezra and Sabine are more focused on saving the prisoners, causing a break between them.

 

Death Troopers.

Saw blows the crystal and Ezra and Sabine flee with the prisoners. Unable to escape into hyperspace, Sabine puts their shuttle on the far side of a star destroyer, which is itself destroyed by the blast from the destabilised crystal(3). The shuttle's engines are blown, but fortunately the Ghost turns up to get them, and Ezra has an object lesson in the perils of direct action.

An interesting side-note on this episode is DT-F16, a female Death Trooper Commander who leads the boots on the ground opposition in the story. She's tough and competent, and I honestly expected her to become a recurring enemy moving forward. It was only after she was killed in the denouement that I realised that I had parsed her as more relevant than she was purely because she was a woman, and female voices tend only to be cast in specific, rather than generic roles. This brought home the realisation that it's been a strength of the series that it has not only had far more than the average number of female roles of substance, it is also willing to kill off both these characters, and female generics, as easily as their male counterparts.

Funny hat day was a mixed success.

The remaining five episodes of this half of the season are essentially five parts of a single story, beginning with 'The Occupation'. The crew finally return to Lothal in response to a distress signal, aboard a freighter owned by dodgy 'entrepreneur' Visago. The planet is in near-total lockdown, but Visago swears he can get them in. Despite his promises, they are almost picked up in a customs scan, and Visago is arrested going back for his cargo. 

They try to contact the local rebels at the formerly-friendly tavern Old Jho's, only to find that Jho has been executed for aiding rebel fugitives. The bar has been given to Valen Rudor, Imperial ace pilot and comedy foe from the original animated shorts and first season. They are, however, contacted by a resistance member; one of Ezra's classmates from Stormtrooper School in Season 1. Say what you will about this season, it's doing a lot to pay off series-long set ups regarding the Rebels' ties to Lothal.

Loth-cats.

Escaping into the sewers, the Rebels are led to former Governor-turned-Rebel cell leader Ryder Azadi(4), who in turn take them to witness a test of a new, more advanced TIE Defender prototype in - surprisingly - 'Flight of the Defender', in which they watch a test flight from a ridge, despite the attentions of the local Porg-equivalents: Loth-cats. Determined to get their money's worth from the high-risk insertion onto Lothal, Sabine decides to steal the Defender's flight recorder as well as providing eye witness accounts of its speed and manoeuvrability. Unfortunately, this is when Thrawn and Pryce arrive for a test flight, forcing the Rebels to improvise by blowing shit up and stealing the Defender itself. They strafe the landing ground before leaving, and Ezra takes down three pursuing Interceptors(5) before Sabine recognises a kill-switch and they are able to ditch before all the wings fall off. 

I'm really worried bad things are going to happen.

Trapped in the desert, they hide the Defender's hyperdrive, intending to come back and use it to allow Azadi's clapped out old U-wing to fly them home. They hide themselves in a cave which Ezra finds by following a white Loth-cat. Ezra has been seeing a Loth-wolf - thought to be extinct - all day, and finally it approaches them and puts Sabine to sleep by breathing on her and saying 'sleep', because things are about to get trippy, yo. It carries them to the Rebel camp and drops them off with a cryptic message 'Dume'(6).

And then we have 'Kindred'.

This guy.

Fleeing from Governor Pryce and - far more importantly for EU fans(7) - a gangly master hunter and assassin named Rukh, the Ghosts split up. It's is a major burn for Pryce, for so long the 'competent one' in Thrawn's inner circle, to be shuffled off pursuit duty in favour of an assassin, and that will likely come back to bite the Empire later. It's increasingly apparent - in last Season's finale, here, and in 'Rebel Assault', that one of Thrawn's greatest weaknesses is a failure to take account of his underlings egos. Thus, while Rukh is able to track his quarry across the desert, but not capture Ezra and a resistance fighter single-handed, Pryce dismisses him and takes over herself. The concept of 'horses for courses' is apparently lost on her.

Badass.

Hera and Chopper take a U-Wing loaded with the Defender's hyperdrive to get word to the Alliance of the threat posed by the new fighter, while the rest of the group buy time. Hera escapes the Imperial blockade by punching into hyperspace through a hangar, because she's awesome, but guided by Rukh's unerring nose, the Imperials close in on the remaining Rebels. At the last, a group of Loth-wolves appear and lead them to a tunnel. As Imperial bombs begin to pound the mountains above them, the wolves seem to lead their charges through what might be hyperspace, or something, because that is a thing that Loth-wolves can do. The Rebels emerge to realise they have travelled to the far side of the planet.

Dances with Loth-wolves.

Ezra helps Kanan to explore the cave they have emerged into, which shows visitors from space - possibly Jedi - and Loth-wolves working together. They speculate on the past of Lothal, and also that the Empire may be doing something far worse to Lothal than merely building factories. Kanan, having previously pondered with Hera the way in which the Ghost's crew seem repeatedly to be drawn back to Lothal - meeting Ezra, working with Azadi, escorting princesses and scoundrels, even adopting a Lothal design as the emblem of the Rebellion - feels that the Loth-wolves are strongly tied to the Force, and in particular to the larger energy system of Lothal. He is also surprised when the wolf repeats 'Dume, which it turns out is his real name: Caleb Dume.

Magic space wolves. Of course.

Kindred is a weird episode, I'm not going to say otherwise. There's a dramatic shift to the hardcore mystical which the show, indeed the franchise, has typically avoided. There has always been that element, except when someone tries to write it off as 'midichlorians', but it was always in the background. There's something about it that almost feels more in keeping with Avatar: The Last Airbender than with Star Wars, although it jibes surprisingly well with past developments on Rebels itself, in particular Kanan and Ezra's experiences in the Lothal Jedi temple. In addition, Kanan gets to be wise and intuitive, and Hera gets to be a total badass, which it turns out is a great division of labour for them.

"Nice piece of heavy plant you've got here. Shame is someone were to... set
fire to it."

We're on sounder footing with 'Crawler Commanders', in which the crew once more cross paths with the Galactic Mining Guild. Needing to get a message out to coordinate with Hera's attack on the TIE Defender factory, they hijack a mining crawler for its long-ranger transceiver. Unfortunately, the crawler's captain is a jobsworth on the scale of oft-dynamited railway employee Woodcock in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and chooses to make a fight of it. Kanan and Zeb free the crawler's slaves - including Visago - and defeat the captain and his foreman, as well as weathering an Imperial inspection.

Badass space battles.

This leads into 'Rebel Assault', in which the Alliance launches its doomed attack on Lothal(9). The ground team take out the air defence towers, and the X-Wings carve a path through the standard TIE Fighters. The Defender presents a bit more of a challenge, cutting down a pair of X-Wings, but despite the Defender Elite's greater agility and armament, Hera is able to deftly destroy her opponent after luring the enemy ace in front of a Star Destroyer's turbolasers. Unfortunately, on entering the atmosphere the strike force encounters a vast second wave of TIEs, leading to an unexpectedly harrowing scene in which the ground team watches the entire strike force plunge in flames from the sky. Thrawn sends Rukh to hunt down any surviving pilots, and especially Hera.

Big ass wolves.

Kanan sends the rest of the ground team on, while he turns back to help Hera, only to be blocked by a Loth wolf. Hera, meanwhile, joins up with Mart Mattin, the late Commander Sato's nephew and erstwhile leader of Iron Squadron. They are able to elude Rukh once - after Hera manages to actually go a few rounds with a Noghri, absorbing enough of his focus for Chopper to taser him - and destroy a scout walker guarding a sewer hatch, but the hunter attacks again and Hera is forced to send Chopper and Mart away before being captured. The midseason finale closes with Kanan swearing to rescue Hera.

Star Wars: Rebels goes from strength to strength, and looks set to go out on a high note, although I admit to some concern about the upcoming season finale. We know from Rogue One that at least Hera and the Ghost will make it to the Battle of Scarif, but I'm concerned that the series might go for a TPK to make way for the status quo of the original trilogy. While Rogue One established that you can kill all of your characters in a Star Wars movie and still turn up a good un(10), I am firmly set against an ending which kills the characters of this story in the service of someone else's.

(1) Voiced by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Alrich is an artist who adopted the surname of his more martially adept wife on marriage. I like this guy.

(2) Nerd favourite Katee Sackhoff, returning from The Clone Wars.

(3) Killing Cham Sindulla's nemesis, Slavin.

(4) Clancy Brown. Man, this voice cast...

(5) Thrawn notes that if Hera were flying the Defender, she would have made much shorter work of the Interceptors; the first, but by no means last time in this run of episodes that he reiterates his recognition of Hera's skills.

(6) Or, if you're watching and not reading, the altogether more pessimistic: 'Doom'.

(7) The ones who aren't too busy complaining that the Empire shouldn't have TIE Defenders, nor the Rebel Alliance(8) A-Wings this early on.

(8) I'm sorry; 'Alliance to Restore the Republic.'

(9) Doomed because that the events of the end of Rogue One constituted their first significant victory in the field is literally the first thing we ever learned about Star Wars.

(10) YMMV.

TV Roundup - Discovery, Inhumans, The Good Place, and not Stranger Things

Having spent November doing NaNoWriMo, I've fallen behind a bit on both my new TV watching and my reviewing. I'm going to do a bit of a catch-up here before getting back into it for December.

First up, Marvel's bid for Kinga Forrester-style global media domination continues with the opening quartet of episodes from Inhumans – ‘Behold… The Inhumans’, ‘Those Who Would Destroy Us’, 'Divide and Conquer' and 'Make way for… Medusa'.

We begin our story in Hawai'i, where a fish-looking dude named Triton fundamentally fails to rescue a newly changed Inhuman from men with guns. Then we transition to the Moon, and the hidden city of Attlian on the far side of Earth's only natural satellite(1), where the Inhuman Royal Family rules over a high-powered elite and a massive underclass of those Inhumans who turn out to have rubbish powers. Maximus, brother to Black Bolt(2), king of the Inhumans, came out of his terrigenesis purely human. He argues that the Inhumans should go to Earth and take over, allowing them to live and breathe free and liberate the toiling underclass. By replacing them with a toiling underclass of humans, certainly, but honestly in the early episodes he's scoring major points against the other Royals, whose interactions with their social inferiors are limited to patronising those who gain cool flying powers and dissing servants for being attracted to them.

Who is this girl? We will literally never know.

So, spoilers for this review if nothing else, I don't like the Inhumans. I'm going to watch the remaining four episodes of Inhumans, but the characters themselves I do not like.

With Triton vanished and Gorgon, leader of the Royal Guard, on Earth looking for him, and a young seer falling into his influence, Maximus launches a coup. He directs the Inhuman-hunting mercenaries to kill Gorgon, which doesn't go well for them, captures and shaves Queen Medusa's animate kung-fu hair - because what would this series be without a man forcibly divesting a woman he has expressed desire for of her power? - and tries to kill his brother to prevent him using his power, a voice which annihilates everything in its path. Since this power is basically uncontrolled - he can whisper or shout, but not focus the blast - Black Bolt has the ultimate power of awesome uselessness.

 

The hair is cool, but ind of moves around Medusa, instead of with her. The
result is to make Medusa herself seem a very passive character.

Medusa's sister, ice-slinger Crystal(3), uses her teleporting dog Lockjaw to send Black Bolt, Medusa, and douchebag quasi-Vulcan prognosticator Karnak to Earth, but she and Lockjaw are captured for a time. Black Bolt gets arrested after walking off with a suit, and he and Medusa try to find one another by basically treating the world like they own it. Black Bolt is broken out of prison and escapes with an Inhuman named Sammy to a compound run by Declan, a geneticist who is generally well-meaning, but working with Maximus, where Medusa finds them after generally being a dick to space scientist Louise. Gorgon hooks up with some surfing military veterans and barely fights off an attack by the Royal Guard, including Mordis, an off-brand version of Cyclops. Karnak gets a bump on the noggin and works on a cannabis farm while his powers are on the fritz, getting his freak on and apparently provoking one of his fellow farmers to start a lethal buyout of his comrades. Crystal escapes when called on to give a speech supporting Maximus, who uses this to accuse the Royal Family of being quitters wot run when the going gets tough. She gets to Earth, but Lockjaw is hit by a car, introducing her to friendly locals Dave and Audrey, to whom she is a dick about them accidentally hitting and failing to instantly heal her dog.

In short, a bunch of Inhumans who were dicks to their fellow Inhumans on the Moon come to Earth and are dicks to humans. Our heroes, folks. Inhumans is a massively ambitious show, with a cast full of superpowered characters, but there just isn't that much to like. Anson Mount's Black Bolt is a complete stiff on the Moon. He's better once he gets into prison and starts to look baffled by stuff, but a mute character is tough to do well in television, especially as part of a speaking ensemble. All of the Royals treat the underclass like crap, and it's not as if it’s a small divide. The Royal Family aren't the upper levels of an all-around crapsack society, they live in a glorious, artificial paradise, while the peons work in the mines and starve. There is some indication that Black Bolt may have been trying to make changes, but it's hard to see him as a man of the people and Maximus will always have that over him in terms of sympathy. The rest of the Royals are just as bad, always slagging off those who are 'only human' and looing down their noses at anyone whose powers aren't cool. No place here for Arm-Fall-Off Boy(4).

Inhumans: Ultimately, far more Agents of SHIELD than Legion, but with the saving grace of a short season.

Next, the last two episodes leading to the mid-season finale of Star Trek: Discovery - 'Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum' and 'Into the Forest I Go'.

"I talk to the trees..."

The war is going badly for the Federation. The Klingon sarcophagus ship is back in action, which means that the Federation fleet is struggling to cope with waves of cloaked enemy vessels. They need a new edge; a means to detect and target the cloaked vessels before they pop out and murder your friends. They need - and bear with me on this - sonar. There's a world, right, which is all one big forest, except for what appears to be a naturally occurring antenna. The trees in the forest sing and the antenna broadcasts this song into space. The crew of the Discovery believe that this signal can be used to detect the cloaked vessels because gosh darnit it just can, THAT'S WHY, okay!

Burnham and Tyler accompany Saru to locate the source of the song, which turns out to be a kind of collective tree consciousness, which gets into Saru's head and makes him feel safe. This causes him to go mental and try to trap his away team on the planet, but Burnham and Tyler are able to stop him and Burnham seems to persuade the mind that they have good intentions and just want to bring an end to the war. Meanwhile, creepy Klingon interrogator L'Rell tries to defect while rescuing Admiral Cornwell, but is forced to abort and smack the Admiral against a thing that sparks, seemingly killing her, only to be condemned herself by Kol. Luckily for her, Kol is distracted when the forest planet sends a subspace shout into the void to invite the Klingons to attend a peace summit, because apparently trees are total Pollyannas.

It seems shocking that an M/M kiss is somewhere that, in Star Trek at least, no
man has gone before.

This brings us on to 'Into the Forest I Go'(5), in which the Discovery faces off against the sarcophagus ship. Stamets is getting burned out and intends to quit soon for the sake of his health, but not before undertaking one last mission. In order to defeat the sarcophagus ship, Burnham and Tyler will sneak aboard as it briefly appears to shoot at the Discovery and plant a few large, blinking and flashing sensor buoys in largely public spaces. Then the Discovery simply has to make a few hundred consecutive jumps in order to conduct a vast number of sensor sweeps from all angles.

The boarding party find L'Rell and the not-entirely-dead Cornwell, and Tyler freaks out a bit and has flashbacks to what is either him having sex with L'Rell back when he was Voq(6) or L'Rell committing what would be a very serious offence outwith the framework of a brutal military regime. Burnham has to go on alone, then to distract the Klingons by revealing herself as the killer of T'Kuvma the One and Only. She fights Kol and manages not to just fall down in the face of his slightly greater skill and vastly superior strength and resilience, buying time for the Discovery to bounce around it like a mad thing, vaguely reminiscent of Scrappy Doo.

Nice set. Shame if it were to... catch fire.

Anyway, Discovery transports Burnham, Tyler, Cornwell and L'Rell aboard, then blows the crap out of the Sarcophagus Ship. Lorca ships Cornwell off to a medical facility, L'Rell assures Tyler that she won't let anyone hurt him, and then a final black alert jump takes the ship... elsewhere.

The theory has long been out there that Tyler is in fact Voq, transformed into a human aspect like that dude in Trouble with Tribbles, and if this much is true then also brainwashed to believe that he is a human. I still subscribe to this theory, although I'm starting to hope that I'm wrong, because if I am then Star Trek is looking like it's going to tackle a serious subject in a serious manner (in contrast to previous series, which have tended to be played a bit more as Arthurian love potion plot than as sexual assault.

Anyway; now we're into the mid-season break, so Discovery reviews will return some time in January.

I watched the first episode of Season 2 of Stranger Things, but I want to take another pass at that when I have time to get a few episodes in, so finally for this time I caught Season 1 of The Good Place, a Netflix sitcom about the afterlife.

Eleanor Shellstrop (Frozen's Kristen Bell) finds herself in the afterlife after a particularly humiliating death, but learns that her sterling work as a human rights lawyer has earned her one of the small number of places in the Good Place. She will spend eternity in an idyllic neighbourhood under the direction of architect Michael (Ted Danson) and virtual guide Janet (D'Arcy Carden), cohabiting with her soulmate Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper). The only problem is that Eleanor Shellstrop is not a human rights lawyer, but a self-absorbed, manipulative saleswoman who resents her compact, 'Icelandic primitive' house and envies on every level her perfect neighbours, Tahani Al-Jamil (Jameela Jamil) and Jianyu (Manny Jacinto). As her thoughtless bad behaviour appears to be plunging the neighbourhood into chaos, Eleanor struggles to learn to be a good person, with the aid of Chidi.

Actually, I call it a sitcom, and it has many of the hallmarks of the genre, but it becomes apparent through the course of the season that it is actually a developing series, which develops its characters and situation before finally throwing a massive curveball in the season finale(7). The leads are all excellent, and even though none of the characters are intrinsically very likeable, Bell actually manages to make us root for the vaguely reforming horror show that is Eleanor. The show is witty and fast-paced, and notably features a widely diverse cast - the leads are a white woman, a black man, an Asian American man and a British Muslim woman.

Also, the running gag that no-one can swear in the Good Place could be annoying, but is forking hilarious. That must have taken some doing.

So, in summary: Discovery is a definite keeper, Inhumans has the virtue of smallness, and The Good Place is a gem to set alongside The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

(1) A status I would not be surprised to see challenged by the revelation that it was put there by the Kree in a later instalment.

(2) As near as I can tell, this is his given name.

(3) Who is painfully princessy.

(4) Admittedly this is at least partly because he's a DC character.

(5) The title is taken from a poem by naturalist (John Muir https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YInfr0hm4A): 'Into the forest I go, To lose my mind and find my soul.' It's a beautiful line, although probably the 19^th century equivalent of those 'this is an antidepressant' memes if you really analyse it. It is also widely attributed to 'unknown' for some reason.

(6) See below for theory discussion.

(7) Season 2 is making a strong showing, despite the immense challenge set by this twist cliff-hanger.