Legion - Season 2

Hero, right?

So… what in the hells can I say about most of a season of Legion in a single blog post?

So, Season 2 follows the shifting alliances in the hunt for the Shadow King’s body. David struggles to follow future Sid’s directions without leading his allies into harm’s way. At the same time, Lenny – or the part of her mind that exists within the Shadow King since her death – begins to show her independence from the primary consciousness of Ahmal Farouk, asking to be given a body and a new life in return for her service.

Weirdness abounds.

Farouk is able to get to his body first, while David – enraged by the discovery that Farouk has restored Lenny by overwriting his sister’s soul and warping her body into a facsimile of Lenny’s – sets up an elaborate gambit, planting subconscious prompts in various allies in order to set up a situation in which Farouk’s powers can be nullified. This gambit does pay off, enabling him to defeat the Shadow King in a bravura clash of swirling chalk figures – seriously, this series is hella stylish – but at the same time Farouk reveals to Sid that he has also managed to contact future Sid, and that the danger that she wants Farouk alive to face in the future is David, because David is, at his core, broken in such a way that he can only ever pretend to connect to other humans, all the while seeing them as lesser beings and his to do with as he pleases. Consequently, Sid tries to shoot him. He erases her memory of the event and her motives in order to restore their relationship which, once she discovers it, leaves Sid understandably pissed as hell.

Really, really stylish.

Division 3, backed by the Shadow King, confront David, who basically declares ‘screw the lot of you’ and swans off with Lenny to be bad guys or something.

Now, not wanting to dump on the Defenders line – or not on any part of it that isn’t Iron Fist, anyway – but this is some seriously tight storytelling. A lot happens in the course of ten episodes, and I would hold this up as another example of why the US standard of 20-23 episodes isn’t necessarily the best model for television drama. The standard was developed in a time when the idea of serialised fiction in an ongoing series was almost unheard of. Serial fiction was the purview of the mini-series – 3-6 episodes of ninety minutes or more – while ongoing series, like Star Trek or Bonanza, would have an anthology format. But then, Babylon 5 happened, pretty much. Arc plots became de rigeur, and while some series make it work, most end up with a mix of arc episodes and filler of indifferent quality, telling a story that ends up over-stretched. A shorter season maintains the quality and momentum of a series much better than a longer one.

On the other hand, presumably revenue is determined by how many episodes you can stick adverts in, so…

But yeah; Legion is very good. Love it.

Legion - 'Chapter 9' and 'Chapter 10'

Meet the new boss, substantially different from and way, way weirder than
the old boss (who talked to her coffee machine.)

I'm just going to say this now, and maybe we can assume it for the start of every other paragraph going forward in the second season of Legion: This is where things get weird.

We open with David, last seen being abducted by an orb, being recovered by Potonomy and Clarke from a nightclub full of catatonic people whose teeth chatter constantly. It has been a year since his disappearance, although he claims to remember nothing, and in that time Amahl Farouk, the Shadow King, has been travelling in Oliver Bird's body, leaving in his wake the psychic virus - known as the Catalyst - which leave people in this frankly unnerving state. David learns that the team from Summerlands are now working with Division 3 under the authority of Admiral Fukyama, a hybrid of human and machine who wears a komuso's basket-hat and speaks through a series of moustachioed gynoids, because of course he does. Their goal is to find Farouk's body and destroy it, thus robbing him of his powers.

Future Syd is more of a winter.

David reconnects with Syd, and Cary creates an isolation tank designed to help him locate the Shadow King. While searching for Farouk, David recalls the nightclub, a monk, and a three-way dance battle against Oliver and Lenny. David gives Syd - who is worried about losing him again - a compass that will always point to him, but although he promises no secrets he does not tell her that he does remember being taken, and that the orb was sent by a future version of Syd, still carrying the compass, who tells him to help Farouk find his original body.

David agrees to help Farouk, creating a distraction so that Farouk-in-Oliver can enter Division 3 in search of something. David insists that no-one get hurt, which Farouk disregards, disintegrating several guards and terrifying the children who are used as security because pre-pubescent individuals are immune to the Catalyst. He also does something to Kerry which initially prevents her reabsorption into Cary, then causes him to be partially absorbed into her. Admiral Fukyama and Clarke immediately become suspicious of David.

Creepy smile!

Unnerved by the loss of life, David has the Loudermilks - who are considerably thrown as, even when they manage to separate again, find themselves unable to recombine, leaving Kerry stuck living through the boring bits and apparently aging fast - enhance the tank to let him move outside of time, ostensibly to predict where Farouk will be, but actually to contact future Syd and ask for confirmation that he should really be helping Farouk. She confirms that he must, because what comes after Farouk, a plague, is worse, and they need the Shadow King to fight it. David finally comes face to face with what may be the true face of Farouk, who agrees to not kill anyone else if David will help him find the monk from his vision, the last survivor of the Migo Order, who were involved in hiding the Shadow King's body. David confides in Syd, who suggests that he do as her future self suggests.

In addition, each episode has a narrative essay on a psychological and philosophical topic. In 'Chapter 9', this considers the birth of delusions as an irrational idea that thrives in place of more rational ones to become a psychosis, considering the story of Zhuang Zhou and the butterfly and an allegory of ideas as chicks hatching from eggs. The delusion is a black, tarry mutant chick, which survives because Lenny crushes a healthy chick, visually suggesting that others can foster delusions by quashing rational ideas, although I don't know if Lenny represents Farouk in this instance, or the fact that Benny and Lenny both represented a deleterious influence on David in their own way. The tar chick also makes an appearance in the background of one scene, which is disturbing AF.

The show notes say 'to be read by Peter Jones, or nearest living equivalent.

'Chapter 10' talks about how ticks and dogs perceive the world, and how the human need to interpret the world creates umwelt, the individual perception of the world. This makes humans the only creatures able to go mad, and can be manipulated, for example by teaching a child that red is green and vice versa, then letting them loose on a pelican crossing. I don't know how current and accurate these sections are, but they certainly add to the uniqueness of the series, making it feel like a particularly grim reinterpretation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Also, did I mention there was a goddamn dance off? And the cyber-brained komuso with the moustachioed gynoids?

So, yeah, Legion continues to be the weirdest thing on television by a matter not of degree, but of kind. It remains compelling, although the new status quo - working for Division 13, Melanie Bird turned insular nihilist - takes a little getting used to. I think the most interesting thing about introducing the 'real' Shadow King - I'm not actually convinced yet that this is what his body looks like - is that we see him interacting with Lenny. This is the first confirmation that Lenny is really real, and also indicates that Farouk not only steals bodies and co-opts their images psychically, but retains entire personalities inside himself, including Lenny who wants to be free and - if at all possible - not dead anymore.

Runaways - 'Reunion'

"Can't stay at home, Can't stay at school."

Runaways is a Marvel property I have heard a great deal about, but don't really know much about, at least in part because I've always intended to maybe try and read it some time. I never got around to that, but now they've made it into a TV series, which may or may not be a part of the MCU(1).

The story centres on a group of privileged, yet troubled teens, whose parents are all members of a charitable trust called the Pride Foundation(2). Alex is a proud geek, whose formerly close bond with his friends was broken when one of their number, Amy, died two years previously. In large part for the sake of Amy's angry Goth sister Nico, he tries to stage a reunion with her and their other friends: jock and closet engineering genius Chase(3); perpetually sunny Karolina, who was raised in her mother's cult; and adoptive sisters Gert, an Angry Young Woman, and Molly, the youngest of the group, who is hitting the puberty and discovering that she has super strength. Sadly, no-one is really interested in getting the band back together.

Gert arranges a Spanish tutoring session with Chase - she either has a super-obvious crush on him, or the show is dummying us and she has complicated feels for other reasons - but he blows her off to go to a party with his Lacrosse team as part of a commitment to better living through douchebaggery. He hits a limit, however, when Karolina blows off church stuff for the party, takes off her cult bracelet for the first time, sees her arms go all sparkly and passes out. The other lacrosse players see this as an ideal opportunity for some date rape, but Chase sees them off and Karolina comes to when he replaces her bracelet. He warns her against drugs, but we see her dispose of a pill that she was given without taking anything.  Molly feeds her parents many pets, and discovers a door in the basement leading to the dinosaur room. No, really and literally.

With Molly and Karolina in a state of advancing freakout, they beg Gert and Chase respectively to take them 'somewhere else, but not home,' and so they wind up at Alex's place, as does Nico after failing to raise her sister's spirit in a candle-lit beach ritual(4). While their parents toast their own organisation and snark at Gert and Molly's hippy parents, the kids awkwardly reunite, tempers flaring over what exactly came between them when the 'glue' of Amy's presence and personality was gone. Chase decides that stealing the good booze is the way forward, which leads to the accidental discovery of a secret door triggered by a stack of coasters(5).

 

"Old folks say you poor little fool."

The kids descend into a cellar, where they see their parents wearing red robes and feeding a young girl from the church into a glowing coffin of, we presume, evil. Molly tries to use her phone as a periscope and accidentally lets of the flash, and they flee.

Runaways has a good rep and a fair amount of potential. Of course, the kids are the real heart of this show, and so far, they make a decent fist of it. They're all pretty privileged, but their shared loss allows the audience to sympathise with them for the one thing that no amount of money can insulate against. None of them really look quite as young as I think they're supposed to be, although they're slightly more convincing high schoolers than the cast of Teen Wolf. As antagonists, the parents are a mixed bag - right on, dino-breeding hippies; douchebag lawyer and trophy wife; uptight tech moguls; sinister-happy cult leaders; ruthless ex-ghetto(6) realtors - and so far seem to embody a fairly banal kind of evil, and even their human sacrifice ritual is kind of sterile and clean - feeding an unresisting victim into a glowing light while shrouded in a sound-dampening forcefield - the ultimate in middle class, house proud cult activity.

'Reunion' is very much a set-up episode, establishing and beginning to upset the status quo. As with all such series, transferring from this 'everyday' set-up to the ongoing situation is a challenge, and it remains to be seen how Runaways manages that. Better than Inhumans and more involving than The Gifted, I'm keen to see where the series will go.

(1) I hear yes, but there's been no direct connection so far.

(2) No relation to LBQTA rights that we can see yet.

(3) He's cool and gadgety, and probably intended to be like Tony Stark, but I read him more like Jonathon Brown in Paddington 2; secretly into steam engines, but asking to be called 'J-Dog' to fit in.

(4) This is the problem with learning all your witchery from The Craft, although fair play she has some good candles, because none of them blow out.

(5) I guess the parents never expected their kids to try to use a coaster.

(6) The rest of Pride suggest that Alex's dad at least comes from 'the hood', but they're so upper-middle class that they could mean anything from a trashbag in an alley to a suburb that isn't quite the thing anymore.

The Gifted - 'eXit Strategy' and 'boXed In'

"Hey; we're the good guys here."

Slowly working through Marvel's not-quite-the-X-Men-series-that-isn't-Legion, I've got two more episodes in the bag.

In 'eXit Strategy', the Underground set out to rescue Lawyer-Face and Polaris(1), with the junior Struckers comboing their powers to create a more targeted destructive effect to stop a prisoner transport truck. Meanwhile, Marco goes to his former contacts in a Mexican gang to get info on the convoy route, only to find that the gang is now run by his ex. Soo awkward. Things then go bad, as everyone's powers stop working, thanks to Pulse, a mutant friend of Johnny's who was thought killed in a raid on a Sentinel Services base, only to turn up apparently working on them. Then Johnny knocks out Pulse and everyone gets away, after Lawyer-Face volunteers the metal pin from his leg to allow Polaris(2) to break out of their transport.

'boXed in' sees Blink coming to terms with the fact that her relationship with Johnny is a big old fake, while Lorna ropes Marco into kidnapping Sentinel Services Agent Tragic McBackstory, whose daughter was killed when a mutant rights march exploded, leading to the current state of world affairs. They rope in Roofie-Breath to mess with his mind, and after Blink extracts them from a self-inflicted Sentinel Services hairball, McBackstory is left to go home with no memory that his daughter is dead.

So... y'know. It's actually hard to call who the real villains are here.

Also, Lawyer-Face makes amends for his almost betraying the entire Underground by going out and dummying Sentinel Services away from the hideout.

The Gifted is not a terrible series, but the plot matches its washed-out colour palette. It's much, much better than, say, Inhumans, but also much less memorable. There's a lot to like, some strong characters and interesting relationships, and mostly what I remember is that I really don't like Roofie-Breath and that Lorna and Marco are working hard to justify McBackstory's hate. Honestly, if the Underground represent the good mutants, I'm starting to think that Sentinel Services may have a point. Not a good point, but a point nonetheless.

(1) I'm watching this very slowly, so regular people names are especially hard to remember. Strucker is Lawyer-Face's surname, but there are a lot of Struckers in the series.

(2) Her real name is Lorna, but she's a long-time comic character as well.

The Punisher - '3am' and 'Two Dead Men'

Beards.

After the disappointment of Iron Fist and the frankly mixed results of The Defenders, I'm heading back to the streets of the MCU rather later than most, with Jon Bernthal reprising his dark horse role as Frank 'Punisher' Castle. I'm watching this with my partner's husband, and as he hadn't seen Daredevil Season 2 I got him to watch the graveyard monologue before we started, and it reminded me just how powerful that performance was.

After finishing off the last members of the gangs whose crossfire killed his family, Frank gets a job in demolitions, dulling the screams of his ghosts with the relentless crack of hammer on concrete. He rebuffs the friendship of new boy Donny and antagonism of the regulation-issue workplace bullies, only really opening up - and that barely - to Curtis, a former comrade who runs a group where veterans talk about their feelings of alienation and fears of the liberal oppression of the Christian right.

 

He's such a round-faced woobie that you want to trust him, which makes me
think even more that he's evil.

Homeland Security Agent Dinah Madani is assigned to the New York office after a stint in Afghanistan, where her local partner was killed. She believes that the killers were corrupt US military personnel; possibly Castle's old regiment under Colonel Schoonover. Her hard-ass boss tells her not to pursue this case, so he's probably involved, while her new partner, serially disgraced agent Sam Stein is supportive, so he's either involved or he's too honest for this world and things are going to go badly for him. He's not a goodhearted African-American of a certain age, so I'm leaning towards the former(1). She's pursuing Billy Russo, another former comrade, but unlike Curtis one actively connected to Castle's black ops days.

Frank comes out of retirement after Donny is sucked into a stick-up gang formed of the other construction workers. Totally inexperienced, he drops his driver's license in front of their mob targets, and Castle is forced to step in rather than let the others kill him, taking out first the stick up gang, and then the members of the mob poker game. Unfortunately, this brings him to the attention of a hacker going by the name of Micro, who contacts him with vague hints that the deaths of his family were related to his own actions in Afghanistan.

A world of beards.

To track down Micro, Frank enlists the aid of Karen Page, who points him at the family of a supposedly dead NSA analyst called David Leiberman. Leiberman gives Castle a disc containing footage of his unit torturing and killing Madani's partner in Afghanistan, which leads Castle to capture and question Madani's boss, learning that people do want him dead, and that the entire carousel massacre was just one of those attempts. Castle also spooks Micro by visiting his home, and is able to follow him to his base of operations and take him prisoner.

The Punisher continues to beat the odds for me, by making the Punisher not only a sympathetic character, but a compelling one, largely thanks to Bernthal's relentlessly intense performance. In this series, we have a chance to see the man before the Punisher, and to see that that man was also flawed, already wired for too much aggression for civilian life, and the series makes a strong attempt to portray the inner as well as outer effects of Frank's PTSD and brain damage(2). Unlike the other inhabitants of the MCU noir, I really can't see romance on the horizon for Frank, and I'll be more than usually disappointed if it shows up.

THE FEELS!

We've had relatively little action so far, but I expect that to change. In terms of new characters, Micro is an interesting contrast to Frank(3), having 'lost' his family not through their deaths but through his, and now separated from them by a computer screen and a persistent threat. Madani is a cookie cutter tough cop so far, a bit like Misty Knight with a few sliders moved around, but she's got a lot of room to grow and we're not really going to get to know her until she crosses paths with Frank.

(1) The pattern of previous shows, what I call the Urich-Clemons-Pops axis, bodes ill for Curtis, a good-hearted African-American, if a little younger than previous victims.

(2) It's easy to forget as he ably demolishes half a dozen opponents, or outfoxes a senior intelligence agent, but some of Frank's confusion - he has memory flashes which mix his wife's death with aspects of his black ops work - is due to having a bullet lodged in his brain.

(3) They are the 'Two Dead Men' referenced in the episode title, and compared to the predeceased duelists in the nonsense poem of the same name.

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.

The Gifted - 'eXposed', ‘rX’ and ‘eXodus’

L to R: Eclipse (Sean Teale), Thunderbird (Blair Redford), Clarice (Jamie Chung), Polaris (Emma Dumont), Andy (Percy Hines White), Caitlin (Amy Acker), Reed (Stephen Moyer) and Lauren (Natalie Alyn Lind) Strucker, and Agent Turner (Coby Bell).

What’s this? Mo Marvel?

Reed Strucker(1) is a hard working DA who spends much of his time prosecuting those criminalised under the United States’ draconian Mutant laws. When his son Andy manifests extreme telekinetic abilities during a bullying incident and his daughter Lauren admits to having possessed similar abilities for some time, he and his wife Caitlin know that they have to get away before Sentinel Services(2) come for them. To this end, Reed makes contact with the Mutant Underground, a movement who have been smuggling mutants out of the country ever since the law clamped down and the X-Men disappeared.

The actors playing the less experienced mutants make a real meal of their
struggle to use their powers.

Reed offers his help in rescuing Lorna Dane, aka Polaris, a mutant who was captured, and who is pregnant, in exchange for getting his family away. Unfortunately, they are traced, and Reed is captured, although the rest of his family are rescued by laser-slinger Eclipse, walking Native American stereotype John ‘Thunderbird’ Proudstar, and new bug Clarice(3). While Reed is leaned on by Sentinel Services Agent Turner and Polaris locked up in prison with a collar which zaps her when she uses her powers(4), the Underground struggle with Clarice’s erratic and overstretched powers and Caitlin’s insistence that there is a way out of this by just being reasonable.

The Gifted is a Marvel-based TV show set in the, or perhaps an X-Men continuity; it’s not entirely clear which one. After three episodes, it’s clear that this is a slow burner, but is starting to get somewhere. Using the character Thunderbird – he’s strong, he’s fast, he has superhuman senses and tracking abilities, and he’s an Apache! – is a bold(5) choice, but beyond the obvious stereotypes he’s presented here as a practical, but caring leader. There’s also a creepy bit of business where his not-girlfriend-because-we’re-working-together uses her ability to transfer memories to make Clarice think she is in love with him, in order to give her the drive and focus to rescue him. Polaris has a disturbing physical fragility playing off against her astonishing powers, and a compelling screen presence that has so-far transcended the fact that her plot is basically ‘try to do a thing, pass out, try to do a bigger thing, pass out, rinse and repeat.’

The budget Magneto prison.

The Strucker kids are decent characters for the original newbie slots, With Lauren’s togetherness and Andy’s outsider fury complementing one another well. Blink is a bit of a cypher, but Eclipse rounds out the main cast nicely, alongside the normal humans. Speaking of rounded, we’ve got an Asian-American, a Latino and a Native American in the main cast, and that’s not nothing, Even if our viewpoint characters are as white as Camembert.

All-in-all, The Gifted is no Legion, but it’s more immediately involving than any season of Agents of SHIELD to date and it could take Inhumans to school, deliver the lessons (complete with objective, outcomes and plenary) and bring it home afterwards.

(1) No relation to the Von Struckers, I presume, although – spoilers – apparently incorrectly.

(2) The sinister government agency du jour, never actually referred to as the SS.

(3) Soon to be known as, but not yet, Blink.

(4) Her powers are magnetic, the collar is electronic, there is a solution inherent in this set up which she appears to simply be ignoring, given that we establish she can work through the pain long enough to rip a door off its hinges.

(5) I wanted to say brave, but I don’t know if that term is considered racist, and I don’t want to be racist for the sake of a pun.

The Defenders

The Defenders.

Built as it is to binge, I thought it as apt to do a single, whole-series review of The Defenders as to do a blow-by-blow, especially considering my current rate of writing.

The Defenders, for the sake of internet historians of the far future, was Netflix’s answer to the Avengers, bringing together their corner of the MCU and uniting the four superpowered Defenders of New York who aren’t Spider-Man(1). Mind you, it takes its sweet time doing it, being a couple of episodes in before anyone actually meets up.

Danny Rand and Coleen Wing are chasing the Hand around the world when they get a tip off from a dying man that the real fight is in New York. They track down a weapons shop in New York and find a whole mess of dead martial artists. They confront the team sent to clean the crime scene, but they turn out to be a group of black youths offered the work by a man in a white suit. One of them is the brother of Candace, the hostess who was murdered at the end of Luke Cage, leading to the much anticipated ‘Luke Cage vs. Iron Fist’ event, in which Danny Rand bloodies his knuckles on Luke’s indestructible skin, before finally knocking him down with the Iron Fist. Then they both run from the law.

Now I have a lawyer. Ho-ho-ho.

Elsewhere, Foggy gives Matt some overflow, pro bon cases to help him kick the Daredevil habit. One of these is the case of Jessica Jones, who sort-of takes the case of a missing architect because someone calls to tell her not to. This leads her to an apartment full of explosives, and later brings the architect himself to her office with a gun(2). This particular Mexican standoff is interrupted when Elektra shows up, all Black Sky, to knock Jessica about and kill the architect. Matt shows up as her attorney, but she gives him the slip and is able to see him doing some ninja parkour shit(3).

Then there’s an earthquake.

Luke gives Danny an earful about privilege, and the four each make their way towards Midland Circle, an upscale newly built corporate headquarters full of evil and built on top of the big hole from Daredevil Season 2. Danny goes in all corporate to declare war on the Hand, only for their leader, the mysterious Alexandra, to order him captured. There follows a massive fight, with first Luke, then Matt and Jessica showing up to help, and the four of them finally being driven off by Elektra.

This restaurant scene has been a focus of the hype, and it was pretty cute.

Our totally not a superteam repair to a Chinese restaurant to regroup, with Matt and Danny explaining to Jessica and Luke who the Hand are(4) and that they will go after their loved ones. Stick then pops up to let us know that the Chaste – who were formed by the Elders of K’un-Lun, incidentally – have, other than him, been wiped out, give some deep background and name the five fingers of the Hand – Alexandra, Madame Gao, Sowande – the man in the white suit – Bakuto and angry Japanese challenge-seeker(5) Murakami. These five were booted out of K’un-Lun for trying to live forever and have been at it ever since. From scenes of the Hand, however, we learn that Alexandra blew the last of their stores of ‘the substance’ to resurrect Elektra. Jessica leaves, Alexandra catches up with them, but Jessica returns and hits the Black Sky with a car before another big brawl, in which Matt stuffs it by going after Elektra alone and trying to get through to her.

Our heroes get police protection for their friends, but play it coy with Misty for the sake of tension. Luke is able to capture Sowande, and from Alexandra’s actions and his taunting they realise that the Hand wants Danny. Stick kills Sowande after he tries to escape with Danny, and the rest of the team decide that Danny needs to be kept off the front line until they know what the Hand want with him. Danny isn’t having it, because he’s the Immortal Iron Fist, damnit, so they have to tie him to a chair. He and Luke bond a little, but then Stick uses drugged incense to incapacitate Luke and tries to kill Danny. Unfortunately, he drags it out too long, Matt and Jessica get back from finding the architect’s plans to blow up Midland Circle and bury whatever the hole leads to, and in the end Elektra clashes the party, kills her father figure and kidnaps Danny, before murdering Alexandra and declaring herself the new boss of the Hand.

Punchy punchy kick kick.

 Jessica, Luke and Matt are picked up by the cops in suspicious proximity to one stabbed guy and one decapitated corpse. They eventually break out of the precinct and go to Midland Circle, where they fight the remaining fingers of the Hand to an inconclusive result. Colleen meets them with a stack of explosives, which she and Clare go to set up while the others go down to rescue Danny, who has let himself be gulled into fighting Elektra, allowing her to redirect the Iron Fist and open the dome structure buried deep beneath the city, which turns out to be a vault covering a dragon’s skeleton. Because why the fuck not.

Gao explains that the Subtance is basically ground up dragon, and that removing the bones from beneath New York will basically fuck the city’s foundations, because never mind rock and roll, they built this city(6) on dragon’s bones. The others arrive and a battle royale ensues, while Coleen and Clare set charges and battle Bakuto and some goons. Misty shows up with the assist, and gets her arm sliced off before Coleen decapitates Bakuto, who inconsiderately falls on the detonator controls, starting an unstoppable countdown.

Matt gets the others to evacuate, while he tries once more to get through to Elektra, despite the fact that she was a dangerous, thrill-seeking egoist at her best. Murakami gets thrown off the lift, Gao gets fatalistic, Jessica catches the falling lift by its cables and Luke persuades the police to evacuate before the building comes down on top of Matt, Elektra, Murakami and Gao.

Nuns!

The police drop the matter. Jessica reopens Alias Investigations. Luke goes home to Harlem. Danny offers to pay for Misty’s treatment at a state of the art hospital (presumably doing great work with robot arms,) then crouches on a roof like he’s Daredevil. And Matt wakes up in what appears to be the Budapest convent hospital from Dracula.

So, that was The Defenders, a perfectly serviceable series which takes the uniqueness of the four Netflix Marvel series and combines them into something kind of generic. The best stuff stylistically is when they’re operating apart and cutting from the visual style of one series to another between scenes – perpetual darkness for Matt Murdock, seventies sepia-toned for Luke Cage, washed out noir for Jessica Jones, entirely bland television colours for Danny Rand(7) – but that only carries the story so far, and when they unite the series proves to share Iron Fist’s lack of a distinct visual language. Sadly, it also shares the lacklustre martial arts work, although having the other three means that you get their distinctive styles, and say what you will about Charlie Cox’s Daredevil, but there’s a thesp who put the hours in on his fight training.

Name dropping historical events liek s

The story is decent enough, but suffers somewhat from being basically what the League of Shadows/Assassins is all about in Batman/Arrow – take one city, add ninjas, stir until well and truly done – but with less ruthless Utopianism and more dragons. Elodie Yung does her best with what she’s given, but Elektra is just too much of a cypher and the Black Sky prophecy too vague for the show to paint a compelling picture of the Hand’s internal power struggles. It is also unclear how using up the last of the Substance makes them vulnerable when Bakuto has come back from the dead and can still shrug off bullet wounds in the chestal area. They still seem to have little to fear save decapitation and massive organ failure, putting them just one down on Connor MacLeod.

The Fingers of the Hand are a mixed bag, with Sigourney Weaver a menacing presence, but never a physical threat because of the characters frailty. Murakami has quirks, more than character – only speaks in Japanese, seeks a challenge(8) – and while Sowande has some personality, Bakuto is as bland as everything else coming out of Iron Fist, leaving Madame Gao to do most of the heavy lifting. It was also frankly disappointing that, after Stick warns Luke that Sowande can mess with the functions of his body and kill him without physical trauma, Luke turns out to be as impervious to the old pressure point deal as he is to blades, bullets and harsh language. 

And watching Danny try to kung fu Luke is priceless.

Truth to tell, Luke Cage is a bit of a problem here all around, his power set being basically a massive fuck you to all martial artists. One on one he could have a good fight against someone agile enough to make him wear himself out, but it never happens. Occasionally he gets slapped around by Danny or Elektra, but he really just gets up again. Danny, meanwhile, once more demands the question ‘how did you become the Iron Fist?’ I know he plunged his hand into the molten heart of Shao Lao, but how was this yoyo the greatest martial artist in K’un-Lun when he gets his arse kicked so much? He’s really got nothing but the Fist going for him a lot of the time, and not even that when he’s trying to charge off despite knowing that’s what the Hand wants, or getting suckered into shattering the vault created by a former Iron Fist. Never has a character so ably converted a strength into a liability.

Despite this, some of my favourite character moments in the series are between Luke and Danny, and I confess I’m broshipping them more than a little, and that at least is something that they’ve got right. Luke Cage might have another solo series in him, but I’d definitely take a Heroes for Hire show over Iron Fist season 2.

Speaking of characters, let’s talk about journeys.

Welcome to the Jungle.

Jessica Jones begins the long walk back to humanity, and probably has the best arc of any of the leads. Now in part this is because she appears at the start of the series slightly regressed from the end of her first season, still refusing to take on the cases being thrown at her since she became famous, and by the finale is seen opening up the office again. Luke Cage has a lot to do with that, of course, giving her the chance to cauterise one old wound for reals, but working with a team, be it ever so dysfunctional, brings her out of the darkness. It’s a shame not to see Trish and Malcolm play more of a part in that, but so it goes. We’ve got a lot of characters knocking around and some of them are going to miss out. I did like that they acknowledge her turning this particular corner by greeting Malcolm with something other than an angry insistence that he stop trying to get her to act like a human being.

Luke Cage and Danny Rand do their best work playing off each other. Danny is a big picture guy, while Luke looks after his own. They help each other see things from another perspective, with Luke knocking a sliver of sense into Danny, and Danny showing Luke that he can’t always protect his own by being insular. It’s disappointing that Danny doesn’t grow more significantly during the course of the series, but he is at least forced to confront the fact that he has issues, even if he doesn’t really do anything about them.

The big problem with Elektra is that she is less a character and more Matt
Murdock's issues.

And finally, Matt Murdock, who… Well, if he had died in this series, it would have been no more than he deserved, and actually an apt ending to the arc established in Daredevil. Unfortunately, they kind of take a weird direction with him. He is pitched as the team’s natural leader, but besides his reflexive secrecy, he repeatedly prioritises saving Elektra, even after she proves herself to have utterly embraced her dark side, leaving the team to their own devices because of this. One of my friends was pondering to what degree Jessica Jones gets a pass for being a bitch because she’s pretty, but Matt at least is willing overlook frankly a lot of murder, purely because he really fancies Elektra. I get it; she’s his dark reflection, and saving her means he is not damned, but this is an arc which does not sit well with this ‘natural leader’ thing, an informed trait if ever there was one.

So anyway, that’s The Defenders, which if nothing else provides strong evidence that secret ninja magic crime cults may be over as a thing. Compared to their appearances in Daredevil, the Hand just don’t seem all that mysterious. The Five Fingers are near-immortals with thousands of years behind them, but only Madame Gao has the right sort of unearthly feel to her. Sigourney Weaver does fine work with what she has, but lacks the time to get properly established. They just come off as regular – if highly successful – criminals, and even the dragon bones that they are digging for don’t really feel as epic as they ought.

In fact, ‘not as epic as they ought’ is pretty much the watchword of the series. Like the Avengers movies, it has a lot to fit in, and in doing so doesn’t reliably do any of it much beyond ‘quite good.’

(1) The fact that Spider-Man is a thing in the MCU does sting The Defenders’ cred a little. I mean, even if Iron Man has moved upstate, the friendly neighbourhood wall-crawler is only in Queens. Does spider sense not work on ninjas? Does MCU Spidey even have spider sense?

(2) The second of many times I thought Malcolm was going to get fridged.

(3) Not sure how she manages this, since she’s a good PI but he’s supposed to be able to track a heartbeat at half a mile.

(4) A spiel which goes down like a cockroach sandwich.

(5) That is literally his character: He’s angry, he’s Japanese, and he seeks for something to challenge him.

(6) And by implication, given how much time they spend talking about this being ‘just a city’ and that Elektra can expect to see many cities fall, many, if not all cities.

(7) Seriously, the sin of Iron Fist – well, one of them – is not really having a style to back up its lack of substance. It’s almost unique in being a series that needed its foreign language scenes to be dubbed instead of subtitled.

(8) And yet is not determined to pit himself one on one against the Iron Fist (which would probably be disappointing) or even the Black Sky.