Michael Stephenson's Blog, page 4
October 31, 2017
Such Is The Law #LawAndOrder #MenendezMurders #TrueCrime #3weekroundup #review #recap
Such Is The Law #LawAndOrder #MenendezMurders #TrueCrime #3weekroundup #review #recap
All pictures courtesy of NBC
Another new series, another three-week roundup. This time we’re gonna take a gander at NBC’s latest Law and Order incarnation, Law and Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders. So, is Dick Wolf’s jump onto the latest true crime’s craze absolutely killing it or is this show already spoiled rotten? Let’s find out together.
Law and Order True Crimes: Menendez Murders focuses on the real-life crimes of Erik and Lyle Menendez who, in the late 80s early 90s made national news for the brutal murder of their parents Kitty and Jose Menendez. Set in the high-priced neighborhoods of greater Los Angeles, the crimes occurred on a spring night when the two brothers executed a premeditated shotgun shooting of their parents inside of their shared family home. The two were killed in the living room in front of the TV. The boys then went on to try to first cover up the crime, then confess to it and go to prison for it. This is the story of their arrest and conviction as told through the eyes of the people involved.
Lyle on the left, Erik on the right
OK, so we start the series with the brutal reenactment of the murder from that night with Lyle and Erik gunning down their parents. We then switch to the detectives coming to the scene to start pursuing justice that night. Being a Law and Order series, by now you all have to know how this show operates. Regardless of the focus or city: we will follow the cops first, then the lawyers. And yes, while the perspective of the victims/criminals is shown, it is not at the forefront of the series per se. Our two detectives in this case: Detectives Les Zoeller and Tom Linehan, two white guys that look like they belong in a slightly serious Starsky and Hutch remake. From go,they both suspect foul play in the crime. Something is off about the boys’ story about coming into the house and finding their parents like this. While the boys don’t necessarily throw out a definitive answer to what happened or what they think happened, it is strongly implied that they think maybe this was some kind of robbery. The detectives almost always have their eyes on the boys due to the strangeness of the crime scene. Nothing is missing which rules out a robbery, at least nothing important. The bullet shells are also gone because whoever shot them picked up the casings. That is strange because neither detective has ever seen a professional assassin do that, yet, somehow a second theory arises that this could’ve been a professional hit on the couple because of some ties that the father Jose had with the mob. That doesn’t jibe with anyone, but the cops will continue to investigate.
We officially meet our victims/criminals in Erik Menendez (played by Gus Halper) and Lyle Menendez (played by Miles Gaston Villanueva) during their initial police interview later that night. While both look shaken, only Erik looks truly grief-stricken and unable to control himself. Lyle is a lot calmer and a lot more collected than his brother. From that very moment, he portrays a sense that he possibly had something to do with his parents’ deaths. Still, the police have little to no evidence to go on to convict or even pursue Lyle or his brother, so they move forward in their investigation.
Jose actor on the rightAs the investigation starts to unfold, we learn about Jose (not so much about Kitty) and the domineering personality he had. Jose was of Cuban descent, arrived to the country with virtually nothing and was a self-made millionaire who had done tons of things to make his money. He, at one point, was even a film producer. But he had many dark secrets. A man obsessed with appearance, he always wanted to appear perfect, which includes appearing perfect as a father. For this reason, he was abnormally cruel under the guise of tough love. He made the boys do a lot of stuff that they didn’t want to do and, as is revealed in the first episode, even paid for a professional tennis sponsorship for Lyle’s girlfriend to go to Europe for the summer just to get her away from Lyle. She wasn’t good enough for him. Naturally, the boys acted out under their father’s control. One had been accused of plagiarism while in college which caused him to not only have to leave the prestigious Ivy League school (Princeton) but had his dad donate a large sum of money in order to cover up his son’s failing. Erik was believed to quite possibly be gay, something which Jose found disgusting. Jose hated that his son wasted his time trying to write films and saw it as a vain hobby. This was the man they called father.
At this point in the series, we get our first break from the traditional Law and Order format. In steps Edie Falco (of Soprano’s and Nurse Jackie’s fame) as Leslie Abramson. Make no mistake, while this series is based around the Menendez brothers, it is really about Leslie Abramson. Falco anchors the show with a weighty performance of a headstrong always-sure attorney who is in the middle of adopting a child with her husband while defending headline-grabbing clients. We get our introduction to her at the end of a case in which she defended a young man who killed his father after years of abuse. She pretty much won.
Anyway, Leslie sees the boys on TV and hears about the case and immediately knows that the boys did it without ever seeing a lick of real evidence. She’s that good. And just like Johnny Cochran’s character on FX’s American Crime Story: People vs OJ Simpson, Leslie is already salivating at the possibility of defending the boys if and when the investigation comes around to them needing a good defense attorney.
It should also be pointed out here that, in another break from the traditional Law and Order format, the focus is looser than loose on the Order side of the prosecution. While we are treated to snippets of the lovely Elizabeth Reaser as Pam Bozanich, for the first three episodes she is shelved from the audience to tend to the retrial of another high-profile case. The details of that case don’t matter. What does matter is that after that case is lost in episode three (I’m jumping around a little here), all of the lawyers on both sides know that the next big case will not only get massive media attention but it is going to be even harder for the defense to get a not guilty and/or a plea bargain because the DA’s office won’t want to look like a fool losing two big cases in a row. All that to say that we see very little of the prosecuting attorneys for the first three episodes.
Left to Right: Lyle's Lawyer, Erik's Lawyer, Prosecutor Pam Bozanich
Back to episode one, as everything is winding up, the boys are waiting on an insurance payout and on the legal un-miring of the will so that they can get their inheritance. The problem? The will becomes part of the investigation once one of Jose’s family members says that Jose had threatened to write his boys out of the will and that he did change it very recently. The problem is that the detectives can’t find the new will, only the old one. What they do finally find on a computer that had recently been wiped (again, this is early 90s, late 80s so we’re talking the big boxy computers that you pretty much had to be a nerd to know how to use) is a document which has barely a full sentence of words that says something about the will. Is it a new will? Sorta, but hardly anything they can use.
Then there is the boys’ strange actions after their parents die. Lyle takes his brother out to go buy stuff for the funeral. The problem? They buy the most expensive stuff they can find. We’re talking tailored name-brand suits, expensive gold watches, cars, and Lyle even wants to invest a couple hundred-thousand dollars in a new business venture all within a span of a few months after the murders. They are supposed to be in grief but don’t act it. They even seemed pissed that they can’t go into their house to get their tennis stuff only a day or two after the murders because one of them has a very important tennis lesson that was on the calendar before the murders.
When they are finally allowed to go back to the house after the cops have cleared it for evidence, Erik is the one who goes in with his uncle and looks into the room in which they committed the murder and starts bawling uncontrollably. Here we see the first big crack in Erik’s facade. Whether he was justified in the murder or not, he feels nothing but guilt and remorse over what he’s done.
Episode two explores Erik’s guilt even more. While the cops are still investigating and Leslie is still prowling on the outskirts, waiting to see if anything pops with the Menendez arrests, Erik visits his old therapist. Both Erik and his mother frequented head doctors on many occasions, much to the dismay and disgust of Jose (again, he wants perfection). And here is where their problems truly start.
The doctor is the shadiest one of them all and his actions lead to the direct downfall of the boys. Dr. Jerome Oziel (played by Josh Charles) is also another domineering figure. But while Jose is physical and sinister, Oziel’s manipulations are more mental. He is just someone trying to get ahead and will use people however he sees fit. He has a crazy mistress, played by Heather Graham, who always comes to his office to sit in his waiting room and torment him with her presence. She likes to get the D in-between his many sessions with patients. She, oddly enough, becomes the most important character within this Menendez drama.
After a few more weeks/months of bumping along in his grief, Erik can take it no more. He finally confesses to his doctor that he and his brother killed their parents. Thinking he is covered under doctor-patient confidentiality, he even confesses his confession to his brother, and Lyle tries to threaten the doctor. Well, the doctor turns it back onto Lyle and Erik and threatens that he’ll be forced to go to the police with this information because it is part of an active investigation and it could lead to more murders. They have to pay him 5,000 dollars per session in order to buy his silence, and that’s regardless of whether they actual come in for the scheduled session or not.
Meanwhile, the doctor loses control of his side chick as Heather Graham’s character goes so crazy that she sticks her head into an oven to try to kill herself. Somehow and for some reason (granted, I know this is real life but if this were fiction I would’ve let the chick die) she convinces him that if they can’t be together 24/7 she will definitely kill herself. The problem: Dr. Oziel is married with children. Yet, he thinks it necessary to move his mistress into his family house. Now let’s be real, people. If this were not based on a true story and you read this crazy situation in a novel somewhere you would be losing your shit on how utterly ridiculous it was. Again, she’s not in a guest house and isn’t a nanny/surrogate or some other live-in help you might see in one of those Hand That Rocks the Cradle ripoffs, she is just some “patient” of his that needs deep psychiatric treatment.
But get this, this crazy heifer gets mad at him for no reason and tells his daughter that she is sleeping with him and that she is going to replace their mother because she and Oziel are in love. And she goes ape on the wife. So Oziel kicks her out. She threatens him that if she gets kicked out then she will run to the police and tell all about the Menendez brothers’ secret (I know it seems I skipped something, but we’ll get to it in episode 3). He returns threat by saying that if she does try that, she will be dead in a day. Well, she matches his threat with her own bit of crazy and does tell the police leading to episode three.
In episode three the questions and stretch of disbelief abound. First off, if you were questioning how Heather Graham’s character knew about the Menendez brothers’ secret, then you are not alone. Not only did she know about their confession but as it turns out in episode three, she knew intimate details like where they bought the guns and where they supposedly dumped them. I was sitting there watching this thinking, “Why in the hell would this Dr. Oziel tell this crazy woman all this stuff? Like, she knew more about it than his wife. What kinda strange f-ed up pillow talk is this?” But I digress.
Dr. Oziel Got A Side-chick ProblemAfter the arrest of the boys at the end of the second episode, the third finally sees Leslie unite with the boys and take stage as their lead counsel (technically she is only representing Erik, but is lead for both). A team of women working on the boys’ side, they are trying to figure out why the boys did it after Erik confesses to his lawyer that he did it and the tapes of every following therapy session with Dr. Oziel are confiscated and submitted into evidence. They have a prelim hearing about allowing the tapes to be used in a trial in which the doctor’s mistress testifies and swings her buxom breastsss around like a British flag girl waving the Union Jack the day the troops came home. This nut—the same one that the case would hinge on if the tapes were disallowed—says that her doctor-boyfriend is using mind control on her from the hallway to intimidate her. Hilarious!
Anyway, to the luck of the prosecution, the tapes are allowed into evidence for the trial. Unfortunately, the detectives can’t find the guns as they aren’t where the mistress said they’d be. But they do find the store in which the guns were purchased and discover that one of the boys, to purchase the guns, used the ID of their college roommate who had “lost” his ID months before the shooting. Just another great bit of evidence for them that this was premeditated far in advance, which speaks to the brutality of the crime and why they deserve the death penalty.
Then enters the media in a big way. Diane Sawyer (the actress that plays her looks nothing like her) does a special on the boys, framing them as spoiled rich kids who killed their own parents for an inheritance, tainting the jury pool like a mickey fickey. Even Kitty’s family now believes that the boys killed their parents in cold blood because they are just ruthless killers who wanted the money. But Leslie doesn’t think the story is that simple.
Leslie gets her own therapist into the jail with the boys to figure out the true motive behind their murder. At first the therapist gets the same stuff: their father was overbearing, he made a prematurely balding Lyle start wearing a wig in high school to keep up appearances, he quizzed them at dinner and hated any perceived imperfection. Finally, they get a breakthrough and the team of ladies are conflicted about it. The breakthrough: Erik admits that his father used to sexually abuse him and his brother and continued to do it from his young age of 5 all the way through to before they killed their parents. And the light suddenly changes.
What’s my grade? I give it a B. I can’t say that it reinvigorates the Law and Order franchise, however it does make a worthy edition. But American Crime Story: People vs OJ Simpson this is not. Where that felt similar to a long film, this feels like a network TV show. Edie Falco and most of the women give great performances, and I also find the actors playing the brothers to be quite good too, but everyone else is a bit of a wash. Heather Graham has played the same kind of smiley, ditzy, big-breasted look-at-me bimbo in every role, which makes me feel more like she’s really just playing herself at this point. Yeah, I know she was raised in a very strict religious upbringing and this is her 20+ year way of rebelling against that, but maybe she should try a role that is devoutly and sincerely religious if only to show that she has range as an actress and is more than just a pretty face, because right now in her career... she isn’t. The detectives are white wall paper and, as I said before, they have yet to show much of the prosecuting attorneys’ lives.
Speaking of, the writing is less personal than American Crime Story. It focuses heavily on the crime and the mystery of why they did it, which is fine. But it doesn’t much explore the inner-workings and lives of the people around the case. For instance, if you saw People vs. OJ Simpson, chances are you remember the Marcia, Marcia, Marcia episode. It was brilliant in how it showed the personal struggle of defense attorney Marcia Clark to get the case right when it seemed she could do no good: she didn’t look nice enough, she didn’t look professional, what was with that hair, she didn’t look smart enough, she seemed like a rookie, and for god’s sake what the hell was with her hair? Here, we get little of that. While we have a full defense team of women, they almost seem interchangeable and their lives are inconsequential. What sort of biases do they bring to this? How do they think this will effect their families? (Side note: this was remedied in later episodes). Granted this was pre-OJ so the media circus wasn’t quite as bad, but this trial was still the hottest ticket in town until OJ came along I would argue. There seem to be too many moving parts for the directors and writers to focus on one thing.
And finally, some may have a disdainful bias against how the show is framed. Make no mistake, the show is definitely shining a sympathetic light on the boys. Whereas some other dramatized true crime stories in recent history have tried straddling the line between whether you should feel pity for the accused or even if they actually committed the crime, here the brothers are painted as victims of the circumstances. So whether you believe this narrative that the brothers were sexually abused by their parents (I thought I read somewhere that the mother participated at some point too, then just became dissonant at the fact that her husband continued) or not, the show doesn’t give any benefit of the doubt that their story could be a lie or that Jose could’ve been anything other than a villain. We see this just in how they film the flashbacks. Filmed in black and white, Jose is almost always in a dark buttoned-up suit like the devil with a snarl on his face, save for the abuse scene in which he wore a white robe but was still menacing enough. The show asks that you feel sorry for them, emotional coaching at its finest.
Should you be watching? Sure. It’s not a storm-the-barn yes, but if you are a true crime fanatic and are craving a short 10-episode fictionalization of past crimes to tide you over until American Crime Story returns in 2018 with Versace’s murder, then you should check this out. Is this going to be the best interpretation of the Menendez murders? I doubt it. With these stories trending now, I won’t be surprised if another program decides to take a shot at the Menendezes, too. I’m bad, I know. And if you are a fan of NBC stalwart Law and Order: SVU then you should love this. Really, the series has a mixture of all of the previous Law and Order iterations in it. Come for the crime, stay for Falco and the rest of the ladies.
What do you think? Have you heard of Law and Order True Crime: Menendez Murders? If you haven’t, do you think you’ll check it out? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Do you like it? Where could they improve in the series? And do you like that they took the boys’ side in this or would you have liked to see more of a well-rounded story? Let me know in the comments below.
Check out my 5-star comedy novel,
Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend
. #AhStalkingIf you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.
Until next time, “Sometimes he burns me so bad that I could just... just... I could just kill him!”
P.S. What movie and or novel first made that line famous? On another note, man, I wonder if Lyle is completely bald now? And what about Erik? Is he also bald? This thing about being forced to wear a wig in high school is so fascinating to me for some reason. I’ll think of a better sign-off next time.
P.P.S. Seriously though, what is it with these true crime fictionalizations and hair? I mean, what the hell was up with Marcia’s hair. Seriously!
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All pictures courtesy of NBC Another new series, another three-week roundup. This time we’re gonna take a gander at NBC’s latest Law and Order incarnation, Law and Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders. So, is Dick Wolf’s jump onto the latest true crime’s craze absolutely killing it or is this show already spoiled rotten? Let’s find out together.
Law and Order True Crimes: Menendez Murders focuses on the real-life crimes of Erik and Lyle Menendez who, in the late 80s early 90s made national news for the brutal murder of their parents Kitty and Jose Menendez. Set in the high-priced neighborhoods of greater Los Angeles, the crimes occurred on a spring night when the two brothers executed a premeditated shotgun shooting of their parents inside of their shared family home. The two were killed in the living room in front of the TV. The boys then went on to try to first cover up the crime, then confess to it and go to prison for it. This is the story of their arrest and conviction as told through the eyes of the people involved.
Lyle on the left, Erik on the rightOK, so we start the series with the brutal reenactment of the murder from that night with Lyle and Erik gunning down their parents. We then switch to the detectives coming to the scene to start pursuing justice that night. Being a Law and Order series, by now you all have to know how this show operates. Regardless of the focus or city: we will follow the cops first, then the lawyers. And yes, while the perspective of the victims/criminals is shown, it is not at the forefront of the series per se. Our two detectives in this case: Detectives Les Zoeller and Tom Linehan, two white guys that look like they belong in a slightly serious Starsky and Hutch remake. From go,they both suspect foul play in the crime. Something is off about the boys’ story about coming into the house and finding their parents like this. While the boys don’t necessarily throw out a definitive answer to what happened or what they think happened, it is strongly implied that they think maybe this was some kind of robbery. The detectives almost always have their eyes on the boys due to the strangeness of the crime scene. Nothing is missing which rules out a robbery, at least nothing important. The bullet shells are also gone because whoever shot them picked up the casings. That is strange because neither detective has ever seen a professional assassin do that, yet, somehow a second theory arises that this could’ve been a professional hit on the couple because of some ties that the father Jose had with the mob. That doesn’t jibe with anyone, but the cops will continue to investigate.
We officially meet our victims/criminals in Erik Menendez (played by Gus Halper) and Lyle Menendez (played by Miles Gaston Villanueva) during their initial police interview later that night. While both look shaken, only Erik looks truly grief-stricken and unable to control himself. Lyle is a lot calmer and a lot more collected than his brother. From that very moment, he portrays a sense that he possibly had something to do with his parents’ deaths. Still, the police have little to no evidence to go on to convict or even pursue Lyle or his brother, so they move forward in their investigation.
Jose actor on the rightAs the investigation starts to unfold, we learn about Jose (not so much about Kitty) and the domineering personality he had. Jose was of Cuban descent, arrived to the country with virtually nothing and was a self-made millionaire who had done tons of things to make his money. He, at one point, was even a film producer. But he had many dark secrets. A man obsessed with appearance, he always wanted to appear perfect, which includes appearing perfect as a father. For this reason, he was abnormally cruel under the guise of tough love. He made the boys do a lot of stuff that they didn’t want to do and, as is revealed in the first episode, even paid for a professional tennis sponsorship for Lyle’s girlfriend to go to Europe for the summer just to get her away from Lyle. She wasn’t good enough for him. Naturally, the boys acted out under their father’s control. One had been accused of plagiarism while in college which caused him to not only have to leave the prestigious Ivy League school (Princeton) but had his dad donate a large sum of money in order to cover up his son’s failing. Erik was believed to quite possibly be gay, something which Jose found disgusting. Jose hated that his son wasted his time trying to write films and saw it as a vain hobby. This was the man they called father. At this point in the series, we get our first break from the traditional Law and Order format. In steps Edie Falco (of Soprano’s and Nurse Jackie’s fame) as Leslie Abramson. Make no mistake, while this series is based around the Menendez brothers, it is really about Leslie Abramson. Falco anchors the show with a weighty performance of a headstrong always-sure attorney who is in the middle of adopting a child with her husband while defending headline-grabbing clients. We get our introduction to her at the end of a case in which she defended a young man who killed his father after years of abuse. She pretty much won.
Anyway, Leslie sees the boys on TV and hears about the case and immediately knows that the boys did it without ever seeing a lick of real evidence. She’s that good. And just like Johnny Cochran’s character on FX’s American Crime Story: People vs OJ Simpson, Leslie is already salivating at the possibility of defending the boys if and when the investigation comes around to them needing a good defense attorney.
It should also be pointed out here that, in another break from the traditional Law and Order format, the focus is looser than loose on the Order side of the prosecution. While we are treated to snippets of the lovely Elizabeth Reaser as Pam Bozanich, for the first three episodes she is shelved from the audience to tend to the retrial of another high-profile case. The details of that case don’t matter. What does matter is that after that case is lost in episode three (I’m jumping around a little here), all of the lawyers on both sides know that the next big case will not only get massive media attention but it is going to be even harder for the defense to get a not guilty and/or a plea bargain because the DA’s office won’t want to look like a fool losing two big cases in a row. All that to say that we see very little of the prosecuting attorneys for the first three episodes.
Left to Right: Lyle's Lawyer, Erik's Lawyer, Prosecutor Pam BozanichBack to episode one, as everything is winding up, the boys are waiting on an insurance payout and on the legal un-miring of the will so that they can get their inheritance. The problem? The will becomes part of the investigation once one of Jose’s family members says that Jose had threatened to write his boys out of the will and that he did change it very recently. The problem is that the detectives can’t find the new will, only the old one. What they do finally find on a computer that had recently been wiped (again, this is early 90s, late 80s so we’re talking the big boxy computers that you pretty much had to be a nerd to know how to use) is a document which has barely a full sentence of words that says something about the will. Is it a new will? Sorta, but hardly anything they can use.
Then there is the boys’ strange actions after their parents die. Lyle takes his brother out to go buy stuff for the funeral. The problem? They buy the most expensive stuff they can find. We’re talking tailored name-brand suits, expensive gold watches, cars, and Lyle even wants to invest a couple hundred-thousand dollars in a new business venture all within a span of a few months after the murders. They are supposed to be in grief but don’t act it. They even seemed pissed that they can’t go into their house to get their tennis stuff only a day or two after the murders because one of them has a very important tennis lesson that was on the calendar before the murders.
When they are finally allowed to go back to the house after the cops have cleared it for evidence, Erik is the one who goes in with his uncle and looks into the room in which they committed the murder and starts bawling uncontrollably. Here we see the first big crack in Erik’s facade. Whether he was justified in the murder or not, he feels nothing but guilt and remorse over what he’s done.
Episode two explores Erik’s guilt even more. While the cops are still investigating and Leslie is still prowling on the outskirts, waiting to see if anything pops with the Menendez arrests, Erik visits his old therapist. Both Erik and his mother frequented head doctors on many occasions, much to the dismay and disgust of Jose (again, he wants perfection). And here is where their problems truly start.
The doctor is the shadiest one of them all and his actions lead to the direct downfall of the boys. Dr. Jerome Oziel (played by Josh Charles) is also another domineering figure. But while Jose is physical and sinister, Oziel’s manipulations are more mental. He is just someone trying to get ahead and will use people however he sees fit. He has a crazy mistress, played by Heather Graham, who always comes to his office to sit in his waiting room and torment him with her presence. She likes to get the D in-between his many sessions with patients. She, oddly enough, becomes the most important character within this Menendez drama.
After a few more weeks/months of bumping along in his grief, Erik can take it no more. He finally confesses to his doctor that he and his brother killed their parents. Thinking he is covered under doctor-patient confidentiality, he even confesses his confession to his brother, and Lyle tries to threaten the doctor. Well, the doctor turns it back onto Lyle and Erik and threatens that he’ll be forced to go to the police with this information because it is part of an active investigation and it could lead to more murders. They have to pay him 5,000 dollars per session in order to buy his silence, and that’s regardless of whether they actual come in for the scheduled session or not.
Meanwhile, the doctor loses control of his side chick as Heather Graham’s character goes so crazy that she sticks her head into an oven to try to kill herself. Somehow and for some reason (granted, I know this is real life but if this were fiction I would’ve let the chick die) she convinces him that if they can’t be together 24/7 she will definitely kill herself. The problem: Dr. Oziel is married with children. Yet, he thinks it necessary to move his mistress into his family house. Now let’s be real, people. If this were not based on a true story and you read this crazy situation in a novel somewhere you would be losing your shit on how utterly ridiculous it was. Again, she’s not in a guest house and isn’t a nanny/surrogate or some other live-in help you might see in one of those Hand That Rocks the Cradle ripoffs, she is just some “patient” of his that needs deep psychiatric treatment. But get this, this crazy heifer gets mad at him for no reason and tells his daughter that she is sleeping with him and that she is going to replace their mother because she and Oziel are in love. And she goes ape on the wife. So Oziel kicks her out. She threatens him that if she gets kicked out then she will run to the police and tell all about the Menendez brothers’ secret (I know it seems I skipped something, but we’ll get to it in episode 3). He returns threat by saying that if she does try that, she will be dead in a day. Well, she matches his threat with her own bit of crazy and does tell the police leading to episode three.
In episode three the questions and stretch of disbelief abound. First off, if you were questioning how Heather Graham’s character knew about the Menendez brothers’ secret, then you are not alone. Not only did she know about their confession but as it turns out in episode three, she knew intimate details like where they bought the guns and where they supposedly dumped them. I was sitting there watching this thinking, “Why in the hell would this Dr. Oziel tell this crazy woman all this stuff? Like, she knew more about it than his wife. What kinda strange f-ed up pillow talk is this?” But I digress.
Dr. Oziel Got A Side-chick ProblemAfter the arrest of the boys at the end of the second episode, the third finally sees Leslie unite with the boys and take stage as their lead counsel (technically she is only representing Erik, but is lead for both). A team of women working on the boys’ side, they are trying to figure out why the boys did it after Erik confesses to his lawyer that he did it and the tapes of every following therapy session with Dr. Oziel are confiscated and submitted into evidence. They have a prelim hearing about allowing the tapes to be used in a trial in which the doctor’s mistress testifies and swings her buxom breastsss around like a British flag girl waving the Union Jack the day the troops came home. This nut—the same one that the case would hinge on if the tapes were disallowed—says that her doctor-boyfriend is using mind control on her from the hallway to intimidate her. Hilarious! Anyway, to the luck of the prosecution, the tapes are allowed into evidence for the trial. Unfortunately, the detectives can’t find the guns as they aren’t where the mistress said they’d be. But they do find the store in which the guns were purchased and discover that one of the boys, to purchase the guns, used the ID of their college roommate who had “lost” his ID months before the shooting. Just another great bit of evidence for them that this was premeditated far in advance, which speaks to the brutality of the crime and why they deserve the death penalty.
Then enters the media in a big way. Diane Sawyer (the actress that plays her looks nothing like her) does a special on the boys, framing them as spoiled rich kids who killed their own parents for an inheritance, tainting the jury pool like a mickey fickey. Even Kitty’s family now believes that the boys killed their parents in cold blood because they are just ruthless killers who wanted the money. But Leslie doesn’t think the story is that simple.
Leslie gets her own therapist into the jail with the boys to figure out the true motive behind their murder. At first the therapist gets the same stuff: their father was overbearing, he made a prematurely balding Lyle start wearing a wig in high school to keep up appearances, he quizzed them at dinner and hated any perceived imperfection. Finally, they get a breakthrough and the team of ladies are conflicted about it. The breakthrough: Erik admits that his father used to sexually abuse him and his brother and continued to do it from his young age of 5 all the way through to before they killed their parents. And the light suddenly changes.
What’s my grade? I give it a B. I can’t say that it reinvigorates the Law and Order franchise, however it does make a worthy edition. But American Crime Story: People vs OJ Simpson this is not. Where that felt similar to a long film, this feels like a network TV show. Edie Falco and most of the women give great performances, and I also find the actors playing the brothers to be quite good too, but everyone else is a bit of a wash. Heather Graham has played the same kind of smiley, ditzy, big-breasted look-at-me bimbo in every role, which makes me feel more like she’s really just playing herself at this point. Yeah, I know she was raised in a very strict religious upbringing and this is her 20+ year way of rebelling against that, but maybe she should try a role that is devoutly and sincerely religious if only to show that she has range as an actress and is more than just a pretty face, because right now in her career... she isn’t. The detectives are white wall paper and, as I said before, they have yet to show much of the prosecuting attorneys’ lives.
Speaking of, the writing is less personal than American Crime Story. It focuses heavily on the crime and the mystery of why they did it, which is fine. But it doesn’t much explore the inner-workings and lives of the people around the case. For instance, if you saw People vs. OJ Simpson, chances are you remember the Marcia, Marcia, Marcia episode. It was brilliant in how it showed the personal struggle of defense attorney Marcia Clark to get the case right when it seemed she could do no good: she didn’t look nice enough, she didn’t look professional, what was with that hair, she didn’t look smart enough, she seemed like a rookie, and for god’s sake what the hell was with her hair? Here, we get little of that. While we have a full defense team of women, they almost seem interchangeable and their lives are inconsequential. What sort of biases do they bring to this? How do they think this will effect their families? (Side note: this was remedied in later episodes). Granted this was pre-OJ so the media circus wasn’t quite as bad, but this trial was still the hottest ticket in town until OJ came along I would argue. There seem to be too many moving parts for the directors and writers to focus on one thing.
And finally, some may have a disdainful bias against how the show is framed. Make no mistake, the show is definitely shining a sympathetic light on the boys. Whereas some other dramatized true crime stories in recent history have tried straddling the line between whether you should feel pity for the accused or even if they actually committed the crime, here the brothers are painted as victims of the circumstances. So whether you believe this narrative that the brothers were sexually abused by their parents (I thought I read somewhere that the mother participated at some point too, then just became dissonant at the fact that her husband continued) or not, the show doesn’t give any benefit of the doubt that their story could be a lie or that Jose could’ve been anything other than a villain. We see this just in how they film the flashbacks. Filmed in black and white, Jose is almost always in a dark buttoned-up suit like the devil with a snarl on his face, save for the abuse scene in which he wore a white robe but was still menacing enough. The show asks that you feel sorry for them, emotional coaching at its finest. Should you be watching? Sure. It’s not a storm-the-barn yes, but if you are a true crime fanatic and are craving a short 10-episode fictionalization of past crimes to tide you over until American Crime Story returns in 2018 with Versace’s murder, then you should check this out. Is this going to be the best interpretation of the Menendez murders? I doubt it. With these stories trending now, I won’t be surprised if another program decides to take a shot at the Menendezes, too. I’m bad, I know. And if you are a fan of NBC stalwart Law and Order: SVU then you should love this. Really, the series has a mixture of all of the previous Law and Order iterations in it. Come for the crime, stay for Falco and the rest of the ladies.
What do you think? Have you heard of Law and Order True Crime: Menendez Murders? If you haven’t, do you think you’ll check it out? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Do you like it? Where could they improve in the series? And do you like that they took the boys’ side in this or would you have liked to see more of a well-rounded story? Let me know in the comments below.
Check out my 5-star comedy novel,
Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend
. #AhStalkingIf you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.Until next time, “Sometimes he burns me so bad that I could just... just... I could just kill him!”
P.S. What movie and or novel first made that line famous? On another note, man, I wonder if Lyle is completely bald now? And what about Erik? Is he also bald? This thing about being forced to wear a wig in high school is so fascinating to me for some reason. I’ll think of a better sign-off next time.
P.P.S. Seriously though, what is it with these true crime fictionalizations and hair? I mean, what the hell was up with Marcia’s hair. Seriously!
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October 30, 2017
It’s Got Nothing To Do With Irene #MeMyselfAndI #3weekroundup #recap #review #CBS
It’s Got Nothing To Do With Irene #MeMyselfAndI #3weekroundup #recap #review #CBS
All pictures courtesy of CBS
And we’re back, and this time with 22% more alertness... maybe. You’ll have to excuse all of the review/recaps this year as I really haven’t been that much into all of these new shows and frankly could pass on most of them, so some of the most minute details go uncaptured and uncared for, but I’m gonna try to change that. Or maybe I won’t change it at all. Hell, you don’t need to know every single second of the first three episodes of these shows to really know if you like them or to even know what’s going on or not, do you? You probably watch half of the stuff on TV while trying to badly multitask and do your dishes, or the family’s laundry or feed a baby or cut your own bangs because you’ve watched ten online tutorials that make it look so easy. But don’t do it! For God’s (and fashion’s) sake don’t cut your own bangs! Anyway, Me, Myself and I is a brand new half-hour comedy on CBS. Will this show make you feel more comfortable with yourself, or will it make you turn off the TV in favor of a little more “me time?” Let’s find out together.
CBS’s Me, Myself and I has a very different format than almost all of their other comedy shows and more different than most shows on TV. It follows the character of Alex at three different points in his life each around 25 years apart. We start by seeing the 40-year-old Alex played by Bobby Moynihan of SNL fame. He is current-Alex who lives in the year 2017 and is struggling through life. As we learn in the opening minutes of the show, his life as an inventor is sputtering along with silly innovations like chopsticks with forks at the end of them. And then his life takes a turn when he sees an ambulance in his driveway and runs through the front door to find that his wife is... sexing the EMT, and here he was nervous that she might be dead. So, he and his Harpy wife go through a rather bitter divorce that ends up with his six-year-old daughter splitting time between her two parents, and Alex staying in his fledgling company’s CFO’s garage. Yes, the CFO Darryl, played by Jaleel White, is also his best friend.
Left to right: Alex, his stepdad, his step-brotherThen we switch over to the younger Alex at the age of 14. A native of Chicago, he is in love with Michael Jordan as this younger self is set in the early 90s (thank god something is finally not set in the frickin’ 80s). His life consists of dreams about being a world-class inventor and loving the Bulls. And then his world changes when his mother (a flight attendant) comes in and tells him that that pilot she’s been dating has asked her to marry him. And they are going to move to LA where the pilot lives: Lakerland for you non-basketball fans. The Lakers are his sworn enemy. So now he has to somehow fit in with a new brother who is pretty much his same age but insists on being called the older brother because he outranks Alex by 39 days.
And finally there is the older Alex. It is at this point that I tell you that this review could get long and a little messy because of how the show is setup. See, this isn’t a show where you follow one age for a while, then the next show you follow a different age and so on. No, you see each story unfold concurrently in each segment/act. The older, 65-year-old Alex is played by John Larroquette of Night Court fame. Whereas we see Alex struggling in his 40s, now in his sixties, Alex has become such a massively successful inventor that he just listed his multi-million dollar company on the NYSE. And then he dropped from a heart attack. Not dead, he has been warned to be healthier and slow down. So as he is strolling across the massive google-like campus of Riley Inc. (his company) he meets with Darryl’s daughter who now works for him as an executive and tells her that he has a big announcement that he wants to make to all the top team execs. The announcement: he’s retiring. And for those in the business world, you could just hear the stock price plummeting.
And so sets up our show. Again, each part of the show, each era informs the other eras in his life, so it is difficult to not have as many details as possible in order for you to get the story. So, we go back to his childhood where Young-Alek or “14” as we will call him is trying to adjust to his new life. His new dad seems pretty cool and is not the cliched controlling jackass of a father like most step-dads are painted to be. When 14, his new brother and the rest of the family sit down for a terrible breakfast that his mother, who was never a good homemaker, cooked for them, the kitchen table wobbles. 14 pulls out an invention that he made that allows for a wobbly table to stay lifted to the proper height on a tiny car-jack replica. It works and everyone is super impressed. His brother is worried that he will be labeled the nerd or geeky inventor when he gets to school so he just wants to look out for him as best he can. He tells him not to whip out any of the cool inventions or he could be laughed at.
And then they get to the bus stop where they see 14’s dream girl Nori Sterling (Nori is a nickname. This is important). The rumor is that she only dates high school guys and is not even gonna bother to look 14’s wa—holy crap! She’s smiling at 14. As it turns out, she has a little crush on him from first sight. There’s a big dance where 14’s brother has a plan to make him the coolest new kid by having him kiss Nori in front of everyone. Crazy enough, not only is Nori the one to ask him to dance on a slow song but she is the one who goes in for the kiss before him. But 14 leans back as he is choking in the big moment. No, like, really choking on the mint his brother gave him just before the would-be kiss. His brother has to Heimlich him safe. But the mint then flies clean across the room and into Nori’s mouth and 14 earns the nickname Chokey.
Alex in 2017, and DarrylCurrent Alek, still struggling after the divorce learns that his ex-wife, the disgusting cheater she is, has just gotten engaged to some guy that lives upstate. So she wants to move his little daughter Abby upstate in the middle of the school season because the girl staying with him when he has no money to his name is obviously out of the question. He guarantees her that he is just one invention away from a breakthrough and pleads to have Abby stay. But he’s got severe inventor’s block (been there) and can’t think of a single good thing. So he finally turns to his step-dad who he is still very much cool with. He goes back home and eats a dessert his mother made—she’s still a terrible cook—and gets the dad pep talk. His dad purposefully drops the fork and makes Alex pick it up only for current Alex to see the table lift he invented when he was young. And then he realizes that this is the idea that he needs to tide him over. He never sold it or licensed it to anyone. He takes the lift and license’s it out to a Japanese firm, getting a little money in his pocket but still having to live in his friend’s garage. But the day is partially saved.
“Retiree” Alex is just taking his sweet time adjusting to the slower life and going around a modestly futuristic city to reminisce. His daughter is now a grown woman who is not only still the number one best daughter in the world, but is the GM of The Chicago Bulls. She just wants the best for him as she frequently flies between Chicago and California. And his “older” brother is now the governor of Calif. Life is pretty good. And then the best, most serendipitous thing happens: he goes to an old diner named Corky’s which is the place he frequented in the “current” timeline. He goes in and meets the owner, an older lady named EleaNOR. Yep, Nori has grown into a pretty older woman who, as most adults do, goes by her full name now. He takes some of the advice that his father gave him during the “14” timeline about how Jordan misses half of his shots and about how being great and life is about continuing to shoot, and he shoots his shot with Eleanor by going to kiss her in her diner.
Now that we know the language and parameters of the show, maybe episode two should go faster. This time around, 14 is dealing with lunchroom hierarchy. Sit at the wrong table too early and earn the nickname Chokey forever. Hell, the losers table has a boy nicknamed Shart and a black kid nicknamed One Nut. And I was crackin’ up at that crap, because you can’t go around callin’ this little spectacle-wearing negro One Nut. Oh my god, that’s so wrong. That’s the kind of funny bullying to where if I was his father, I would get in trouble with my wife for having to also laugh at the name before giving him a rousing talk about how he should have self-confidence and things get better as an adult and how most women don’t discriminate against dudes with one nut. Ha ha ha! I can’t hate. Better than having tiny nuts, I guess.
To get back on track, 14’s brother pays the cool kids $10 to let him sit with them for a week to earn him some cool points (note that 14 and the brother have different lunch periods, so he can’t just sit with him). 14 learns of this and bucks it, opting to sit with One Nut and the others. He tries to make a grandstand and storm the cool kids table to sit down but stumbles on the stairs that separate the cool tables from the rest of the cafeteria. He slips, knocking all the other “losers” down to the floor and understands why Shart is nicknamed Shart. Not every battle is won.
Current Alex is tricked into getting back out into the dating field by Darryl who takes him to a club under the guise of a celebration with the Japanese businessmen. But the club isn’t their thing and they end up at Corky’s where Alex extols the deliciousness of waffles for every meal. A woman overhears him and says that she can have waffles every meal, too, and sees that they are both eating waffles currently. So they then go out on a date which Darryl hears for a full hour as Alex butt-dialed him. The date almost ends good because the woman wants to go back to her place but instead of doing that, he tries to get her address which she writes on his hand, then instead of a kiss and each driving in their own car to her place, Alex ends the date with a firm handshake. Yep, he shakes and sweat-wipes the address off his hand as he is not ready to date again. But he’s learned to not be afraid that there isn’t love out there for him.
Finally, retiree sets up a dinner with Eleanor who just wants to catch up on old times and what his life has been like since school so long ago. But as she walks into his place, she realizes they are both on different wave lengths because he still considers her the love of his life and she has a boyfriend. Surprise! Well, he complains about how she always settles for the same type of guy who doesn’t want to commit to her because she had a boyfriend in middle school but that kid didn’t want to call her his girlfriend. Eleanor’s current bf is the same way and doesn’t like to commit to even talk about marriage. So retiree tells her that about her boyfriend and tries to let it go. But then when he is in the car with his daughter later on, he receives a call from Eleanor who says she wants to talk to him urgently. Did she break up with her dude? Well... she told him what Retiree Alex said and the guy proposed to her. Can’t win them all.
Nori and "14"
Episode three deals with gifts and being spoiled or winning a prize and birthdays. For his 14th birthday (I thought it would’ve been his 15th but go with it) 14 gets a signed Michael Jordan rookie basketball card. A collector’s card back then, it could be worth a lot of money later in life. Well, enamored by Nori who tells him that her dad is a basketball card collector, he up and gives it away to her to please her (and they say patriarchy is oppressive. Guys bend backwards to try to please women and vice versa). He immediately regrets it as it meant so much to him, and it also meant a lot to his step-dad to just give it to him and see him so happy. Well, his brother plots to get it back by stealing the card back instead of asking for it back from Nori. Somehow, this plan works, they hop out of the window and abscond with the card.
Current Alex does a tradition with his little Abby where they go and shoot pop-a-shot hoops at the local arcade. While there, he runs into some of the other moms in he and his ex-wife’s social circle. They tell him of this Glamping event that they were going to invite his daughter to but it was a mother/daughter thing. But he doesn’t want his daughter missing out on anything so he says he’ll take her. For those not in the know Glamping is glamorous camping and it tends to cost a heck of a lot more than regular camping. Well, he learns that it is going to cost somewhere around 3000 dollars to take his daughter. And he struggles to tell her no. He goes to his step-dad once again for advice and receives some good advice about being the tough parent but ultimately can’t be that to his daughter. He takes her on the trip anyway. Where did he get the money? You guessed it, he sold the authentic Jordan basketball card worth a lot of money. He tells his step-dad who tells him that he is fine with it having been sold because he got 14 the card to bring joy. Current Alex selling the card was just a way for him to bring joy to his little girl. It’s all very sweet.
"Retiree" holding card, and Governor brotherRetiree gets let down a little when his daughter cancels their resuscitated tradition of pop-a-shot at the local arcade. Only in recent years has he had time to resurrect the tradition and wants to do it again, but she has to work in Chicago on his birthday. So he mopes around for a little while, visiting Corky’s only to not see Eleanor who has taken the day off to celebrate her recent engagement. He even talks to his brother the governor who forgot it was his birthday. But the show ends with the adult Abby and the governor joining Retiree in the same arcade to do some pop-a-shot only after Abby procured a signed Michael Jordan rookie basketball card from the Bulls organization to replace the one he sold—a story she only heard from her grandpa once she was in college.
What’s my grade? I give it an A-. Oh yeah! Big time! The way I grade stuff is not always on the right edge of what the national zeitgeist likes. I can’t remember what I gave This Is Us last year (it wasn’t a bad score, but it certainly wasn’t equal to what people view it as now: a beloved show) but I did think that the show was good off the bat.
I mention This Is Us because this, to me, feels very much like CBS’s answer to that show. Yes, it is a comedy with very little, if any, drama like This Is Us. And yes it, at times, does have the feel of something filmed on a set rather than in real-life locations like This Is Us, but it is unlike most things on TV save for This Is Us. It’s actually funny, has a heartwarming message every episode, is definitely a family show so far (though the later time makes me think that later episodes could get racier) and appeals to literally all ages. You’re a retiree? You should be able to relate to the older Alex. You’re trying to struggle through getting older and not being where you want to be in your career? The current Alex is for you. You’re just a kid trying to survive the jungle that is middle and high school? Then we’ve got 14 for you. But even on top of that, it shows (and here’s the big kicker) positive male models. Frankly, even in This Is Us we get the cliché of an alcoholic father, a narcissistic male actor, and an overly anxious guy who has to turn to his wife for every little decision in his life. Here, we actually get a legitimate dad who is not the bumbling oaf of so many comedies, is there with helping words and a friendly smile whenever you need advice and loves his kid(s). We get this both in the step-dad and in Alex’s two adult father characters. It’s refreshing.
So why then are other critics not liking this show? Honestly, I don’t know. One of the only big flaws I could see is that maybe this actually could’ve been an hour long comedy-drama slightly more similar to This Is Us or Parenthood. It is a single-cam comedy which is not usually CBS’s style (they still go with the studio audiences), but I don’t find that to be a huge drawback. I think the acting is solid but maybe it’s a little too syrupy for people whereas This Is Us is more raw and gut-twisting? And I can also see a few critics crying sexism because this is very much a show centered around a white guy where the women are, for the most part, non-existent. We have yet to see Alex’s mother in the current timeline, though we’ve seen his father twice. His ex-wife was a cheater and Retiree’s Eleanor was not going to be his, so they are all sort of shown in a bad light, but I still find this show to be very good. And it’s strange because I thought I was going to hate this show which is why I took my time to finally watch it. I also thought I’d hate the fact that none of the actors look related in any way, let alone like they are supposed to be the same person at different ages. But I would say that this is the early season’s best new addition.
Should you be watching? Yes. All comedy is subjective and you might not find a single thing funny on the show nor like the saccharine nature of the show’s sentimentality which plays out slightly more heavy-handed than This Is Us, but I would say that if you like that show or Parenthood, then at least give this comedy a three-episode shot yourself and see what you think. Me, Myself and I airs on CBS Mondays at 9:30pm. Also catch it on CBS on Demand and CBS All Access.
What do you think? Have you heard of Me, Myself and I? If you haven’t, do you think you’ll tune in for an episode now? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Do you like it? What improvements do you think it could make? Which Alex do you best identify with? And do you think that retiree Alex still has a shot with Eleanor or is it finally time for him to let that undying love go? Let me know in the comments below.
Check out my 5-star comedy novel,
Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend
. #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.
Until next time, “Well, I think we should rescue the princess but first we should—” ‘Nobody asked your opinion No-balls McGee!’
P.S. Seriously, I would love to be in some of these Hollywood exec meetings. First we had the Baywatch movie where the producers decided not to feature any hot, steamy nudity from its stars (male or female), now we’ve got the black kid being called One Nut. Somebody actively sat around and said, “Well, he’s black, looks nerdy, looks short and already wears glasses but is that enough for kids to pick on him? Ooo, I know. (sinister voice) Give him one nut. Bwahahaha!
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All pictures courtesy of CBS
And we’re back, and this time with 22% more alertness... maybe. You’ll have to excuse all of the review/recaps this year as I really haven’t been that much into all of these new shows and frankly could pass on most of them, so some of the most minute details go uncaptured and uncared for, but I’m gonna try to change that. Or maybe I won’t change it at all. Hell, you don’t need to know every single second of the first three episodes of these shows to really know if you like them or to even know what’s going on or not, do you? You probably watch half of the stuff on TV while trying to badly multitask and do your dishes, or the family’s laundry or feed a baby or cut your own bangs because you’ve watched ten online tutorials that make it look so easy. But don’t do it! For God’s (and fashion’s) sake don’t cut your own bangs! Anyway, Me, Myself and I is a brand new half-hour comedy on CBS. Will this show make you feel more comfortable with yourself, or will it make you turn off the TV in favor of a little more “me time?” Let’s find out together.
CBS’s Me, Myself and I has a very different format than almost all of their other comedy shows and more different than most shows on TV. It follows the character of Alex at three different points in his life each around 25 years apart. We start by seeing the 40-year-old Alex played by Bobby Moynihan of SNL fame. He is current-Alex who lives in the year 2017 and is struggling through life. As we learn in the opening minutes of the show, his life as an inventor is sputtering along with silly innovations like chopsticks with forks at the end of them. And then his life takes a turn when he sees an ambulance in his driveway and runs through the front door to find that his wife is... sexing the EMT, and here he was nervous that she might be dead. So, he and his Harpy wife go through a rather bitter divorce that ends up with his six-year-old daughter splitting time between her two parents, and Alex staying in his fledgling company’s CFO’s garage. Yes, the CFO Darryl, played by Jaleel White, is also his best friend.
Left to right: Alex, his stepdad, his step-brotherThen we switch over to the younger Alex at the age of 14. A native of Chicago, he is in love with Michael Jordan as this younger self is set in the early 90s (thank god something is finally not set in the frickin’ 80s). His life consists of dreams about being a world-class inventor and loving the Bulls. And then his world changes when his mother (a flight attendant) comes in and tells him that that pilot she’s been dating has asked her to marry him. And they are going to move to LA where the pilot lives: Lakerland for you non-basketball fans. The Lakers are his sworn enemy. So now he has to somehow fit in with a new brother who is pretty much his same age but insists on being called the older brother because he outranks Alex by 39 days. And finally there is the older Alex. It is at this point that I tell you that this review could get long and a little messy because of how the show is setup. See, this isn’t a show where you follow one age for a while, then the next show you follow a different age and so on. No, you see each story unfold concurrently in each segment/act. The older, 65-year-old Alex is played by John Larroquette of Night Court fame. Whereas we see Alex struggling in his 40s, now in his sixties, Alex has become such a massively successful inventor that he just listed his multi-million dollar company on the NYSE. And then he dropped from a heart attack. Not dead, he has been warned to be healthier and slow down. So as he is strolling across the massive google-like campus of Riley Inc. (his company) he meets with Darryl’s daughter who now works for him as an executive and tells her that he has a big announcement that he wants to make to all the top team execs. The announcement: he’s retiring. And for those in the business world, you could just hear the stock price plummeting.
And so sets up our show. Again, each part of the show, each era informs the other eras in his life, so it is difficult to not have as many details as possible in order for you to get the story. So, we go back to his childhood where Young-Alek or “14” as we will call him is trying to adjust to his new life. His new dad seems pretty cool and is not the cliched controlling jackass of a father like most step-dads are painted to be. When 14, his new brother and the rest of the family sit down for a terrible breakfast that his mother, who was never a good homemaker, cooked for them, the kitchen table wobbles. 14 pulls out an invention that he made that allows for a wobbly table to stay lifted to the proper height on a tiny car-jack replica. It works and everyone is super impressed. His brother is worried that he will be labeled the nerd or geeky inventor when he gets to school so he just wants to look out for him as best he can. He tells him not to whip out any of the cool inventions or he could be laughed at.
And then they get to the bus stop where they see 14’s dream girl Nori Sterling (Nori is a nickname. This is important). The rumor is that she only dates high school guys and is not even gonna bother to look 14’s wa—holy crap! She’s smiling at 14. As it turns out, she has a little crush on him from first sight. There’s a big dance where 14’s brother has a plan to make him the coolest new kid by having him kiss Nori in front of everyone. Crazy enough, not only is Nori the one to ask him to dance on a slow song but she is the one who goes in for the kiss before him. But 14 leans back as he is choking in the big moment. No, like, really choking on the mint his brother gave him just before the would-be kiss. His brother has to Heimlich him safe. But the mint then flies clean across the room and into Nori’s mouth and 14 earns the nickname Chokey.
Alex in 2017, and DarrylCurrent Alek, still struggling after the divorce learns that his ex-wife, the disgusting cheater she is, has just gotten engaged to some guy that lives upstate. So she wants to move his little daughter Abby upstate in the middle of the school season because the girl staying with him when he has no money to his name is obviously out of the question. He guarantees her that he is just one invention away from a breakthrough and pleads to have Abby stay. But he’s got severe inventor’s block (been there) and can’t think of a single good thing. So he finally turns to his step-dad who he is still very much cool with. He goes back home and eats a dessert his mother made—she’s still a terrible cook—and gets the dad pep talk. His dad purposefully drops the fork and makes Alex pick it up only for current Alex to see the table lift he invented when he was young. And then he realizes that this is the idea that he needs to tide him over. He never sold it or licensed it to anyone. He takes the lift and license’s it out to a Japanese firm, getting a little money in his pocket but still having to live in his friend’s garage. But the day is partially saved. “Retiree” Alex is just taking his sweet time adjusting to the slower life and going around a modestly futuristic city to reminisce. His daughter is now a grown woman who is not only still the number one best daughter in the world, but is the GM of The Chicago Bulls. She just wants the best for him as she frequently flies between Chicago and California. And his “older” brother is now the governor of Calif. Life is pretty good. And then the best, most serendipitous thing happens: he goes to an old diner named Corky’s which is the place he frequented in the “current” timeline. He goes in and meets the owner, an older lady named EleaNOR. Yep, Nori has grown into a pretty older woman who, as most adults do, goes by her full name now. He takes some of the advice that his father gave him during the “14” timeline about how Jordan misses half of his shots and about how being great and life is about continuing to shoot, and he shoots his shot with Eleanor by going to kiss her in her diner.
Now that we know the language and parameters of the show, maybe episode two should go faster. This time around, 14 is dealing with lunchroom hierarchy. Sit at the wrong table too early and earn the nickname Chokey forever. Hell, the losers table has a boy nicknamed Shart and a black kid nicknamed One Nut. And I was crackin’ up at that crap, because you can’t go around callin’ this little spectacle-wearing negro One Nut. Oh my god, that’s so wrong. That’s the kind of funny bullying to where if I was his father, I would get in trouble with my wife for having to also laugh at the name before giving him a rousing talk about how he should have self-confidence and things get better as an adult and how most women don’t discriminate against dudes with one nut. Ha ha ha! I can’t hate. Better than having tiny nuts, I guess.
To get back on track, 14’s brother pays the cool kids $10 to let him sit with them for a week to earn him some cool points (note that 14 and the brother have different lunch periods, so he can’t just sit with him). 14 learns of this and bucks it, opting to sit with One Nut and the others. He tries to make a grandstand and storm the cool kids table to sit down but stumbles on the stairs that separate the cool tables from the rest of the cafeteria. He slips, knocking all the other “losers” down to the floor and understands why Shart is nicknamed Shart. Not every battle is won.
Current Alex is tricked into getting back out into the dating field by Darryl who takes him to a club under the guise of a celebration with the Japanese businessmen. But the club isn’t their thing and they end up at Corky’s where Alex extols the deliciousness of waffles for every meal. A woman overhears him and says that she can have waffles every meal, too, and sees that they are both eating waffles currently. So they then go out on a date which Darryl hears for a full hour as Alex butt-dialed him. The date almost ends good because the woman wants to go back to her place but instead of doing that, he tries to get her address which she writes on his hand, then instead of a kiss and each driving in their own car to her place, Alex ends the date with a firm handshake. Yep, he shakes and sweat-wipes the address off his hand as he is not ready to date again. But he’s learned to not be afraid that there isn’t love out there for him.
Finally, retiree sets up a dinner with Eleanor who just wants to catch up on old times and what his life has been like since school so long ago. But as she walks into his place, she realizes they are both on different wave lengths because he still considers her the love of his life and she has a boyfriend. Surprise! Well, he complains about how she always settles for the same type of guy who doesn’t want to commit to her because she had a boyfriend in middle school but that kid didn’t want to call her his girlfriend. Eleanor’s current bf is the same way and doesn’t like to commit to even talk about marriage. So retiree tells her that about her boyfriend and tries to let it go. But then when he is in the car with his daughter later on, he receives a call from Eleanor who says she wants to talk to him urgently. Did she break up with her dude? Well... she told him what Retiree Alex said and the guy proposed to her. Can’t win them all.
Nori and "14"Episode three deals with gifts and being spoiled or winning a prize and birthdays. For his 14th birthday (I thought it would’ve been his 15th but go with it) 14 gets a signed Michael Jordan rookie basketball card. A collector’s card back then, it could be worth a lot of money later in life. Well, enamored by Nori who tells him that her dad is a basketball card collector, he up and gives it away to her to please her (and they say patriarchy is oppressive. Guys bend backwards to try to please women and vice versa). He immediately regrets it as it meant so much to him, and it also meant a lot to his step-dad to just give it to him and see him so happy. Well, his brother plots to get it back by stealing the card back instead of asking for it back from Nori. Somehow, this plan works, they hop out of the window and abscond with the card.
Current Alex does a tradition with his little Abby where they go and shoot pop-a-shot hoops at the local arcade. While there, he runs into some of the other moms in he and his ex-wife’s social circle. They tell him of this Glamping event that they were going to invite his daughter to but it was a mother/daughter thing. But he doesn’t want his daughter missing out on anything so he says he’ll take her. For those not in the know Glamping is glamorous camping and it tends to cost a heck of a lot more than regular camping. Well, he learns that it is going to cost somewhere around 3000 dollars to take his daughter. And he struggles to tell her no. He goes to his step-dad once again for advice and receives some good advice about being the tough parent but ultimately can’t be that to his daughter. He takes her on the trip anyway. Where did he get the money? You guessed it, he sold the authentic Jordan basketball card worth a lot of money. He tells his step-dad who tells him that he is fine with it having been sold because he got 14 the card to bring joy. Current Alex selling the card was just a way for him to bring joy to his little girl. It’s all very sweet.
"Retiree" holding card, and Governor brotherRetiree gets let down a little when his daughter cancels their resuscitated tradition of pop-a-shot at the local arcade. Only in recent years has he had time to resurrect the tradition and wants to do it again, but she has to work in Chicago on his birthday. So he mopes around for a little while, visiting Corky’s only to not see Eleanor who has taken the day off to celebrate her recent engagement. He even talks to his brother the governor who forgot it was his birthday. But the show ends with the adult Abby and the governor joining Retiree in the same arcade to do some pop-a-shot only after Abby procured a signed Michael Jordan rookie basketball card from the Bulls organization to replace the one he sold—a story she only heard from her grandpa once she was in college. What’s my grade? I give it an A-. Oh yeah! Big time! The way I grade stuff is not always on the right edge of what the national zeitgeist likes. I can’t remember what I gave This Is Us last year (it wasn’t a bad score, but it certainly wasn’t equal to what people view it as now: a beloved show) but I did think that the show was good off the bat.
I mention This Is Us because this, to me, feels very much like CBS’s answer to that show. Yes, it is a comedy with very little, if any, drama like This Is Us. And yes it, at times, does have the feel of something filmed on a set rather than in real-life locations like This Is Us, but it is unlike most things on TV save for This Is Us. It’s actually funny, has a heartwarming message every episode, is definitely a family show so far (though the later time makes me think that later episodes could get racier) and appeals to literally all ages. You’re a retiree? You should be able to relate to the older Alex. You’re trying to struggle through getting older and not being where you want to be in your career? The current Alex is for you. You’re just a kid trying to survive the jungle that is middle and high school? Then we’ve got 14 for you. But even on top of that, it shows (and here’s the big kicker) positive male models. Frankly, even in This Is Us we get the cliché of an alcoholic father, a narcissistic male actor, and an overly anxious guy who has to turn to his wife for every little decision in his life. Here, we actually get a legitimate dad who is not the bumbling oaf of so many comedies, is there with helping words and a friendly smile whenever you need advice and loves his kid(s). We get this both in the step-dad and in Alex’s two adult father characters. It’s refreshing.
So why then are other critics not liking this show? Honestly, I don’t know. One of the only big flaws I could see is that maybe this actually could’ve been an hour long comedy-drama slightly more similar to This Is Us or Parenthood. It is a single-cam comedy which is not usually CBS’s style (they still go with the studio audiences), but I don’t find that to be a huge drawback. I think the acting is solid but maybe it’s a little too syrupy for people whereas This Is Us is more raw and gut-twisting? And I can also see a few critics crying sexism because this is very much a show centered around a white guy where the women are, for the most part, non-existent. We have yet to see Alex’s mother in the current timeline, though we’ve seen his father twice. His ex-wife was a cheater and Retiree’s Eleanor was not going to be his, so they are all sort of shown in a bad light, but I still find this show to be very good. And it’s strange because I thought I was going to hate this show which is why I took my time to finally watch it. I also thought I’d hate the fact that none of the actors look related in any way, let alone like they are supposed to be the same person at different ages. But I would say that this is the early season’s best new addition.
Should you be watching? Yes. All comedy is subjective and you might not find a single thing funny on the show nor like the saccharine nature of the show’s sentimentality which plays out slightly more heavy-handed than This Is Us, but I would say that if you like that show or Parenthood, then at least give this comedy a three-episode shot yourself and see what you think. Me, Myself and I airs on CBS Mondays at 9:30pm. Also catch it on CBS on Demand and CBS All Access.
What do you think? Have you heard of Me, Myself and I? If you haven’t, do you think you’ll tune in for an episode now? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Do you like it? What improvements do you think it could make? Which Alex do you best identify with? And do you think that retiree Alex still has a shot with Eleanor or is it finally time for him to let that undying love go? Let me know in the comments below.
Check out my 5-star comedy novel,
Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend
. #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.Until next time, “Well, I think we should rescue the princess but first we should—” ‘Nobody asked your opinion No-balls McGee!’
P.S. Seriously, I would love to be in some of these Hollywood exec meetings. First we had the Baywatch movie where the producers decided not to feature any hot, steamy nudity from its stars (male or female), now we’ve got the black kid being called One Nut. Somebody actively sat around and said, “Well, he’s black, looks nerdy, looks short and already wears glasses but is that enough for kids to pick on him? Ooo, I know. (sinister voice) Give him one nut. Bwahahaha!
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Land Of The Free And The Home Of #TheBrave #3weekroundup #NBC #review #recap
Land Of The Free And The Home Of #TheBrave #3weekroundup #NBC #review #recap
All pictures courtesy of NBC
I am trying my darnedest to fly through these reviews of these new shows so that I can get back to my usual writing but they seem to come faster every year, and I also seem to need to say more about them every year. On deck today, we have NBC’s new military-themed show The Brave (#TheBrave). What the heck is this show about with such a pedantic and uncreative title you ask? And is this show made to last or will it crumble beneath the weight of great expectations? Let’s find out together.
NBC’s The Brave stars Anne Heche and Mark Vogel as leaders of a special forces command team. While Anne Heche’s character Patricia Campbell runs the intelligence and office unit of the team at a safe command center somewhere in the US, Mark Vogel’s character Adam Dalton is the leader of the boots-on-ground tactical field team that traverses the globe following orders on a myriad of different crimes that need a militaristic force to properly execute commands. His field team consists of Jaz Khan, a Middle Eastern-looking young woman who is a weapons and language specialist who speaks a few languages and is a sniper. During the first two missions in the first two episodes, she is seen wearing a traditional Muslim head garb for women but doesn’t do the same in the third episode. Next we have Joseph “McG” Mcguire who, to me, melts into the background and hasn’t been of any significance yet from what I can remember. Granted, I was doing another review while watching the first two episodes so I didn’t catch as many thorough details as I normally would, but he has just sorta been in the background. We also have Amir Al-Raisani who is the Muslim male that they have on the show. He has many talents, one of which is being a pickpocket and another of which is being able to slip in and out of any role. Also, with his presence, if you haven’t noticed most of the dirty work that will happen will most likely take place overseas in the many Islamic-run states in the Middle East and throughout all of Asia and Africa. Speaking of Africa, we finally have the black guy Ezekiel “Preach” Carter. It’s assumed by his nickname that he is the devout Christian of the group which could potentially set up a few really good scenes later in the season where he and the other Muslim team members have a philosophical and theological dialogue (don’t hold your breath). He is probably the biggest one on the team and, even though the team is made up of all field op specialists, can be considered the muscle.
Back in the office, we have Heche who is the command that coordinates with other agencies and gets her orders from the top. Next we have the newest team member Hannah Rivera who is one of the two main strategists. She is special because she just recently got off from field work and her own ops team. In episode three her background is explored more and we learn that she was previously stationed deep undercover in Mexico keeping tabs on a drug cartel. And finally we have Noah Morgenthau who is the other strategist and mainly does data analytics from what I’ve seen. We have also learned that he graduated top of his class from Quantico (or maybe it was some other intelligence agency academy. I say Quantico because, funny enough, the actor playing Noah, Tate Ellington, was one of the original cast members on the show Quantico) and keeps a low profile while trying to give the best scenario for each mission. He is a by-the-book type of guy. It should be known that both Hannah and Noah are on equal footing here and one does not outrank another just in case I made that confusing.
The Office Team
The crew’s first mission is to some Middle Eastern country where they must rescue a recently kidnapped American doctor who was working with Doctors Without Borders in a rundown village on the outskirts of some town. The woman was taken captive by her supposed driver while on her way to the airport to finally get back to the states after so long overseas. She is kidnapped and taken by a terrorist group that has yet to make any demands on the US government to get her back. So the team must not only figure out where she has been taken but also why she was taken in the first place.
As Heche’s team gathers intel from afar, utilizing drones and satellites from across the world to try to get a trace on where she might be, the ground team embarks on a mission to work the streets to find her. In conjunction with the “directors” back in HQ, the ground team discovers that some terrorist guy who freely roams the streets in this city but is a known bad guy on one of the many flagged lists that US intelligence outfits have, is actually part of the kidnapping. Or at least they operate off of such a theory. Using whatever covert ops skills they can, they follow him first through the streets of the city, keeping him in drone sights until he ducks into a covered street marketplace and the ground crew takes over. They didn’t want to tip their hand that he was being followed because they know that if he realizes someone is on him, he will call and most likely have the doctor murdered or moved. So while the Muslim woman and man are trying to blend into the marketplace patrons, their fearless team leader Adam Dalton gets in on the action as the white tourist looking at silks in the market.
Dalton is made, forcing the team to take the terrorist and change the plan on the fly. They decide to use Amir as a sort of bait hostage similar to what happened in the movie Inception with the “uncle Pete” character just after Sato got shot. Amir sits in the room trying to plead with the man for details because he supposedly doesn’t know what’s going on and why he’s been kidnapped but says that they keep mentioning this girl, this doctor. He then manages to escape and helps the terrorist escape in a well-played ruse. But when the man follows him out of the building, hops in the getaway car and puts something sharp to Amir’s neck, the team’s hope that the terrorist guy would lead them to the place where they have the kidnapped doctor starts to jiggle like an unstable Jenga tower.
Luckily the man blabs just in time for Jaz to snipe his brains out. After hearing that they took the doctor to a local hospital, the HQ team realizes that they didn’t kidnap the woman because they wanted a ransom for her, but because the bigger terrorist leader, some guy who is on the top ten list is actually sick and in need of a doctor to perform surgery. Holy crap, they could both save this doctor and take out one of the most ruthless terrorists in the world.
Well, the ground team concocts a plan that sees them sneaking into the hospital, isolating half of the guard soldiers for the big bad terrorist, beating them up and taking their uniforms to disguise themselves, and escorting the doctor lady out of the hospital after she successfully performed the surgery. Even better, they planted a remote detonating bomb on the big bad terrorist’s wife. Boom, go the terrorists.
The episode ends in a rather strange fashion with the team back stateside we’re assuming and at some beach. As they play and their boss back at HQ spies on them with a drone, a small truck makes its way onto the beach and detonates a bomb near the group. Why is this weird? Well, it leads into episode two which...
In episode two the conclusion of the first episode is only discussed in passing. It’s like in movies where they talk about some amazing action scene as opposed to showing it to you, generally because they didn’t have the budget for it. They literally say that some people died in the bombing and how crazy that was and that it happened two weeks ago and you’re like what? Hmph! Well that’s... strange. It felt like it was a cliffhanger to something amazing and then just got completely dropped the next episode.
Dalton and Preach (the black guy)Anyway, episode two sees the crew going to rescue another person. This time, they must rescue an undercover CIA agent who had been compromised in the foreign country of Ukraine. The woman is bleeding and beaten and jogging around the city for most of the episode, trying to avoid the Ukraine government that doesn’t want her there. This is yet another job for Jaz.
At some point, even though the team does get to the CIA agent early on, they are ambushed and their transport out of the city is compromised. The agent is carried off by some Ukraine soldiers and manages to eventually escape into a women’s bathhouse. See, the person she was spying on/working for while undercover is so powerful that he has the military and local law enforcement under his control. But the bath houses are strictly for women and are supposed to be a refuge away from men. So the ground team sends in Jaz to find the woman in the bathhouse. The funny thing is that Amir, being the rather traditional Muslim he is, is very protective of the Muslim woman on the team (you bet they’re gonna have a romance later in the show) and knows that she has almost zero experience with undercover work like he does. He is worried for her and almost loses his grip when she gets stopped on the street by two Ukrainian soldiers. Luckily, the men dismiss her as not a traitor and more likely to shoot the escaped American than they are. They check out her butt and send her on her way.
Jaz gets into the bathhouse and finds the CIA agent. Meanwhile, the HQ team is trying to figure out a way to evac the ground team with the agent. As it turns out, Noah has personal ties to the agent—they were in the academy together and she was number two in their class behind him. Their current problem: the guy that the agent had been spying on has roving street sentries driving in tight patterns in the area where she was last seen around the bath house. They’re checking every vehicle and making sure she can’t escape. While HQ has a bead on all of the moving vehicles and relays that info to the ground team, Jaz and the agent move to the back of the bath house.
Dalton and Preach realize that they can bypass having their vehicle checked by procuring one of the guard vehicles. They beat up the guys inside, pull the vehicle to the back and make a smooth getaway from the bath house with the Agent and Jaz in-tow. Not cleared yet, they have to provide cover for the evac copter to land safely and long enough to get everyone loaded. Preach and McG go and set a big charge at an abandoned building while HQ coordinates the copter’s landing in a nearby empty yard. They play a game of watch-closely with the Ukrainians and detonate the building as cover for the helicopter landing in a different area. While everyone is distracted, the copter lands, loads and takes off into the night. Another day saved, another mission completed and no strange cliffhanger bomb at the end.
Episode three sees the team encounter an agent from Mexican intelligence that has been working in the drug cartel division for some time. He tells them that he has been following a drug kingpin for a very long time. One of the drug guys happens to be the same one that Hannah has a past with. He ordered her killed and beat her mercilessly, leaving scars all over her back. He is one of the biggest reasons she is no longer in the field. Well, as it turns out the drug lord is on the cusp of buying some illegal arms for his cartel. While the cartel guy is important (note: he’s not the top guy), the arms dealer is on the top ten list for illegal arms smuggling in the world. But no one can ever get the guy because he is so careful. As it turns out, the Mexican intelligence dude has been able to turn this arms dealer’s girlfriend. She’s supplied him with a wealth of information about how he operates but it still isn’t enough.
So, the plan is not to kill him or capture him but to use him to gain intel. The team hopes to bug him and track his movements so that they find his base of operations and are able to bring down his entire network of clients. Thinking it easy, their first plan is to bug his cellphone—a thousand-dollar custom job that is dipped in gold and all of this crazy crap. The point is that it is expensive. All they have to do is use Amir’s pickpocket skills to switch the phone out with their own dummy phone and voila, they have him. Unfortunately, as he is walking and right before Amir is about to switch the phones, the guy takes his real phone out and literally breaks his expensive phone in half and tosses it into a fountain like a penny into a wishing pond.
OK, new plan. They now have to contact the girlfriend and get her to help them get a bug into his necklace, the one thing he would never destroy because it has sentimental value to it. To do this, the ground team stages a robbery using intel from the girlfriend. She gives them info on their travel route for the next day and the team lies in wait. They have to switch plans slightly when the paranoid arms dealer confesses that he thought he saw Amir in two different places, following him. So, he orders that they turn around.
Well, the ground team still go through with the roadside heist, saying that they are taking his money from the recent arms deal with the drug lord which is really a guise to touch his necklace and plant the bug. The mission completed, the ground crew starts to go home but the arms dealer is still suspicious. His head of security tells him that his girlfriend was probably the one who betrayed them—intel that HQ gets from the bug that is in working condition. The dealer really loves the woman and reluctantly orders his security guy to kill her but not that very night, giving the team time to concoct a plan.
Back in HQ, Hannah and Noah get into a fight about whether to call the ground crew in the absence of their leader Patricia who has already left after another successful mission. Noah thinks the personal angle of this mission is effecting Hannah’s judgment because she sees the girlfriend as the informant she had while undercover who she couldn’t save. While Noah goes to look for their boss, Hannah breaks the chain of command and calls Dalton about the girlfriend.
The ground crew, after hearing that the girlfriend is in trouble, gets into a brief argument about what to do because if they go and rescue her then they sacrifice the bug and the arms dealer will go back into hiding and his clients will all disperse back into the underworld. But the Mexican intelligence officer is in love with the girlfriend and knows she will be killed, so he begs them to do something. Well, after much thought, Dalton concocts a plan. What they do is that they sneak the stolen money that they still had from their fake heist into the home of the drug dealer who had just bought the guns. Knowing that the arms dealer would soon come to close out the deal and shake hands, they also place Amir in the driveway on a bike, helmet off, to stare menacingly at the arms dealer as he arrives.
Naturally, the dealer and his head of security think that it wasn’t the girlfriend who was the traitor but the cartel guy who wanted the guns and wanted to keep the money for himself. The arms dealers goes in and kills the cartel guy and all of his people, bringing justice and an easing of mind to Hannah back at HQ, and saving the girlfriend’s life while keeping their bug intact. And there is yet again no strange bombing cliffhanger.
What’s my grade? I give this show a solid C+.Here’s the deal, I used to didn’t know why people said that TV wasn’t all that great and why movies and books were these phenomenal things, and that was even while I still loved all three of them. But now I understand: TV is more predictable and relies on this predictability “life is not like a box of chocolates” mentality to draw the viewer. After the past few years in which we saw some truly unique procedural ideas, this year networks fell back on the old tried and true standbys that see a lack of creativity returning to primetime. Don’t get me wrong, I see that this show has potential, especially if it finds its right audience and doesn’t get much competition from the similar CBS show Seal Team, but its very vanilla considering the other dramatic offerings on display for TV. Yes, it follows a small band of military special forces doing “God’s work” in foreign lands, but when boiled down to it, it is really nothing more than a case-a-week show where, each week, there will be clear-cut bad guys and good guys that are supposed to stop them. It’s basically almost every other cop drama ever made but with better tech and military might and ingenuity. Hell, the show is essentially Taken but with fatigues. Will it interest people who love military action? Sure. Everyone else? Eh!
I get it. This is the network’s patriotic reaction to the Midwest values that voters supposedly showed in last November’s election, but I’m not sure this appeals to Trump’s base quite like what they might like for it to. The amount of diversity on this show is astounding and judging by Trump’s “all sides” supporters, that’s not what everyone wants to see. Hell, there’s really only, like, two white people. Granted, they’re the two in charge, but still.
If the race thing and the fact that it is a ton of minorities doing the work to protect this country doesn’t bother you, then good. But unfortunately this show also doesn’t really supply that much in the way of mental stimulation or plot intrigue. It doesn’t even follow the recently most popular setup of a procedural that The Blacklist does so well by having a case a week in conjunction with an overall case that lingers throughout the season. I thought for a minute that the bomb at the end of the first episode might trigger something great and amazing, maybe a revenge plot thrown into the military actions or something different than what the trailers looked like, but nope. Nothing. Again, that final scene was so bizarre because it not only happened in a way that made it feel like a bold cliffhanger that suggested maybe they would kill one of their main players already, but it was not discussed in any great detail the next episode. Who did it? Why? How’d they know Dalton and his team were there? Was this a retaliation for killing the terrorist guy or just random? All good questions that have no answers. The only answer given is the worst one that we don’t want to hear as an audience: (paraphrased) “oh, we’re not gonna pursue revenge because that’s not our job. Our job is to follow orders from HQ. Their job is to figure out what happened.” And you’re all like, “What? Really? Dude, you’re gonna actually play goody two shoes. That’s no fun.” Sure, it may be closer to real life, but it’s also not that entertaining to not even see the characters give a single damn about it.
But I think the worst failing of the show is that it is almost character-less in its writing. OK, shameless plug here, if you read even one episode, the military episode of my episodic serial novel Extraordinary (that episode is titled “Fatigues” and is available on Amazon. Click “Extraordinary” at the end of this article), by the time you’ve finished the one episode, you should have a great understanding of exactly who the characters are or at least one aspect of their lives. I understand that this series is different because it has to do the case-a-week thing so it has to fit in a case, but my Extraordinary episodes are there to mimic the quick 60-minute format of drama shows. You should know something about these characters at the end of an hour.
Take for instance our leader Dalton. If you’ve seen the first three episodes, what do you know about him? How long has he been serving? When did he join the military? Why? Does he have a wife, spouse or girlfriend back stateside? Why did he become special forces? I bet that if you’ve been watching the episodes, you could only maybe answer half of those questions, if any. What’s sad is that the same goes for just about every other character on the show. You could ask the same about Patricia, Preach, Amir, Jaz or that other guy on the ground team. And yes while we know that Noah was top of his class and Hannah was “affected” by her in-field work, we still know little about their personalities and who they are outside of work. The action is great but the characters are all sort of robots, which, frankly gets tiring to watch after a while, especially when you know they are almost always going to win.
Should you be watching? Eh! Listen, if you like military-themed entertainment and are all about soldiers fighting against evil and stomping out the bad guys, then sure, this might be the show for you. But just know that this is definitely no American Sniper, no Quantico, no Homeland, no Tyrant, no any Middle Eastern, military or covert operations show that others have thought was really good. This show is closer to something that you probably can miss a few episodes of in a row because your schedule gets busy, and you won’t really miss much in the way of plot, nor will you feel bad for having missed it. Frankly, I’m not sure that this is even as good as the other military show Seal Team. Unfortunately, because I haven’t watched Seal Team yet, I can’t do a comparison of the two shows in this review so I can’t tell you which is better (they look like a carbon copy of each other). Look for a comparison in my Seal Team review in a few days. The Brave airs at 10pm on NBC Mondays.
What do you think? Have you heard of The Brave? If not, do you think you will check it out now? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Do you like it? Where do you think the show can improve? And who is your favorite character? And what did you think of the first episode’s bomb scene? Should they have done something cool with that plotwise or was it good the way it was? Let me know in the comments below.
Check out my 5-star comedy novel,
Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend
. #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.
Until next time, “Why do you young people always think you’re so special? Huh? Well? You think you’re special?” ‘Well, I am in special ops so...”
P.S. Did I get some stuff incorrect on purpose in this review/recap? Yes, just to show how little this show entertained me. I didn’t care about the details in it because I was bored. I’ll try to come up with a better sign-off next time.
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All pictures courtesy of NBC I am trying my darnedest to fly through these reviews of these new shows so that I can get back to my usual writing but they seem to come faster every year, and I also seem to need to say more about them every year. On deck today, we have NBC’s new military-themed show The Brave (#TheBrave). What the heck is this show about with such a pedantic and uncreative title you ask? And is this show made to last or will it crumble beneath the weight of great expectations? Let’s find out together.
NBC’s The Brave stars Anne Heche and Mark Vogel as leaders of a special forces command team. While Anne Heche’s character Patricia Campbell runs the intelligence and office unit of the team at a safe command center somewhere in the US, Mark Vogel’s character Adam Dalton is the leader of the boots-on-ground tactical field team that traverses the globe following orders on a myriad of different crimes that need a militaristic force to properly execute commands. His field team consists of Jaz Khan, a Middle Eastern-looking young woman who is a weapons and language specialist who speaks a few languages and is a sniper. During the first two missions in the first two episodes, she is seen wearing a traditional Muslim head garb for women but doesn’t do the same in the third episode. Next we have Joseph “McG” Mcguire who, to me, melts into the background and hasn’t been of any significance yet from what I can remember. Granted, I was doing another review while watching the first two episodes so I didn’t catch as many thorough details as I normally would, but he has just sorta been in the background. We also have Amir Al-Raisani who is the Muslim male that they have on the show. He has many talents, one of which is being a pickpocket and another of which is being able to slip in and out of any role. Also, with his presence, if you haven’t noticed most of the dirty work that will happen will most likely take place overseas in the many Islamic-run states in the Middle East and throughout all of Asia and Africa. Speaking of Africa, we finally have the black guy Ezekiel “Preach” Carter. It’s assumed by his nickname that he is the devout Christian of the group which could potentially set up a few really good scenes later in the season where he and the other Muslim team members have a philosophical and theological dialogue (don’t hold your breath). He is probably the biggest one on the team and, even though the team is made up of all field op specialists, can be considered the muscle.
Back in the office, we have Heche who is the command that coordinates with other agencies and gets her orders from the top. Next we have the newest team member Hannah Rivera who is one of the two main strategists. She is special because she just recently got off from field work and her own ops team. In episode three her background is explored more and we learn that she was previously stationed deep undercover in Mexico keeping tabs on a drug cartel. And finally we have Noah Morgenthau who is the other strategist and mainly does data analytics from what I’ve seen. We have also learned that he graduated top of his class from Quantico (or maybe it was some other intelligence agency academy. I say Quantico because, funny enough, the actor playing Noah, Tate Ellington, was one of the original cast members on the show Quantico) and keeps a low profile while trying to give the best scenario for each mission. He is a by-the-book type of guy. It should be known that both Hannah and Noah are on equal footing here and one does not outrank another just in case I made that confusing.
The Office TeamThe crew’s first mission is to some Middle Eastern country where they must rescue a recently kidnapped American doctor who was working with Doctors Without Borders in a rundown village on the outskirts of some town. The woman was taken captive by her supposed driver while on her way to the airport to finally get back to the states after so long overseas. She is kidnapped and taken by a terrorist group that has yet to make any demands on the US government to get her back. So the team must not only figure out where she has been taken but also why she was taken in the first place.
As Heche’s team gathers intel from afar, utilizing drones and satellites from across the world to try to get a trace on where she might be, the ground team embarks on a mission to work the streets to find her. In conjunction with the “directors” back in HQ, the ground team discovers that some terrorist guy who freely roams the streets in this city but is a known bad guy on one of the many flagged lists that US intelligence outfits have, is actually part of the kidnapping. Or at least they operate off of such a theory. Using whatever covert ops skills they can, they follow him first through the streets of the city, keeping him in drone sights until he ducks into a covered street marketplace and the ground crew takes over. They didn’t want to tip their hand that he was being followed because they know that if he realizes someone is on him, he will call and most likely have the doctor murdered or moved. So while the Muslim woman and man are trying to blend into the marketplace patrons, their fearless team leader Adam Dalton gets in on the action as the white tourist looking at silks in the market.
Dalton is made, forcing the team to take the terrorist and change the plan on the fly. They decide to use Amir as a sort of bait hostage similar to what happened in the movie Inception with the “uncle Pete” character just after Sato got shot. Amir sits in the room trying to plead with the man for details because he supposedly doesn’t know what’s going on and why he’s been kidnapped but says that they keep mentioning this girl, this doctor. He then manages to escape and helps the terrorist escape in a well-played ruse. But when the man follows him out of the building, hops in the getaway car and puts something sharp to Amir’s neck, the team’s hope that the terrorist guy would lead them to the place where they have the kidnapped doctor starts to jiggle like an unstable Jenga tower.
Luckily the man blabs just in time for Jaz to snipe his brains out. After hearing that they took the doctor to a local hospital, the HQ team realizes that they didn’t kidnap the woman because they wanted a ransom for her, but because the bigger terrorist leader, some guy who is on the top ten list is actually sick and in need of a doctor to perform surgery. Holy crap, they could both save this doctor and take out one of the most ruthless terrorists in the world.
Well, the ground team concocts a plan that sees them sneaking into the hospital, isolating half of the guard soldiers for the big bad terrorist, beating them up and taking their uniforms to disguise themselves, and escorting the doctor lady out of the hospital after she successfully performed the surgery. Even better, they planted a remote detonating bomb on the big bad terrorist’s wife. Boom, go the terrorists.
The episode ends in a rather strange fashion with the team back stateside we’re assuming and at some beach. As they play and their boss back at HQ spies on them with a drone, a small truck makes its way onto the beach and detonates a bomb near the group. Why is this weird? Well, it leads into episode two which...
In episode two the conclusion of the first episode is only discussed in passing. It’s like in movies where they talk about some amazing action scene as opposed to showing it to you, generally because they didn’t have the budget for it. They literally say that some people died in the bombing and how crazy that was and that it happened two weeks ago and you’re like what? Hmph! Well that’s... strange. It felt like it was a cliffhanger to something amazing and then just got completely dropped the next episode.
Dalton and Preach (the black guy)Anyway, episode two sees the crew going to rescue another person. This time, they must rescue an undercover CIA agent who had been compromised in the foreign country of Ukraine. The woman is bleeding and beaten and jogging around the city for most of the episode, trying to avoid the Ukraine government that doesn’t want her there. This is yet another job for Jaz. At some point, even though the team does get to the CIA agent early on, they are ambushed and their transport out of the city is compromised. The agent is carried off by some Ukraine soldiers and manages to eventually escape into a women’s bathhouse. See, the person she was spying on/working for while undercover is so powerful that he has the military and local law enforcement under his control. But the bath houses are strictly for women and are supposed to be a refuge away from men. So the ground team sends in Jaz to find the woman in the bathhouse. The funny thing is that Amir, being the rather traditional Muslim he is, is very protective of the Muslim woman on the team (you bet they’re gonna have a romance later in the show) and knows that she has almost zero experience with undercover work like he does. He is worried for her and almost loses his grip when she gets stopped on the street by two Ukrainian soldiers. Luckily, the men dismiss her as not a traitor and more likely to shoot the escaped American than they are. They check out her butt and send her on her way.
Jaz gets into the bathhouse and finds the CIA agent. Meanwhile, the HQ team is trying to figure out a way to evac the ground team with the agent. As it turns out, Noah has personal ties to the agent—they were in the academy together and she was number two in their class behind him. Their current problem: the guy that the agent had been spying on has roving street sentries driving in tight patterns in the area where she was last seen around the bath house. They’re checking every vehicle and making sure she can’t escape. While HQ has a bead on all of the moving vehicles and relays that info to the ground team, Jaz and the agent move to the back of the bath house.
Dalton and Preach realize that they can bypass having their vehicle checked by procuring one of the guard vehicles. They beat up the guys inside, pull the vehicle to the back and make a smooth getaway from the bath house with the Agent and Jaz in-tow. Not cleared yet, they have to provide cover for the evac copter to land safely and long enough to get everyone loaded. Preach and McG go and set a big charge at an abandoned building while HQ coordinates the copter’s landing in a nearby empty yard. They play a game of watch-closely with the Ukrainians and detonate the building as cover for the helicopter landing in a different area. While everyone is distracted, the copter lands, loads and takes off into the night. Another day saved, another mission completed and no strange cliffhanger bomb at the end.
Episode three sees the team encounter an agent from Mexican intelligence that has been working in the drug cartel division for some time. He tells them that he has been following a drug kingpin for a very long time. One of the drug guys happens to be the same one that Hannah has a past with. He ordered her killed and beat her mercilessly, leaving scars all over her back. He is one of the biggest reasons she is no longer in the field. Well, as it turns out the drug lord is on the cusp of buying some illegal arms for his cartel. While the cartel guy is important (note: he’s not the top guy), the arms dealer is on the top ten list for illegal arms smuggling in the world. But no one can ever get the guy because he is so careful. As it turns out, the Mexican intelligence dude has been able to turn this arms dealer’s girlfriend. She’s supplied him with a wealth of information about how he operates but it still isn’t enough.
So, the plan is not to kill him or capture him but to use him to gain intel. The team hopes to bug him and track his movements so that they find his base of operations and are able to bring down his entire network of clients. Thinking it easy, their first plan is to bug his cellphone—a thousand-dollar custom job that is dipped in gold and all of this crazy crap. The point is that it is expensive. All they have to do is use Amir’s pickpocket skills to switch the phone out with their own dummy phone and voila, they have him. Unfortunately, as he is walking and right before Amir is about to switch the phones, the guy takes his real phone out and literally breaks his expensive phone in half and tosses it into a fountain like a penny into a wishing pond. OK, new plan. They now have to contact the girlfriend and get her to help them get a bug into his necklace, the one thing he would never destroy because it has sentimental value to it. To do this, the ground team stages a robbery using intel from the girlfriend. She gives them info on their travel route for the next day and the team lies in wait. They have to switch plans slightly when the paranoid arms dealer confesses that he thought he saw Amir in two different places, following him. So, he orders that they turn around.
Well, the ground team still go through with the roadside heist, saying that they are taking his money from the recent arms deal with the drug lord which is really a guise to touch his necklace and plant the bug. The mission completed, the ground crew starts to go home but the arms dealer is still suspicious. His head of security tells him that his girlfriend was probably the one who betrayed them—intel that HQ gets from the bug that is in working condition. The dealer really loves the woman and reluctantly orders his security guy to kill her but not that very night, giving the team time to concoct a plan.
Back in HQ, Hannah and Noah get into a fight about whether to call the ground crew in the absence of their leader Patricia who has already left after another successful mission. Noah thinks the personal angle of this mission is effecting Hannah’s judgment because she sees the girlfriend as the informant she had while undercover who she couldn’t save. While Noah goes to look for their boss, Hannah breaks the chain of command and calls Dalton about the girlfriend.
The ground crew, after hearing that the girlfriend is in trouble, gets into a brief argument about what to do because if they go and rescue her then they sacrifice the bug and the arms dealer will go back into hiding and his clients will all disperse back into the underworld. But the Mexican intelligence officer is in love with the girlfriend and knows she will be killed, so he begs them to do something. Well, after much thought, Dalton concocts a plan. What they do is that they sneak the stolen money that they still had from their fake heist into the home of the drug dealer who had just bought the guns. Knowing that the arms dealer would soon come to close out the deal and shake hands, they also place Amir in the driveway on a bike, helmet off, to stare menacingly at the arms dealer as he arrives.
Naturally, the dealer and his head of security think that it wasn’t the girlfriend who was the traitor but the cartel guy who wanted the guns and wanted to keep the money for himself. The arms dealers goes in and kills the cartel guy and all of his people, bringing justice and an easing of mind to Hannah back at HQ, and saving the girlfriend’s life while keeping their bug intact. And there is yet again no strange bombing cliffhanger.
What’s my grade? I give this show a solid C+.Here’s the deal, I used to didn’t know why people said that TV wasn’t all that great and why movies and books were these phenomenal things, and that was even while I still loved all three of them. But now I understand: TV is more predictable and relies on this predictability “life is not like a box of chocolates” mentality to draw the viewer. After the past few years in which we saw some truly unique procedural ideas, this year networks fell back on the old tried and true standbys that see a lack of creativity returning to primetime. Don’t get me wrong, I see that this show has potential, especially if it finds its right audience and doesn’t get much competition from the similar CBS show Seal Team, but its very vanilla considering the other dramatic offerings on display for TV. Yes, it follows a small band of military special forces doing “God’s work” in foreign lands, but when boiled down to it, it is really nothing more than a case-a-week show where, each week, there will be clear-cut bad guys and good guys that are supposed to stop them. It’s basically almost every other cop drama ever made but with better tech and military might and ingenuity. Hell, the show is essentially Taken but with fatigues. Will it interest people who love military action? Sure. Everyone else? Eh!
I get it. This is the network’s patriotic reaction to the Midwest values that voters supposedly showed in last November’s election, but I’m not sure this appeals to Trump’s base quite like what they might like for it to. The amount of diversity on this show is astounding and judging by Trump’s “all sides” supporters, that’s not what everyone wants to see. Hell, there’s really only, like, two white people. Granted, they’re the two in charge, but still.
If the race thing and the fact that it is a ton of minorities doing the work to protect this country doesn’t bother you, then good. But unfortunately this show also doesn’t really supply that much in the way of mental stimulation or plot intrigue. It doesn’t even follow the recently most popular setup of a procedural that The Blacklist does so well by having a case a week in conjunction with an overall case that lingers throughout the season. I thought for a minute that the bomb at the end of the first episode might trigger something great and amazing, maybe a revenge plot thrown into the military actions or something different than what the trailers looked like, but nope. Nothing. Again, that final scene was so bizarre because it not only happened in a way that made it feel like a bold cliffhanger that suggested maybe they would kill one of their main players already, but it was not discussed in any great detail the next episode. Who did it? Why? How’d they know Dalton and his team were there? Was this a retaliation for killing the terrorist guy or just random? All good questions that have no answers. The only answer given is the worst one that we don’t want to hear as an audience: (paraphrased) “oh, we’re not gonna pursue revenge because that’s not our job. Our job is to follow orders from HQ. Their job is to figure out what happened.” And you’re all like, “What? Really? Dude, you’re gonna actually play goody two shoes. That’s no fun.” Sure, it may be closer to real life, but it’s also not that entertaining to not even see the characters give a single damn about it.
But I think the worst failing of the show is that it is almost character-less in its writing. OK, shameless plug here, if you read even one episode, the military episode of my episodic serial novel Extraordinary (that episode is titled “Fatigues” and is available on Amazon. Click “Extraordinary” at the end of this article), by the time you’ve finished the one episode, you should have a great understanding of exactly who the characters are or at least one aspect of their lives. I understand that this series is different because it has to do the case-a-week thing so it has to fit in a case, but my Extraordinary episodes are there to mimic the quick 60-minute format of drama shows. You should know something about these characters at the end of an hour.
Take for instance our leader Dalton. If you’ve seen the first three episodes, what do you know about him? How long has he been serving? When did he join the military? Why? Does he have a wife, spouse or girlfriend back stateside? Why did he become special forces? I bet that if you’ve been watching the episodes, you could only maybe answer half of those questions, if any. What’s sad is that the same goes for just about every other character on the show. You could ask the same about Patricia, Preach, Amir, Jaz or that other guy on the ground team. And yes while we know that Noah was top of his class and Hannah was “affected” by her in-field work, we still know little about their personalities and who they are outside of work. The action is great but the characters are all sort of robots, which, frankly gets tiring to watch after a while, especially when you know they are almost always going to win.
Should you be watching? Eh! Listen, if you like military-themed entertainment and are all about soldiers fighting against evil and stomping out the bad guys, then sure, this might be the show for you. But just know that this is definitely no American Sniper, no Quantico, no Homeland, no Tyrant, no any Middle Eastern, military or covert operations show that others have thought was really good. This show is closer to something that you probably can miss a few episodes of in a row because your schedule gets busy, and you won’t really miss much in the way of plot, nor will you feel bad for having missed it. Frankly, I’m not sure that this is even as good as the other military show Seal Team. Unfortunately, because I haven’t watched Seal Team yet, I can’t do a comparison of the two shows in this review so I can’t tell you which is better (they look like a carbon copy of each other). Look for a comparison in my Seal Team review in a few days. The Brave airs at 10pm on NBC Mondays.
What do you think? Have you heard of The Brave? If not, do you think you will check it out now? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Do you like it? Where do you think the show can improve? And who is your favorite character? And what did you think of the first episode’s bomb scene? Should they have done something cool with that plotwise or was it good the way it was? Let me know in the comments below.
Check out my 5-star comedy novel,
Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend
. #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.Until next time, “Why do you young people always think you’re so special? Huh? Well? You think you’re special?” ‘Well, I am in special ops so...”
P.S. Did I get some stuff incorrect on purpose in this review/recap? Yes, just to show how little this show entertained me. I didn’t care about the details in it because I was bored. I’ll try to come up with a better sign-off next time.
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The Doctor Is... No, I’m Not Going To Say He’s In #TheGoodDoctor #ABC #3weekroundup #premiereweek #review #recap
The Doctor Is... No, I’m Not Going To Say He’s In #TheGoodDoctor #ABC #3weekroundup #premiereweek #review #recap
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Get ready for yet another three-week roundup review. I’m your writer, Michael Stephenson, and I’m here to bring you the latest on another new fall show that the network execs are praying that you’ll absolutely love. But will this show be a godsend or is it in need of some surgical repair? Let’s dive in together to find out.
The Good Doctor #TheGoodDoctor is an ABC show that stars Freddie Highmore as the titular character named Dr. Shawn Murphy who is special because he suffers from autism but also has an acute form of savant syndrome. In other words, he’s a socially awkward medical genius who thinks like a computer and acts like one, too. While we are going to forego the comparisons to Doogie Howser (yes, though Highmore is 25 he still looks like a teenager), we are going to make the comparison between this series and one of the other shows that apparently one of the executive producers of this show worked on: House, MD. On that show we had a jerk of a doctor who was also a genius at diagnosing a patient’s ailment. While there we got a man on the late-stages decline of his career, here we get a young man on the precipice of his career. An intern in a teaching hospital, Shawn is there to join the surgical team. But problems start before he even arrives.
Before he gets to the hospital he goes to the airport where he witnesses an accident in which a child is injured by shattered falling glass. Though there’s already a doctor tending to the boy, he comes over and tells the man how he is saving the boy’s life incorrectly and shows him the correct way. The guy gets annoyed and is all, “Hey, kid, who are you!” And he’s like, “Hello, I am Dr. Shawn Murphy.”
Meanwhile, as he is busy saving a life, a few miles out is the hospital where he is set to start his last part of the hiring interview later that day. The interview is really just a formality as the hospital president has already hired him but he must make his argument for why Shawn belongs on the surgical team considering his disability. His proponent: President Dr. Aaron Glassman. As we learn, Glassman knew Shawn growing up. He met him one night when Shawn and his younger brother came to his practice asking if he could heal Shawn’s dead bunny. Now, Glassman sees the potential in making Shawn a doctor there and has to fight with his head of surgery, and the board of directors to make this happen.
Meanwhile, as Glassman fights, Shawn saves. He figures that the boy needs surgery and has a tiny shard of glass lodged somewhere in his bloodstream that quickly makes its way to his heart. Clearly that’s not beneficial. He rides along in the ambulance with the boy and the boy’s parents and is repeatedly told even by the EMT that he’s imagining something that the heart monitor isn’t showing. Of course he’s right but that’s not until the end of the show.
Anyway, we get to the hospital where we meet the different doctors Shawn will be working with. We have Claire Browne who is this very beautiful black girl who seems to be the caring motherly type that will be the one to befriend Shawn first. Her immediate connection with him is due to her paralleled idealization as being of lower rank in the hospital. She is both black and a woman surgeon working under mostly males; Shawn, while a white guy, is both very young and autistic and seems more like he should be receiving treatment from the doctors rather than giving it. You see how that works? Don’t get me wrong because this is a very diverse show, but I have noticed how it is the go-to for writers to make the woman the one who is the most open with someone and usually it’s the black woman. Anyway, she listens to something he said to her without even fully knowing who he is. He says that they should get some secondary test on the kid before operating and she suggests that to her superior.
Dr. MelendezHer superior is Dr. Neil Melendez, an arrogant Latino showboat surgeon who is the lead attending behind the chief of surgery Dr. Marcus Andrews, a black guy. These two, in the first three episodes, seem to butt heads with everybody including each other. Melendez runs a team of surgeons under his tutelage and thinks that he is God’s gift to triple by-passes. Andrews is equally talented but older and angling himself for the job of hospital president as soon as the old white guy either retires or is pushed out by the board. He goes the hardest against this idea of bringing Shawn, an autistic surgeon, into the hospital, throwing out things like “the liability” and “he can barely communicate” as defenders against the idea. He’s not wrong, just not fully right.
Under Melendez (outside of the white woman who has yet to make a meaningful impact save for her horizontal dances with the hot-shot surgeon) is Dr. Jared Kalu. Kalu and Browne are on the same level, still learning and still sniping each other to take credit for ideas and get the hottest surgeries in the hospital. They’re also sleeping together. Let me point out that at this point, the specialties (if any) of each surgeon is unclear. That includes the specialty of Melendez who has been prepping surgeries for livers and cutting open heads. I can only assume that everyone is in general surgery at this point. Anyway, Kalu is a brown-noser (and that’s not just because he is another minority character) who is sleeping with his fellow surgeon but not in a serious capacity. We’re unclear of his motives just yet but things are still taking shape.
Meanwhile, the show unfolds in a back and forth of chaos and tranquility for Shawn. While Shawn is barred from entering the surgical gallery because the guards don’t believe that he works at the hospital and the surgeons there were hostile to this crazy man suggesting that they aren’t doing their job properly, he flashes back to his childhood. That bunny that I mentioned earlier got broken and dead because his abusive father grabbed it and threw it against the wall in a scene that I just knew would trigger PETA’s angry-letter-writing department. Shawn’s brother, a kind soul, then takes his brother and the bunny to a small clinic where they meet Glassman. Glassman can tell that there is something wrong with the young Shawn but doesn’t press the issue. He does, however, pay close attention to Shawn’s brother’s plan to run away and never return to their abusive home again. Glassman extends a helping hand that sees him serve as the number the boys can call if ever in serious need. In some rather heavy foreshadowing we not only get the sense that Glassman will somehow end up raising Shawn as his own, but that something bad will happen to Shawn’s brother.
And something bad does happen. Shawn and his brother link up with a group of other Never-Neverland street boys and run to play in an old abandoned garage near the junkyard they found to live in. They manage to climb onto a bus or train car and Shawn’s brother slips off and dies as Shawn watches, his head smashed just like the bunny’s.
Back to now and we finally see that not only does the hospital let him in, but Shawn was right about there being extra glass in the boy’s heart that had got there from his veins. That and the fact that a video of him saving the boy’s life in the airport goes viral helps the board to allow Glassman to hire the boy. He also stakes his own career on Shawn and has him explain why he wants to be a doctor—to stop all the dying in front of him and start saving lives. But he’s still got Sauron’s eye on him as both Melendez and Andrew are looking to get him out and don’t think he belongs. Melendez has him on suction duty, making sure he won’t touch a blade.
Episode two sees Shawn diving into some grunt work around the hospital. Everyone, including Melendez and Shawn himself thinks that he needs to improve his bedside manners, but all the grunt work is also a punishment for daring to even exist on Melendez’s team. While doing it, he learns that he doesn’t need to order expensive tests for everything that he thinks maybe could be wrong with someone. Most people are upset that they get this kid who doesn’t seem confident in anything he’s saying and is scaring them.
Meanwhile, while the others are preparing to do a big surgery, Shawn discovers that a little girl who came in for a stomach ache actually has a genetic disorder in which her organs turn and twist around each other which can cause cut-offs in circulation, disruptions in the digestive system and even death. Committed to his job, he oversteps the line and goes to the little girl’s house to talk to the parents. Why to her house? See, earlier in the day, after ordering all the expensive tests, Shawn was told by Melendez to follow the orders of an older nurse. She tells him to dismiss pretty much every patient because none of it is serious. Well, the girl is serious and she was wrong. The parents go back to the girl’s room and find her passed out, unable to awake. Had he not come, she would’ve been dead by the morning.
They rush back to the hospital and Murphy is ready to do the surgery, scalpel in hand, when Melendez swoops in to take it over and put him back on suction duty. Not only does Melendez get to push him aside and do the surgery when he also thought the little girl’s stomach ache was nothing, but he also doesn’t know that on the earlier surgery he performed to save a woman’s life, the idea he utilized (cut out a healthy kidney to properly get to a cancerous tumor) came from Shawn. Kalu took credit for the idea and Browne said nothing. They had a talk about how cutthroat the surgical department is and blah, blah, blah.
Episode three saw the first new surgical twist on a medical show that I’ve seen in a very long time. Granted, I haven’t been keeping up with too many surgical shows in recent years, but I just hadn’t seen this twist. Anyway, the twist was that Shawn and Claire had to go on a liver pickup for a liver transplant. While in route back to the hospital, they had to stop on the side of the road to do surgery just on the liver because it had a bloodclot in it. This, after the liver had been removed prematurely and after their helicopter transport couldn’t take off into the fog. I can’t ever remember seeing doctors do surgery on an ex-body organ. Usually they are taking organs out and just throwing them on ice or in clean baths or something, not doing surgery on them.
Anyway, as they are trying to save the liver by keeping it cold in the ice box, back at the hospital the guy who is supposed to get it tests positive for alcohol in his blood when he was supposed to be sober for six months. In the end, he doesn’t get the liver and goes home to die because the liver damage is even worse than before. Also, a wealthy donor is back in the hospital to get the skin on his jaw repaired as part of the post-op of another surgery. It’s important that his surgery go well, so the chief of surgery is going to do it himself. The president of the hospital orders that he have Melendez as his second in the surgery just in case and he throws a fit, until the president tells him to stop thinking like a surgeon and think like the president of a hospital.
Claire and ShawnIn the end, the surgery for the donor goes well and Claire discovers that Shawn doesn’t like questions because it reminds him of the time just after his brother died and the cops kept asking him why he didn’t want to go back to his parents. They are bonding.
What’s my grade? I give this a B+ verging on an A-. This series, for those that don’t know, is based on a South Korean show. Here, I like how the characters relate to each other. We have some clearly defined character patterns and it looks like there could be some really interesting medical mysteries. This series, though coming from the guys behind House, actually reminds me heavily of another medical show that came on ABC’s spring schedule around four years ago (I know because that’s how long How to get Away with Murder came on and the black girl in that was also on this show) called Black Box starring Kelly Reilly. In it, she was a whiz doctor with mental problems that made her see medicine differently. Her problem was depression and I believe some form of schizophrenia. In any case, just like on The Good Doctor, she could see surgical procedures, see what was wrong with someone in her imagination. Here, Shawn imagines dissections of organs and can take the body apart and put it back together in his head, all of which we see in neat animations similar to on the defunct show Limitless. This adds an extra cool layer to the show because it lets us into the mind of a character that has trouble communicating. So while he isn’t able to tell us everything he’s feeling or thinking like on Grey’s Anatomy, he still lets us know how he perceives the world.
I also like the lightheartedness of the show. It’s good-natured, not all about sex or love or bed-hopping, and filled with hope and an American can-do attitude. While it comes on at ten o’clock and I’m sure it might get more racy or gory over time, this could easily be a nine o’clock family-time show. In fact, putting my network scheduling exec hat on, I’d probably move this show to Sundays to fill some of the dead air that currently is ABC Sunday nights, which features Toy Box and Shark Tank—two shows that don’t belong on Sundays.
The one thing wrong with the show so far is the lack of details. Again, while all the characters are good, there is not much depth to any of them at the moment. You don’t get a sense of who they are and why they are doing the things they do. The mystery of what all happened between the president and Shawn in his childhood is not really that compelling, the doctors just seem to do surgeries at random, and we don’t have the clearly defined lines that we did with the Grey’s Anatomy characters from their first three episodes. For instance, is Kalu a Cristine—someone driven above and beyond all to be the best surgeon to possibly ever live and certainly the best in the hospital—or is he just a jerk. Does Melendez want to be known as a world-best surgeon like Dr. Shepherd? And outside of being the one who Shawn will identify with after the president is gone, what role does Claire play? Who is she? What’s her background? Why is she a doctor?
Still, I think that if given enough time over the course of a season, these flaws should iron out. Should you be watching? Yes. Freddie Highmore as Shawn is fairly brilliant. This is far different than his last turn as Norman Bates in Bates Motel. His reputation for playing quirky, off-beat characters is growing on me. I also like the actress playing Claire, Antonia Thomas. Is she attractive, yes, but she also exudes a certain intellectual innocence that calls back to the early days of Noah Wiley on ER. You get the feeling that she knows a lot but still likes to listen. If this show were to stay on as long as Grey’s Anatomy, I wouldn’t be surprised if she somehow ended up as the chief of surgery one day similar to how Bailey got there. She is both caring and determined—a great example of modern femininity. The penis-wagging of Melendez and Andrews might get on your nerves, but I think it will tone down through the season as Shawn continues to prove himself. In the end, the Good Doctor is a good show that has potential to be great with a slight tightening of the writing reigns and deeper personal stories for all of the characters. The Good Doctor airs on Monday nights at 10pm on ABC.
What do you think? Have you heard of The Good Doctor? If you haven’t, do you think you’ll check it out now? If you have, have you seen it? Did you find the show engrossing? What would you like to see the show improve going forward? Who is the most intriguing character? Do you think Claire will keep sleeping with Kula? And do you think the president actually raised Shawn or no? Let me know in the comments below.
Check out my 5-star comedy novel,
Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend
. #AhStalkingIf you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.
Until next time, “Is there a doctor in the house?” ‘Yes, but the house burned down. Plus, he wasn’t that good of a doctor anyway.’
P.S. Don’t you love meta TV show references? That’s for all you House, MD fans out there. Yeah, you don’t have to miss that show any longer. I think it has a worthy heir here. I’ll think of a better sign-off next time.
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All pictures courtesy of ABC
Get ready for yet another three-week roundup review. I’m your writer, Michael Stephenson, and I’m here to bring you the latest on another new fall show that the network execs are praying that you’ll absolutely love. But will this show be a godsend or is it in need of some surgical repair? Let’s dive in together to find out.
The Good Doctor #TheGoodDoctor is an ABC show that stars Freddie Highmore as the titular character named Dr. Shawn Murphy who is special because he suffers from autism but also has an acute form of savant syndrome. In other words, he’s a socially awkward medical genius who thinks like a computer and acts like one, too. While we are going to forego the comparisons to Doogie Howser (yes, though Highmore is 25 he still looks like a teenager), we are going to make the comparison between this series and one of the other shows that apparently one of the executive producers of this show worked on: House, MD. On that show we had a jerk of a doctor who was also a genius at diagnosing a patient’s ailment. While there we got a man on the late-stages decline of his career, here we get a young man on the precipice of his career. An intern in a teaching hospital, Shawn is there to join the surgical team. But problems start before he even arrives.
Before he gets to the hospital he goes to the airport where he witnesses an accident in which a child is injured by shattered falling glass. Though there’s already a doctor tending to the boy, he comes over and tells the man how he is saving the boy’s life incorrectly and shows him the correct way. The guy gets annoyed and is all, “Hey, kid, who are you!” And he’s like, “Hello, I am Dr. Shawn Murphy.” Meanwhile, as he is busy saving a life, a few miles out is the hospital where he is set to start his last part of the hiring interview later that day. The interview is really just a formality as the hospital president has already hired him but he must make his argument for why Shawn belongs on the surgical team considering his disability. His proponent: President Dr. Aaron Glassman. As we learn, Glassman knew Shawn growing up. He met him one night when Shawn and his younger brother came to his practice asking if he could heal Shawn’s dead bunny. Now, Glassman sees the potential in making Shawn a doctor there and has to fight with his head of surgery, and the board of directors to make this happen.
Meanwhile, as Glassman fights, Shawn saves. He figures that the boy needs surgery and has a tiny shard of glass lodged somewhere in his bloodstream that quickly makes its way to his heart. Clearly that’s not beneficial. He rides along in the ambulance with the boy and the boy’s parents and is repeatedly told even by the EMT that he’s imagining something that the heart monitor isn’t showing. Of course he’s right but that’s not until the end of the show.
Anyway, we get to the hospital where we meet the different doctors Shawn will be working with. We have Claire Browne who is this very beautiful black girl who seems to be the caring motherly type that will be the one to befriend Shawn first. Her immediate connection with him is due to her paralleled idealization as being of lower rank in the hospital. She is both black and a woman surgeon working under mostly males; Shawn, while a white guy, is both very young and autistic and seems more like he should be receiving treatment from the doctors rather than giving it. You see how that works? Don’t get me wrong because this is a very diverse show, but I have noticed how it is the go-to for writers to make the woman the one who is the most open with someone and usually it’s the black woman. Anyway, she listens to something he said to her without even fully knowing who he is. He says that they should get some secondary test on the kid before operating and she suggests that to her superior.
Dr. MelendezHer superior is Dr. Neil Melendez, an arrogant Latino showboat surgeon who is the lead attending behind the chief of surgery Dr. Marcus Andrews, a black guy. These two, in the first three episodes, seem to butt heads with everybody including each other. Melendez runs a team of surgeons under his tutelage and thinks that he is God’s gift to triple by-passes. Andrews is equally talented but older and angling himself for the job of hospital president as soon as the old white guy either retires or is pushed out by the board. He goes the hardest against this idea of bringing Shawn, an autistic surgeon, into the hospital, throwing out things like “the liability” and “he can barely communicate” as defenders against the idea. He’s not wrong, just not fully right. Under Melendez (outside of the white woman who has yet to make a meaningful impact save for her horizontal dances with the hot-shot surgeon) is Dr. Jared Kalu. Kalu and Browne are on the same level, still learning and still sniping each other to take credit for ideas and get the hottest surgeries in the hospital. They’re also sleeping together. Let me point out that at this point, the specialties (if any) of each surgeon is unclear. That includes the specialty of Melendez who has been prepping surgeries for livers and cutting open heads. I can only assume that everyone is in general surgery at this point. Anyway, Kalu is a brown-noser (and that’s not just because he is another minority character) who is sleeping with his fellow surgeon but not in a serious capacity. We’re unclear of his motives just yet but things are still taking shape.
Meanwhile, the show unfolds in a back and forth of chaos and tranquility for Shawn. While Shawn is barred from entering the surgical gallery because the guards don’t believe that he works at the hospital and the surgeons there were hostile to this crazy man suggesting that they aren’t doing their job properly, he flashes back to his childhood. That bunny that I mentioned earlier got broken and dead because his abusive father grabbed it and threw it against the wall in a scene that I just knew would trigger PETA’s angry-letter-writing department. Shawn’s brother, a kind soul, then takes his brother and the bunny to a small clinic where they meet Glassman. Glassman can tell that there is something wrong with the young Shawn but doesn’t press the issue. He does, however, pay close attention to Shawn’s brother’s plan to run away and never return to their abusive home again. Glassman extends a helping hand that sees him serve as the number the boys can call if ever in serious need. In some rather heavy foreshadowing we not only get the sense that Glassman will somehow end up raising Shawn as his own, but that something bad will happen to Shawn’s brother.
And something bad does happen. Shawn and his brother link up with a group of other Never-Neverland street boys and run to play in an old abandoned garage near the junkyard they found to live in. They manage to climb onto a bus or train car and Shawn’s brother slips off and dies as Shawn watches, his head smashed just like the bunny’s.
Back to now and we finally see that not only does the hospital let him in, but Shawn was right about there being extra glass in the boy’s heart that had got there from his veins. That and the fact that a video of him saving the boy’s life in the airport goes viral helps the board to allow Glassman to hire the boy. He also stakes his own career on Shawn and has him explain why he wants to be a doctor—to stop all the dying in front of him and start saving lives. But he’s still got Sauron’s eye on him as both Melendez and Andrew are looking to get him out and don’t think he belongs. Melendez has him on suction duty, making sure he won’t touch a blade.
Episode two sees Shawn diving into some grunt work around the hospital. Everyone, including Melendez and Shawn himself thinks that he needs to improve his bedside manners, but all the grunt work is also a punishment for daring to even exist on Melendez’s team. While doing it, he learns that he doesn’t need to order expensive tests for everything that he thinks maybe could be wrong with someone. Most people are upset that they get this kid who doesn’t seem confident in anything he’s saying and is scaring them.
Meanwhile, while the others are preparing to do a big surgery, Shawn discovers that a little girl who came in for a stomach ache actually has a genetic disorder in which her organs turn and twist around each other which can cause cut-offs in circulation, disruptions in the digestive system and even death. Committed to his job, he oversteps the line and goes to the little girl’s house to talk to the parents. Why to her house? See, earlier in the day, after ordering all the expensive tests, Shawn was told by Melendez to follow the orders of an older nurse. She tells him to dismiss pretty much every patient because none of it is serious. Well, the girl is serious and she was wrong. The parents go back to the girl’s room and find her passed out, unable to awake. Had he not come, she would’ve been dead by the morning.
They rush back to the hospital and Murphy is ready to do the surgery, scalpel in hand, when Melendez swoops in to take it over and put him back on suction duty. Not only does Melendez get to push him aside and do the surgery when he also thought the little girl’s stomach ache was nothing, but he also doesn’t know that on the earlier surgery he performed to save a woman’s life, the idea he utilized (cut out a healthy kidney to properly get to a cancerous tumor) came from Shawn. Kalu took credit for the idea and Browne said nothing. They had a talk about how cutthroat the surgical department is and blah, blah, blah.
Episode three saw the first new surgical twist on a medical show that I’ve seen in a very long time. Granted, I haven’t been keeping up with too many surgical shows in recent years, but I just hadn’t seen this twist. Anyway, the twist was that Shawn and Claire had to go on a liver pickup for a liver transplant. While in route back to the hospital, they had to stop on the side of the road to do surgery just on the liver because it had a bloodclot in it. This, after the liver had been removed prematurely and after their helicopter transport couldn’t take off into the fog. I can’t ever remember seeing doctors do surgery on an ex-body organ. Usually they are taking organs out and just throwing them on ice or in clean baths or something, not doing surgery on them.
Anyway, as they are trying to save the liver by keeping it cold in the ice box, back at the hospital the guy who is supposed to get it tests positive for alcohol in his blood when he was supposed to be sober for six months. In the end, he doesn’t get the liver and goes home to die because the liver damage is even worse than before. Also, a wealthy donor is back in the hospital to get the skin on his jaw repaired as part of the post-op of another surgery. It’s important that his surgery go well, so the chief of surgery is going to do it himself. The president of the hospital orders that he have Melendez as his second in the surgery just in case and he throws a fit, until the president tells him to stop thinking like a surgeon and think like the president of a hospital.
Claire and ShawnIn the end, the surgery for the donor goes well and Claire discovers that Shawn doesn’t like questions because it reminds him of the time just after his brother died and the cops kept asking him why he didn’t want to go back to his parents. They are bonding. What’s my grade? I give this a B+ verging on an A-. This series, for those that don’t know, is based on a South Korean show. Here, I like how the characters relate to each other. We have some clearly defined character patterns and it looks like there could be some really interesting medical mysteries. This series, though coming from the guys behind House, actually reminds me heavily of another medical show that came on ABC’s spring schedule around four years ago (I know because that’s how long How to get Away with Murder came on and the black girl in that was also on this show) called Black Box starring Kelly Reilly. In it, she was a whiz doctor with mental problems that made her see medicine differently. Her problem was depression and I believe some form of schizophrenia. In any case, just like on The Good Doctor, she could see surgical procedures, see what was wrong with someone in her imagination. Here, Shawn imagines dissections of organs and can take the body apart and put it back together in his head, all of which we see in neat animations similar to on the defunct show Limitless. This adds an extra cool layer to the show because it lets us into the mind of a character that has trouble communicating. So while he isn’t able to tell us everything he’s feeling or thinking like on Grey’s Anatomy, he still lets us know how he perceives the world.
I also like the lightheartedness of the show. It’s good-natured, not all about sex or love or bed-hopping, and filled with hope and an American can-do attitude. While it comes on at ten o’clock and I’m sure it might get more racy or gory over time, this could easily be a nine o’clock family-time show. In fact, putting my network scheduling exec hat on, I’d probably move this show to Sundays to fill some of the dead air that currently is ABC Sunday nights, which features Toy Box and Shark Tank—two shows that don’t belong on Sundays.
The one thing wrong with the show so far is the lack of details. Again, while all the characters are good, there is not much depth to any of them at the moment. You don’t get a sense of who they are and why they are doing the things they do. The mystery of what all happened between the president and Shawn in his childhood is not really that compelling, the doctors just seem to do surgeries at random, and we don’t have the clearly defined lines that we did with the Grey’s Anatomy characters from their first three episodes. For instance, is Kalu a Cristine—someone driven above and beyond all to be the best surgeon to possibly ever live and certainly the best in the hospital—or is he just a jerk. Does Melendez want to be known as a world-best surgeon like Dr. Shepherd? And outside of being the one who Shawn will identify with after the president is gone, what role does Claire play? Who is she? What’s her background? Why is she a doctor?
Still, I think that if given enough time over the course of a season, these flaws should iron out. Should you be watching? Yes. Freddie Highmore as Shawn is fairly brilliant. This is far different than his last turn as Norman Bates in Bates Motel. His reputation for playing quirky, off-beat characters is growing on me. I also like the actress playing Claire, Antonia Thomas. Is she attractive, yes, but she also exudes a certain intellectual innocence that calls back to the early days of Noah Wiley on ER. You get the feeling that she knows a lot but still likes to listen. If this show were to stay on as long as Grey’s Anatomy, I wouldn’t be surprised if she somehow ended up as the chief of surgery one day similar to how Bailey got there. She is both caring and determined—a great example of modern femininity. The penis-wagging of Melendez and Andrews might get on your nerves, but I think it will tone down through the season as Shawn continues to prove himself. In the end, the Good Doctor is a good show that has potential to be great with a slight tightening of the writing reigns and deeper personal stories for all of the characters. The Good Doctor airs on Monday nights at 10pm on ABC.
What do you think? Have you heard of The Good Doctor? If you haven’t, do you think you’ll check it out now? If you have, have you seen it? Did you find the show engrossing? What would you like to see the show improve going forward? Who is the most intriguing character? Do you think Claire will keep sleeping with Kula? And do you think the president actually raised Shawn or no? Let me know in the comments below.
Check out my 5-star comedy novel,
Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend
. #AhStalkingIf you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.Until next time, “Is there a doctor in the house?” ‘Yes, but the house burned down. Plus, he wasn’t that good of a doctor anyway.’
P.S. Don’t you love meta TV show references? That’s for all you House, MD fans out there. Yeah, you don’t have to miss that show any longer. I think it has a worthy heir here. I’ll think of a better sign-off next time.
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October 29, 2017
Didn’t We Just Prove How Stupid People Are? #WisdomOfTheCrowd #CBS #3weekroundup #review #recap
Didn’t We Just Prove How Stupid People Are? #WisdomOfTheCrowd #CBS #3weekroundup #review #recap
All pictures courtesy of CBS
It’s funny that in this current political climate, where everyone thinks that the other guy is an idiot for voting and/or believing what he believes, a network somehow found the time to greenlight this show. Even moreso the audacity of them to keep that particular name (or to have changed it to that) is, in and of itself, proving the opposite of this show’s main thrust. So, is this show wise before its time or does its three-episode youth stumble into dumb territory? Let’s find out together.
CBS’s Wisdom of the Crowd stars Jeremy Piven as Jeffrey Tanner, a billionaire tech genius with a sudden hard-on for justice. By this point, if you’ve read this blog before or if you’ve seen some of the recent shows from last season, you will know that, above being too many geniuses on TV, there are also suddenly too many billionaires on TV that promise to magically solve all of society’s problems. But I don’t want to drift into the critique part just yet, so let’s keep with the plot. Piven’s Tanner decided to give up his billion-dollar company to start a new one, a non-profit crime-solving tech firm he calls Sophe. The app to go with the lab is inspired by (but named after) his late daughter Mia who was murdered precisely one year before the show starts. The funny thing: a man was already arrested and convicted for her murder. But Tanner thinks that this man is innocent and that they got the wrong guy. So, he makes a crazy announcement as soon as Sophe goes online. He will pay someone 100 million dollars if they can find the real culprit.
With Tanner’s national press conference about selling his company and starting a new one making waves, a few people pop back into Tanner’s life. First we have Tanner’s politician ex-wife Alex Hale played by Monica Potter. She pops up for a few minutes to reminisce about old times and how our hero was a terrible husband but good father. We also get Mike Leigh who seems to be Tanner’s righthand guy. He is the suit that is always worried about his boss for some reason. Next we have Sara Morton who is not only Tanner’s chief tech officer in his new Sophe company (and presumably in the other company, too) but is also his secret girlfriend/booty call. I say booty call because they don’t seem to live together (she comes to his place, looks into his fridge and is surprised to find no food) and the relationship looks very new.
Tanner and Detective TommyAnd finally, the most important person of all is Detective Tommy Cavanaugh played by Richard T. Jones. The detective is the one who originally worked on Mia’s case along with his partner. As is usual in these shows, he is there to tell the billionaire that he can’t act like an arrogant know-it-all and there’s rules and laws and yadda, yadda, yadda, some stuff about police work. The detective wants back in on the case but is also told by his superiors that he needs to go in order to keep tabs on Tanner, and the billionaire wants his insight. And the detecting begins.
Tanner originally announced the app as something that could help to revolutionize all crime solving, but freaks when another case comes in to distract his team from solving Mia’s murder and getting this innocent man out of prison. So Tanner decides to release some footage of a club/store from the night of the murder. Apparently, his daughter was coming out of some place but there was evidence that a man was stalking the sidewalk outside. The original recording was never used in court but it showed not just the convicted man outside but some other guy, too. Someone recognizes the clip, then hacks the program to show the full video. As it turns out, the video was cutting off after 30 seconds because of the app it was on had strict time guidelines similar to what Vine used to have.
The hacker reveals a video that shows a car from a local rideshare zooming away. Tanner hires the hacker who helps to figure out that the rideshare picked up a few women who had been purportedly raped or sexually assaulted. As far as Mia... So they discover that the rideshare has been frequenting certain bars and getting away with assaulting these women. They figure that the same driver has a connection with someone working in the various bars to get the girls drugged, drunk and easily molested. They reverse-hack the bartender’s cellphone GPS of the guy who had tended at all of the bars where the rapes had happened.
After the detectives talk to him to spook him, they follow him to a park where he meets with the other rapist guy. Using the Sophe app, they get one of the users to use their phone as a listening device so that the volunteer-recorded conversation can be used legally in court. They lose one of the men in a chase and start tracking the other man through crowd-sourcing. But with his picture on everyone’s phone, regular citizens start stalking him like he’s Jim Carrey in The Truman Show. And this is partially why so many people balk at the idea behind this show working. Though they have caught a rapist that may or may not have been the guy, this doesn’t mean that the city nor state will reopen Mia’s case.
Episode two sees Tanner and Detective Tommy taking on yet another case together, despite Tommy’s objection to this whole Sophe thing. While at the police station to talk more about Mia Tanner’s case and a new photo that was sent in by one of the Sophe users, Tanner sees a black couple in turmoil over their missing son. A teenager, the boy has been missing for a day and they are certain that something bad has happened. Naturally, Tanner sees a little of himself in the couple as he can remember sitting in the same interview room a year prior and hearing about how his daughter was murdered. Before the cops and parents know, Tanner sends out a BOLO for the boy and his users point out that there is a FitBit on his wrist that has a GPS. Before his team can, some random man hacks the GPS and follows it to a trashcan where they find a bloody jacket that the kid was wearing. People are doing cop work quicker than the cops.
Meanwhile, Tanner is still working on his daughter’s case while the team is on the kid’s case. Tanner goes to his daughter’s friend who tells him about some sports shop she went to. He also is trying to figure out this picture in which she is seen talking (read: arguing) with a white nationalist months prior to her death.
The detectives discover that the missing kid was a computer coder/hacker who had stolen the answers to various tests and posted them online in a coded video game, selling them online for real money. As it turns out, this kid was kind of bad. He would skip school to go drinking with his buddies and cheated on his tests so he could eventually get into an ivy league college. He even brags about throwing off the curve in the class’ grade. For this, another student got mad at him and accidentally pushed him off a ridge and down into a ravine out in the desert somewhere. But the kid survived the tumble and the group uses base theorem among their Sophe users to figure out his most probable location. They find him barely alive after some back and forth with the search team police captain. It ends with Detective Tommy sending Tanner a picture of a guy who could have been the white supremacist his daughter was talking to in the picture.
Episode three sees Tanner’s team trying to link Mia’s murder with any other crimes. While they find nothing on Mia, they do find three murders that are supposedly over 80% connected. Detective Tommy gives them a non-released detail on one of the cases and the number balloons from three to 14. Do they have a serial killer on their hands? The crimes are spread over eight jurisdictions and 11 years, so what the heck is going on?
The detectives first go to an Asian woman’s parents’ house to ask about her murder. That leads them to another one of the guys that was killed. Before he died, he knew the victim and told her parents that he might have known who killed her. So they stumble around a little as the machine keeps adding more and more crimes that fit into the same profile as the first three. And they finally get to a crime where the victim lived. The detectives go to visit the victim who managed to escape what she thought would be a rape and/or murder. And she ran home to report the crime.
While the detectives and the team are focused on those aggregated potential serial killer crimes, Tanner and the convicted guy in prison are still focused on figuring out who the real killer is. The convicted guy remembers a strange dream while Tanner gets some kind of homemade doll that Mia made while volunteering at some nursing care place. This leads him to the guy in the picture with his daughter who lives as a hermit way out in the woods. He’s fled due to some legal matters and having bill collectors after him for money. But Tanner also finds out that his daughter wasn’t a volunteer at this sobriety house place, but a patient who checked herself in due to depression.
Back to the current case, the algorithm noting the connections finally spits out info that all of the murders took place in, near, or around a construction site, which has changed the landscape of the city. A little more sleuthing spits out that each site used the same sanitation (port-a-potty) services, so they take a trip to that company. As it turns out, one of the workers at that potty place was the one who did it. A serial killer, he collected shoes and wondered what took them so long to catch him. At the end, while Tanner struggles to deal with the fact that he might not ever find the man who killed his daughter, the guy convicted for her murder gets stabbed in prison and left to die.
What’s my grade? I give it a C+. Is it original? No, not really. This concept has been done in recent years on a myriad of different shows. The basic setup is that billionaire experiences something personally traumatic, billionaire comes into an industry where he can save lives, billionaire steps on the toes of the old guard in said industry, billionaire proves that he is right about the new changes because he is smarter and richer than everybody else in the room and billionaire is humbled out of some of his arrogance with just one case that proves that technology doesn’t make him a god. Both APB and Pure Genius tried this concept last year and it didn’t work, so I don’ especially expect for it to work this time around. The shows are great because they do introduce us to some new technologies that you probably wouldn’t know about even if you are a techie (there’s just so much stuff to keep up with that either becomes a flash in the pan or sticks and stays for a while). But unfortunately most of these shows take the concept and are unable to provide any real answers or solutions to the current problems we have. Wisdom of the crowd falls into the same rut.
That rut is quite evident and speaks to the very nature of man and of the internet as we know it: people are simply not as good as we all might want to think, despite how optimistic we are about humanity. People don’t listen, can be overly aggressive, quickly matriculate a mob mentality and are quick to judge even though the old Biblical saying “Judge not lest ye be judged” is on the tip of the tongue of every religious, atheistic and agnostic person from here to the Buddhist mountains in China. But worst of all is that people lie and for a smorgasbord of different reasons. Some people lie because they don’t want to hurt the feelings of others. Some lie because they just don’t want to tell the truth or incriminate themselves. And some people lie because they want to “be part of something bigger than themselves” as the show sickeningly and incessantly reminds you. These are the people who call tip-lines in real life and give false tips to try to help find a killer or a missing person, if only to feel important for a brief moment. Hardly trying to be a cynic, but it would seem most likely that these types of people would be the ones downloading and using this app the most.
The whole idea, even from the outset, feels rather dangerous and stupid, but when thinking about it more deeply, rings of a superficiality that posits that there are more good people than bad people when there are really more middling/indifferent people than both groups and they don’t sit around all day thinking about good or bad but what benefits them for the moment. This show takes the armchair detectives that most of cop and lawyer television has made the majority of this population into and gives them the power to play Veronica Mars without any repercussions, even when they are put into the line of danger. For instance, at the end of the first episode, when the crowd gathers around the bartender/rapist dude, they take pictures of him on the train and literally are in punching distance from him. With the thought already seeded in their minds that this man is guilty and his supposed confession, this could have turned into a volatile situation. In reality, it would have, either with the man defending himself by trying to escape (usually with a gun or other weapon) or the mob demanding street justice right there. Yet, the show asks you to suspend your disbelief in such a cheap and blatantly eye-rolling way that it almost seems laughable. We have people who are just protesting and screaming at other people in real life, yet get bottles thrown at them, guns pointed at them, punches thrown at them and even get run over by crazy people in cars, yet you’re telling me that this guy who everybody thinks committed a crime gets not a single punch thrown at him. Hell, somebody would’ve spit on him if this was reality and as nasty as that sounds, you know it’s right, reader.
The Girlfriend; She was also on Game of Thrones
And if the lack of believability in the idea wasn’t enough, the lack of true characterization was also a bit of an issue. I’d say that outside of Tanner the billionaire and his tech first lady Sara, we don’t get much building on who these people are. Basic questions like: is Detective Tommy married? Is his partner? What about the tech boys? Are they both gay and, in a very veiled way, flirting with each other? Is that why the hacker guy is always trying to cut down the uptight looking nerdy guy? Or are they each into women and have women at home? None of these questions are answered or even hinted at in the first three episodes, though I do suspect that the two tech guys are gay (they just give off that vibe to me the way they are written). Even Tanner’s financial officer is a caricature of the penny miser steadfastly pinching every penny he can to keep the company afloat as they hemorrhage money. And frankly, what little character development is given to Tanner and Sara is so flimsy that there’s hardly anything to grab hold of and claim as something that you can love about the characters. Do they seem in love? Eh! She’s a strong woman, knows what she wants and has the skills to get it. He’s a grieving dad who is her boss, is the head of a new tech firm and is trying to save the world sans-cape. And the biggest question left out there is what the heck is Tanner’s ex-wife doing on this show and is she ever going to become relevant to the actual plot. Right now, she serves as filler in-between the much more interesting stuff.
But in the end, the show does try to establish itself as a new-age crime drama/procedural in the vein of Criminal Minds, Law and Order and CSI. With the demographic for CBS skewing older, it might be able to find an audience as it does move at the proper pace for a show like this and the crimes get solved with the power of the people. However, unlike some other shows and movies, this is not necessarily a mystery so much as it is definitely a procedural. You won’t have fun trying to solve the crime with the team. You won’t get enough evidence to do that.
Should you be watching? Eh! Probably not. Frankly, I liked FOX’s APB from last season a lot better than this and it got canceled. Where as that show focused on not just the digital world, it also saw the philanthropist billionaire upgrade a precinct’s hardware tech, too, giving them more drones, better guns, better cars, better bulletproof suits and a myriad of cool gadgets, on top of the APB app which allowed people to report crimes and whatnot. While Wisdom of the Crowd expands on that app part, making it more interactive, which I’m sure a second season of APB would’ve done, Crowd never quite feels engrossing enough on a personal level. There’s something missing and I don’t know what. But if you are a fan of crime procedurals and miss the many CSI iterations, then you might want to check this out. Wisdom of the Crowd airs on CBS Sundays in the 8pm EST time slot, though check local listings for NFL interruptions and timing delays. And it can also be caught on demand and on CBS All Access.
What do you think? Have you heard of Wisdom of the Crowd? If not, do you think you’ll check it out for a few episodes? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Did you like it? What, if any, improvements do you think the show should make? Who do you think killed Mia? And do you think that maybe her mother had something to do with her murder like I do? Let me know in the comments below.
Check out my 5-star comedy novel,
Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend
. #AhStalkingIf you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.
Until next time, “Take the suit away and what are you?”‘A billionaire genius playboy philanthropist.’
P.S. Is that the direct quote? No, I don’t think so, but I didn’t have the desire to look up the specifics Tony Said. It’s funny how I wrote this script long ago about how we’d enter into an age in which billionaire after billionaire will come forth thinking that they can fix all of societies ills. I wrote it for the provocateurs. Out of the many that will come, only one or two will actually succeed and his name ain’t Trump. Anyway, I’ll think of a better, more original sign-off next time.
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All pictures courtesy of CBSIt’s funny that in this current political climate, where everyone thinks that the other guy is an idiot for voting and/or believing what he believes, a network somehow found the time to greenlight this show. Even moreso the audacity of them to keep that particular name (or to have changed it to that) is, in and of itself, proving the opposite of this show’s main thrust. So, is this show wise before its time or does its three-episode youth stumble into dumb territory? Let’s find out together.
CBS’s Wisdom of the Crowd stars Jeremy Piven as Jeffrey Tanner, a billionaire tech genius with a sudden hard-on for justice. By this point, if you’ve read this blog before or if you’ve seen some of the recent shows from last season, you will know that, above being too many geniuses on TV, there are also suddenly too many billionaires on TV that promise to magically solve all of society’s problems. But I don’t want to drift into the critique part just yet, so let’s keep with the plot. Piven’s Tanner decided to give up his billion-dollar company to start a new one, a non-profit crime-solving tech firm he calls Sophe. The app to go with the lab is inspired by (but named after) his late daughter Mia who was murdered precisely one year before the show starts. The funny thing: a man was already arrested and convicted for her murder. But Tanner thinks that this man is innocent and that they got the wrong guy. So, he makes a crazy announcement as soon as Sophe goes online. He will pay someone 100 million dollars if they can find the real culprit.
With Tanner’s national press conference about selling his company and starting a new one making waves, a few people pop back into Tanner’s life. First we have Tanner’s politician ex-wife Alex Hale played by Monica Potter. She pops up for a few minutes to reminisce about old times and how our hero was a terrible husband but good father. We also get Mike Leigh who seems to be Tanner’s righthand guy. He is the suit that is always worried about his boss for some reason. Next we have Sara Morton who is not only Tanner’s chief tech officer in his new Sophe company (and presumably in the other company, too) but is also his secret girlfriend/booty call. I say booty call because they don’t seem to live together (she comes to his place, looks into his fridge and is surprised to find no food) and the relationship looks very new.
Tanner and Detective TommyAnd finally, the most important person of all is Detective Tommy Cavanaugh played by Richard T. Jones. The detective is the one who originally worked on Mia’s case along with his partner. As is usual in these shows, he is there to tell the billionaire that he can’t act like an arrogant know-it-all and there’s rules and laws and yadda, yadda, yadda, some stuff about police work. The detective wants back in on the case but is also told by his superiors that he needs to go in order to keep tabs on Tanner, and the billionaire wants his insight. And the detecting begins. Tanner originally announced the app as something that could help to revolutionize all crime solving, but freaks when another case comes in to distract his team from solving Mia’s murder and getting this innocent man out of prison. So Tanner decides to release some footage of a club/store from the night of the murder. Apparently, his daughter was coming out of some place but there was evidence that a man was stalking the sidewalk outside. The original recording was never used in court but it showed not just the convicted man outside but some other guy, too. Someone recognizes the clip, then hacks the program to show the full video. As it turns out, the video was cutting off after 30 seconds because of the app it was on had strict time guidelines similar to what Vine used to have.
The hacker reveals a video that shows a car from a local rideshare zooming away. Tanner hires the hacker who helps to figure out that the rideshare picked up a few women who had been purportedly raped or sexually assaulted. As far as Mia... So they discover that the rideshare has been frequenting certain bars and getting away with assaulting these women. They figure that the same driver has a connection with someone working in the various bars to get the girls drugged, drunk and easily molested. They reverse-hack the bartender’s cellphone GPS of the guy who had tended at all of the bars where the rapes had happened.
After the detectives talk to him to spook him, they follow him to a park where he meets with the other rapist guy. Using the Sophe app, they get one of the users to use their phone as a listening device so that the volunteer-recorded conversation can be used legally in court. They lose one of the men in a chase and start tracking the other man through crowd-sourcing. But with his picture on everyone’s phone, regular citizens start stalking him like he’s Jim Carrey in The Truman Show. And this is partially why so many people balk at the idea behind this show working. Though they have caught a rapist that may or may not have been the guy, this doesn’t mean that the city nor state will reopen Mia’s case.
Episode two sees Tanner and Detective Tommy taking on yet another case together, despite Tommy’s objection to this whole Sophe thing. While at the police station to talk more about Mia Tanner’s case and a new photo that was sent in by one of the Sophe users, Tanner sees a black couple in turmoil over their missing son. A teenager, the boy has been missing for a day and they are certain that something bad has happened. Naturally, Tanner sees a little of himself in the couple as he can remember sitting in the same interview room a year prior and hearing about how his daughter was murdered. Before the cops and parents know, Tanner sends out a BOLO for the boy and his users point out that there is a FitBit on his wrist that has a GPS. Before his team can, some random man hacks the GPS and follows it to a trashcan where they find a bloody jacket that the kid was wearing. People are doing cop work quicker than the cops.
Meanwhile, Tanner is still working on his daughter’s case while the team is on the kid’s case. Tanner goes to his daughter’s friend who tells him about some sports shop she went to. He also is trying to figure out this picture in which she is seen talking (read: arguing) with a white nationalist months prior to her death.
The detectives discover that the missing kid was a computer coder/hacker who had stolen the answers to various tests and posted them online in a coded video game, selling them online for real money. As it turns out, this kid was kind of bad. He would skip school to go drinking with his buddies and cheated on his tests so he could eventually get into an ivy league college. He even brags about throwing off the curve in the class’ grade. For this, another student got mad at him and accidentally pushed him off a ridge and down into a ravine out in the desert somewhere. But the kid survived the tumble and the group uses base theorem among their Sophe users to figure out his most probable location. They find him barely alive after some back and forth with the search team police captain. It ends with Detective Tommy sending Tanner a picture of a guy who could have been the white supremacist his daughter was talking to in the picture.
Episode three sees Tanner’s team trying to link Mia’s murder with any other crimes. While they find nothing on Mia, they do find three murders that are supposedly over 80% connected. Detective Tommy gives them a non-released detail on one of the cases and the number balloons from three to 14. Do they have a serial killer on their hands? The crimes are spread over eight jurisdictions and 11 years, so what the heck is going on? The detectives first go to an Asian woman’s parents’ house to ask about her murder. That leads them to another one of the guys that was killed. Before he died, he knew the victim and told her parents that he might have known who killed her. So they stumble around a little as the machine keeps adding more and more crimes that fit into the same profile as the first three. And they finally get to a crime where the victim lived. The detectives go to visit the victim who managed to escape what she thought would be a rape and/or murder. And she ran home to report the crime.
While the detectives and the team are focused on those aggregated potential serial killer crimes, Tanner and the convicted guy in prison are still focused on figuring out who the real killer is. The convicted guy remembers a strange dream while Tanner gets some kind of homemade doll that Mia made while volunteering at some nursing care place. This leads him to the guy in the picture with his daughter who lives as a hermit way out in the woods. He’s fled due to some legal matters and having bill collectors after him for money. But Tanner also finds out that his daughter wasn’t a volunteer at this sobriety house place, but a patient who checked herself in due to depression.
Back to the current case, the algorithm noting the connections finally spits out info that all of the murders took place in, near, or around a construction site, which has changed the landscape of the city. A little more sleuthing spits out that each site used the same sanitation (port-a-potty) services, so they take a trip to that company. As it turns out, one of the workers at that potty place was the one who did it. A serial killer, he collected shoes and wondered what took them so long to catch him. At the end, while Tanner struggles to deal with the fact that he might not ever find the man who killed his daughter, the guy convicted for her murder gets stabbed in prison and left to die.
What’s my grade? I give it a C+. Is it original? No, not really. This concept has been done in recent years on a myriad of different shows. The basic setup is that billionaire experiences something personally traumatic, billionaire comes into an industry where he can save lives, billionaire steps on the toes of the old guard in said industry, billionaire proves that he is right about the new changes because he is smarter and richer than everybody else in the room and billionaire is humbled out of some of his arrogance with just one case that proves that technology doesn’t make him a god. Both APB and Pure Genius tried this concept last year and it didn’t work, so I don’ especially expect for it to work this time around. The shows are great because they do introduce us to some new technologies that you probably wouldn’t know about even if you are a techie (there’s just so much stuff to keep up with that either becomes a flash in the pan or sticks and stays for a while). But unfortunately most of these shows take the concept and are unable to provide any real answers or solutions to the current problems we have. Wisdom of the crowd falls into the same rut.
That rut is quite evident and speaks to the very nature of man and of the internet as we know it: people are simply not as good as we all might want to think, despite how optimistic we are about humanity. People don’t listen, can be overly aggressive, quickly matriculate a mob mentality and are quick to judge even though the old Biblical saying “Judge not lest ye be judged” is on the tip of the tongue of every religious, atheistic and agnostic person from here to the Buddhist mountains in China. But worst of all is that people lie and for a smorgasbord of different reasons. Some people lie because they don’t want to hurt the feelings of others. Some lie because they just don’t want to tell the truth or incriminate themselves. And some people lie because they want to “be part of something bigger than themselves” as the show sickeningly and incessantly reminds you. These are the people who call tip-lines in real life and give false tips to try to help find a killer or a missing person, if only to feel important for a brief moment. Hardly trying to be a cynic, but it would seem most likely that these types of people would be the ones downloading and using this app the most.
The whole idea, even from the outset, feels rather dangerous and stupid, but when thinking about it more deeply, rings of a superficiality that posits that there are more good people than bad people when there are really more middling/indifferent people than both groups and they don’t sit around all day thinking about good or bad but what benefits them for the moment. This show takes the armchair detectives that most of cop and lawyer television has made the majority of this population into and gives them the power to play Veronica Mars without any repercussions, even when they are put into the line of danger. For instance, at the end of the first episode, when the crowd gathers around the bartender/rapist dude, they take pictures of him on the train and literally are in punching distance from him. With the thought already seeded in their minds that this man is guilty and his supposed confession, this could have turned into a volatile situation. In reality, it would have, either with the man defending himself by trying to escape (usually with a gun or other weapon) or the mob demanding street justice right there. Yet, the show asks you to suspend your disbelief in such a cheap and blatantly eye-rolling way that it almost seems laughable. We have people who are just protesting and screaming at other people in real life, yet get bottles thrown at them, guns pointed at them, punches thrown at them and even get run over by crazy people in cars, yet you’re telling me that this guy who everybody thinks committed a crime gets not a single punch thrown at him. Hell, somebody would’ve spit on him if this was reality and as nasty as that sounds, you know it’s right, reader.
The Girlfriend; She was also on Game of ThronesAnd if the lack of believability in the idea wasn’t enough, the lack of true characterization was also a bit of an issue. I’d say that outside of Tanner the billionaire and his tech first lady Sara, we don’t get much building on who these people are. Basic questions like: is Detective Tommy married? Is his partner? What about the tech boys? Are they both gay and, in a very veiled way, flirting with each other? Is that why the hacker guy is always trying to cut down the uptight looking nerdy guy? Or are they each into women and have women at home? None of these questions are answered or even hinted at in the first three episodes, though I do suspect that the two tech guys are gay (they just give off that vibe to me the way they are written). Even Tanner’s financial officer is a caricature of the penny miser steadfastly pinching every penny he can to keep the company afloat as they hemorrhage money. And frankly, what little character development is given to Tanner and Sara is so flimsy that there’s hardly anything to grab hold of and claim as something that you can love about the characters. Do they seem in love? Eh! She’s a strong woman, knows what she wants and has the skills to get it. He’s a grieving dad who is her boss, is the head of a new tech firm and is trying to save the world sans-cape. And the biggest question left out there is what the heck is Tanner’s ex-wife doing on this show and is she ever going to become relevant to the actual plot. Right now, she serves as filler in-between the much more interesting stuff.
But in the end, the show does try to establish itself as a new-age crime drama/procedural in the vein of Criminal Minds, Law and Order and CSI. With the demographic for CBS skewing older, it might be able to find an audience as it does move at the proper pace for a show like this and the crimes get solved with the power of the people. However, unlike some other shows and movies, this is not necessarily a mystery so much as it is definitely a procedural. You won’t have fun trying to solve the crime with the team. You won’t get enough evidence to do that.
Should you be watching? Eh! Probably not. Frankly, I liked FOX’s APB from last season a lot better than this and it got canceled. Where as that show focused on not just the digital world, it also saw the philanthropist billionaire upgrade a precinct’s hardware tech, too, giving them more drones, better guns, better cars, better bulletproof suits and a myriad of cool gadgets, on top of the APB app which allowed people to report crimes and whatnot. While Wisdom of the Crowd expands on that app part, making it more interactive, which I’m sure a second season of APB would’ve done, Crowd never quite feels engrossing enough on a personal level. There’s something missing and I don’t know what. But if you are a fan of crime procedurals and miss the many CSI iterations, then you might want to check this out. Wisdom of the Crowd airs on CBS Sundays in the 8pm EST time slot, though check local listings for NFL interruptions and timing delays. And it can also be caught on demand and on CBS All Access.
What do you think? Have you heard of Wisdom of the Crowd? If not, do you think you’ll check it out for a few episodes? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Did you like it? What, if any, improvements do you think the show should make? Who do you think killed Mia? And do you think that maybe her mother had something to do with her murder like I do? Let me know in the comments below.
Check out my 5-star comedy novel,
Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend
. #AhStalkingIf you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.Until next time, “Take the suit away and what are you?”‘A billionaire genius playboy philanthropist.’
P.S. Is that the direct quote? No, I don’t think so, but I didn’t have the desire to look up the specifics Tony Said. It’s funny how I wrote this script long ago about how we’d enter into an age in which billionaire after billionaire will come forth thinking that they can fix all of societies ills. I wrote it for the provocateurs. Out of the many that will come, only one or two will actually succeed and his name ain’t Trump. Anyway, I’ll think of a better, more original sign-off next time.
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As Bland The Second Time As The First #BladeRunner2049 #review #spoilers #movie
As Bland The Second Time As The First #BladeRunner2049 #review #spoilers #movie
All pictures courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Sony Pictures
Oh god. Here we go again. You know, this year has been really tough for me. Outside of starting my new episodic serial Extraordinary (#Extraordinary season one out now), a third season of The Writer (#TheWriter out now), trying to get the two mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear (#KnowFear coming soon) and The Man On The Roof (#TMOTR coming soon) out, and doing a ton of other writing projects on top of blogging, I feel like a lot of the entertainment I imbibed did not live up to any level of expectations. You can scroll back through to read my Summer of Suck (#summerofsuck) reviews on all the music, TV and films that came out this summer and see that I understood precisely why the box office was in such a funk. And now with the fall/winter/holiday/award season kicking into full gear, and being just a few weeks away from Thor, The Greatest Showman, and Star Wars, I am anticipating some pretty great entertainment. Unfortunately, we can’t always get what we want. “Well, that was fine and dandy, Michael, but what about the actual film you’re here to review? You know, Blade Runner 2049?” Right? Well, is this film franchise like the energizer bunny and has plenty of juice left in the tank for great storytelling, or is it time for these movies to power down (and maybe even reboot)? Let’s find out together.
Let me first start by saying that I just recently saw the original Blade Runner in preparation for this movie because I wanted to really see this movie because I am an unapologetic Ryan Gosling fan and it looked cool and I like sci-fi. For me, Blade Runner was always one of those “gotta see” movies that you never can quite get around to actually seeing until it happens into your lap one day. So, when it was playing on cable last week, I recorded it and hurried up and watched it before my Tuesday 2049 showing. Well, I have to say that I wasn’t all that impressed with the first one and don’t fully get why so many people say that the original Blade Runner was the film that informed over half of all the sci-fi films and TV shows that came after it, even unto today. But, giving it a hard think, I am willing to concede that argument, as most sci-fi pre-80s (from what I can think of) had a much lighter tone that mimicked something like Star Wars or Star Trek, with the exception of cross-genre horror flicks like Alien. If this—similar to how people talked about Twin Peaks (that travesty of a time-waste)—influenced future filmmakers, then so be it. With that said, I will keep most of my thoughts about the original Blade Runner for later in this review, but will mention the main plot as it was pertinent to 2049.
In the original Blade Runner, a private investigator named Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) has a special job in the future (at the time, 2019) of decommissioning (read: killing; we’ll discuss this further later) old or malfunctioning humanoid robots known as replicants. This job title is known by many as a Blade Runner for reasons that I can’t remember. Actually, I’m not sure they ever explained why they have this name, but I digress. In that film, it is becoming harder and harder for people to tell the difference between the real humans and the robots, especially the ones who have escaped their slave-worker camps to dwell in the grime that is future LA. This is so difficult because they not only look human but their creator has recently figured out how to implant fake memories into them so that they can have an entire past life that they never lived. Deckard falls in love with a replicant played by Sean Young, does some stuff, then watches a replicant die. It’s all very “Oh! That’s nice.” And the one big question from that film (I actually didn’t want to include this so early in the review at first but changed my mind last minute) is: Is Deckard himself a replicant?
Blade Runner 2049 stars Ryan Gosling as one of the new Blade Runners 30 years into the future in 2049—self-explanatory. What’s interesting about Ryan’s character who is called K but really has no name, is that he is a replicant and knows that he is a replicant. He’s one of the newest models who has been commissioned by the LAPD to destroy or “retire” the older models. The older models have been deemed dangerous because they never listened and obeyed their end-users quite like the newer models. For those who haven’t seen either movie, understand that these replicants aren’t like most film robots. They live autonomous lives like regular people when they aren’t slaving away “off-world” or on other planets, I assume, harvesting their trees and fighting blue cat aliens. Still, the end-users are their workplace bosses or their sex-work clientele if they’re pleasure bots.
Back to the plot, Gosling starts the film by decommissioning Dave Bautista’s character who talks some gibberish about miracles and how Ryan or K should be ashamed for putting down his own kind. Ryan takes his eye, checks Bautista’s serial number, scans it into the police database and discovers the replicant was a field medic. He then is about to leave when he has his drone do a geo-mapping of the area and finds a large box buried beneath a dead tree. His captain orders the box be dug up and brought back to HQ. In the box they find the bony remains of a woman who was previously pregnant but died in childbirth. They think that the medic helped deliver her baby and tried to save her. The big problem that they discover when looking closer at the bones: the bones/DNA strands inside the marrow have a serial number on them. That’s right, the dead woman who had given birth was supposedly a replicant. But how could that be when replicants are robots and robots, as we know, are inorganic objects that can’t reproduce. This is the miracle the medic was talking about.
So now the police captain is intent on finding this baby (should be around 30 by now) so that she can destroy it because if the world knew this could happen, it would change everything and maybe they wouldn’t be able to use replicants as mindless slaves anymore.
Billionaire WallaceMeanwhile, the new billionaire (I assume he’s a billionaire but they never say) tech guy behind the newest crop of replicants is Wallace played by Jared Leto in a role that’s more wasted than your uncle Dale was at the last family reunion picnic. Dale know damn well he need help. He need more help than Jack on This Is Us, but I digress. Wallace is blind because... well, there’s no real reason it seems. It’s just a character thing, and that’s fine. He believes that creating replicants to use as slaves is somehow holy because it helps to further civilization’s dominance both on earth and throughout the galaxy, “but [he] can only make so many.” He has cracked the code on how to make better replicants—something that the original creator from the first movie couldn’t do—but can not figure out the ultimate trick that his predecessor could: how to make a replicant produce on its own. Upon hearing about this supposed baby, he wants it so that he can study how it came into being.
Now the race is on between Ryan/LAPD and Wallace to find this grown child. SPOILERS AHEAD!
SPOILERS! So, if you are sorta paying attention, by now, you’ve probably figured out that the female pregnant replicant in question is the same character played by Sean Young in the first film. Yes, this also means that the child is the son or daughter of Harrison Ford, hence his appearance in the film. But before we get to Ford, we are introduced to a mix of other characters. We have Wallace, who, as I said, is played by Leto and is blind. He runs many companies, one of which is a farming company that has saved the world from famine. Keep this salvation-theme in mind for later. We have his righthand woman in Luv. Luv is a unique character in that she, too, is a replicant that knows she is a replicant. In fact, it weirdly seems that all replicants know they are replicants, which, to me seems to defeat the purpose of giving them fake memories. But I digress.
Anyway, Luv is not just Wallace’s eyes, but is also the main person who runs his businesses and also seems to be an enforcer. She is overly suspicious from the start, seems to always have a brooding rage just beneath the surface and is almost always seen in white. It is rather unclear whether she is also programmed/made to be a pleasure bot for Wallace, as she is the only being he has almost any interaction with and is female. Though I see nothing on his part, she almost seems to be in a state of awe-struck yearning when around him as if she is not only there to learn from him but wants to love him (as her name implies) while also envying him. The actress’ performance is unique in its subtlety.
On K’s side there is Joi. Joi is unique in that she is NOT a pleasure bot. In fact, she is not a robot at all, but is an interactive augmented reality-esque program. For those who didn’t see the movie, think of her as if your Google Home or Amazon Echo had a holographic projection of a woman. Her use is both weird and expected from K (Gosling; trying so hard not to call him by his real name) the replicant. He is, technically, a computer. She is, technically, a computer program. Thus, they complement each other. Joi is K’s live-in companion/spouse program. The funny thing about her is (and I’ll really have to speak more on this when I get to the critiquing section and talk about other reviewers calling the film sexist) that she really is solely there to cheerlead him. As just a holographic output of a program, she doesn’t cook, is not really shown cleaning, though I assume the main computer hub-attachments can do that, and can’t even sleep with him. Almost any sort of objectification of this character in other reviewers’ minds is purely fantastical and wishful hating. Oh, and even though this character has little to no influence on the film, she is the dark-haired button-nosed young woman featured in most of the advertising.
Joi
Joi’s inclusion is important only because K buys her an emanator which allows for her as a hologram to transmit anywhere that he takes this computer key thingy (so she can go with him out of the city), and to actually feel the touch of physical things but only for seconds at a time (she can feel his synthetic kiss).
Anyway, K has this memory from his early childhood (again, he never had a childhood, so it must be false, right?). In it, he is running from a group of boys who are trying to steal a hand-carved wooden horse from him. All he has, he wants to protect the wooden horse at all costs. He finds a hiding place for it in some abandoned factory then goes back to the boys to catch his beating. Well, as he is going around to other cities (the dump that is San Diego), checking for homeless kids and seeing the seedy underbelly of black market child labor, he happens to wander over to a man who had a child matching the information that he found on this supposed replicant baby from 30 years ago.
At this rundown place, while he finds nothing of import on the baby (the records have been removed from that year), he does see an abandoned factory. Yep, the same factory from his memory. He follows it down to where, in his fake memory, he placed the wooden horse. He grabs into the hiding place and... Holy crap, there’s the horse with the same date on the bottom and everything like in his memory. Now he believes that he is the replicant-born child.
Sup, DocHe goes to this woman Dr. Anna Stelline who contracts for Wallace to help make the replicant memories. A bubble-girl like Jake Gyllenhaal, she explains how she doesn’t implant real memories but creates them from her imagination like an artist does a painting or poem. But when she says that she can examine his memories, she does say that this memory of the wooden horse that he had is a real memory. The way she says it is quite important.
So now K is losing it. He knows that he is the kid but doesn’t know what else to do. He goes home and has a strange threesome between Joi and this street hooker-replicant which a lot of critics are talking about. After reading a few non-spoiler reviews about this thing, I thought I was gonna get something on a Caligula level that is draped in weird and insatiable debauchery. Nope. The amount of outraged reviewers is stupid and their claims unfounded. It’s actually quite artistic and thought-provoking the way it is done. It reminds me more of that Robin Williams film Bicentennial Man in which all he wants to be is human.
OK, so the setup is that Joi wants to finally make real love with K, feel it, experience it as a real person. But, again, she’s just a computer program with a holographic output that only allows her to feel things in rather shifty intervals. But apparently if she overlays her holographic programming over a replicant’s body, she can interact with the real world more readily. So she essentially steps into the hooker-replicant who wears Joi sorta like a second skin. They make out with K a little and then we jump to the next morning. That’s it! That’s literally all that happens. They don’t even both get undressed. Yes, both Joi and the replicant-hooker start unzipping and taking clothes off, but you don’t see anymore. The way some reviewers talked about this scene, I thought I was going to see two sets of naked breasts overlaid atop each other, zooming in and out or two women orgasming at the same time or something that geek-boy fantasies are made of. Nope. Nothin’. It’s literally the next morning almost immediately and you get a silhouette of the replicant-hooker naked from afar. Not to be a horn-dog, but I was quite confused not because I wanted to see more nudity but because I then took eight minutes to have an inner-debate about what the hell people were so offended by. Moving on...
After K tells his boss that he’s found the natural-born replicant (doesn’t say he thinks it is him), she gives the malfunctioning replicant time to flee the city. He then goes in search of his would-be father Harrison Ford. He finds Ford in old Las Vegas in what is now supposedly a radioactive orange wasteland. After they fight for a while for literally no reason whatsoever, save to show that Ford is and can still be a badass—and I’m completely here for that—they have a chat about the kid. Ford says that the plan was always for him to leave and get as far away from his kid and the mother (Sean Young’s replicant character) as possible in order to protect them both. K never intimates that he is Ford’s son and doesn’t get a chance before Luv and her goons show up and bust up the place. Luv had been tracking him and even killed his police captain to figure out where he went after her own tracer went dark. She crushes the program stick containing Joi on it and leaves him to die.
Pleasure Bot Prostitute
K is rescued by an underground group of replicants who are set on revolution. Surprise, surprise, the replicant-hooker, played by the lovely Mackenzie Davis, is actually part of this group. A woman who has removed her right eye where her serial code would normally be is the leader. She not only has been tracking K’s investigation but she was there when the baby was born years ago. She says that the baby was a girl and that she saw it with her own eyes. And we finally get a few flashbacks to show that the doctor who makes the false memories is the real little girl, and we understand why she identified his memories as real the way she did. Somehow, either by accident or on purpose, one of her own memories got placed in his conscious almost exactly the way it happened to her when she was young and living as a homeless impoverished kid in San Diego.
CGI Sean Young Anyway, we get some fan service where a CGI’d Sean Young appears (seriously, they did a better job on her than when Jeff Bridges played both his young and old self in the recent Tron: Legacy) just to tempt Ford into giving up the location of his replicant child. But he has no idea where the child is and doesn’t even know the gender. Even more important, Wallace doesn’t know that his most prized memory-making contractor is the very “thing” he is coveting the most in life.
Admittedly, I lost about a minute and a half of time at this point in the movie because I was checking the time and couldn’t believe it was still going, so I missed the reason for moving Ford. Just know that they put Ford in a transport along with Luv to take him somewhere. Where, I don’t know. But I do know that it must be outside of an ocean city (maybe LA, maybe somewhere higher up or lower down the coast) as the climactic fight takes place just outside a city sea-wall in which the rain and storm-tide is crashing against the downed flying car and threatening to drown everyone.
As you can guess, K tracks them and fights with Luv one last time where she stabs him a few times. He gets the best of her and drowns her, then frees Ford and takes him to his daughter. And we get a first-time introduction between Ford and the memory doctor while K is slowly dying on the front stairs. The end.
What’s my grade? I give it a C+, B-. Again with the double grade, uggghhh! Why? Well, similar to what I thought about FOX’s The Orville, I thought that this movie and to a greater extent, this franchise, has a lot of flaws but that some of the chief flaws can be fixed by making one or two large tweaks. Where the Orville needs to pick one solid genre (either drama or comedy. It’s not good as a hybrid of both), here, both the original Blade Runner and 2049 need to be shorter.
To me, the producers who first bought the short story “Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?” from Philip K. Dick (RIP to him. Outside of never being read, one of the worst things to happen to an author is to die before you’ve seen your work truly influence others; he died before the release of the original Blade Runner, FYI) created a two hour movie that should’ve been about fifteen minutes shorter. Blade Runner 2049, as a sequel, took an already longer-than-need-be film and added almost an entire extra hour, when in fact it should’ve been even shorter than the original. You could seriously cut a full hour, maybe hour and 15 minutes from this movie and lose almost nothing. Some fans will say, “But you’ll lose the spatial dissonance and artistic integrity and—” No, you won’t. Almost every single scene in this movie went on for too long. Consider this, I went to see this movie at 11:40am in the morning, expecting to sit through about 12 minutes of commercials and be out of this movie around 2:30. I checked my phone’s time at 2:00pm just after the Vegas confrontation with love and thought, OK, this is good timing.
From there, there was literally still about 45 minutes of the movie left. But check this out, of those 45 minutes (excluding credits) there was only about six (seven if ultra generous) scenes left in the movie. They were: 1) K awaking to the underground replicant rebels, 2) Ford meeting and being interrogated by Wallace, 3) K seeing the Joi program advertised on a big digital interactive holo-display, 4) the climactic sequence with the flying car crashing into the water and the fight (again, you can divide this between the crash and the fight if really generous), 5) K and Ford arriving to the outside of where the doctor is, and 6) Ford meeting the doctor. Frankly, even that is being generous as I counted what should technically be one scene in Ford meeting the doctor and them arriving where she lives as two scenes. That’s six scenes. Six! That averages to nine minutes on every scene. This is already after almost two hours of the movie. The climax alone took at least 15 minutes, which still seemed like too long. And climaxes are always alotted the most time in a film outside of, maybe the opening sequence.
Look At All The Vast Amounts Of Wasted Time
Right now, some fans are calling me a smartypants and egging me on to find places to cut. For starters, everything doesn’t necessarily need to be cut but some stuff can be sped up in the editing bay. But I’d cut at least a minute from the opening convo/fight with Bautista, cut K smelling the gruel (why include it if we don’t see him eating any and he doesn’t even make a hard enough face in either way of liking or disliking what he sees/smells for us to understand his thinking). Frankly, as much as they tried to make this a love story, you can pretty much cut Joi as she is wholly superfluous to the story, which means you can cut the Joi advert scene at the end too. Again, you lose almost nothing by cutting her character completely or having her in far fewer scenes. K’s reach to be more human-like could be better explored by having more interaction with the replicant-hooker. By playing them off each other more often, you could explore how the humanity or perceived humanity of others influences our own. This was tried and failed through the Joi character. Plus, the hooker at least has an important role in bringing K in contact with the underground group which is clearly a setup for future films.
Cut three minutes out of the fight with Luv, another two from the fight between K and Ford. Speed up the scene where K is shot down by the San Diego scavengers. Speed up the scene where Wallace is introduced to the new replicant he quickly kills. And finally, speed up the Vegas scene in which he is walking around the outside of the city. Again, by making these alterations, making the characters walk faster, talk a little faster, snipping camera shots two seconds sooner, you can easily get this film down to two hours and still have a plethora of informing silence which is what the fans love so much. Silence from characters is great when used properly.
I have to jump around a little here because I had a succinct train of thought on what I would hit one point after another but lost it. So let me jump to the criticism that I thought was unfounded about this film. I thought the sexism criticism of this film was unfounded and, frankly, kinda stupid. I know I sound, yet again, like a misogynist who is trying to silence a few female critics out there, but critics of all kinds have really burned my oatmeal this year with their over-bloated infatuation with movies that weren’t worth a damn. I read three criticisms from much higher-paid film critics than me (all three women) who said that the movie was overly sexist and that if you were a woman you weren’t going to like it because you can only view everything through your righteous feminist hat, and I’m like, “What?” First off, give women some credit. Second off, this movie was hardly sexist. And third off, you don’t have to be a woman to not like this movie.
One of the critics insisted that all of the female characters in the movie were only there as playmates or additives to the male characters. One didn’t like the cutesy names of the women (Joi, Luv) and another found the “gratuitous nudity” offensive and chauvinistic. Miss me with the BS. For starters, the main women of the film got more screentime than all of the main men. Wallace was not in a scene without Luv being seen. K, for large chunks of the film, was always in a scene with a woman: Joi at home, his captain at work, Luv while out detecting, or the hooker. The only one who stands alone and has enough screentime to merit him not being considered a minor character is Ford. If anything, the female characters have more depth than the male characters and allow the men to be shaped and constrained by their opposing energy.
On top of that, the females are shown to have at least four notable archetypes, something the men aren’t given. We have Joi who is the 1950s quintessential mother posing as the Nurturer. She is there to nurture K, yet the fact that she doesn’t conform to other supposed 50s standards as cooking and cleaning like a housewife strips what little sexist criteria that would exist away from the character. We have Robin Wright’s Boss character. She is the one who drives K to complete the investigation and knows or at least thinks that she knows what is best for the world by destroying this baby. We have the replicant-hooker who stands in as our stories Jezebel of sorts who is supposed to be a temptation for our hero, but then, in a narrative twist, actually turns out to be an ally in disguise when usually all we get in films are traitors in disguise. And finally we have our rather complex Luv who stands in as our ultimate foil and personified avarice and jealous ex and strong-willed, strong-headed woman. She is literally what a lot of people think about when they think of a modern feminist as opposed to what feminist ideal-ize themselves as: she is strong, independent-thinking, takes little to no shiznit from anyone, is always well put together and is always on task. And yet, if looking for it, there is always this slight twinge of softness and vulnerability when in the presence of Wallace. It seems that she knows how valuable she is to him while also realizing that she is wholly disposable to him because she is nothing more than a creature.
As far as the nudity, gratuitous? Hardly. As I said, they didn’t even have an actual sex scene in the supposed “threesome,” and the only offense I could see from that scene is some notion that it is disgusting for a man to be thinking of having sex with a different woman while with you, but even then women do that just as much as men do. And while I saw no detailed full-frontal nudity of a woman (usually filmmakers even in modern days will have women either “grow it back” or put some kind of privates wig down there for full effect) we did see multiple shots of full-frontal male nudity in tanks. Yes, we saw the breasts of the newest replicant, but this scene hardly played as sexual, especially after Wallace gutted her. Now, I can see a complaint of racism from this with its not-too-subtle allusions to slave auctions, but sexism? No. I will concede that the giant statues of women in Vegas and the superfluous scene of Joi at the end were both unnecessary but even then I can hardly call them sexist. And even while they are playing into the idea of the male gaze in media, they also are informing of both the environment and the characters at that point in time.
And finally, the scene in which Sean Young’s character is shot in the head was a very “eh!” situation. Yes, all of the female characters in the film die save for the hooker and doctor, but this is not an indictment on the disposable nature of women in film; rather, it is confined to the actual plot of the film. I hate when film criticism is more mired in social justice or political causes on either side that it can’t see the very nature of the film and what it is trying to say. EVERYBODY IN THE FILM WAS DISPOSABLE! How is that not clear? To point out that it is just the women is alarmist and looking for offense. Hell, K seems very much to be dying on the stairs and nobody gives a single damn at the end. Or what about all of the nameless, faceless male characters that die throughout the film. Was the San Diego dump bombing scene necessary? No. But who were killed? All men. A brigade of them. Coco in the police force is smacked in the back of his head and we can’t be bothered to care. We hardly even feel anything for Bautista’s character at the beginning and lord only knows what the hell happened to that black dude who was in, like, what, two scenes? Wouldn’t be surprised if his character’s name literally was Token.
My point is that just because you see a few naked breasts and choose to ignore the naked male penises, or see the female characters die (replaced quickly with new ones for a sequel: the hooker, the memory doctor and the rebel leader) that does not make the movie sexist. In fact, they showed women in a wide range of character archetypes, bein careful not to have most of them overlap for fear of showing these android-beings as being too human.
Now that that’s outta my system, let’s talk about the generality of the movie. I thought that this was rather boring and bland just like the first one. Do I get it? Again, yes. The thing I dislike about critics these days is that they have gotten so high on themselves and what they think about film that they carry an air of superiority that the fans do too. When I read on Indiewire how if I thought the movie was too long I, apparently, didn’t get it and couldn’t be an intellectual like the author thinks of himself, I was rather pissed. Even in gist, calling someone stupid for not liking a movie is abrasive to say the least. Yes, I called the sexism criticism stupid but that is because it is very overblown. Again, if you want an actually sexist movie watch Ex Machina, this year’s Wonder Woman or Nolan’s Inception. I thought this movie failed on a few levels.
For starters, the reason why I still gave it a fairly decent score (the B-) is because, if you take this as its own film and not the sequel to a film that is 35 years old (literally older than most of its cast), then it is actually a fairly decent movie that is thought-provoking and has a great social commentary, even though it still doesn’t fully exploit the myriad of possibilities that are intrinsic in this narrative.
If, however, you take this film as a sequel to the original Blade Runner (the C+), then I think that it fails, like most sequels do, to live up to the catch of the first one. The original Blade Runner had a ton of room for improvement but it had a few things going for it. It was an old-fashioned Noir, gumshoe detective story with a detective who meets a beautiful (synthetic) dame and has to figure out a crime. Deckard had the usual flaws of a Noir PI: he drank too much, had a weakness for women, hung out in seedy places and had an air of cockiness about him. In the film, he spouted off dime-story philosophy to try to sound deep and all the fanatics of the film took said spoutings as being deep. It was highly stylized and gave the future a dark and brooding dystopian-like aesthetic when most people were used to bright and cheery sci-fi like Star Trek. Deckard kept us informed of his thoughts at all times and possessed a certain street-tough, louse-ish charm that endeared audiences to the character. But the biggest flaw of the movie was that in this Noir detective story, very little detective work was performed. Deckard looked hard at a photo and followed a person around for a while, but that was generally it. No, administering the human test does not count as detective work. He lucked into the end after being told where the replicants he sought were (at the house of one of their makers) and ultimately couldn’t even defeat the main replicant, instead being saved by him in a huge twist. This was Blade Runner.
While Blade Runner 2049 does make one huge improvement—the character is actually seen doing real police work—almost everything else is changed or discarded in the new version. There is no self-kept log of K’s feelings or facts about the case as a whole. K, while Gosling does possess a certain natural charisma, possesses little to no charm or even foibles like Deckard had. Is he a hard drinker? A druggie? Had he tried to have some kind of strange replicant wife? When did he learn he was a replicant and how did that impact him? None of this is explored and while we are given hope for some kind of charm in the opening scene, it is quickly wave-crested by his arrival back home to Joi who, seemingly, sucks all of his joy out. Yes, an allowance can be made that he is almost devoid of any personality because he is a replicant, however, the discussion in the pop culture realm surrounding the first Blade Runner is so heavily entrenched in the “Is Deckard a replicant?” question that it almost seems like a betrayal that this new replicant isn’t allowed to have a personality. K acts cold and inhuman, not even bothering to straddle the line between human and robot. It almost seems like the movie, while trying to skirt answering the question about Deckard’s humanity as it is never answered whether he is or isn’t human, inadvertently answers it twofold: by having allowed him to show far more humanity than any replicant character so far and by allowing for him to have had sex and father a baby. Or it just brings up another intriguing question about how real all of the replicants are, like... you know what I’m getting at, right? Right? Like, do they produce... bodily fluids of all kinds?
I guess that the answer to that question is assumed but it really only begs more questions. Now I am going to delve into a little bit of real sexism here and do some mansplaining. It doesn’t take a genius to know that for years a great deal of nerds (most are male) have wanted to build life-like replicas of females (girls and women) so they wouldn’t have to interact with the real thing either out of fear or frustration. If they have the ability to one day do this, why and what sense would it make for them to create a bot that is so life-like that it even has the supposed “icky” (again, something nerds or a sexist would say) parts of a woman (or a man for that matter) as any bodily fluids outside of lubrication and saliva? Wouldn’t the replicant who got pregnant have to have had a menstruation? This would literally be a flaw for replicants in either of their two main uses: off-plant laboring and/or sex work. Even when allowing for the possibility that, like 2049 supposes, she was made specifically for that meeting with Deckard so he could fall in love with and impregnate her, it then seems almost to negate the entirety of the original film. Because the only reason Deckard meets her is because he goes there for info on the rogue replicants. We would therefore have to assume that the original creator knew of those replicants and possibly even freed them himself to give the LAPD purpose to come visit him. But again, I digress.
Back to 2049, not only is the hard-boiled noir style gone, but so too is the aesthetic style and the music palette. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely loved the visuals in the film which is one of the biggest reasons why it hasn’t sunken down into the D-grade territory, and I also really like what Zimmer has done with the remnants left by Vangelis on the soundtrack, but it’s far different than the original to me. Where the original Blade Runner was like looking at everything through a gray smoke-screen of futuristic decay, this film was far cleaner, far crisper and had many of its visual cues from more recent Tom Cruise sci-fi pics Edge of Tomorrow and Oblivion. In other words, it wasn’t unique. Maybe that’s just a product of the times but it felt like they were going too much for new-age cinema style rather than an update to what had been established. This, to me, is the difference between Mad Max: Fury Road and this film. Where Fury Road felt like a poet or writer going back to re-edit an old work after growing and learning newer words or how to write more poetically, Blade Runner felt like the original author had died and a new author came in to continue the franchise (example: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo/Millennium series). Yes, I know the Blade Runner films had two different directors so it should feel that way, but still, this felt more like one of those sequels from the Cloverfield universe. For those who don’t know, instead of writing actual Cloverfield sequels, they buy cool specs and tweak the concepts to fit into the Cloverfield mold. Blade Runner 2049 seems like a spec script that was co-opted into the franchise and given that name because execs thought it’d make more money.
Also, I think that one of the biggest misses of the film is its lack of good philosophy to build on from the first one. Here, we are heavy on religious philosophy, allegory and metaphor which I find to be perfectly fine, but I didn’t feel that it made a real point to challenge or say anything of value that hadn’t already been brought up in the first one. Where the first one challenged what it was to be human and how the unknown of death influences how we live (Batty’s whole struggle is not to be human or more human-like but is really with time. Death is not what he is angry about having, but the fact that he knows when he’ll die and that his time alive is so finite and wasted in-part by trying to gain more time is really what’s the most heartbreaking issue rooted in his final speeches), this one didn’t really challenge anything so much as it gave us a bunch of cool what-if scenarios to ponder. There is never a question about K’s humanity neither from him nor anyone else because we already know he is a replicant. And the idea of dying for something being noble is really only prevalent at the very end of the film. But even that idea is not thoroughly realized because there is little to no ponderance of what death truly is, truly means and how it frames our lives. There is no pull for him to become more human-like, nor does there really seem to be a thrust for him to shy away from any unprogrammed humanity. And even his pursuit of the truth and the idea of reality being an easily manipulated fiction is hardly breathtaking. We’re just sort of seeing this mystery unfold.
Even more, there really isn’t a great big challenge of the concept behind the baby. Admittedly, the critique about the film being sexist almost made me ignore the very question that the film never actually poses itself, but is hidden within its layers: Is the child actually a good thing? Knowing Wallace’s intent for the birth algorithm, is it OK for us to actually root for him? Because he wants to make more slave replicants in order to expand humanity’s domination throughout the universe, make humans’ lives better. If you side with the replicants, that’s not a good thing. On the other hand, what would be the upside to replicants becoming every bit like humans both for humans and for them? In other words, what is the point to something gaining humanity? This question runs counter to the one most usually asked in cinema: What would it be like to gain the power of god?
Finally, to the idiots who insist that because someone may not like something they automatically don’t get it, give me a break. I got how this story was an allegory/metaphor for God, the devil and Jesus’ birth. I understood that, as it was so blatant it almost got on my nerves. For those that didn’t see or get this, consider some of these things if and when you re-watch the film. Luv is, essentially, Lucifer (see how they share the first two letters of the name). At first, I thought that the name was silly too and you may think that my inference just off the name is silly if you didn’t see any of these religious undertones. OK, consider this: there is almost not a single scene in which Luv is in where light doesn’t play a role. For instance, when she and K are walking through the Wallace Industry archives, notice that the lights are always crawling on the walls and often toward her. At first, the BR fan might easily dismiss this as an ode or nod to the scenery during the Deckard test in the original, but this is done on purpose in multiple scenes through the movie. Why? Because Lucifer is the “Morning Star (angel),” the “Bringer of Light.” Hell, even when she enters the captain’s office, the first thing she says is something about the light and turns it on. She always wears light colors or white to try to symbolize her purity though she has none and has to stand through all of Wallace’s musings on angels and creation.
So if Luv is Lucifer then that, by default, makes Wallace God or at least some form of god (argument can be made that the original replicant maker from the first film is actually god in this interpretation). With that in mind, his blindness actually makes sense as an allusion to God’s supposed blindness to the plight of his creation. Yes, the replicants are suffering but why would he care? He sees what he is doing as necessary for the universe.
You have the child as Jesus—funny how this is 30-some years after the baby was supposedly born, right? She is a doctor so you know she is smart. She was also raised in a rather tough upbringing. Biblical scholars believe that Joseph either left the family or died sometime in Christ’s youth, hence why Ford’s character is not around. She’s born to a “virgin” replicant or someone who, for all intents and purposes, should not have been able to give birth, and blah, blah, blah. Look, there’s more allusions in there but I am running out of time and this review is already too long.
Ultimately I feel like they have made two fairly lackluster films in this franchise, both of which supply great visuals and music but are sorely lacking in excitement. While this film made for a coherent plot, it did nothing to win over new audiences. I think that this idea has, to a great extent been squandered and almost deliberately so. Realize that we still haven’t seen any off-world stuff, nor any place outside of the US west coast and have no idea why they speak the language they speak. There is so much untapped potential here that this could literally be a shared cinematic universe all itself, and yes I am still including the artistic integrity of each picture. You don’t have to remove the philosophy, weird parts or even a lot of the slow, brooding silence, just add in more action and let the replicants and the humans have slightly more personality, then give each film to a visionary and explore off-world colonies, other places in the world, hell even show a full-on war rebellion or something. There’s so much to do here. Yet, for some reason I feel like in the last few years we are being punked by Ridley Scott. As one of the exec producers on this, it seems as if he’s tried to ruin his own legacy of decent/good/great films by going back to retread them in some way. He did it with Alien, he’s doing it here. If I hear anything about them trying to do a sequel or prequel to Gladiator, so help me God...
Should you see it? Eh! If you were a fan of the original Blade Runner, then chances are you probably already have seen it. I can’t say that you, as a new fan that knows nothing about this film should go see it. Gosling fans feel free, Ford fans feel free, but again, it might not be satisfying after nearly three hours of runtime. It’s just an OK movie.
What do you think? Was I too hard on this film? If you haven’t seen it, do you plan on going now? If you have seen it, what did you think of the film? If you think it’s a masterpiece then tell me how. And do you think K actually dies at the end or no? Would you be willing to see a sequel? Let me know in the comments below.
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. #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.
Until next time, “What do androids dream of?” ‘What every thing dreams of: something better.’
P.S. You can’t tell me that if you’re a fan of Blade Runner you don’t like that sign-off. OK, it probably won’t work well as my ultimate sign-off for everything, but it works here, doesn’t it? No? You don’t like it? Not thought-provoking enough? Fine. Whatevs! My feelings aren’t hurt. Nope. I’ll think of a better sign-off next time.
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Oh god. Here we go again. You know, this year has been really tough for me. Outside of starting my new episodic serial Extraordinary (#Extraordinary season one out now), a third season of The Writer (#TheWriter out now), trying to get the two mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear (#KnowFear coming soon) and The Man On The Roof (#TMOTR coming soon) out, and doing a ton of other writing projects on top of blogging, I feel like a lot of the entertainment I imbibed did not live up to any level of expectations. You can scroll back through to read my Summer of Suck (#summerofsuck) reviews on all the music, TV and films that came out this summer and see that I understood precisely why the box office was in such a funk. And now with the fall/winter/holiday/award season kicking into full gear, and being just a few weeks away from Thor, The Greatest Showman, and Star Wars, I am anticipating some pretty great entertainment. Unfortunately, we can’t always get what we want. “Well, that was fine and dandy, Michael, but what about the actual film you’re here to review? You know, Blade Runner 2049?” Right? Well, is this film franchise like the energizer bunny and has plenty of juice left in the tank for great storytelling, or is it time for these movies to power down (and maybe even reboot)? Let’s find out together.
Let me first start by saying that I just recently saw the original Blade Runner in preparation for this movie because I wanted to really see this movie because I am an unapologetic Ryan Gosling fan and it looked cool and I like sci-fi. For me, Blade Runner was always one of those “gotta see” movies that you never can quite get around to actually seeing until it happens into your lap one day. So, when it was playing on cable last week, I recorded it and hurried up and watched it before my Tuesday 2049 showing. Well, I have to say that I wasn’t all that impressed with the first one and don’t fully get why so many people say that the original Blade Runner was the film that informed over half of all the sci-fi films and TV shows that came after it, even unto today. But, giving it a hard think, I am willing to concede that argument, as most sci-fi pre-80s (from what I can think of) had a much lighter tone that mimicked something like Star Wars or Star Trek, with the exception of cross-genre horror flicks like Alien. If this—similar to how people talked about Twin Peaks (that travesty of a time-waste)—influenced future filmmakers, then so be it. With that said, I will keep most of my thoughts about the original Blade Runner for later in this review, but will mention the main plot as it was pertinent to 2049.
In the original Blade Runner, a private investigator named Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) has a special job in the future (at the time, 2019) of decommissioning (read: killing; we’ll discuss this further later) old or malfunctioning humanoid robots known as replicants. This job title is known by many as a Blade Runner for reasons that I can’t remember. Actually, I’m not sure they ever explained why they have this name, but I digress. In that film, it is becoming harder and harder for people to tell the difference between the real humans and the robots, especially the ones who have escaped their slave-worker camps to dwell in the grime that is future LA. This is so difficult because they not only look human but their creator has recently figured out how to implant fake memories into them so that they can have an entire past life that they never lived. Deckard falls in love with a replicant played by Sean Young, does some stuff, then watches a replicant die. It’s all very “Oh! That’s nice.” And the one big question from that film (I actually didn’t want to include this so early in the review at first but changed my mind last minute) is: Is Deckard himself a replicant?
Blade Runner 2049 stars Ryan Gosling as one of the new Blade Runners 30 years into the future in 2049—self-explanatory. What’s interesting about Ryan’s character who is called K but really has no name, is that he is a replicant and knows that he is a replicant. He’s one of the newest models who has been commissioned by the LAPD to destroy or “retire” the older models. The older models have been deemed dangerous because they never listened and obeyed their end-users quite like the newer models. For those who haven’t seen either movie, understand that these replicants aren’t like most film robots. They live autonomous lives like regular people when they aren’t slaving away “off-world” or on other planets, I assume, harvesting their trees and fighting blue cat aliens. Still, the end-users are their workplace bosses or their sex-work clientele if they’re pleasure bots.
Back to the plot, Gosling starts the film by decommissioning Dave Bautista’s character who talks some gibberish about miracles and how Ryan or K should be ashamed for putting down his own kind. Ryan takes his eye, checks Bautista’s serial number, scans it into the police database and discovers the replicant was a field medic. He then is about to leave when he has his drone do a geo-mapping of the area and finds a large box buried beneath a dead tree. His captain orders the box be dug up and brought back to HQ. In the box they find the bony remains of a woman who was previously pregnant but died in childbirth. They think that the medic helped deliver her baby and tried to save her. The big problem that they discover when looking closer at the bones: the bones/DNA strands inside the marrow have a serial number on them. That’s right, the dead woman who had given birth was supposedly a replicant. But how could that be when replicants are robots and robots, as we know, are inorganic objects that can’t reproduce. This is the miracle the medic was talking about.
So now the police captain is intent on finding this baby (should be around 30 by now) so that she can destroy it because if the world knew this could happen, it would change everything and maybe they wouldn’t be able to use replicants as mindless slaves anymore.
Billionaire WallaceMeanwhile, the new billionaire (I assume he’s a billionaire but they never say) tech guy behind the newest crop of replicants is Wallace played by Jared Leto in a role that’s more wasted than your uncle Dale was at the last family reunion picnic. Dale know damn well he need help. He need more help than Jack on This Is Us, but I digress. Wallace is blind because... well, there’s no real reason it seems. It’s just a character thing, and that’s fine. He believes that creating replicants to use as slaves is somehow holy because it helps to further civilization’s dominance both on earth and throughout the galaxy, “but [he] can only make so many.” He has cracked the code on how to make better replicants—something that the original creator from the first movie couldn’t do—but can not figure out the ultimate trick that his predecessor could: how to make a replicant produce on its own. Upon hearing about this supposed baby, he wants it so that he can study how it came into being. Now the race is on between Ryan/LAPD and Wallace to find this grown child. SPOILERS AHEAD!
SPOILERS! So, if you are sorta paying attention, by now, you’ve probably figured out that the female pregnant replicant in question is the same character played by Sean Young in the first film. Yes, this also means that the child is the son or daughter of Harrison Ford, hence his appearance in the film. But before we get to Ford, we are introduced to a mix of other characters. We have Wallace, who, as I said, is played by Leto and is blind. He runs many companies, one of which is a farming company that has saved the world from famine. Keep this salvation-theme in mind for later. We have his righthand woman in Luv. Luv is a unique character in that she, too, is a replicant that knows she is a replicant. In fact, it weirdly seems that all replicants know they are replicants, which, to me seems to defeat the purpose of giving them fake memories. But I digress.
Anyway, Luv is not just Wallace’s eyes, but is also the main person who runs his businesses and also seems to be an enforcer. She is overly suspicious from the start, seems to always have a brooding rage just beneath the surface and is almost always seen in white. It is rather unclear whether she is also programmed/made to be a pleasure bot for Wallace, as she is the only being he has almost any interaction with and is female. Though I see nothing on his part, she almost seems to be in a state of awe-struck yearning when around him as if she is not only there to learn from him but wants to love him (as her name implies) while also envying him. The actress’ performance is unique in its subtlety. On K’s side there is Joi. Joi is unique in that she is NOT a pleasure bot. In fact, she is not a robot at all, but is an interactive augmented reality-esque program. For those who didn’t see the movie, think of her as if your Google Home or Amazon Echo had a holographic projection of a woman. Her use is both weird and expected from K (Gosling; trying so hard not to call him by his real name) the replicant. He is, technically, a computer. She is, technically, a computer program. Thus, they complement each other. Joi is K’s live-in companion/spouse program. The funny thing about her is (and I’ll really have to speak more on this when I get to the critiquing section and talk about other reviewers calling the film sexist) that she really is solely there to cheerlead him. As just a holographic output of a program, she doesn’t cook, is not really shown cleaning, though I assume the main computer hub-attachments can do that, and can’t even sleep with him. Almost any sort of objectification of this character in other reviewers’ minds is purely fantastical and wishful hating. Oh, and even though this character has little to no influence on the film, she is the dark-haired button-nosed young woman featured in most of the advertising.
JoiJoi’s inclusion is important only because K buys her an emanator which allows for her as a hologram to transmit anywhere that he takes this computer key thingy (so she can go with him out of the city), and to actually feel the touch of physical things but only for seconds at a time (she can feel his synthetic kiss).
Anyway, K has this memory from his early childhood (again, he never had a childhood, so it must be false, right?). In it, he is running from a group of boys who are trying to steal a hand-carved wooden horse from him. All he has, he wants to protect the wooden horse at all costs. He finds a hiding place for it in some abandoned factory then goes back to the boys to catch his beating. Well, as he is going around to other cities (the dump that is San Diego), checking for homeless kids and seeing the seedy underbelly of black market child labor, he happens to wander over to a man who had a child matching the information that he found on this supposed replicant baby from 30 years ago.
At this rundown place, while he finds nothing of import on the baby (the records have been removed from that year), he does see an abandoned factory. Yep, the same factory from his memory. He follows it down to where, in his fake memory, he placed the wooden horse. He grabs into the hiding place and... Holy crap, there’s the horse with the same date on the bottom and everything like in his memory. Now he believes that he is the replicant-born child.
Sup, DocHe goes to this woman Dr. Anna Stelline who contracts for Wallace to help make the replicant memories. A bubble-girl like Jake Gyllenhaal, she explains how she doesn’t implant real memories but creates them from her imagination like an artist does a painting or poem. But when she says that she can examine his memories, she does say that this memory of the wooden horse that he had is a real memory. The way she says it is quite important. So now K is losing it. He knows that he is the kid but doesn’t know what else to do. He goes home and has a strange threesome between Joi and this street hooker-replicant which a lot of critics are talking about. After reading a few non-spoiler reviews about this thing, I thought I was gonna get something on a Caligula level that is draped in weird and insatiable debauchery. Nope. The amount of outraged reviewers is stupid and their claims unfounded. It’s actually quite artistic and thought-provoking the way it is done. It reminds me more of that Robin Williams film Bicentennial Man in which all he wants to be is human.
OK, so the setup is that Joi wants to finally make real love with K, feel it, experience it as a real person. But, again, she’s just a computer program with a holographic output that only allows her to feel things in rather shifty intervals. But apparently if she overlays her holographic programming over a replicant’s body, she can interact with the real world more readily. So she essentially steps into the hooker-replicant who wears Joi sorta like a second skin. They make out with K a little and then we jump to the next morning. That’s it! That’s literally all that happens. They don’t even both get undressed. Yes, both Joi and the replicant-hooker start unzipping and taking clothes off, but you don’t see anymore. The way some reviewers talked about this scene, I thought I was going to see two sets of naked breasts overlaid atop each other, zooming in and out or two women orgasming at the same time or something that geek-boy fantasies are made of. Nope. Nothin’. It’s literally the next morning almost immediately and you get a silhouette of the replicant-hooker naked from afar. Not to be a horn-dog, but I was quite confused not because I wanted to see more nudity but because I then took eight minutes to have an inner-debate about what the hell people were so offended by. Moving on...
After K tells his boss that he’s found the natural-born replicant (doesn’t say he thinks it is him), she gives the malfunctioning replicant time to flee the city. He then goes in search of his would-be father Harrison Ford. He finds Ford in old Las Vegas in what is now supposedly a radioactive orange wasteland. After they fight for a while for literally no reason whatsoever, save to show that Ford is and can still be a badass—and I’m completely here for that—they have a chat about the kid. Ford says that the plan was always for him to leave and get as far away from his kid and the mother (Sean Young’s replicant character) as possible in order to protect them both. K never intimates that he is Ford’s son and doesn’t get a chance before Luv and her goons show up and bust up the place. Luv had been tracking him and even killed his police captain to figure out where he went after her own tracer went dark. She crushes the program stick containing Joi on it and leaves him to die.
Pleasure Bot ProstituteK is rescued by an underground group of replicants who are set on revolution. Surprise, surprise, the replicant-hooker, played by the lovely Mackenzie Davis, is actually part of this group. A woman who has removed her right eye where her serial code would normally be is the leader. She not only has been tracking K’s investigation but she was there when the baby was born years ago. She says that the baby was a girl and that she saw it with her own eyes. And we finally get a few flashbacks to show that the doctor who makes the false memories is the real little girl, and we understand why she identified his memories as real the way she did. Somehow, either by accident or on purpose, one of her own memories got placed in his conscious almost exactly the way it happened to her when she was young and living as a homeless impoverished kid in San Diego.
CGI Sean Young Anyway, we get some fan service where a CGI’d Sean Young appears (seriously, they did a better job on her than when Jeff Bridges played both his young and old self in the recent Tron: Legacy) just to tempt Ford into giving up the location of his replicant child. But he has no idea where the child is and doesn’t even know the gender. Even more important, Wallace doesn’t know that his most prized memory-making contractor is the very “thing” he is coveting the most in life. Admittedly, I lost about a minute and a half of time at this point in the movie because I was checking the time and couldn’t believe it was still going, so I missed the reason for moving Ford. Just know that they put Ford in a transport along with Luv to take him somewhere. Where, I don’t know. But I do know that it must be outside of an ocean city (maybe LA, maybe somewhere higher up or lower down the coast) as the climactic fight takes place just outside a city sea-wall in which the rain and storm-tide is crashing against the downed flying car and threatening to drown everyone.
As you can guess, K tracks them and fights with Luv one last time where she stabs him a few times. He gets the best of her and drowns her, then frees Ford and takes him to his daughter. And we get a first-time introduction between Ford and the memory doctor while K is slowly dying on the front stairs. The end.
What’s my grade? I give it a C+, B-. Again with the double grade, uggghhh! Why? Well, similar to what I thought about FOX’s The Orville, I thought that this movie and to a greater extent, this franchise, has a lot of flaws but that some of the chief flaws can be fixed by making one or two large tweaks. Where the Orville needs to pick one solid genre (either drama or comedy. It’s not good as a hybrid of both), here, both the original Blade Runner and 2049 need to be shorter.
To me, the producers who first bought the short story “Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?” from Philip K. Dick (RIP to him. Outside of never being read, one of the worst things to happen to an author is to die before you’ve seen your work truly influence others; he died before the release of the original Blade Runner, FYI) created a two hour movie that should’ve been about fifteen minutes shorter. Blade Runner 2049, as a sequel, took an already longer-than-need-be film and added almost an entire extra hour, when in fact it should’ve been even shorter than the original. You could seriously cut a full hour, maybe hour and 15 minutes from this movie and lose almost nothing. Some fans will say, “But you’ll lose the spatial dissonance and artistic integrity and—” No, you won’t. Almost every single scene in this movie went on for too long. Consider this, I went to see this movie at 11:40am in the morning, expecting to sit through about 12 minutes of commercials and be out of this movie around 2:30. I checked my phone’s time at 2:00pm just after the Vegas confrontation with love and thought, OK, this is good timing.
From there, there was literally still about 45 minutes of the movie left. But check this out, of those 45 minutes (excluding credits) there was only about six (seven if ultra generous) scenes left in the movie. They were: 1) K awaking to the underground replicant rebels, 2) Ford meeting and being interrogated by Wallace, 3) K seeing the Joi program advertised on a big digital interactive holo-display, 4) the climactic sequence with the flying car crashing into the water and the fight (again, you can divide this between the crash and the fight if really generous), 5) K and Ford arriving to the outside of where the doctor is, and 6) Ford meeting the doctor. Frankly, even that is being generous as I counted what should technically be one scene in Ford meeting the doctor and them arriving where she lives as two scenes. That’s six scenes. Six! That averages to nine minutes on every scene. This is already after almost two hours of the movie. The climax alone took at least 15 minutes, which still seemed like too long. And climaxes are always alotted the most time in a film outside of, maybe the opening sequence.
Look At All The Vast Amounts Of Wasted TimeRight now, some fans are calling me a smartypants and egging me on to find places to cut. For starters, everything doesn’t necessarily need to be cut but some stuff can be sped up in the editing bay. But I’d cut at least a minute from the opening convo/fight with Bautista, cut K smelling the gruel (why include it if we don’t see him eating any and he doesn’t even make a hard enough face in either way of liking or disliking what he sees/smells for us to understand his thinking). Frankly, as much as they tried to make this a love story, you can pretty much cut Joi as she is wholly superfluous to the story, which means you can cut the Joi advert scene at the end too. Again, you lose almost nothing by cutting her character completely or having her in far fewer scenes. K’s reach to be more human-like could be better explored by having more interaction with the replicant-hooker. By playing them off each other more often, you could explore how the humanity or perceived humanity of others influences our own. This was tried and failed through the Joi character. Plus, the hooker at least has an important role in bringing K in contact with the underground group which is clearly a setup for future films.
Cut three minutes out of the fight with Luv, another two from the fight between K and Ford. Speed up the scene where K is shot down by the San Diego scavengers. Speed up the scene where Wallace is introduced to the new replicant he quickly kills. And finally, speed up the Vegas scene in which he is walking around the outside of the city. Again, by making these alterations, making the characters walk faster, talk a little faster, snipping camera shots two seconds sooner, you can easily get this film down to two hours and still have a plethora of informing silence which is what the fans love so much. Silence from characters is great when used properly.
I have to jump around a little here because I had a succinct train of thought on what I would hit one point after another but lost it. So let me jump to the criticism that I thought was unfounded about this film. I thought the sexism criticism of this film was unfounded and, frankly, kinda stupid. I know I sound, yet again, like a misogynist who is trying to silence a few female critics out there, but critics of all kinds have really burned my oatmeal this year with their over-bloated infatuation with movies that weren’t worth a damn. I read three criticisms from much higher-paid film critics than me (all three women) who said that the movie was overly sexist and that if you were a woman you weren’t going to like it because you can only view everything through your righteous feminist hat, and I’m like, “What?” First off, give women some credit. Second off, this movie was hardly sexist. And third off, you don’t have to be a woman to not like this movie.
One of the critics insisted that all of the female characters in the movie were only there as playmates or additives to the male characters. One didn’t like the cutesy names of the women (Joi, Luv) and another found the “gratuitous nudity” offensive and chauvinistic. Miss me with the BS. For starters, the main women of the film got more screentime than all of the main men. Wallace was not in a scene without Luv being seen. K, for large chunks of the film, was always in a scene with a woman: Joi at home, his captain at work, Luv while out detecting, or the hooker. The only one who stands alone and has enough screentime to merit him not being considered a minor character is Ford. If anything, the female characters have more depth than the male characters and allow the men to be shaped and constrained by their opposing energy.
On top of that, the females are shown to have at least four notable archetypes, something the men aren’t given. We have Joi who is the 1950s quintessential mother posing as the Nurturer. She is there to nurture K, yet the fact that she doesn’t conform to other supposed 50s standards as cooking and cleaning like a housewife strips what little sexist criteria that would exist away from the character. We have Robin Wright’s Boss character. She is the one who drives K to complete the investigation and knows or at least thinks that she knows what is best for the world by destroying this baby. We have the replicant-hooker who stands in as our stories Jezebel of sorts who is supposed to be a temptation for our hero, but then, in a narrative twist, actually turns out to be an ally in disguise when usually all we get in films are traitors in disguise. And finally we have our rather complex Luv who stands in as our ultimate foil and personified avarice and jealous ex and strong-willed, strong-headed woman. She is literally what a lot of people think about when they think of a modern feminist as opposed to what feminist ideal-ize themselves as: she is strong, independent-thinking, takes little to no shiznit from anyone, is always well put together and is always on task. And yet, if looking for it, there is always this slight twinge of softness and vulnerability when in the presence of Wallace. It seems that she knows how valuable she is to him while also realizing that she is wholly disposable to him because she is nothing more than a creature.
As far as the nudity, gratuitous? Hardly. As I said, they didn’t even have an actual sex scene in the supposed “threesome,” and the only offense I could see from that scene is some notion that it is disgusting for a man to be thinking of having sex with a different woman while with you, but even then women do that just as much as men do. And while I saw no detailed full-frontal nudity of a woman (usually filmmakers even in modern days will have women either “grow it back” or put some kind of privates wig down there for full effect) we did see multiple shots of full-frontal male nudity in tanks. Yes, we saw the breasts of the newest replicant, but this scene hardly played as sexual, especially after Wallace gutted her. Now, I can see a complaint of racism from this with its not-too-subtle allusions to slave auctions, but sexism? No. I will concede that the giant statues of women in Vegas and the superfluous scene of Joi at the end were both unnecessary but even then I can hardly call them sexist. And even while they are playing into the idea of the male gaze in media, they also are informing of both the environment and the characters at that point in time.
And finally, the scene in which Sean Young’s character is shot in the head was a very “eh!” situation. Yes, all of the female characters in the film die save for the hooker and doctor, but this is not an indictment on the disposable nature of women in film; rather, it is confined to the actual plot of the film. I hate when film criticism is more mired in social justice or political causes on either side that it can’t see the very nature of the film and what it is trying to say. EVERYBODY IN THE FILM WAS DISPOSABLE! How is that not clear? To point out that it is just the women is alarmist and looking for offense. Hell, K seems very much to be dying on the stairs and nobody gives a single damn at the end. Or what about all of the nameless, faceless male characters that die throughout the film. Was the San Diego dump bombing scene necessary? No. But who were killed? All men. A brigade of them. Coco in the police force is smacked in the back of his head and we can’t be bothered to care. We hardly even feel anything for Bautista’s character at the beginning and lord only knows what the hell happened to that black dude who was in, like, what, two scenes? Wouldn’t be surprised if his character’s name literally was Token.
My point is that just because you see a few naked breasts and choose to ignore the naked male penises, or see the female characters die (replaced quickly with new ones for a sequel: the hooker, the memory doctor and the rebel leader) that does not make the movie sexist. In fact, they showed women in a wide range of character archetypes, bein careful not to have most of them overlap for fear of showing these android-beings as being too human.
Now that that’s outta my system, let’s talk about the generality of the movie. I thought that this was rather boring and bland just like the first one. Do I get it? Again, yes. The thing I dislike about critics these days is that they have gotten so high on themselves and what they think about film that they carry an air of superiority that the fans do too. When I read on Indiewire how if I thought the movie was too long I, apparently, didn’t get it and couldn’t be an intellectual like the author thinks of himself, I was rather pissed. Even in gist, calling someone stupid for not liking a movie is abrasive to say the least. Yes, I called the sexism criticism stupid but that is because it is very overblown. Again, if you want an actually sexist movie watch Ex Machina, this year’s Wonder Woman or Nolan’s Inception. I thought this movie failed on a few levels.
For starters, the reason why I still gave it a fairly decent score (the B-) is because, if you take this as its own film and not the sequel to a film that is 35 years old (literally older than most of its cast), then it is actually a fairly decent movie that is thought-provoking and has a great social commentary, even though it still doesn’t fully exploit the myriad of possibilities that are intrinsic in this narrative. If, however, you take this film as a sequel to the original Blade Runner (the C+), then I think that it fails, like most sequels do, to live up to the catch of the first one. The original Blade Runner had a ton of room for improvement but it had a few things going for it. It was an old-fashioned Noir, gumshoe detective story with a detective who meets a beautiful (synthetic) dame and has to figure out a crime. Deckard had the usual flaws of a Noir PI: he drank too much, had a weakness for women, hung out in seedy places and had an air of cockiness about him. In the film, he spouted off dime-story philosophy to try to sound deep and all the fanatics of the film took said spoutings as being deep. It was highly stylized and gave the future a dark and brooding dystopian-like aesthetic when most people were used to bright and cheery sci-fi like Star Trek. Deckard kept us informed of his thoughts at all times and possessed a certain street-tough, louse-ish charm that endeared audiences to the character. But the biggest flaw of the movie was that in this Noir detective story, very little detective work was performed. Deckard looked hard at a photo and followed a person around for a while, but that was generally it. No, administering the human test does not count as detective work. He lucked into the end after being told where the replicants he sought were (at the house of one of their makers) and ultimately couldn’t even defeat the main replicant, instead being saved by him in a huge twist. This was Blade Runner.
While Blade Runner 2049 does make one huge improvement—the character is actually seen doing real police work—almost everything else is changed or discarded in the new version. There is no self-kept log of K’s feelings or facts about the case as a whole. K, while Gosling does possess a certain natural charisma, possesses little to no charm or even foibles like Deckard had. Is he a hard drinker? A druggie? Had he tried to have some kind of strange replicant wife? When did he learn he was a replicant and how did that impact him? None of this is explored and while we are given hope for some kind of charm in the opening scene, it is quickly wave-crested by his arrival back home to Joi who, seemingly, sucks all of his joy out. Yes, an allowance can be made that he is almost devoid of any personality because he is a replicant, however, the discussion in the pop culture realm surrounding the first Blade Runner is so heavily entrenched in the “Is Deckard a replicant?” question that it almost seems like a betrayal that this new replicant isn’t allowed to have a personality. K acts cold and inhuman, not even bothering to straddle the line between human and robot. It almost seems like the movie, while trying to skirt answering the question about Deckard’s humanity as it is never answered whether he is or isn’t human, inadvertently answers it twofold: by having allowed him to show far more humanity than any replicant character so far and by allowing for him to have had sex and father a baby. Or it just brings up another intriguing question about how real all of the replicants are, like... you know what I’m getting at, right? Right? Like, do they produce... bodily fluids of all kinds?
I guess that the answer to that question is assumed but it really only begs more questions. Now I am going to delve into a little bit of real sexism here and do some mansplaining. It doesn’t take a genius to know that for years a great deal of nerds (most are male) have wanted to build life-like replicas of females (girls and women) so they wouldn’t have to interact with the real thing either out of fear or frustration. If they have the ability to one day do this, why and what sense would it make for them to create a bot that is so life-like that it even has the supposed “icky” (again, something nerds or a sexist would say) parts of a woman (or a man for that matter) as any bodily fluids outside of lubrication and saliva? Wouldn’t the replicant who got pregnant have to have had a menstruation? This would literally be a flaw for replicants in either of their two main uses: off-plant laboring and/or sex work. Even when allowing for the possibility that, like 2049 supposes, she was made specifically for that meeting with Deckard so he could fall in love with and impregnate her, it then seems almost to negate the entirety of the original film. Because the only reason Deckard meets her is because he goes there for info on the rogue replicants. We would therefore have to assume that the original creator knew of those replicants and possibly even freed them himself to give the LAPD purpose to come visit him. But again, I digress.
Back to 2049, not only is the hard-boiled noir style gone, but so too is the aesthetic style and the music palette. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely loved the visuals in the film which is one of the biggest reasons why it hasn’t sunken down into the D-grade territory, and I also really like what Zimmer has done with the remnants left by Vangelis on the soundtrack, but it’s far different than the original to me. Where the original Blade Runner was like looking at everything through a gray smoke-screen of futuristic decay, this film was far cleaner, far crisper and had many of its visual cues from more recent Tom Cruise sci-fi pics Edge of Tomorrow and Oblivion. In other words, it wasn’t unique. Maybe that’s just a product of the times but it felt like they were going too much for new-age cinema style rather than an update to what had been established. This, to me, is the difference between Mad Max: Fury Road and this film. Where Fury Road felt like a poet or writer going back to re-edit an old work after growing and learning newer words or how to write more poetically, Blade Runner felt like the original author had died and a new author came in to continue the franchise (example: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo/Millennium series). Yes, I know the Blade Runner films had two different directors so it should feel that way, but still, this felt more like one of those sequels from the Cloverfield universe. For those who don’t know, instead of writing actual Cloverfield sequels, they buy cool specs and tweak the concepts to fit into the Cloverfield mold. Blade Runner 2049 seems like a spec script that was co-opted into the franchise and given that name because execs thought it’d make more money.
Also, I think that one of the biggest misses of the film is its lack of good philosophy to build on from the first one. Here, we are heavy on religious philosophy, allegory and metaphor which I find to be perfectly fine, but I didn’t feel that it made a real point to challenge or say anything of value that hadn’t already been brought up in the first one. Where the first one challenged what it was to be human and how the unknown of death influences how we live (Batty’s whole struggle is not to be human or more human-like but is really with time. Death is not what he is angry about having, but the fact that he knows when he’ll die and that his time alive is so finite and wasted in-part by trying to gain more time is really what’s the most heartbreaking issue rooted in his final speeches), this one didn’t really challenge anything so much as it gave us a bunch of cool what-if scenarios to ponder. There is never a question about K’s humanity neither from him nor anyone else because we already know he is a replicant. And the idea of dying for something being noble is really only prevalent at the very end of the film. But even that idea is not thoroughly realized because there is little to no ponderance of what death truly is, truly means and how it frames our lives. There is no pull for him to become more human-like, nor does there really seem to be a thrust for him to shy away from any unprogrammed humanity. And even his pursuit of the truth and the idea of reality being an easily manipulated fiction is hardly breathtaking. We’re just sort of seeing this mystery unfold.
Even more, there really isn’t a great big challenge of the concept behind the baby. Admittedly, the critique about the film being sexist almost made me ignore the very question that the film never actually poses itself, but is hidden within its layers: Is the child actually a good thing? Knowing Wallace’s intent for the birth algorithm, is it OK for us to actually root for him? Because he wants to make more slave replicants in order to expand humanity’s domination throughout the universe, make humans’ lives better. If you side with the replicants, that’s not a good thing. On the other hand, what would be the upside to replicants becoming every bit like humans both for humans and for them? In other words, what is the point to something gaining humanity? This question runs counter to the one most usually asked in cinema: What would it be like to gain the power of god? Finally, to the idiots who insist that because someone may not like something they automatically don’t get it, give me a break. I got how this story was an allegory/metaphor for God, the devil and Jesus’ birth. I understood that, as it was so blatant it almost got on my nerves. For those that didn’t see or get this, consider some of these things if and when you re-watch the film. Luv is, essentially, Lucifer (see how they share the first two letters of the name). At first, I thought that the name was silly too and you may think that my inference just off the name is silly if you didn’t see any of these religious undertones. OK, consider this: there is almost not a single scene in which Luv is in where light doesn’t play a role. For instance, when she and K are walking through the Wallace Industry archives, notice that the lights are always crawling on the walls and often toward her. At first, the BR fan might easily dismiss this as an ode or nod to the scenery during the Deckard test in the original, but this is done on purpose in multiple scenes through the movie. Why? Because Lucifer is the “Morning Star (angel),” the “Bringer of Light.” Hell, even when she enters the captain’s office, the first thing she says is something about the light and turns it on. She always wears light colors or white to try to symbolize her purity though she has none and has to stand through all of Wallace’s musings on angels and creation.
So if Luv is Lucifer then that, by default, makes Wallace God or at least some form of god (argument can be made that the original replicant maker from the first film is actually god in this interpretation). With that in mind, his blindness actually makes sense as an allusion to God’s supposed blindness to the plight of his creation. Yes, the replicants are suffering but why would he care? He sees what he is doing as necessary for the universe.
You have the child as Jesus—funny how this is 30-some years after the baby was supposedly born, right? She is a doctor so you know she is smart. She was also raised in a rather tough upbringing. Biblical scholars believe that Joseph either left the family or died sometime in Christ’s youth, hence why Ford’s character is not around. She’s born to a “virgin” replicant or someone who, for all intents and purposes, should not have been able to give birth, and blah, blah, blah. Look, there’s more allusions in there but I am running out of time and this review is already too long.
Ultimately I feel like they have made two fairly lackluster films in this franchise, both of which supply great visuals and music but are sorely lacking in excitement. While this film made for a coherent plot, it did nothing to win over new audiences. I think that this idea has, to a great extent been squandered and almost deliberately so. Realize that we still haven’t seen any off-world stuff, nor any place outside of the US west coast and have no idea why they speak the language they speak. There is so much untapped potential here that this could literally be a shared cinematic universe all itself, and yes I am still including the artistic integrity of each picture. You don’t have to remove the philosophy, weird parts or even a lot of the slow, brooding silence, just add in more action and let the replicants and the humans have slightly more personality, then give each film to a visionary and explore off-world colonies, other places in the world, hell even show a full-on war rebellion or something. There’s so much to do here. Yet, for some reason I feel like in the last few years we are being punked by Ridley Scott. As one of the exec producers on this, it seems as if he’s tried to ruin his own legacy of decent/good/great films by going back to retread them in some way. He did it with Alien, he’s doing it here. If I hear anything about them trying to do a sequel or prequel to Gladiator, so help me God...
Should you see it? Eh! If you were a fan of the original Blade Runner, then chances are you probably already have seen it. I can’t say that you, as a new fan that knows nothing about this film should go see it. Gosling fans feel free, Ford fans feel free, but again, it might not be satisfying after nearly three hours of runtime. It’s just an OK movie.
What do you think? Was I too hard on this film? If you haven’t seen it, do you plan on going now? If you have seen it, what did you think of the film? If you think it’s a masterpiece then tell me how. And do you think K actually dies at the end or no? Would you be willing to see a sequel? Let me know in the comments below.
Check out my 5-star comedy novel,
Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend
. #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.Until next time, “What do androids dream of?” ‘What every thing dreams of: something better.’
P.S. You can’t tell me that if you’re a fan of Blade Runner you don’t like that sign-off. OK, it probably won’t work well as my ultimate sign-off for everything, but it works here, doesn’t it? No? You don’t like it? Not thought-provoking enough? Fine. Whatevs! My feelings aren’t hurt. Nope. I’ll think of a better sign-off next time.
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To Space And Beyond #TheOrville #FOX #3weekroundup #review #recap #premiereweek
To Space And Beyond #TheOrville #FOX #3weekroundup #review #recap #premiereweek
All pictures courtesy of FOX
It’s that time of the year again, ladies and gentlemen. That’s right, it is time for us to sift through the good, bad and downright putrid refuse that is the new crop of TV shows to find out if there’s anything new worth watching this 2017-2018 season. That’s right, it’s Premiere Week! Well, OK, technically premiere week came, like a week or two ago and I’m doing my first TV review on a show that has been out for the last four or five weeks, but you get the point and you know why. “Why?” You ask. You must be new here. For any new readers, let me say that I do a review of the first three episodes of a series, rather than the first one, because I (unlike other reviewers) see the benefit in letting a show build to something. Judging an entire series by its first episode—an episode that is already going to be overstuffed by its very definition and struggling to set tone and pace and wow-factor—to me is a little over-reactive. There are tons of shows that, frankly, don’t catch on with audiences or critics the first episode out and take a little time to build before people are truly wild about it. Case in point, the first season of Seinfeld. The ratings for the first episode of that were terrible because few people knew who he was and it came on as a late spring/summer show. So, I always say that it may be excruciating at first, but give a show at least three episodes before tossing your viewership to some other mindless show.
So, with the yearly disclaimer and explanation on why I do a three-week/three-episode roundup of new shows, what do I have to say about FOX’s new Seth MacFarlane-created The Orville. Is it a fun space adventure into the unknown and great beyond, or does this thing crash and burn back to earth before ever reaching the stratosphere? Let’s find out together!
As I said, The Orville was created by Seth MacFarlane who, in another unexpected twist, decided to also star in the show himself. But wait, you’re saying that’s not unexpected as he voices all of his show’s lead characters with the exception of the defunct The Cleveland Show. You’re also thinking, “Another unexpected twist? What the hell was the first one?” Ha! The first one is that this show is not an animated comedy like Family Guy but is actually an hour-long live-action dramedy that tries to straddle the line between Seth’s trademark humor and the weightiness of a primetime sci-fi drama in the vein of Star Trek or Battle Star Galactica. So now we’re going from that first twist and leap-frogging the second twist (which I revealed first) to go to the main thrust of the show, you follow? After the second to last sentence where I referenced those two other sci-fi shows, you’re saying, “Star Trek? Battle Star Galactica? Really?” Yes, your thought is correct. This is a show about a newly-appointed space captain and his crew who voyage around space encountering new species, visiting new planets and going where no man has gone before... and a lotta places that man apparently has gone before. This is Seth’s ode to Star Trek, Star Wars and any other interplanetary sci-fi geekdom allusion you can conjure. Or is it? Hold on to that question until the end because it plays a very important role in my overall critique of the series.
We begin with Seth’s character Ed “soon-to-be Captain” Mercer walking in on his wife cheating on him with a blue alien in their New York apartment in 2418 (or 17; doesn’t really matter). His wife, played by Adrian Palicki (fresh off of Marvel’s Agents of Shield and the never-was spin-off of that show), is cheating with a blue alien who has blue juice burst from his pores, covering his own face. While this can be interpreted as a reaction to the shock of being caught, your mind immediately goes first to the other thing that happens during sex and we are straight-way given the baseline of how this series is supposed to go and the level of jokes to expect.
Anyway, Ed and his wife Commander Kelly Grayson get a divorce and we zoom ahead one year to see that the Union (this series’ Star Trek Federation) is in a mode of Manifest-Destiny-type expansion and needs to fill 3000 exploratory and combat spaceships to cruise the galaxy. Only because they are in need of so many captains does Ed get the call/promotion. And while he can’t choose his first mate (protocol, I assume) he can choose his first driver (forgot the name the show uses and it’s really just easier this way). The man he chooses to helm his ship is Lieutenant Gordon Malloy played by Scott Grimes. He is supposedly one of the best pilots in the Union but was recently demerited for doing some kind of badassery that helped to save his previous crew but damaged a spaceship. He’s also the hard-drinking, wise-cracking red head that seems needed in every spaceship film or TV show these days.
Now that we have the three main white characters, we fill out the cast with the Union-provided doctor played by veteran actress Penny Johnson Jerald; the Klingon-knockoff Lieutenant Commander Bortus; the second pilot Lt. John LaMarr or the black guy that’s supposed to actually look like a black guy and not an alien; and the young strong alien girl who is fourth in command, Lt. Alara Kitan played by Halston Sage. Kitan is there because she is super strong because the atmosphere on her planet is a lot denser and there’s more gravity, so she was able to move quickly through the ranks in the Union military.
Oh, and we also have an Iron-Giant-looking (it also looks like the original Iron Man suit that Tony made in the cave in the first movie) robot. It looks super-primitive and is an ode to Lost in Space’s Robot, mixed with a little bit of HAL and that robot that Matt Damon voiced in Interstellar. The robot comes from a planet filled with nothing but robots (ala Futurama’s Chapek 9, an all-robot planet; knew there’d be some hat-tip to Groening somewhere) that think they are superior to all organic beings. Yet, this bot does not get sarcasm. Stupid, robots.
Anyway, with all the key players met, they embark on their first mission to a planet that they use their warp-drive to get to, so it’s a fair distance from earth. A routine supplies-drop, upon arriving they are told by the guy who contacted them that the planet needs no supplies. Instead, what they need is protection. This planet is an outpost planet that serves as a “scientific playground.” Filled with researchers, all they do is make scientific discoveries and study various things that are brought to them from around the galaxy. Their most recent breakthrough has come in the form of a machine that can create a time bubble around things and then speed-up the time within said bubble. For example, they take a freshly-picked green banana, put it under the bubble, then watch as it goes from green to yellow to black and finally a flattened, juice-less peel. Though time for them has passed in seconds, inside the bubble a full month has passed. Well, they see the military application for this and are afraid that these white aliens who look, literally, exactly like that white alien woman from that last Star Trek Beyond film, will come and take it and use it to wipe out entire armies by aging them rapidly. I’m not sure if these are supposed to be the big baddies in this series like the Borg or Vulcans or Klingons or what have you, but I do know that they are defeated rather easily.
After a few members of the crew point out that the guy who called them for help had a dog licking its balls in the background of the video-call, the aliens do invade and the crew escapes back onto their ship where they then devise the plan to give the aliens precisely what they want. But what they do is send the aliens the machine with a redwood tree seed already lodged in the aging mechanism. They turn it on, set it for 100 years, then send it to the aliens who are quickly destroyed by a 100-year-old giant redwood growing through their ship. Admittedly, I thought this was pretty cool and an inventive way to defeat an enemy without having to fire a single shot of some strange phaser or photon-blaster. And surprise, the person who helped come up with this genius idea was Adrian’s character, Ed’s ex-wife. At this point some of you who are still reading this (maybe even some who have seen the show) are pissed not just because you think, “Gosh, this guy can’t write,” but because you think I totally buried the lede and that I should’ve mentioned that Ed’s ex-wife was made his second-in-command earlier. However, the setup was so obvious from jump that this, to me, should’ve been assumed. Plus, it is in the actual description of the first episode, so...
What’s interesting is that not only did she request the assignment to apologize and basically fem-blame (when a woman blames a man for all her problems) him for her cheating—the usual “you were distant and worked a lot” shtick—she was also the one who went to his superior and suggested that Ed be given a captain position, vouching for his lethargic and unprofessional behavior for the past year as being totally influenced by her cheating. In the end, Ed half-forgives her enough to no longer object to her being his second officer. And so begins the voyage of The Orville (named after Orville Wright).
In the second episode, we are treated to more couple’s bickering and forced getting along when The Orville is contacted by a ship in distress. As it just so happens, the ship has Ed’s mother and father on it who, instead of properly explaining why they were on the ship, delve into something to do with a colon exam and seeds getting lodged into the folds of the rectum and you’re supposed to laugh but... eh! So, in order to see what’s going on, the captain and his ex-wife/first officer leave the ship (they take a smaller ship, and here it should be noted that it doesn’t seem like they have the advanced power to beam-up to something, but this other ship does). With the third-in-command nesting on an egg (yeah, we’ll get back to this in the third episode), they turn to the young Kitan to captain the ship while they briefly step off.
The brief step-off becomes anything but when they get on the ship and find it empty, then step into an elevator which locks them in and beams them away to places unknown. Suddenly, back on board the Orville, the crew see that what they thought was this huge ship is nothing more than an oversized ring pop floating in space. On Kitan’s command, they tractor-beam it toward them only for it to blow up before they can get it on board and examine it. This is her first big mistake and it knocks out some of the power. She gets treated like a child by the older parts of the crew and she is told by the doctor lady to stand up for herself and actually be in command because they left her in command for a reason.
Meanwhile, as the Orville tries to figure out what happened to Ed and Kelly, the two exes awake in what looks exactly like their old New York apartment and I have an immediate recognition/premonition of what this is. For a full day they look out the window and see the New York skyline and I am amazed because I just keep wondering how much their apartment cost and how much money they were making in 2417 because this place has a serious view. You can’t even get great views in some million-dollar apartments in New York now (trust me, I watch Million Dollar Listing New York), I can only imagine the astronomical prices 400 years from now.
The Black Guy
Anyway, as it turns out they spend a night reminiscing and not having sex until they finally awake the next morning to see that the familiar apartment view has been replaced with what’s actually outside: a bunch of red-skinned aliens staring back at them. Yep, this is a zoo. As it turns out, there are at least two races of beings that think themselves so advanced that they are superior to almost all other life: that being the robots of which Isaac is a part, and these red-skinned aliens. You can see that they clearly are more advanced because they have the beam-me-up technology that has, up until this point in the series, been absent. The crew discovers at the same time that the red aliens put out space-lures to fish for new animals for their exhibits and have finally caught some humans.
Disobeying the orders of Union command, Kitan orders the crew go rescue Ed and Kelly and wade into the dangerous territory of these red aliens. Luckily, she takes Isaac with her to speak with the red alien zookeeper, as the red aliens see the robot’s people as equals. While the alien at first wants to kill Ed and Kelly after Kitan and the robot make up a lie about the two being infected with some disease, Kitan makes a deal with him for their release. The deal: instead of keeping the live humans they get hours and hours of reality television to show in that animal cell block, beginning with The Real Housewives of New Jersey. And it is here that I let out a hardy laugh for the episode.
With all restored, the episode ends with Bortus finally hatching his egg and discovering that the child that comes out is a... girl, and this leads into the third episode.
A little background on Bortus and his people. These Klingon-looking people are apparently a race of all males. A joke is made early in the series about them not squabbling over having to put the toilet seat down or not and it is revealed that Bortus only pees once a year. They are an efficient people and highly logical and emotionless. So, Bortus and his partner (also a male) decide to have a baby. They do this by Bortus laying an egg and hatching it, which, as I previously said comes out female. Apparently, this anomaly happens at least once every 75 years but luckily Bortus and his people have a gender-change procedure that they do right after the baby’s birth. And here was where I started to take offense to the show.
Bortus and his partner initially agree that this change needs to be made but the doctor on the ship won’t perform it (she being a woman herself doesn’t see the problem). Captain Ed also won’t order the doctor to do it, so Bortus and his partner call a ship from their home planet. And things get political. Bortus, after seeing Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, changes his mind about the procedure and believes his partner will change his mind too, only for the revelation that his partner was also born female to surface. Bortus’ partner had the operation as a baby and had only recently learned of this. He wants the child to not be ostracized from society by being a female.
So, the crew follow Bortus’ people back to their home planet where more eye-rolls came to me as they flew to the surface. Apparently, the entirety of the planet has been industrialized as these people are huge exporters of galactic weaponry. It looks bleak, red and marred by destruction and weapons testing. Anyway, they land and have a tribunal or court case concerning whether there is need to do the surgery or not. Naturally, Commander Kelly is the one to defend Bortus’ new decision to not have the surgery, mainly floundering with arguments that have almost no bearing whatsoever on the actual court case or Bortus’ people. This is one of the reasons why I disliked it so much but I digress. I’ll save my critique until after the grade.
Anyway, Captain Ed has this brilliant idea to scan the planet and he finds female life. In fact, there is a female of Bortus’ race that is living high up in a nearby cave from the city in which they find themselves. They bring her to the tribunal where she testifies that she was born female and her parents escaped to the city’s limits to raise her, opting not to have her sex changed. And she lived this amazing life and is happy. The opposing attorney rightfully points out that while she may be happy, she is living the life that the parents precisely wanted to prevent for Bortus’ baby: she is ostracized and has no connection to actual society. Then, in the most “gimme a frickin’ break” moment in the series so far, she quotes from the planet’s greatest author and everyone is offended that she would sully this author’s words, only to then realize that she was actually that author the whole time. Puh-lease!
In the end, her testimony does nothing and the baby still undergoes the gender reassignment so that Bortus and his partner are left with a beautiful and healthy baby boy.
What’s my score? I give The Orville a C- to a D+. Yes, two grades. I know. I try not to do that, but in this case it seems necessary. For starters, this show has a lotta issues, so many that it’s hard to know where to begin. Let me give it credit in the one thing that it is trying to do right, which is stay true to Gene Roddenberry and other futurists’ idea of humanity being able to come to a point in time in which we can all get along and explore and learn more than we war and churn. The swift-moving, heart-pounding action of Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate or even the newest Star Trek movies and shows ain’t nowhere near this series. It is not an action/adventure series. However, that doesn’t make it boring. Again, this was the original intent of Star Trek: to explore. So, older fans that are nostalgic for the non-shoot’em up style of the original Star Trek might find this to be a happy equivalent.
I will also give this show props in the design of its various creatures and aliens and even the costumes and effects, though I have a slight gripe in that the way the show is lit makes it feel too much like it is being shot on a sound stage. Holy crap, I just realized exactly what it feels like. It feels like some of the old skits that Mad TV and/or SNL used to do to make fun of Star Trek. It is lit the exact same, so even though you can clearly see that they’ve spent some money getting the costumes and special effects right, the lighting still makes it all look a little cheap.
Ultimately, the two biggest gripes I have with this show is that it is not funny/doesn’t know what it wants to be, and that the writing is so subpar that any exploration of today’s social or political ideas comes off as being more bumbling than a Three Stooges episode.
Beginning with the comedy, we already thought we knew what to expect with Seth MacFarlane not only being the creator but the lead star of the show. And while we do get a lot of his brand of comedy, what we also get is a lot of his brand of recent comedy which is not very good. Let me break this down for you: When Family Guy first premiered way back in 1999 (oh my god, that’s seriously been on almost twenty years? Man, where does time go?) Seth could stay with a plot throughout a full season of the show and through one full episode. The cancellation and subsequent renewal only strengthened the funny. But in more recent years (and the reason I stopped watching Family Guy) the show has become moreso a collection of different scenes that serve to setup the next gag rather than a cohesive plot. Don’t get me wrong, they do all still have plots, but there are so many cut-aways, fourth wall breaks and clips that scream “laugh at this” that you end up not laughing as much as you maybe should. The same went for Ted 2 and A Million Ways to Die in the West. Seth has settled into a tone of gag-comedy that diffuses the intelligence and satirical acid of early Family Guy episodes for a “don’t you find this funny” type of nudge in the gut at every joke. To me, this is what Twin Peaks did in similar fashion, except it insisted “don’t you find this deep and thought provoking?” It was because of this that I really only laughed once or twice an episode which is a terrible time/influence ratio for an hour-long dramedy. It just isn’t funny, plain and simple.
This problem is made even worse by the ill-delivered lines of the actors. The funny thing is that while I’ve seen almost all of these actors in something else and enjoyed what they did there, here I find that each episode feels like someone else’s turn to see if they can outdo the bad acting of someone from the previous episode. I thought Adrian was bad on the third episode, Halston on the second and Seth on the first. And, this in no way is an offense against Seth’s looks because I actually think he looks decent, I don’t think he should be in front of the camera. Most scenes he’s in, he is like a vanilla ice cream cone in July—he melts into the background. The supposedly witty lines he delivers are meant to come off as charming or even endearing in some instances but never quite make it past that Frat-boy level of snark that is programmed in all of us to just accept or ignore. He’s like that coworker who thinks that everyone else thinks he’s funny so he’s constantly making jokes, and then his coworkers keep giving him pity laughs which only feed into his idea that people think he is funny. Bottomline: there’s something about his performance that just does not work here.
The other reason and partial first reason why I said I gave this show such a low score is because of the writing mixed with the show’s identity. This show doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. You hear the name Seth MacFarlane and you immediately think, “Oh, comedy! Of course.” But as I stated, the comedy parts really aren’t that funny. What’s more, there really aren’t that many comedic moments per episode, whether that be one-liners, gag-setups or visual ha-has. Actually, there are more dramatic and semi-dramatic moments in the show than there are truly comedic moments, or at least more dramatic moments than those moments where you ask yourself if you should be laughing or not. You could almost say that this is more of a poorly-executed drama with comedic elements thrown in sparingly rather than a melding of the two genres. The fact that the show takes itself too seriously while floundering in the comedy is no more apparent than in the third episode.
I had so many gripes with this episode not just because I’m not a feminist but because I don’t know what the hell it was trying to ultimately say about gender identity, personality changing, choice, feminism, masculinity and the like. As an environmentalist and someone who loves nature, I always find it highly offensive when it is shown that it is solely men’s fault for polluting or ruining nature such as on Bortus’ all-male planet. There are plenty of men who love nature just as much if not more than women just as plenty of women have no problem destroying the environment. Then finding one of probably the only females on the planet and giving her the honor of being the planet’s/species’ most famous and thought-provoking writer was such poor writing that I almost turned the show off and I never do that for anything (I think I can count on one hand how many movies I’ve turned off because I couldn’t take it anymore). Forget the sexism stuff and just consider these questions because apparently the show would have us believe that: this hermit woman who has no contact with society, lives in a cave that looked like it had little to no electronic hook-ups to the city a few miles away, and who no one even knew existed, somehow became the PLANET’S most famous author and nobody knew she was female, or have never seen a picture of her or have never talked to her even over the phone? Even if she was writing under a pen name some of my fellow authors have to know how illogically stupid this is. And this is supposedly 400 years in the future.
The even bigger problem is that the show jumps back and forth between trying to go for a fun and light-hearted spoof or parody tone to after-school special at the drop of a dime. The episode with Kitan commanding the ship and her going to the doctor for advice felt less like a woman to grown-ass-woman talk and more like an after-class talk between Cory and Mr. Feeney, or Mr. Kotter and any of his troubled students (I know, that’s reachin’ back, right?). The show feels like it wants to make bold statements about things but is too timid because it doesn’t have the glossy armor of being “just a cartoon” to allow its audience to sponge out whatever message they want to glean.
“But you haven’t explained the two grades,” you say. OK, the two grades is because I felt like I was grading two different series in one, which ultimately brought both series down. I think that this show actually has a lot of potential. With Star Trek being exclusively on CBS All Access, this could fill a niche that fans have been craving for over a decade and end FOX’s reputation for getting semi-quality sci-fi shows and canceling them after one season, but it needs to do two things and neither, surprisingly, is getting rid of Seth as the lead. If I were to give advice, I would tell the show to get a new showrunner for starters, then decide on one style, which I know would be difficult to do for MacFarlane. I think deciding the style would be difficult because, and this seems crazy, but I actually think that the show works better as a drama with quirky characters than as a comedy and definitely better than the dramedy it is trying to be. I think getting a new showrunner—maybe someone off the Syfy channel or see if the District 9 director would be interested in doing TV (hell, it looks like that planned Aliens sequel ain’t goin’ nowhere)—would really fix both issues. A new showrunner could get in new writers who can write snappier dialogue and new, more creative situations as opposed to old Twilight Zone retreads—I mean humans caged as animals for alien viewing? Really? The ZONE did that 50+ years ago, and people still indulge in their Zone marathons every July 4th and New Year’s so you’re not fooling anyone.
But if they were going to go with the comedic tone, then they need to get some of (read: all of) the people behind that old Galaxy Quest movie, which is probably what a lot of people thought they’d be getting when tuning in to The Orville. The writers, producers and director behind Galaxy Quest were all able to make an exciting and funny film out of a ridiculous concept. The Orville is taking a well-worn concept and playing it too straight-faced and the writing isn’t smart or well-informed. Again, I think this could do really well if they re-tooled to choose either drama with two funny characters in Seth and the redhead (make everyone else serious or give them biting humor), or going all-out hilarious. But what it is now is not working for most people.
Should you be watching? Eh! While I don’t really think it was boring, it was very predictable. And I think that regardless of what tone they go with for the show, the actual lighting needs to be changed so that it doesn’t look so sketch-comedy-show-ish, but I do see it being a time killer for people who love Star Trek and aren’t willing to pay for CBS All Access quite yet. The Orville airs at 9pm on Thursdays only on FOX. Catch previous episodes On Demand and on FOX.com.
What do you think? Have you heard of The Orville? If so, have you seen it? If not, do you think you’ll check it out now? If you have seen it, what did you think? What improvements, if any, do you think the show should make? Who is your favorite character? And what the hell is Norm MacDonald doing voicing that strange snot-blob thing? Let me know it the comments below.
Check out my 5-star comedy novel,
Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend
. #AhStalkingIf you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.
Until next time, “Space. It’s big and... black, and seems to stretch on forever.”‘Hey, I know somethin’ else that’s big and black and stretches on forever! Ha!” – a quote from Big D*** Willie
P.S. Crude, I know. That was a test. If you didn’t laugh at that line, then chances are you probably won’t be laughing too often at this show. And if you did, then chances are that you still won’t be laughing very much at this show. I’ll try to think of a better sign-off line next time.
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All pictures courtesy of FOX It’s that time of the year again, ladies and gentlemen. That’s right, it is time for us to sift through the good, bad and downright putrid refuse that is the new crop of TV shows to find out if there’s anything new worth watching this 2017-2018 season. That’s right, it’s Premiere Week! Well, OK, technically premiere week came, like a week or two ago and I’m doing my first TV review on a show that has been out for the last four or five weeks, but you get the point and you know why. “Why?” You ask. You must be new here. For any new readers, let me say that I do a review of the first three episodes of a series, rather than the first one, because I (unlike other reviewers) see the benefit in letting a show build to something. Judging an entire series by its first episode—an episode that is already going to be overstuffed by its very definition and struggling to set tone and pace and wow-factor—to me is a little over-reactive. There are tons of shows that, frankly, don’t catch on with audiences or critics the first episode out and take a little time to build before people are truly wild about it. Case in point, the first season of Seinfeld. The ratings for the first episode of that were terrible because few people knew who he was and it came on as a late spring/summer show. So, I always say that it may be excruciating at first, but give a show at least three episodes before tossing your viewership to some other mindless show.
So, with the yearly disclaimer and explanation on why I do a three-week/three-episode roundup of new shows, what do I have to say about FOX’s new Seth MacFarlane-created The Orville. Is it a fun space adventure into the unknown and great beyond, or does this thing crash and burn back to earth before ever reaching the stratosphere? Let’s find out together!
As I said, The Orville was created by Seth MacFarlane who, in another unexpected twist, decided to also star in the show himself. But wait, you’re saying that’s not unexpected as he voices all of his show’s lead characters with the exception of the defunct The Cleveland Show. You’re also thinking, “Another unexpected twist? What the hell was the first one?” Ha! The first one is that this show is not an animated comedy like Family Guy but is actually an hour-long live-action dramedy that tries to straddle the line between Seth’s trademark humor and the weightiness of a primetime sci-fi drama in the vein of Star Trek or Battle Star Galactica. So now we’re going from that first twist and leap-frogging the second twist (which I revealed first) to go to the main thrust of the show, you follow? After the second to last sentence where I referenced those two other sci-fi shows, you’re saying, “Star Trek? Battle Star Galactica? Really?” Yes, your thought is correct. This is a show about a newly-appointed space captain and his crew who voyage around space encountering new species, visiting new planets and going where no man has gone before... and a lotta places that man apparently has gone before. This is Seth’s ode to Star Trek, Star Wars and any other interplanetary sci-fi geekdom allusion you can conjure. Or is it? Hold on to that question until the end because it plays a very important role in my overall critique of the series.
We begin with Seth’s character Ed “soon-to-be Captain” Mercer walking in on his wife cheating on him with a blue alien in their New York apartment in 2418 (or 17; doesn’t really matter). His wife, played by Adrian Palicki (fresh off of Marvel’s Agents of Shield and the never-was spin-off of that show), is cheating with a blue alien who has blue juice burst from his pores, covering his own face. While this can be interpreted as a reaction to the shock of being caught, your mind immediately goes first to the other thing that happens during sex and we are straight-way given the baseline of how this series is supposed to go and the level of jokes to expect. Anyway, Ed and his wife Commander Kelly Grayson get a divorce and we zoom ahead one year to see that the Union (this series’ Star Trek Federation) is in a mode of Manifest-Destiny-type expansion and needs to fill 3000 exploratory and combat spaceships to cruise the galaxy. Only because they are in need of so many captains does Ed get the call/promotion. And while he can’t choose his first mate (protocol, I assume) he can choose his first driver (forgot the name the show uses and it’s really just easier this way). The man he chooses to helm his ship is Lieutenant Gordon Malloy played by Scott Grimes. He is supposedly one of the best pilots in the Union but was recently demerited for doing some kind of badassery that helped to save his previous crew but damaged a spaceship. He’s also the hard-drinking, wise-cracking red head that seems needed in every spaceship film or TV show these days.
Now that we have the three main white characters, we fill out the cast with the Union-provided doctor played by veteran actress Penny Johnson Jerald; the Klingon-knockoff Lieutenant Commander Bortus; the second pilot Lt. John LaMarr or the black guy that’s supposed to actually look like a black guy and not an alien; and the young strong alien girl who is fourth in command, Lt. Alara Kitan played by Halston Sage. Kitan is there because she is super strong because the atmosphere on her planet is a lot denser and there’s more gravity, so she was able to move quickly through the ranks in the Union military.
Oh, and we also have an Iron-Giant-looking (it also looks like the original Iron Man suit that Tony made in the cave in the first movie) robot. It looks super-primitive and is an ode to Lost in Space’s Robot, mixed with a little bit of HAL and that robot that Matt Damon voiced in Interstellar. The robot comes from a planet filled with nothing but robots (ala Futurama’s Chapek 9, an all-robot planet; knew there’d be some hat-tip to Groening somewhere) that think they are superior to all organic beings. Yet, this bot does not get sarcasm. Stupid, robots. Anyway, with all the key players met, they embark on their first mission to a planet that they use their warp-drive to get to, so it’s a fair distance from earth. A routine supplies-drop, upon arriving they are told by the guy who contacted them that the planet needs no supplies. Instead, what they need is protection. This planet is an outpost planet that serves as a “scientific playground.” Filled with researchers, all they do is make scientific discoveries and study various things that are brought to them from around the galaxy. Their most recent breakthrough has come in the form of a machine that can create a time bubble around things and then speed-up the time within said bubble. For example, they take a freshly-picked green banana, put it under the bubble, then watch as it goes from green to yellow to black and finally a flattened, juice-less peel. Though time for them has passed in seconds, inside the bubble a full month has passed. Well, they see the military application for this and are afraid that these white aliens who look, literally, exactly like that white alien woman from that last Star Trek Beyond film, will come and take it and use it to wipe out entire armies by aging them rapidly. I’m not sure if these are supposed to be the big baddies in this series like the Borg or Vulcans or Klingons or what have you, but I do know that they are defeated rather easily.
After a few members of the crew point out that the guy who called them for help had a dog licking its balls in the background of the video-call, the aliens do invade and the crew escapes back onto their ship where they then devise the plan to give the aliens precisely what they want. But what they do is send the aliens the machine with a redwood tree seed already lodged in the aging mechanism. They turn it on, set it for 100 years, then send it to the aliens who are quickly destroyed by a 100-year-old giant redwood growing through their ship. Admittedly, I thought this was pretty cool and an inventive way to defeat an enemy without having to fire a single shot of some strange phaser or photon-blaster. And surprise, the person who helped come up with this genius idea was Adrian’s character, Ed’s ex-wife. At this point some of you who are still reading this (maybe even some who have seen the show) are pissed not just because you think, “Gosh, this guy can’t write,” but because you think I totally buried the lede and that I should’ve mentioned that Ed’s ex-wife was made his second-in-command earlier. However, the setup was so obvious from jump that this, to me, should’ve been assumed. Plus, it is in the actual description of the first episode, so...
What’s interesting is that not only did she request the assignment to apologize and basically fem-blame (when a woman blames a man for all her problems) him for her cheating—the usual “you were distant and worked a lot” shtick—she was also the one who went to his superior and suggested that Ed be given a captain position, vouching for his lethargic and unprofessional behavior for the past year as being totally influenced by her cheating. In the end, Ed half-forgives her enough to no longer object to her being his second officer. And so begins the voyage of The Orville (named after Orville Wright).
In the second episode, we are treated to more couple’s bickering and forced getting along when The Orville is contacted by a ship in distress. As it just so happens, the ship has Ed’s mother and father on it who, instead of properly explaining why they were on the ship, delve into something to do with a colon exam and seeds getting lodged into the folds of the rectum and you’re supposed to laugh but... eh! So, in order to see what’s going on, the captain and his ex-wife/first officer leave the ship (they take a smaller ship, and here it should be noted that it doesn’t seem like they have the advanced power to beam-up to something, but this other ship does). With the third-in-command nesting on an egg (yeah, we’ll get back to this in the third episode), they turn to the young Kitan to captain the ship while they briefly step off.
The brief step-off becomes anything but when they get on the ship and find it empty, then step into an elevator which locks them in and beams them away to places unknown. Suddenly, back on board the Orville, the crew see that what they thought was this huge ship is nothing more than an oversized ring pop floating in space. On Kitan’s command, they tractor-beam it toward them only for it to blow up before they can get it on board and examine it. This is her first big mistake and it knocks out some of the power. She gets treated like a child by the older parts of the crew and she is told by the doctor lady to stand up for herself and actually be in command because they left her in command for a reason.
Meanwhile, as the Orville tries to figure out what happened to Ed and Kelly, the two exes awake in what looks exactly like their old New York apartment and I have an immediate recognition/premonition of what this is. For a full day they look out the window and see the New York skyline and I am amazed because I just keep wondering how much their apartment cost and how much money they were making in 2417 because this place has a serious view. You can’t even get great views in some million-dollar apartments in New York now (trust me, I watch Million Dollar Listing New York), I can only imagine the astronomical prices 400 years from now.
The Black GuyAnyway, as it turns out they spend a night reminiscing and not having sex until they finally awake the next morning to see that the familiar apartment view has been replaced with what’s actually outside: a bunch of red-skinned aliens staring back at them. Yep, this is a zoo. As it turns out, there are at least two races of beings that think themselves so advanced that they are superior to almost all other life: that being the robots of which Isaac is a part, and these red-skinned aliens. You can see that they clearly are more advanced because they have the beam-me-up technology that has, up until this point in the series, been absent. The crew discovers at the same time that the red aliens put out space-lures to fish for new animals for their exhibits and have finally caught some humans.
Disobeying the orders of Union command, Kitan orders the crew go rescue Ed and Kelly and wade into the dangerous territory of these red aliens. Luckily, she takes Isaac with her to speak with the red alien zookeeper, as the red aliens see the robot’s people as equals. While the alien at first wants to kill Ed and Kelly after Kitan and the robot make up a lie about the two being infected with some disease, Kitan makes a deal with him for their release. The deal: instead of keeping the live humans they get hours and hours of reality television to show in that animal cell block, beginning with The Real Housewives of New Jersey. And it is here that I let out a hardy laugh for the episode.
With all restored, the episode ends with Bortus finally hatching his egg and discovering that the child that comes out is a... girl, and this leads into the third episode.
A little background on Bortus and his people. These Klingon-looking people are apparently a race of all males. A joke is made early in the series about them not squabbling over having to put the toilet seat down or not and it is revealed that Bortus only pees once a year. They are an efficient people and highly logical and emotionless. So, Bortus and his partner (also a male) decide to have a baby. They do this by Bortus laying an egg and hatching it, which, as I previously said comes out female. Apparently, this anomaly happens at least once every 75 years but luckily Bortus and his people have a gender-change procedure that they do right after the baby’s birth. And here was where I started to take offense to the show.
Bortus and his partner initially agree that this change needs to be made but the doctor on the ship won’t perform it (she being a woman herself doesn’t see the problem). Captain Ed also won’t order the doctor to do it, so Bortus and his partner call a ship from their home planet. And things get political. Bortus, after seeing Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, changes his mind about the procedure and believes his partner will change his mind too, only for the revelation that his partner was also born female to surface. Bortus’ partner had the operation as a baby and had only recently learned of this. He wants the child to not be ostracized from society by being a female. So, the crew follow Bortus’ people back to their home planet where more eye-rolls came to me as they flew to the surface. Apparently, the entirety of the planet has been industrialized as these people are huge exporters of galactic weaponry. It looks bleak, red and marred by destruction and weapons testing. Anyway, they land and have a tribunal or court case concerning whether there is need to do the surgery or not. Naturally, Commander Kelly is the one to defend Bortus’ new decision to not have the surgery, mainly floundering with arguments that have almost no bearing whatsoever on the actual court case or Bortus’ people. This is one of the reasons why I disliked it so much but I digress. I’ll save my critique until after the grade.
Anyway, Captain Ed has this brilliant idea to scan the planet and he finds female life. In fact, there is a female of Bortus’ race that is living high up in a nearby cave from the city in which they find themselves. They bring her to the tribunal where she testifies that she was born female and her parents escaped to the city’s limits to raise her, opting not to have her sex changed. And she lived this amazing life and is happy. The opposing attorney rightfully points out that while she may be happy, she is living the life that the parents precisely wanted to prevent for Bortus’ baby: she is ostracized and has no connection to actual society. Then, in the most “gimme a frickin’ break” moment in the series so far, she quotes from the planet’s greatest author and everyone is offended that she would sully this author’s words, only to then realize that she was actually that author the whole time. Puh-lease!
In the end, her testimony does nothing and the baby still undergoes the gender reassignment so that Bortus and his partner are left with a beautiful and healthy baby boy.
What’s my score? I give The Orville a C- to a D+. Yes, two grades. I know. I try not to do that, but in this case it seems necessary. For starters, this show has a lotta issues, so many that it’s hard to know where to begin. Let me give it credit in the one thing that it is trying to do right, which is stay true to Gene Roddenberry and other futurists’ idea of humanity being able to come to a point in time in which we can all get along and explore and learn more than we war and churn. The swift-moving, heart-pounding action of Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate or even the newest Star Trek movies and shows ain’t nowhere near this series. It is not an action/adventure series. However, that doesn’t make it boring. Again, this was the original intent of Star Trek: to explore. So, older fans that are nostalgic for the non-shoot’em up style of the original Star Trek might find this to be a happy equivalent.
I will also give this show props in the design of its various creatures and aliens and even the costumes and effects, though I have a slight gripe in that the way the show is lit makes it feel too much like it is being shot on a sound stage. Holy crap, I just realized exactly what it feels like. It feels like some of the old skits that Mad TV and/or SNL used to do to make fun of Star Trek. It is lit the exact same, so even though you can clearly see that they’ve spent some money getting the costumes and special effects right, the lighting still makes it all look a little cheap.
Ultimately, the two biggest gripes I have with this show is that it is not funny/doesn’t know what it wants to be, and that the writing is so subpar that any exploration of today’s social or political ideas comes off as being more bumbling than a Three Stooges episode.
Beginning with the comedy, we already thought we knew what to expect with Seth MacFarlane not only being the creator but the lead star of the show. And while we do get a lot of his brand of comedy, what we also get is a lot of his brand of recent comedy which is not very good. Let me break this down for you: When Family Guy first premiered way back in 1999 (oh my god, that’s seriously been on almost twenty years? Man, where does time go?) Seth could stay with a plot throughout a full season of the show and through one full episode. The cancellation and subsequent renewal only strengthened the funny. But in more recent years (and the reason I stopped watching Family Guy) the show has become moreso a collection of different scenes that serve to setup the next gag rather than a cohesive plot. Don’t get me wrong, they do all still have plots, but there are so many cut-aways, fourth wall breaks and clips that scream “laugh at this” that you end up not laughing as much as you maybe should. The same went for Ted 2 and A Million Ways to Die in the West. Seth has settled into a tone of gag-comedy that diffuses the intelligence and satirical acid of early Family Guy episodes for a “don’t you find this funny” type of nudge in the gut at every joke. To me, this is what Twin Peaks did in similar fashion, except it insisted “don’t you find this deep and thought provoking?” It was because of this that I really only laughed once or twice an episode which is a terrible time/influence ratio for an hour-long dramedy. It just isn’t funny, plain and simple.
This problem is made even worse by the ill-delivered lines of the actors. The funny thing is that while I’ve seen almost all of these actors in something else and enjoyed what they did there, here I find that each episode feels like someone else’s turn to see if they can outdo the bad acting of someone from the previous episode. I thought Adrian was bad on the third episode, Halston on the second and Seth on the first. And, this in no way is an offense against Seth’s looks because I actually think he looks decent, I don’t think he should be in front of the camera. Most scenes he’s in, he is like a vanilla ice cream cone in July—he melts into the background. The supposedly witty lines he delivers are meant to come off as charming or even endearing in some instances but never quite make it past that Frat-boy level of snark that is programmed in all of us to just accept or ignore. He’s like that coworker who thinks that everyone else thinks he’s funny so he’s constantly making jokes, and then his coworkers keep giving him pity laughs which only feed into his idea that people think he is funny. Bottomline: there’s something about his performance that just does not work here.
The other reason and partial first reason why I said I gave this show such a low score is because of the writing mixed with the show’s identity. This show doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. You hear the name Seth MacFarlane and you immediately think, “Oh, comedy! Of course.” But as I stated, the comedy parts really aren’t that funny. What’s more, there really aren’t that many comedic moments per episode, whether that be one-liners, gag-setups or visual ha-has. Actually, there are more dramatic and semi-dramatic moments in the show than there are truly comedic moments, or at least more dramatic moments than those moments where you ask yourself if you should be laughing or not. You could almost say that this is more of a poorly-executed drama with comedic elements thrown in sparingly rather than a melding of the two genres. The fact that the show takes itself too seriously while floundering in the comedy is no more apparent than in the third episode.
I had so many gripes with this episode not just because I’m not a feminist but because I don’t know what the hell it was trying to ultimately say about gender identity, personality changing, choice, feminism, masculinity and the like. As an environmentalist and someone who loves nature, I always find it highly offensive when it is shown that it is solely men’s fault for polluting or ruining nature such as on Bortus’ all-male planet. There are plenty of men who love nature just as much if not more than women just as plenty of women have no problem destroying the environment. Then finding one of probably the only females on the planet and giving her the honor of being the planet’s/species’ most famous and thought-provoking writer was such poor writing that I almost turned the show off and I never do that for anything (I think I can count on one hand how many movies I’ve turned off because I couldn’t take it anymore). Forget the sexism stuff and just consider these questions because apparently the show would have us believe that: this hermit woman who has no contact with society, lives in a cave that looked like it had little to no electronic hook-ups to the city a few miles away, and who no one even knew existed, somehow became the PLANET’S most famous author and nobody knew she was female, or have never seen a picture of her or have never talked to her even over the phone? Even if she was writing under a pen name some of my fellow authors have to know how illogically stupid this is. And this is supposedly 400 years in the future.
The even bigger problem is that the show jumps back and forth between trying to go for a fun and light-hearted spoof or parody tone to after-school special at the drop of a dime. The episode with Kitan commanding the ship and her going to the doctor for advice felt less like a woman to grown-ass-woman talk and more like an after-class talk between Cory and Mr. Feeney, or Mr. Kotter and any of his troubled students (I know, that’s reachin’ back, right?). The show feels like it wants to make bold statements about things but is too timid because it doesn’t have the glossy armor of being “just a cartoon” to allow its audience to sponge out whatever message they want to glean.
“But you haven’t explained the two grades,” you say. OK, the two grades is because I felt like I was grading two different series in one, which ultimately brought both series down. I think that this show actually has a lot of potential. With Star Trek being exclusively on CBS All Access, this could fill a niche that fans have been craving for over a decade and end FOX’s reputation for getting semi-quality sci-fi shows and canceling them after one season, but it needs to do two things and neither, surprisingly, is getting rid of Seth as the lead. If I were to give advice, I would tell the show to get a new showrunner for starters, then decide on one style, which I know would be difficult to do for MacFarlane. I think deciding the style would be difficult because, and this seems crazy, but I actually think that the show works better as a drama with quirky characters than as a comedy and definitely better than the dramedy it is trying to be. I think getting a new showrunner—maybe someone off the Syfy channel or see if the District 9 director would be interested in doing TV (hell, it looks like that planned Aliens sequel ain’t goin’ nowhere)—would really fix both issues. A new showrunner could get in new writers who can write snappier dialogue and new, more creative situations as opposed to old Twilight Zone retreads—I mean humans caged as animals for alien viewing? Really? The ZONE did that 50+ years ago, and people still indulge in their Zone marathons every July 4th and New Year’s so you’re not fooling anyone.
But if they were going to go with the comedic tone, then they need to get some of (read: all of) the people behind that old Galaxy Quest movie, which is probably what a lot of people thought they’d be getting when tuning in to The Orville. The writers, producers and director behind Galaxy Quest were all able to make an exciting and funny film out of a ridiculous concept. The Orville is taking a well-worn concept and playing it too straight-faced and the writing isn’t smart or well-informed. Again, I think this could do really well if they re-tooled to choose either drama with two funny characters in Seth and the redhead (make everyone else serious or give them biting humor), or going all-out hilarious. But what it is now is not working for most people.
Should you be watching? Eh! While I don’t really think it was boring, it was very predictable. And I think that regardless of what tone they go with for the show, the actual lighting needs to be changed so that it doesn’t look so sketch-comedy-show-ish, but I do see it being a time killer for people who love Star Trek and aren’t willing to pay for CBS All Access quite yet. The Orville airs at 9pm on Thursdays only on FOX. Catch previous episodes On Demand and on FOX.com.
What do you think? Have you heard of The Orville? If so, have you seen it? If not, do you think you’ll check it out now? If you have seen it, what did you think? What improvements, if any, do you think the show should make? Who is your favorite character? And what the hell is Norm MacDonald doing voicing that strange snot-blob thing? Let me know it the comments below.
Check out my 5-star comedy novel,
Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend
. #AhStalkingIf you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.Until next time, “Space. It’s big and... black, and seems to stretch on forever.”‘Hey, I know somethin’ else that’s big and black and stretches on forever! Ha!” – a quote from Big D*** Willie
P.S. Crude, I know. That was a test. If you didn’t laugh at that line, then chances are you probably won’t be laughing too often at this show. And if you did, then chances are that you still won’t be laughing very much at this show. I’ll try to think of a better sign-off line next time.
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October 6, 2017
Always Be Good To Her. Mother! #review #Mother #movie
Always Be Good To Her. Mother! #review #Mother #movies
Wow! So, I just paced my house for the last 15 minutes trying to figure out what I wanted to say about this movie, yet it’s so simplistic in its message that I don’t think that I have to say as much about it as I thought I would. So if the movie was so simple, then why the heck do I like it so much? Is it even a good film? And how did Jennifer Lawrence’s top-nude scenes not save this movie? Let’s dig in and find out.
The movie mother! By Darren Aronofsky and starring mega-star Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem is a movie that, uh... was definitely marketed wrong. It’s not rare that I say that but it is rare that I start a review in that manner. I did it because I think that a great deal of this movie’s box-office floppiness is due, in part, to the marketing. Yes, the critics played a part in it too, either hyping it as something that is almost so smart and brilliant that most people are turned off by the pretentiousness of the critiques, and conclude that the film must also be pretentious. Or crapping on the film so hard for being... well, pretentious and overly preachy. Apparently, in this time of Trumpism and everything being divided either into a camp of Liberal or Conservative, the slightest whiff of any political message gets lambasted by both sides regardless of its artistic worthiness. And then there are that small sliver of critics who are just pissed about the baby. But before we throw the movie out with the baby water, or, wait... Is that how that saying goes? Hmph? I don’t know. Anyway, before you dismiss the movie for the baby scene, and yes there will be SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW (kind of impossible not to review it without spoilers. I’ll explain why later), remember that these are some of the same critics that praised IT. That’s all I’ll say for now until I get to the spoiler-heavy area.
So, in mother! Jennifer Lawrence plays a young woman (correction: young, beautiful, really hot woman; oh my god I don’t think I’ve been more attracted to her than here. Damn, with my comments about Laura Dern on my Twin Peaks post and my comments about Baywatch, I truly am becoming a dirty old lecher) married to Javier Bardem, who, while still attractive himself, is aging and looks it. Let me point out that the parenthetical above, while at first glance sexist and chauvinistic, is actually extremely apt for Lawrence’s description and character in this movie, and you’ll understand why later.
Bardem is supposed to be a writer, in fact, the author of this book which we’re not exactly sure was popular or not as he, like almost all writers, is self-deprecating and talks about how so few people have read it. Lawrence is his young housewife who is concerned almost solely with making their house into a home. See, Bardem (note that I will always use the actors names as the don’t officially have character names but designations. This is easier) used to live in this house before, but it burned down in a tragic fire we briefly see at the beginning. We later learn that he escaped that fire only to come back to the house and discover one lone thing left within the ashes, a clear egg-shaped orb with fiery veins that glow through it. That is not my best poetry to explain the beauty of this thing, but it’ll have to do for now. Now that he’s rebuilt the house, he and his bride have moved in to start their life. This is paradise. It’s a country home so there are no other people around probably for miles and they like it that way. Hell, Jennifer never even feels she has to leave the house it’s so amazing.
And then a man shows up.
A stranger, the man is supposedly a doctor come to the local town to do research at the school. He came to their house looking for a bed and breakfast and automatically seems suspicious to Jennifer because they’re literally in the middle of nowhere, so the man had to come really far out to happen upon their door. Bardem lets the man in and allows him to get comfortable. Well, as it so happens, the man is a fan of Bardem’s work. As Bardem takes him on a tour of the house, the man remarks on how beautiful Jennifer is and he also talks about the beauty of that orb, but Javier does not let him touch the orb, which is very important to both the story and one of my criticisms of the movie.
Well, Bardem, much to Jennifer’s shock, welcomes the man to stay the night. Jennifer doesn’t like this, especially because the man smokes and does it inside of the house. Not only that, but the man is sick with something that Jennifer knows nothing about, which is another important point for criticism. She sees her husband holding the man while he vomits into the toilet, coughing up something that she can’t identify. As he is coughing, she finds his Zippo lighter and knocks it behind the cabinet in the room that they’ve now made into a guest room for him.
And the next morning his wife arrives.
Wait, he has a wife? Reader, you didn’t know he had a wife? Played by Michelle Pfeiffer who had conceivably dropped off the face of the earth (ha! I’m making myself laugh now. I need to stop), the wife is even more intrusive and rude the husband. She demands to have a tour, asks the all-important kids question, loudly wonders about the age gap between Jennifer and Javier, invites herself to stay with her husband and immediately starts drinking. For the first half hour, this movie plays as nothing more than a potential horror movie/psychological slow-creep thriller about very bad houseguests. Michelle tells Jennifer that she needs to spice things up in her marriage because Michelle immediately figures out that while Jennifer wants children, Javier either doesn’t (though he said he did) or just isn’t interested in them right now. Not enough to have sex with Jennifer, at least. This is what is bothering her. That, along with the fact that while Javier is claiming to work, he hasn’t been able to create anything new in a very long time. Things are beginning to get tense. And then the wife breaks the orb.
Javier gets so mad about the orb breaking that he boards up his office so they can never get in again, but still allows them to be guests in the house.
And then their sons arrive. Two sons, they arrive in a ruckus. As it turns out, their father is so sick that he is about to die. He recently changed his will to have everything go into a trust rather than divvy up his fortune to his heirs. This way, his sons and wife all have to get along and make communal money decisions. But one son is so angry that he bludgeons his brother to death in the middle of one of the rooms. While Javier and the family leave to take the brother to the hospital (strangely disappearing as soon as they are out the door) and the murdering brother briefly returns to get his wallet, Jennifer follows the leak of the blood through a hole in the floor and down to the basement where she finds a room that looks like it has some kind of oil barrel in it possibly for the heating of the house.
The family comes back and hosts a bereavement gathering for the brother. And this is when things start to get hella weird because these people are even more rude than the family and Jennifer is losing it. They are using the bathroom without asking, sitting on unstable counters, using the couple’s bedroom to try to get it on and, in the weirdest twist, painting the walls. And this is legitimately the first moment in the movie where, if you haven’t been forewarned what’s going on, you will start to question what the hell you just paid for and either check out or try to figure it out. I would say wait, slow down, think about it, and try to figure it out because the second half of the film gets even crazier.
There Were Many Letters I Could Have Gotten But I Wanted OneAfter Bardem and Jennifer finally get the family out of the house, they have a fight in which she wants to leave, but he finally gives her the D and they wake up all happy. She immediately knows she’s pregnant after one piping and he suddenly has inspiration to create again. He starts writing immediately and she goes into full mommy-prep mode as she turns that once-guest bedroom into a nursery.
The one big problem? That hole where the blood bled through is not only still there, but it still seems to be bleeding. Even when she puts a rug over it, it not only bleeds but bleeds through the rug. Then she takes the rug away from the floor to see that the floor is no longer bleeding but its actually the rug. This is just one of the many problems that she has seen wrong with the house throughout its existence. See, every so often she’ll get a pulsing sensation through her heart and also feel the house’s “heart” beating. Often during these times she can see or feel the decay of the house, the old burnt pieces of wood and destroyed plaster, see the warp of the fire-damaged frame on which this house is built. She sees it on the walls and the floors and the ceilings and everywhere and then she straightens up, goes to take some kind of tonic (what the tonic is, we really never know), and then is fine again for a little while.
And here is where those people who don’t want to be spoiled (even though I’ve told you about half the movie already) step off the train and leave because literally once you read the next sentence, you can go into it knowing exactly what to expect and there should be no real surprises in the movie.
OK, so there are going to be spoilers for the entirety of the plot from here-on out. OK? Got it?
OK, so here is why I really don’t understand why this film is so split with people, save for if it is a criticism not necessarily of the film but of the two main people involved: Darren Aronofsky and Jennifer Lawrence. The movie can be taken to have two messages, depending on how you want to see them, based on the same exact thing. The movie is a basic, almost overly simplistic allegory (more metaphor than allegory, frankly) of the story of mother earth, humanity and (here’s where the split is) either the first and last books in the Christian Bible, or an atheistic more nature/scientific look at the infinite loop of existence. In either case, it plays into climate change. While I could spend most of my time breaking down the latter, the former is what most people saw who understood the movie.
By now, you should be able to come up with the fact that Jennifer, who, as I mentioned, never leaves or even steps foot out of the house. (She does walk onto the porch, but for the sake of this film and I’m sure what was intended in Darren’s mind we will consider that still inside the house). Both she and the house are one as evidenced by the opening sequence in which the old house was already burnt down but everything remakes itself and the crumbled embers of a person lying in bed rejuvenates, puffs and grows back into a woman. She and the house are the literal interpretation of mother earth. So, anything that she does to the house also happens to her.
If she is mother Earth/nature then her husband must be... OK, here is where I will briefly mention the atheistic possibility, then go back to the Christian one. If looking at this from a purely atheist view (I mention this because Darren Aronofsky is reportedly a Jewish-raised atheist, though both this and his last movie Noah are heavily religious in tone), you can actually conclude that Javier is Father Time. You can conclude this for a few reasons starting with his age. He looks much older, much more worn. But his profession as a writer can also refer to the old line about life or certain events being “written on the sands of time” which are controlled by father time. Again, that is only there if you don’t want to see the religious aspect.
Now, back to the Judeo-Christian interpretation. In the loosest sense, Javier is God to Jennifer’s mother earth. I can see some other devout Christians understanding that and not liking it. Darren has to make some narrative compromises (not all of which are necessary) to fit in the movie. In the case of Javier not being the full-on creator as in the Christian bible, we can excuse that for sake of not giving the entire film away. Where as in the bible there was nothing, from which God birthed everything including mother earth, here both the basic structure of the house and the ashes that constitute mother are already in existence and he simply reconstitutes them. It is unclear and never shown whether or not he ever started from scratch.
So then if we have our God and mother earth, then you already know the man is Adam, his wife, Michelle Pfeifer, is Eve. Here, I have a criticism. This slight narrative alteration, while seemingly small, is exceptionally significant. I’m talking about the sickness. Again, I know that Jennifer is a feminist and I believe Darren is also, so I can see why they’d change this, but it still stuck out to me. In the film, when the man is introduced he not only already has vice (smoking and drinking) but he is also shown to be sick and ailing the night before his wife arrives. He is shown with an imperfect body (there’s some huge gash on his side where, presumably his rib was), and he’s throwing up. The thing he vomited up looks devilish.
In the Bible there is nothing wrong with Adam. As much as it may hurt to hear, Adam’s downfall from perfection and oneness with nature and God doesn’t come around until Eve is introduced. The fact that he shows that the man is sick and vice-filled enough to piss off mother earth with his smoking BEFORE Eve arrives betrays the original Biblical narrative of the Fall and suggests that mankind has always been inherently sinful. This is only further solidified by the fact that we never see a devil or tempting force that makes them go up to Javier’s office and accidentally break that beautiful crystal, which is meant to stand in as the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This purports the premise that man has always been an evil creature as opposed to just a sometimes stupid one that doesn’t listen. Legitimately, this was probably my biggest critique of the film as it puts almost all of the onus on Adam and very little on Eve.
And of course if those two are Adam and Eve, then their two sons are Cain and Abel. This, unlike the Adam smoking and being sick thing, is a needed narrative change because it would look strange for them to fight over the inheritance/favor of Javier’s character/God as in the Bible, when they don’t know him. It also makes the point of the first blood spilt on the earth from murder, as opposed to sacrifice, of extreme importance. The blood both leads down to the basement to the room where the oil is which we know becomes the instrument for the later destruction, and it leaves a stain on the floor that can never be healed. But even worse, it leaves a stain in the same room where mother, rather inexplicably, chooses to put a nursery. This is symbolic for mother earth and God’s ability to take the most horrifying event in life and bring beauty anew from it.
By this time, you’ve already guessed why I specifically called out Jennifer’s beauty in this film. Obviously she’s wearing makeup in this film as she does in all films (nature of the business) but here, in a great many of the scenes she is so brushed that she literally looks like a porcelain doll. She is noticeably perfect. The sheen is in the exact right place and she looks more perfect and enticing, while also being more innocent than she ever has before, even in real life on Oscars carpets and in her Hunger Games glow-up scenes. Yes, this is partially because she’s older and has the gloss of maturity on her, but it is also intentional to show the pure-driven innocence and untouched beauty of mother nature/earth in times and places where humans do not heavily disrupt what is already there.
Then, as the craziness begins in the second act of the film, if you figured the message out and the Biblical references in the first act, you are wholly prepared for all the insanity of the second act, even though Darren does take it slightly over the top with the messaging. You don’t necessarily need to be beat over the head with the message, but he does that just to make sure you’re getting it. Here, I can see people balking at its preachyness. And the other half of the audience that still hasn’t got it by that point in time (whether they just haven’t thought about what they’re consuming or are of a different religion that knows little about the Judeo-Christian creation) sees a hodgepodge of insanity that makes almost no sense until the end.
Let me actually back up to the beginning of that last paragraph and talk about the structure of the film because I think it’s important. To me, this film does not have the traditional three-act structure like so many writers—screenwriters in particular—talk about. Yes, you can make an argument for the calm-down after the baby’s birth being a third act, or even after the re-creation, however I wouldn’t count either of those as full or even partial acts unto themselves but rather elongated beats in the second act. I point this out because it mimics both our calendar concept of time (B.C. and A.D. or C.E.) as well as the division of the Christian Bible between old and new testament, casting away much of its Judaism and Islamic principles shared amongst all three religions and going strictly for the Christian path. Here, I can also see another minor criticism from other devout Christians popping up who understood the movie. It is quite easy for them to say, and rightfully so, that Christianity, for whatever reason is the most criticized and easiest to criticize in Hollywood or pop culture in general, both here and around the world. There are, however, other religions in the world and some that even predate Christianity, yet they field almost no criticism quite like Christians do. While I can see some people saying this, I was fine with it. I’m even OK with a declared atheist making religious films so long as he takes the time to understand the subject matter on a deeper level than just, “I don’t believe in this and these people are weak who believe in this so let me make fun of them,” like other atheist filmmakers have done in the past.
So, while mother is pregnant, her husband finishes his new word, his first new creation in a very long time. And before mother’s even done reading it, his publisher is already calling about how many copies are being made. This can be taken as another reference to Javier being father time in an atheistic interpretation. We as an audience have been well-trained to understand the passage of time in film so much so that we take it for granted when we see one image that is starkly different from the previous image. For instance, whenever you see a flat-tummyed woman in a scene saying that she’s pregnant and in the very next scene she’s now rubbing her bulbous ready-to-pop belly, we automatically assume that months have passed. Here, however, because of the blunt messaging of the film, we really shouldn’t blatantly assume such a thing. Just as Jennifer knows right away that she is pregnant the morning after she and Javier have sex, the very next scene in which she is near ready to give birth could very well be the next day or two days later, rather than months. I say this because of the speedy pace of the second act of the movie.
We go from the book being published, to her preparing a celebratory dinner for just the two of them, to fans showing up on their doorstep to talk about the new book, to the fans invading their home to talk about the book, to stealing things from the house, to trying to paint the house again, to raving and having parties and sex, and destroying the kitchen, to all-out chaos and troopers and police invading the house, to people looking at mother to check her teeth and treat her like cattle ready to sell into slavery, to people bombing the house, to people protesting and chanting gibberish against each other, to people yanking and grabbing and pulling at her and Javier, to people receiving Javier’s word and getting symbols of blood smeared on their forehead to she and Javier finally escaping back into his office he had boarded up from Adam and Eve so long ago after they broke that egg-crystal.
She gives birth and the people give gifts and want to see the baby but she doesn’t want her baby to be seen by them. Here, both the atheistic and Christian narratives mingle to give us two meanings of equal weight and caliber. In the Christian narrative the child is Jesus—a child created not by man but by God and mother earth/nature. In the atheistic narrative which also serves as interpretation for what and who Jesus is, the child is every gift both big and small that this earth gives us, which is basically everything. We would have nothing without the earth’s (and God’s) generosity. The child is oil, food, medicine, wood for houses, metal for electronics, everything you can think of that we “need” in our lives today. But because mother has already given so much of herself, of her house to people, she wants this one thing to herself.
But God loves everyone including mother earth, so while he understands her hurt over their house having been half-destroyed, he still wants to just show them his pride and joy. They play a game of attrition that she finally loses by falling asleep for a second. He takes the baby and shows it to the crowd but she runs after it and then we have the baby scene. In it, the baby’s neck audibly snaps as the crowd passes the baby around. If you’ve seen Aronofsky’s Noah, then think of that lamb scene in which they throw the animal into the air and the people tear at its limbs while it is still alive. Then, for a brief second, mother gets to an altar at front to see that the people have eaten the baby, picked it’s bones clean. And I actually started laughing only because the quick flash of the picked-over carcass looked exactly like the leftover bones of a roast chicken. And I literally thought, dag, did Perdue pay for some advertising in this movie?
The crowd then rages at mother, half stripping off her shirt and beating her. On an off-screen, on-screen note, I was wondering how Jennifer Lawrence and a lot of these female stars that have been hacked in recent years felt about onscreen nudity now. I’m not saying that the hack effected her decision and I don’t know if her breasts at the end of the film were hers or if that was a body double because in the midst of the fight, it did look like someone different at times, but I do know that her breasts in the sheer top at the beginning of the movie were all her and I did like them. Shame me for liking breasts if you want to. I don’t care. But I will say that if they were hers, then I think she chose the right film in which to sort of snap back against the invasion of privacy of the hack and reclaim rights to her own body. Here, her bare breasts were shown, in both instances, with artistic meaning. It wasn’t just enough to appreciate the nakedness of the female form but to say that mother earth started as an innocent stripped down form of beauty, now man has come in and seeks to strip her once again but not to admire her beauty but to strip her of said beauty. It, in some ways, is a poetic mirror to the picture hack controversy.
And in the end she grabs Adam’s Zippo lighter that has been sitting behind the cabinet for all this time, runs to the basement and sets the house on fire, blowing it up. Only she and Javier survive: him without a scratch and her charred crispy which is precisely what is suggested will happen to this earth in the book of Revelation (because God’s already destroyed the world with water with the great flood) and by today’s climate change scientists. Javier talks to her about why he let the people in and how he can’t help it because he has to create (which is almost the exact same thing I wrote in one of my books that I never got published). He then reaches into her chest cavity, pulls another one of those beautiful crystals from out of her and watches as she dies and turns to ash. He takes the crystal and places it on a special holder he has in his office and the house peels back the char, repaints a lot of itself and gets to humming again. A woman even puffs back up to fluffy in bed just like in the beginning and everything starts again, ending this whole story with a Buddhist reincarnation-like twist like in one of my works.
The meaning is straight forward: we humans have come into and been gifted a land of beauty and perfection but we’ve taken advantage of it so much that we are destroying all the things this world has and is giving us on an environmental level. Eventually, it will turn on us and decide that it either doesn’t want to live anymore or try to destroy us if we haven’t already destroyed ourselves and it by that time. This, when taking some of Revelation and the other disciples’ scripture literally, is actually the exact thing said in the Bible too. For people like me, who see the parallels to what we are doing both to the ecosystem/environment and what we are doing to each other, this message is not lost. I have long been an avid eco-warrior. Longtime readers should know that I have wanted to make a Captain Planet film for a very long time because I think that it is important. And I have always believed that regardless of your religion (but especially if you’re a Christian), one of your chief concerns should be treating this earth right because it has given so much to us all. This is probably why I was able to overlook the preachyness of the film and the undertones that serve as an indictment against religions being bad and destructive (everything influenced by man is bad and destructive, including atheism and science) to really enjoy this movie.
There are a lot of critics that are trying to parse out one message at a time similar to what fans of Twin Peaks do. But as I said there, sometimes you can get stuck on the little things and make them into something larger than what they should be rather than looking at the big picture. To say that this movie is against protesting or police brutality or something like that just because that is shown briefly, is to miss the point of the movie. Yes, those things are important but in the whole of it, they are quite minor. While the movie is overly artsy at times and goes from a gentle caress of a massage in the first act to a heavy-handed deep-tissue thump in the second act, it is ultimately as bubblegum Hollywood as you can get with the simplest message: we as a species need to figure out our danged problems real fast and start learning how to treat each other right, as well as this beautiful earth that has been gifted to us, otherwise we’re going to lose it. And while God can, and most likely will start over (and in this movie he does bear some of the blame here for mother’s breakdown), he only wants us to find an equilibrium where all three of us can live in perfect and pure harmony. See? Simple. Don’t let other reviewers tell you otherwise. You can further extrapolate from there.
My big problems is that in many interviews both Jennifer and Darren straight said that she was mother earth. I think it was a mistake to tell the message of the movie before people have seen it. That is one thing that Darren can certainly learn from David Lynch. It almost feels like telling the mystery of a film before seeing the film. I know, there are plenty of people who will read a book that something is based on, then go see the movie which, even though I hope for the same thing later in my career with my works, always found to be a little weird. I think this would’ve been better if audiences had a little more mystery going into it.
Also, I found a lot of critics’ reviews stupid. Chief among the complaints (which was a problem with Jennifer’s last movie Passengers) is that the film was called out as being too misogynistic. Give me a break. Some reviewers have suggested that the film has a “muse” problem and that Jennifer is too passive to Javier’s controlling masculinity in which he dictates what can and can’t happen in his house. It’s almost as if they don’t understand that God is God, or the story as a whole. He created her. She comes from him. And this goes back to my Adam sickness and Eve’s responsibility critique, beside I find that the movie makes it perfectly clear what the power dynamic is. Michelle or Eve makes it a point to call attention to their age difference, suggesting that they are, in no ways equals here. To me, her criticism is the exact same criticism that the critics have. She’s not supposed to be treated equally. She is actually pedestal-ed as his last creation. In essence, she is equal to all of the guests of their home because God loves them, too. Saying that she is not strong enough as a character misses the point of the metaphor. It would be like saying one of my books (my creation) is not fairly treated in relation to me. It makes almost no sense. Again, you have to view this through a biblical paradigm. The earth has no true personality of its own because it is never given freewill of its own nor spirit nor soul but is always coddled by God. It is only given the tools to defend itself and not be of itself. It is vessel.
What do you think? Have you seen mother!? If not, do you think you will now after reading this? If you did, how did you like the movie? Did you understand it while you were watching it? If you didn’t understand it but get it now, do you think that understanding the meaning of the movie before seeing it would have influenced how you felt about the movie? Honestly, I thought I was going to see a horror movie and had only seen one trailer (I tried not to suffer from multiple-trailer fatigue this year for any film I saw) and was briefly disappointed before being pleasantly surprised by the story. Let me know what you think in the comments below.
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. #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.
Until next time, “You didn’t send your mother a birthday card but you sent one to your dry cleaner?” ‘Well, my dry cleaner always keeps me looking clean and stylish.’ “Hm? OK. Fair enough.”
P.S. The release date of this movie is super strange as it is not really in the prime spot for awards season fodder nor is it in a good spot for box-office success. If they wanted a horror movie box office, they should’ve released it in October. Awards? November. Box office? Either during Easter or on Mother’s day. Wasted opportunity. Anyway, I’ll try to come up with a better sign-off next time.
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Wow! So, I just paced my house for the last 15 minutes trying to figure out what I wanted to say about this movie, yet it’s so simplistic in its message that I don’t think that I have to say as much about it as I thought I would. So if the movie was so simple, then why the heck do I like it so much? Is it even a good film? And how did Jennifer Lawrence’s top-nude scenes not save this movie? Let’s dig in and find out.
The movie mother! By Darren Aronofsky and starring mega-star Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem is a movie that, uh... was definitely marketed wrong. It’s not rare that I say that but it is rare that I start a review in that manner. I did it because I think that a great deal of this movie’s box-office floppiness is due, in part, to the marketing. Yes, the critics played a part in it too, either hyping it as something that is almost so smart and brilliant that most people are turned off by the pretentiousness of the critiques, and conclude that the film must also be pretentious. Or crapping on the film so hard for being... well, pretentious and overly preachy. Apparently, in this time of Trumpism and everything being divided either into a camp of Liberal or Conservative, the slightest whiff of any political message gets lambasted by both sides regardless of its artistic worthiness. And then there are that small sliver of critics who are just pissed about the baby. But before we throw the movie out with the baby water, or, wait... Is that how that saying goes? Hmph? I don’t know. Anyway, before you dismiss the movie for the baby scene, and yes there will be SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW (kind of impossible not to review it without spoilers. I’ll explain why later), remember that these are some of the same critics that praised IT. That’s all I’ll say for now until I get to the spoiler-heavy area.
So, in mother! Jennifer Lawrence plays a young woman (correction: young, beautiful, really hot woman; oh my god I don’t think I’ve been more attracted to her than here. Damn, with my comments about Laura Dern on my Twin Peaks post and my comments about Baywatch, I truly am becoming a dirty old lecher) married to Javier Bardem, who, while still attractive himself, is aging and looks it. Let me point out that the parenthetical above, while at first glance sexist and chauvinistic, is actually extremely apt for Lawrence’s description and character in this movie, and you’ll understand why later.
Bardem is supposed to be a writer, in fact, the author of this book which we’re not exactly sure was popular or not as he, like almost all writers, is self-deprecating and talks about how so few people have read it. Lawrence is his young housewife who is concerned almost solely with making their house into a home. See, Bardem (note that I will always use the actors names as the don’t officially have character names but designations. This is easier) used to live in this house before, but it burned down in a tragic fire we briefly see at the beginning. We later learn that he escaped that fire only to come back to the house and discover one lone thing left within the ashes, a clear egg-shaped orb with fiery veins that glow through it. That is not my best poetry to explain the beauty of this thing, but it’ll have to do for now. Now that he’s rebuilt the house, he and his bride have moved in to start their life. This is paradise. It’s a country home so there are no other people around probably for miles and they like it that way. Hell, Jennifer never even feels she has to leave the house it’s so amazing.
And then a man shows up.
A stranger, the man is supposedly a doctor come to the local town to do research at the school. He came to their house looking for a bed and breakfast and automatically seems suspicious to Jennifer because they’re literally in the middle of nowhere, so the man had to come really far out to happen upon their door. Bardem lets the man in and allows him to get comfortable. Well, as it so happens, the man is a fan of Bardem’s work. As Bardem takes him on a tour of the house, the man remarks on how beautiful Jennifer is and he also talks about the beauty of that orb, but Javier does not let him touch the orb, which is very important to both the story and one of my criticisms of the movie.
Well, Bardem, much to Jennifer’s shock, welcomes the man to stay the night. Jennifer doesn’t like this, especially because the man smokes and does it inside of the house. Not only that, but the man is sick with something that Jennifer knows nothing about, which is another important point for criticism. She sees her husband holding the man while he vomits into the toilet, coughing up something that she can’t identify. As he is coughing, she finds his Zippo lighter and knocks it behind the cabinet in the room that they’ve now made into a guest room for him.
And the next morning his wife arrives.
Wait, he has a wife? Reader, you didn’t know he had a wife? Played by Michelle Pfeiffer who had conceivably dropped off the face of the earth (ha! I’m making myself laugh now. I need to stop), the wife is even more intrusive and rude the husband. She demands to have a tour, asks the all-important kids question, loudly wonders about the age gap between Jennifer and Javier, invites herself to stay with her husband and immediately starts drinking. For the first half hour, this movie plays as nothing more than a potential horror movie/psychological slow-creep thriller about very bad houseguests. Michelle tells Jennifer that she needs to spice things up in her marriage because Michelle immediately figures out that while Jennifer wants children, Javier either doesn’t (though he said he did) or just isn’t interested in them right now. Not enough to have sex with Jennifer, at least. This is what is bothering her. That, along with the fact that while Javier is claiming to work, he hasn’t been able to create anything new in a very long time. Things are beginning to get tense. And then the wife breaks the orb.
Javier gets so mad about the orb breaking that he boards up his office so they can never get in again, but still allows them to be guests in the house.
And then their sons arrive. Two sons, they arrive in a ruckus. As it turns out, their father is so sick that he is about to die. He recently changed his will to have everything go into a trust rather than divvy up his fortune to his heirs. This way, his sons and wife all have to get along and make communal money decisions. But one son is so angry that he bludgeons his brother to death in the middle of one of the rooms. While Javier and the family leave to take the brother to the hospital (strangely disappearing as soon as they are out the door) and the murdering brother briefly returns to get his wallet, Jennifer follows the leak of the blood through a hole in the floor and down to the basement where she finds a room that looks like it has some kind of oil barrel in it possibly for the heating of the house.
The family comes back and hosts a bereavement gathering for the brother. And this is when things start to get hella weird because these people are even more rude than the family and Jennifer is losing it. They are using the bathroom without asking, sitting on unstable counters, using the couple’s bedroom to try to get it on and, in the weirdest twist, painting the walls. And this is legitimately the first moment in the movie where, if you haven’t been forewarned what’s going on, you will start to question what the hell you just paid for and either check out or try to figure it out. I would say wait, slow down, think about it, and try to figure it out because the second half of the film gets even crazier.
There Were Many Letters I Could Have Gotten But I Wanted OneAfter Bardem and Jennifer finally get the family out of the house, they have a fight in which she wants to leave, but he finally gives her the D and they wake up all happy. She immediately knows she’s pregnant after one piping and he suddenly has inspiration to create again. He starts writing immediately and she goes into full mommy-prep mode as she turns that once-guest bedroom into a nursery. The one big problem? That hole where the blood bled through is not only still there, but it still seems to be bleeding. Even when she puts a rug over it, it not only bleeds but bleeds through the rug. Then she takes the rug away from the floor to see that the floor is no longer bleeding but its actually the rug. This is just one of the many problems that she has seen wrong with the house throughout its existence. See, every so often she’ll get a pulsing sensation through her heart and also feel the house’s “heart” beating. Often during these times she can see or feel the decay of the house, the old burnt pieces of wood and destroyed plaster, see the warp of the fire-damaged frame on which this house is built. She sees it on the walls and the floors and the ceilings and everywhere and then she straightens up, goes to take some kind of tonic (what the tonic is, we really never know), and then is fine again for a little while.
And here is where those people who don’t want to be spoiled (even though I’ve told you about half the movie already) step off the train and leave because literally once you read the next sentence, you can go into it knowing exactly what to expect and there should be no real surprises in the movie.
OK, so there are going to be spoilers for the entirety of the plot from here-on out. OK? Got it?
OK, so here is why I really don’t understand why this film is so split with people, save for if it is a criticism not necessarily of the film but of the two main people involved: Darren Aronofsky and Jennifer Lawrence. The movie can be taken to have two messages, depending on how you want to see them, based on the same exact thing. The movie is a basic, almost overly simplistic allegory (more metaphor than allegory, frankly) of the story of mother earth, humanity and (here’s where the split is) either the first and last books in the Christian Bible, or an atheistic more nature/scientific look at the infinite loop of existence. In either case, it plays into climate change. While I could spend most of my time breaking down the latter, the former is what most people saw who understood the movie.
By now, you should be able to come up with the fact that Jennifer, who, as I mentioned, never leaves or even steps foot out of the house. (She does walk onto the porch, but for the sake of this film and I’m sure what was intended in Darren’s mind we will consider that still inside the house). Both she and the house are one as evidenced by the opening sequence in which the old house was already burnt down but everything remakes itself and the crumbled embers of a person lying in bed rejuvenates, puffs and grows back into a woman. She and the house are the literal interpretation of mother earth. So, anything that she does to the house also happens to her.
If she is mother Earth/nature then her husband must be... OK, here is where I will briefly mention the atheistic possibility, then go back to the Christian one. If looking at this from a purely atheist view (I mention this because Darren Aronofsky is reportedly a Jewish-raised atheist, though both this and his last movie Noah are heavily religious in tone), you can actually conclude that Javier is Father Time. You can conclude this for a few reasons starting with his age. He looks much older, much more worn. But his profession as a writer can also refer to the old line about life or certain events being “written on the sands of time” which are controlled by father time. Again, that is only there if you don’t want to see the religious aspect.
Now, back to the Judeo-Christian interpretation. In the loosest sense, Javier is God to Jennifer’s mother earth. I can see some other devout Christians understanding that and not liking it. Darren has to make some narrative compromises (not all of which are necessary) to fit in the movie. In the case of Javier not being the full-on creator as in the Christian bible, we can excuse that for sake of not giving the entire film away. Where as in the bible there was nothing, from which God birthed everything including mother earth, here both the basic structure of the house and the ashes that constitute mother are already in existence and he simply reconstitutes them. It is unclear and never shown whether or not he ever started from scratch.
So then if we have our God and mother earth, then you already know the man is Adam, his wife, Michelle Pfeifer, is Eve. Here, I have a criticism. This slight narrative alteration, while seemingly small, is exceptionally significant. I’m talking about the sickness. Again, I know that Jennifer is a feminist and I believe Darren is also, so I can see why they’d change this, but it still stuck out to me. In the film, when the man is introduced he not only already has vice (smoking and drinking) but he is also shown to be sick and ailing the night before his wife arrives. He is shown with an imperfect body (there’s some huge gash on his side where, presumably his rib was), and he’s throwing up. The thing he vomited up looks devilish.
In the Bible there is nothing wrong with Adam. As much as it may hurt to hear, Adam’s downfall from perfection and oneness with nature and God doesn’t come around until Eve is introduced. The fact that he shows that the man is sick and vice-filled enough to piss off mother earth with his smoking BEFORE Eve arrives betrays the original Biblical narrative of the Fall and suggests that mankind has always been inherently sinful. This is only further solidified by the fact that we never see a devil or tempting force that makes them go up to Javier’s office and accidentally break that beautiful crystal, which is meant to stand in as the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This purports the premise that man has always been an evil creature as opposed to just a sometimes stupid one that doesn’t listen. Legitimately, this was probably my biggest critique of the film as it puts almost all of the onus on Adam and very little on Eve.
And of course if those two are Adam and Eve, then their two sons are Cain and Abel. This, unlike the Adam smoking and being sick thing, is a needed narrative change because it would look strange for them to fight over the inheritance/favor of Javier’s character/God as in the Bible, when they don’t know him. It also makes the point of the first blood spilt on the earth from murder, as opposed to sacrifice, of extreme importance. The blood both leads down to the basement to the room where the oil is which we know becomes the instrument for the later destruction, and it leaves a stain on the floor that can never be healed. But even worse, it leaves a stain in the same room where mother, rather inexplicably, chooses to put a nursery. This is symbolic for mother earth and God’s ability to take the most horrifying event in life and bring beauty anew from it.
By this time, you’ve already guessed why I specifically called out Jennifer’s beauty in this film. Obviously she’s wearing makeup in this film as she does in all films (nature of the business) but here, in a great many of the scenes she is so brushed that she literally looks like a porcelain doll. She is noticeably perfect. The sheen is in the exact right place and she looks more perfect and enticing, while also being more innocent than she ever has before, even in real life on Oscars carpets and in her Hunger Games glow-up scenes. Yes, this is partially because she’s older and has the gloss of maturity on her, but it is also intentional to show the pure-driven innocence and untouched beauty of mother nature/earth in times and places where humans do not heavily disrupt what is already there.
Then, as the craziness begins in the second act of the film, if you figured the message out and the Biblical references in the first act, you are wholly prepared for all the insanity of the second act, even though Darren does take it slightly over the top with the messaging. You don’t necessarily need to be beat over the head with the message, but he does that just to make sure you’re getting it. Here, I can see people balking at its preachyness. And the other half of the audience that still hasn’t got it by that point in time (whether they just haven’t thought about what they’re consuming or are of a different religion that knows little about the Judeo-Christian creation) sees a hodgepodge of insanity that makes almost no sense until the end.
Let me actually back up to the beginning of that last paragraph and talk about the structure of the film because I think it’s important. To me, this film does not have the traditional three-act structure like so many writers—screenwriters in particular—talk about. Yes, you can make an argument for the calm-down after the baby’s birth being a third act, or even after the re-creation, however I wouldn’t count either of those as full or even partial acts unto themselves but rather elongated beats in the second act. I point this out because it mimics both our calendar concept of time (B.C. and A.D. or C.E.) as well as the division of the Christian Bible between old and new testament, casting away much of its Judaism and Islamic principles shared amongst all three religions and going strictly for the Christian path. Here, I can also see another minor criticism from other devout Christians popping up who understood the movie. It is quite easy for them to say, and rightfully so, that Christianity, for whatever reason is the most criticized and easiest to criticize in Hollywood or pop culture in general, both here and around the world. There are, however, other religions in the world and some that even predate Christianity, yet they field almost no criticism quite like Christians do. While I can see some people saying this, I was fine with it. I’m even OK with a declared atheist making religious films so long as he takes the time to understand the subject matter on a deeper level than just, “I don’t believe in this and these people are weak who believe in this so let me make fun of them,” like other atheist filmmakers have done in the past.
So, while mother is pregnant, her husband finishes his new word, his first new creation in a very long time. And before mother’s even done reading it, his publisher is already calling about how many copies are being made. This can be taken as another reference to Javier being father time in an atheistic interpretation. We as an audience have been well-trained to understand the passage of time in film so much so that we take it for granted when we see one image that is starkly different from the previous image. For instance, whenever you see a flat-tummyed woman in a scene saying that she’s pregnant and in the very next scene she’s now rubbing her bulbous ready-to-pop belly, we automatically assume that months have passed. Here, however, because of the blunt messaging of the film, we really shouldn’t blatantly assume such a thing. Just as Jennifer knows right away that she is pregnant the morning after she and Javier have sex, the very next scene in which she is near ready to give birth could very well be the next day or two days later, rather than months. I say this because of the speedy pace of the second act of the movie.
We go from the book being published, to her preparing a celebratory dinner for just the two of them, to fans showing up on their doorstep to talk about the new book, to the fans invading their home to talk about the book, to stealing things from the house, to trying to paint the house again, to raving and having parties and sex, and destroying the kitchen, to all-out chaos and troopers and police invading the house, to people looking at mother to check her teeth and treat her like cattle ready to sell into slavery, to people bombing the house, to people protesting and chanting gibberish against each other, to people yanking and grabbing and pulling at her and Javier, to people receiving Javier’s word and getting symbols of blood smeared on their forehead to she and Javier finally escaping back into his office he had boarded up from Adam and Eve so long ago after they broke that egg-crystal.
She gives birth and the people give gifts and want to see the baby but she doesn’t want her baby to be seen by them. Here, both the atheistic and Christian narratives mingle to give us two meanings of equal weight and caliber. In the Christian narrative the child is Jesus—a child created not by man but by God and mother earth/nature. In the atheistic narrative which also serves as interpretation for what and who Jesus is, the child is every gift both big and small that this earth gives us, which is basically everything. We would have nothing without the earth’s (and God’s) generosity. The child is oil, food, medicine, wood for houses, metal for electronics, everything you can think of that we “need” in our lives today. But because mother has already given so much of herself, of her house to people, she wants this one thing to herself.
But God loves everyone including mother earth, so while he understands her hurt over their house having been half-destroyed, he still wants to just show them his pride and joy. They play a game of attrition that she finally loses by falling asleep for a second. He takes the baby and shows it to the crowd but she runs after it and then we have the baby scene. In it, the baby’s neck audibly snaps as the crowd passes the baby around. If you’ve seen Aronofsky’s Noah, then think of that lamb scene in which they throw the animal into the air and the people tear at its limbs while it is still alive. Then, for a brief second, mother gets to an altar at front to see that the people have eaten the baby, picked it’s bones clean. And I actually started laughing only because the quick flash of the picked-over carcass looked exactly like the leftover bones of a roast chicken. And I literally thought, dag, did Perdue pay for some advertising in this movie?
The crowd then rages at mother, half stripping off her shirt and beating her. On an off-screen, on-screen note, I was wondering how Jennifer Lawrence and a lot of these female stars that have been hacked in recent years felt about onscreen nudity now. I’m not saying that the hack effected her decision and I don’t know if her breasts at the end of the film were hers or if that was a body double because in the midst of the fight, it did look like someone different at times, but I do know that her breasts in the sheer top at the beginning of the movie were all her and I did like them. Shame me for liking breasts if you want to. I don’t care. But I will say that if they were hers, then I think she chose the right film in which to sort of snap back against the invasion of privacy of the hack and reclaim rights to her own body. Here, her bare breasts were shown, in both instances, with artistic meaning. It wasn’t just enough to appreciate the nakedness of the female form but to say that mother earth started as an innocent stripped down form of beauty, now man has come in and seeks to strip her once again but not to admire her beauty but to strip her of said beauty. It, in some ways, is a poetic mirror to the picture hack controversy.
And in the end she grabs Adam’s Zippo lighter that has been sitting behind the cabinet for all this time, runs to the basement and sets the house on fire, blowing it up. Only she and Javier survive: him without a scratch and her charred crispy which is precisely what is suggested will happen to this earth in the book of Revelation (because God’s already destroyed the world with water with the great flood) and by today’s climate change scientists. Javier talks to her about why he let the people in and how he can’t help it because he has to create (which is almost the exact same thing I wrote in one of my books that I never got published). He then reaches into her chest cavity, pulls another one of those beautiful crystals from out of her and watches as she dies and turns to ash. He takes the crystal and places it on a special holder he has in his office and the house peels back the char, repaints a lot of itself and gets to humming again. A woman even puffs back up to fluffy in bed just like in the beginning and everything starts again, ending this whole story with a Buddhist reincarnation-like twist like in one of my works.
The meaning is straight forward: we humans have come into and been gifted a land of beauty and perfection but we’ve taken advantage of it so much that we are destroying all the things this world has and is giving us on an environmental level. Eventually, it will turn on us and decide that it either doesn’t want to live anymore or try to destroy us if we haven’t already destroyed ourselves and it by that time. This, when taking some of Revelation and the other disciples’ scripture literally, is actually the exact thing said in the Bible too. For people like me, who see the parallels to what we are doing both to the ecosystem/environment and what we are doing to each other, this message is not lost. I have long been an avid eco-warrior. Longtime readers should know that I have wanted to make a Captain Planet film for a very long time because I think that it is important. And I have always believed that regardless of your religion (but especially if you’re a Christian), one of your chief concerns should be treating this earth right because it has given so much to us all. This is probably why I was able to overlook the preachyness of the film and the undertones that serve as an indictment against religions being bad and destructive (everything influenced by man is bad and destructive, including atheism and science) to really enjoy this movie.
There are a lot of critics that are trying to parse out one message at a time similar to what fans of Twin Peaks do. But as I said there, sometimes you can get stuck on the little things and make them into something larger than what they should be rather than looking at the big picture. To say that this movie is against protesting or police brutality or something like that just because that is shown briefly, is to miss the point of the movie. Yes, those things are important but in the whole of it, they are quite minor. While the movie is overly artsy at times and goes from a gentle caress of a massage in the first act to a heavy-handed deep-tissue thump in the second act, it is ultimately as bubblegum Hollywood as you can get with the simplest message: we as a species need to figure out our danged problems real fast and start learning how to treat each other right, as well as this beautiful earth that has been gifted to us, otherwise we’re going to lose it. And while God can, and most likely will start over (and in this movie he does bear some of the blame here for mother’s breakdown), he only wants us to find an equilibrium where all three of us can live in perfect and pure harmony. See? Simple. Don’t let other reviewers tell you otherwise. You can further extrapolate from there.
My big problems is that in many interviews both Jennifer and Darren straight said that she was mother earth. I think it was a mistake to tell the message of the movie before people have seen it. That is one thing that Darren can certainly learn from David Lynch. It almost feels like telling the mystery of a film before seeing the film. I know, there are plenty of people who will read a book that something is based on, then go see the movie which, even though I hope for the same thing later in my career with my works, always found to be a little weird. I think this would’ve been better if audiences had a little more mystery going into it.
Also, I found a lot of critics’ reviews stupid. Chief among the complaints (which was a problem with Jennifer’s last movie Passengers) is that the film was called out as being too misogynistic. Give me a break. Some reviewers have suggested that the film has a “muse” problem and that Jennifer is too passive to Javier’s controlling masculinity in which he dictates what can and can’t happen in his house. It’s almost as if they don’t understand that God is God, or the story as a whole. He created her. She comes from him. And this goes back to my Adam sickness and Eve’s responsibility critique, beside I find that the movie makes it perfectly clear what the power dynamic is. Michelle or Eve makes it a point to call attention to their age difference, suggesting that they are, in no ways equals here. To me, her criticism is the exact same criticism that the critics have. She’s not supposed to be treated equally. She is actually pedestal-ed as his last creation. In essence, she is equal to all of the guests of their home because God loves them, too. Saying that she is not strong enough as a character misses the point of the metaphor. It would be like saying one of my books (my creation) is not fairly treated in relation to me. It makes almost no sense. Again, you have to view this through a biblical paradigm. The earth has no true personality of its own because it is never given freewill of its own nor spirit nor soul but is always coddled by God. It is only given the tools to defend itself and not be of itself. It is vessel.
What do you think? Have you seen mother!? If not, do you think you will now after reading this? If you did, how did you like the movie? Did you understand it while you were watching it? If you didn’t understand it but get it now, do you think that understanding the meaning of the movie before seeing it would have influenced how you felt about the movie? Honestly, I thought I was going to see a horror movie and had only seen one trailer (I tried not to suffer from multiple-trailer fatigue this year for any film I saw) and was briefly disappointed before being pleasantly surprised by the story. Let me know what you think in the comments below.
Check out my 5-star comedy novel,
Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend
. #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.Until next time, “You didn’t send your mother a birthday card but you sent one to your dry cleaner?” ‘Well, my dry cleaner always keeps me looking clean and stylish.’ “Hm? OK. Fair enough.”
P.S. The release date of this movie is super strange as it is not really in the prime spot for awards season fodder nor is it in a good spot for box-office success. If they wanted a horror movie box office, they should’ve released it in October. Awards? November. Box office? Either during Easter or on Mother’s day. Wasted opportunity. Anyway, I’ll try to come up with a better sign-off next time.
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June 10, 2017
Third Highest-rated Comic Book Movie Ever? Why? #WonderWoman #Review #comicbookmovie #Spoilers
Third Highest-rated Comic Book Movie Ever? Why? #WonderWoman #Review #comicbookmovie #Spoilers
So, I just saw Wonder Woman (#WonderWoman), and after reading online that it was not only good but that it was the third highest-rated comic book movie ever, I had high expectations. However, I also had to temper them knowing that this was another DCEU film and that they are three films deep into this thing and it has yet to get on the right track. But were the critics right? Did DC and Warner Bros. Finally right the ship, or is all of this talk of this film being good total bunk? Keep reading to find out.
Let me first start by saying that I absolutely called this a year or even more ago (it was either in a Suicide Squad review or in my Batman v. Superman review, I can’t remember. Although, now that I think about it, I’m not sure I ever posted my Suicide Squad review. I’m too busy to remember these things, and this parenthetical is already running too long, so...). What, you ask, did I call? The good movie reviews. I knew this was going to be a movie that you had to judge not just for what is on the screen but for all the things going on outside of the film, mainly politics and big money. I also called that this would be the first “successful” DC film as far as critics go. And, I even called some of the headlines that literally read: “Wonder Woman Shows the Men How to Do It” and “Of Course A Woman Would Save the DCEU.” OK, those are paraphrased or off by a few words, but I guarantee you can find those types of headlines all over the internet and in various publications. Remember, I called this before ever seeing the movie because I knew, regardless of whether the film was good or not, it was going to get a majority of good reviews. Why? We all know why, but before you push me aside and say I’m being sexist, hear two things: first, know that I’ve been pretty right on a lot of my predictions about the DCEU (still don’t know why we call it that instead of the DCCU) even dating back to Man of Steel, but that was before I had this blog and you couldn’t possibly know that so... Second, while I have been known to make plenty of remarks that can be construed as sexist, I am not, in any way, against female superheroes nor against Wonder Woman. And third—or, wait, did I say just two things? I meant and second part deux, while most of my criticism has nothing to do with the superhero being a woman, some of it does have to do with the fact that I still would like to write (read: reboot) the DC universe and do some Superman movies and a Justice League movie of my own, and know that the success of this current iteration may stand in the way of that if they decide to continue in perpetuity. Gahh! OK, we ready? We all good? Let’s get to it.
Do not believe the hype, Wonder Woman has fixed almost nothing in the DCEU. And, while I hate to say this let’s get this out of the way first before I level my criticism: yes, most of the reviews stem from the fact that she is a woman superhero, which has caused many critics and fanboys to overlook some of the film’s glaring mistakes. There, now with that said, let’s take the sexism blinders off and start looking at the film through the lenses of being the “third highest-rated superhero/comic book movie of all time” and being a “DCEU film.” We’ll start with the same criticism that some feminist might say to me: “Oh, if it was a guy, you’d love the film.” No, I would not. In fact, I know this unequivocally because it is essentially the mash-up of two other male-driven superhero films: Man of Steel and the first Captain America. Don’t get me wrong, I really liked Captain America, however, a lot of people didn’t and I understand why. But we can’t take some of the same criticisms we had of those films and completely ignore them here.
Women Warriors! Loved The Look. Story Is Flawed
For starters, at the beginning of Man of Steel and Wonder Woman, we see life as it is on the planet/island/realm from which our hero/heroine originates. I like that Themyscria is given some screen time, however, unlike in Man of Steel, I never quite felt as immersed in the island and its culture. To me, unlike in Man of Steel (which, I thought Krypton was one of the best parts of that movie), we don’t get as much world building and what we do get feels lackluster. OK, there’s some kind of hierarchy and they spend all their time training and fighting all day, but that’s about it. Not only do we not get great world building, the rules of the film are hardly defined here. I know, they did that little cartoon history lesson (again, just like in Man of Steel) to show how the island came to be, but everything went so fast, I only half-paid attention.
The rules? Right. As I was saying, while they are on the island I never get a full understanding of who the Amazons are. So, in that history story we have the gods, right? And we have the people. Did Zeus make a secondary race between gods and people in order to keep people from killing themselves and that’s what the Amazons are? Again, if we are just talking about the film and NOT the comics which are filled with lore and answers for every question, the film doesn’t properly answer this, because if they are just normal people, then how do they live so long? Does that island-protection spell also have something to do with keeping them ageless? Or has time stopped on the island? I just, I don’t understand. Assuming that they fought this great war back when Greeks ruled the world, that would make the island and every inhabitant thousands of years old, including Diana, right, because Zeus is dead and the last thing he did was make Hippolyta’s clay daughter Pinocchio to life. And if it wasn’t during Greek reign, then when (and why are they dressed akin to Greeks)? Or does the film technically start during ancient days (remember, historians, Greeks ruled even before Romans so we’re talking 3000 years ago here) and Diana slowly grows over the course of 100s of years? And for that matter, since she is the only child on the island, how is she the only one aging?
I hope by this time you’re starting to see that a lot of my criticisms really aren’t going to be sex-based. Granted, you can say that this criticism was a nit-pick but it really confused me because of Batman v. Superman. In that movie, Diana is shown once again not to have aged since World War I. And while we know that Captain Steve Rogers in Captain America was put into a deep freeze that the super-soldier potion allowed him to live through into modern day, we are given no standard by which Diana ages neither on the island nor in the world of man. However, maybe she returns to the island in-between the end of Wonder Woman and Batman v. Superman, which could explain her absence during Man of Steel. If we think of it that way, then she only pops out every few years or so as a vacation into man’s realm, just so she can be seen on camera because the island itself is magic.
I wish the island criticism stopped there but it doesn’t because while I can piece together how Steve Trevor just happened to fly through the island’s barrier after it had remained hidden after however many years—Diana smacking her arm bracelets and sending out that power wave—I can’t, for the life of me figure out why it was so easy to kill these women. Again, what the hell are they? If they’re gods, how weak of them. If they’re demi-gods, same thing. If they’re just regular humans on a magical island, then shouldn’t the island have more magical stuff that could heal them from things like gunshots and whatnot? I know, a gun is a gun, but you see them all training for so long, so many years, and suddenly the slaughter is on when a tiny brigade of men come? Really? Really? So, in other words, ladies, you can work your ass off, get all the education you want and could possibly ever need, do everything right for years and as soon as you’re up against a man for anything, you’re never going to be good enough? Maybe that is the artistic point they’re trying to make there, an ironic commentary on real-life women routinely getting passed up for positions they are qualified for, and if it is, then I can accept that. But I also wish they had done it in a better way that set clear boundaries as to what these women can and can’t do. With Superman, while you’ve always had some abilities ambiguity, Krypton has always been portrayed as a planet with a bunch of regular people. Superman, therefore, gets his powers from our yellow sun and hasn’t been born with them. The whole Wonder Woman movie (before the end, which I could have guessed even if I didn’t know anything about the comics), I kept thinking to myself after that beach scene, “Why don’t they just shoot her? Just shoot Wonder Woman. Two to the gut and this’ll be over.” And not at her like all the gunmen did, but actually shoot her. Catch her from the back or in the leg. Her shins may have been guarded but her thigh was out and easily shot. But I digress.
Moving on, in this opening we get the textbook definition of, “Well, it’s not OK when I do it, but you can do it all you want?” that men and women have complained about to each other since the dawn of this current society's feminism. For years, we’ve heard a chorus of people say that little boys should be admonished for wanting to rough-house and seek out rather violent ways of expression. We’ve had articles on how little boys playing warriors or cops and robbers, or playing violent video games is wrong and it reinforces “the patriarchal archetype of boys wanting violence,” yet in this film, Diana explicitly wants violence as a child. Unlike, say... Rey in Star Wars, she doesn’t just want to go out to explore beyond her island home, she is looking to conquer. She is born and raised in a fight culture that glorifies battle and whose sole purpose is to train and ready themselves for a war against man and Ares.
Now, while this criticism is overtly sexist, I have to also mention that some of the critics and fans didn’t like the first Captain America because of Steve Roger’s lust for war. Even though he wanted to go to WWII in order to help his brothers, some saw it as a lust for violence, which is the same thing Diana has here and throughout the movie. There literally is no other motivation, save for to murder.
Speaking of murder, this movie has the same exact problem that made so many critics hate Man of Steel: the death toll. Granted, maybe at this point in time we’ve gotten so used to our heroes killing people that we’ve become numb to it, but if that is the case, then I contend that we need to all go back and re-view Man of Steel in this light because it could change the entirety of how we view the film. In a universe where both Batman and Superman kill (two superheroes who were always determined not to kill at any cost), I thought maybe Diana would take the lead here and show the boys how it was done. But no. Yes, Diana is a warrior but again, why is it OK for her to kill at will and cause destruction but not any other superhero? We are shown a few scenes in which she slices the throats of some of the Nazi soldiers; she shield-bursts through a sniper’s tower (very similar, albeit fewer victims, to Superman and Zod bashing into buildings), and stabs through the guy who she thought was Ares all Terminator 2 style (remember that final scene where T-2 stabs Arnold through, then Arnold has to pull the rod out? Totally reminded me of that). And this, of course, is after the beach slaughter.
Granted, it’s war and people do die, but the whole point of superheroes was for them to be better than regular heroes like soldiers and firefighters. Batman didn’t kill Joker, even though he was evil incarnate. Superman wasn’t supposed to kill Lex Luthor even though, again, he was a bad guy. Wonder Woman? Eh! Kill whoever you want, they’re just Nazis.
And as if that weren’t bad enough, we have to hear her run around the entire movie talking about how badly she wants to “kill” Ares. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word “kill” in a superhero movie that often, and especially not coming out of the mouth of the superhero. The villain, sure. But the hero (heroine) having a killgasm like that? No. As an aside, I thought this was actually bad writing as they couldn’t come up with another word other than kill? Even Deadpool had other ways of saying what he wanted to do.
And one more thing about the murder rate in this thing, that end scene where she goes all hell-hath-no-fury on all of those soldiers either proves my killgasm point or is the worst, most blatant, “See? They’re really not dead and all is well,” cover-up since Batman v. Superman’s line about “luckily downtown is empty and everybody’s gone home for this death battle with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Doomsday.” This woman was lifting up tanks and exploding through buildings just a scene ago. You’re telling me that when she loses her cool and can’t control her rage, her punches and kicks aren’t killing soldiers? Give me a break.
Then there are the characters. Steve Trevor is... sigh. To me, he was very one note. I liked the scene in which he and Diana are talking in the baths and he talks about his father. And I also liked the boat scene (though, I have gripes about that one too), but other than that, I found a lot of his scenes ushering on the movie. There was a lot of, “OK, Diana, we have to go. No, we can’t do that, we have to be here. Now we have to be here.” It felt more like he was a theater-house usher than a real character. And that dancing scene felt charmless to me. I don’t know, maybe I’m just not a fan of Chris Pine as he is also just OK to me in Star Trek. So, I’ll leave it at that. I suppose I can buy the romance between them. And also, what was he? I missed it when he said his rank and all of that. I know he’s a spy, but was he supposed to be American working with Brits? It just stood out because everyone else in the film has a thick accent, then he doesn’t. Confusing.
Anyway, the other characters were fine, albeit forgettable. I did find the scene between Diana and the Native American ironic, but I’m not going to waste time explaining why. But moving to the villains, well... sigh. To me, they were actually quite useless, almost as useless as most Marvel villains. I felt like Danny Huston’s character (can’t even remember his name he was so pointless; the general dude) was literally thrown into the movie as a red herring for the sake of having a red herring. Look, I don’t know the history of that particular character, so when I’m watching the film I want something explained to me. Why the hell is he taking that pill/capsule? Who was he really? And how did that capsule “restore him” or whatever? You see what I mean when I say red herring? He was there solely so you could think he was Ares. For a film that was touted as “reinvigorating the comic book genre,” I found this to be wholly unoriginal and uninspired. I didn’t even see the point of his evil, which is really hard to do with a character that is a Nazi. In comparing him to Red Skull, we at least knew that the red guy had other plans that superseded even the Furor’s and would continue regardless of what happened with the war. Here, does Huston’s character want to rule the world, is a psychopath that likes killing people for the sake of it, or what? He doesn’t seem to sway strongly either way. He doesn’t even seem to have a seething hatred for the enemy, he’s just... there, because why not?
Again, Huston’s character is there for the sake of throwing you off to think that he is Ares. A braver, smarter idea would have been to make Ares’ character genderless or gender-ambiguous in the opening story so that then they could have the doctor lady be suspected as Ares, only to have it be the British bloke or vice versa. I have not and will not ever understand women (and some men) who argue against a female superhero having a female villain to fight. The question of “why can’t they fight a man” is stupid to me. Yes, they can fight a man but when thinking about casting a film and the roles in a film, there are so few female villains, you’d think that Wonder Woman would have a strong one. Especially considering that villain roles are so often described as being some of the best, juiciest roles. Cate Blanchett looks absolutely wicked in the Thor: Ragnarok trailers and the female villains on ABC’s Once Upon A Time are so sinfully good. If the chemist woman was the main villain throughout most of the film, it would have made for a braver narrative. Instead, they had her as a secondary villain character, then are foolish enough to not even have a single scene of meaningful interaction between her and the heroine. And if you wanna talk patriarchy, Wonder Woman, after being raised in a matriarchal society, still somehow sees the evil woman as the delicate, helpless victim. And she spares her. Are you serious? “Yo, I’mma kill all these dudes because, you know, men are disposable and that’s what soldiers do, they die, but as soon as I see one woman, I’ve got to come to my senses and claim that love defeats all.” How is this any different than that Man of Steel family-at-the-museum scene that so many people hated? Seriously? The only difference is that Wonder Woman, unlike Superman, gets to actually say her piece on why she believes the villain is wrong, and uh... of course, it’s got somethin’ to do with love. But with that said, I believe Ares was pretty good for the tiny bit of screen time he had as the revealed villain. In fact, I dare call the performance inspired. Were he to have stayed around he could have been DC's Loki, but instead we are left with the sniveling Lex to fill that position, so... yeah.
While I thought that the linear storytelling was good this time around as opposed to Man of Steel’s time jumps, I still felt that the pacing was off here. There were huge swaths of this movie in which nothing of importance really happened. How many scenes do we honestly need of Trevor explaining the ravages of war to Diana? And the climax felt clunky and more distracting than anything as they switched back and forth between Wonder Woman and the others trying to stop the planes. It felt like they didn’t stay with one for longer than a minute at a time, which more so distracted than intensified the tension. It felt very much like how they kept cutting away from the Doomsday battle to show Lois being useless and the military being useless in Batman v. Superman. Hell, even the scene in which they’re trying to dress her goes on for too long. I can’t believe that a shopping montage went on for too long, yet it did. It blows my mind. But again, I digress.
Now, there are a ton of other nitpicks that I can make that I’m sure will one day be pointed out on CinemaSins, so I’ll just run through them here. First off (and this is definitely a personal nitpick), why do all of the superheroes now suddenly have their costumes just lying around? And more importantly why are the costumes always the exact colors that just happen to align with America? “Oh, we’re going to fight on the Allied side of WWI? I just happen to have a red, white and blue costume ready to go (I know it red, gold and blue but you get the point). Oh, I’m Superman and I’m from another planet? I just happen to have a blue jumpsuit with a red cape. How coincidental those are American colors.” Face-palm! Again, this movie was touted as being refreshingly new and invigorating to the superhero genre, yet... Just like in Man of Steel we get a, “Noooo!” scene at the death of a key character; just like in Man of Steel we get a strange apocalyptic vision/dream sequence in which the real villain shows our hero/heroine the world that could be (sans the cool skull sinkhole); we literally even get the same shot/plot point of a character long-diving off of a structure and going into water (Jor-el did it in Man of Steel, Diana does it on the island to go save Trevor; we have no hidden identity (Trevor was always meant to know but he then proceeds to tell everybody who will listen what kind of a wack job he’s traveling with); we get the destruction of a small town (like Smallville); we get a clip of our heroine walking through fire at the end (like when Clark saved the oil rig); we get an alley fight to show that Diana can still be a badass even when dressed in office clothes (ala Captain America); we get someone dying in and/or exploding in a plane (ala Captain America and Man of Steel with Meloni’s character being sucked into the phantom zone/drive thing); we get literally the same scene but in reverse in which the main villain is dressing for the final fight (in Man of Steel, Zod shakes off his spacesuit armor piece by piece to reveal an all-black under-suit, whereas in Wonder Woman Ares assembles his armor piece by piece into an all-black exo-suit); just like in Man of Steel, our hero/heroine must destroy/kill/defeat the last remaining person of their race (Zod and Kal-el are the last remaining Kryptonians; Diana and Ares are the last remaining gods, though Diana is a demi-god), and finally we get no clear definition of a code of honor or what the hero lives by. And this is still discounting the flaws that her powers, for the most part, go undefined (so, she can be cut by a regular blade but never sustains any other damage? I mean, her hair isn’t even tousled at the end); Zeus’ powers also go somewhat undefined (so, a god can just make other gods without doing the, uh... you know? Or is it only demi-gods he can create from virtually nothing?); and she essentially, has the exact opposite origin of Superman (so, where Kal-el was the only child born from natural “make-sex” ways, bucking the trend of genetic engineering, Diana is the only child engineered from clay and given life by a god. Yes, it takes a very subtle amount of massaging, but they’re virtually the antithesis of each other). But this is one of the highest-rated comic book movies of all time? Then what is Man of Steel?
What’s my grade? I give it a slightly higher grade than Batman v. Superman, a C+. Listen, there is no way that this movie is anything other than average. Was it OK? Yes, but it does not deserve to be rated as one of the top three great comic book movies of all time, and that did, unfortunately, influence my grade. If we’re even going there, the general list should start off in no particular order: Superman, Superman II, The Dark Knight, The Avengers, Batman and Iron Man. But because it’s Wonder Woman and there’s a woman lead, there’s a glossiness here. To me, the gloss is made even worse by people saying that it’s the first female-led superhero movie, forgetting about Elektra and Catwoman. Hell, that is almost as big of a slight as those Hollywood execs who, every three years or so, claim “women-led films don’t make money” forgetting about Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, Misery, Aliens, Sixteen Candles, The Hunger Games, a ba-thousand horror films in which women play both canon fodder and heroine routinely and on and on. And the worst thing is that I know this will happen just the same when Black Panther comes out. Suddenly, everyone is going to forget about Blank Man, Meteor Man, Steel and Spawn, and claim, “Oh my god, it’s the first black superhero.” No, he is not. No, she was not.
I will, however, give them some credit because they did improve on some of the humorous elements, although that boat scene between her and Trevor almost epitomized the argument that some men and boys make against rape culture claims. Dressing how you want is one thing and I wouldn’t stop you from doing that, but don’t badger a guy to sleep next to you, talk about sex in innuendo fashion or otherwise, and then expect nothing to happen or for him to not have mixed signals. It just really made me feel uncomfortable because it’s telling both young girls and boys that courting/engaging in that kind of behavior is fine when neither of you should be putting yourself in a situation where something you don’t want to happen could happen. The conversation should literally have been, “Why don’t you want to sleep right next to me?” “Because you’re a woman and I’m a man. Period.” There’s nothing to argue about there. Don’t try to test him or his manhood by challenging him to do what you want, but I digress. I thought that the CGI was adequate and the acting was OK. Yes, I do still think that Gal has a lot of room for improvement but I thought she was bolstered by the cast of bit players and middling stars. Nobody in the cast was such a huge star that they outshined her just by being on the screen, not even Chris Pine who could often melt into the background.
While I will say that it is criminal that Patty Jenkins hasn’t gotten another film to direct since Monster, after watching this, I actually thought that this was the picture Zack Snyder wanted to direct more than anything. A lot of people kept saying after Batman v. Superman that Batman was more his style because of the darkness, but Wonder Woman was definitely his thing. If you look at the film, it has literally every hallmark of a Snyder film. It had the opportunity to be as dark as it wanted to be because it was a war film; had the blood and sandals style of 300; used the same type of slow-mo shots; followed a warrior who literally could kill anyone she wanted to; had a group of people protecting themselves from the encroaching evil that lurks just beyond their borders ala Dawn of the Dead; and like that Dawn of the Dead movie, has a band of misfits that come together to survive as they also wade through dangerous territory. You look at all of his films and he’s always done better with a bigger cast, rather than focused on one star and a bunch of supporting characters, whether that be in Dawn, 300, Guardians of Ga’Hoole, Watchmen or Sucker Punch. Focusing on darker world building was always his thing. That, however, does not make me more hopeful for Justice League.
I still think that it is as I predicted when I said that Wonder Woman would be accepted by most: Justice League will return to mediocrity for critics, there will not be a Justice League part 2 (at least not for a while), there won’t be a Man of Steel 2, they’ll continue for two more sequels with Wonder Woman, and they’ll have only one other successful character, but all the other plans will languish in development hell (currently, my bet on the other character is Aquaman but I reserve the right to see Justice League before calling it). In fact, I believe that the reason why they even chose WWI was to specifically distance Wonder Woman from the rest of the shared universe. They did everything they could to make it its own film completely apart from the JL universe. Yes, some will argue that they stayed true to the roots by using one of the world wars, but they could’ve chosen any war. The world has been in wars and conflicts ever since the fall of the British empire. They could’ve chosen the Vietnam or Korean war or et cetera, but we got WWI, and I partially think another reason the film rated so high is because critics love war films. For whatever reason, war films tend to almost always rate extremely high.
Just remember, folks, that these movies are based highly on the box office and while Marvel has cranked out the billion-dollar films, DC has yet to get one. But again, take everything I’m saying with a grain of salt as I always wanted to do a Superman and Justice League trilogy which look less and less likely as they keep on this path. Still keeping hope alive to write the Captain Planet film, though. Oh, and no, WB does not get credit for giving this film to a woman to direct. No congratulations for doing what you’re supposed to do, but I’ll definitely look at you sideways if you don’t at least add a female writer to Allan Heinberg for the sequel.
Oh, and just before I get outta here, I’d like to say that I was a little disappointed in the soundtrack as it played in the movie. I expected a little more, but... I don’t know. I don’t understand why they didn’t go with Junkie XL for this. Yes, I know he is doing Justice League, but he worked on WW’s theme for Batman v. Superman, it just seemed like he’d do all of the films and take over for Zimmer. I don’t know. Haven’t listened to the soundtrack raw and on its own yet, so I’ll probably be wowed by it there but it didn’t pull me further into the movie.
What do you think? Have you seen Wonder Woman, and if so, how did you like it? Did you see some of the many similarities between it and the other movies I mentioned? Do you think it is really deserving of the title of one of the greatest comic book movies of all time? And do you think this bodes well for the rest of the DCEU? Also, do you think this iteration of Wonder Woman can fly? Because I’m really confused by that. In BvS she was about to leave the city on a plane, right? But in this film, it looked like in the final battle she might have been flying a few times, or just had some serious hang time on her jumps. Anyway, let me know in the comments below.
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Until next time, “We’re gonna solve this thing with love, damn it! And if that doesn’t work, we’ve always got fists.”
P.S. So let me get this straight, Batman’s got a gun and loves running people over; Superman enjoys snapping a neck or two; and Wonder Woman’s got a sword and shield that she totally uses to slice through necks and stab through people, yet we’re only outraged by the first two? Really? Hmph! Interesting.
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So, I just saw Wonder Woman (#WonderWoman), and after reading online that it was not only good but that it was the third highest-rated comic book movie ever, I had high expectations. However, I also had to temper them knowing that this was another DCEU film and that they are three films deep into this thing and it has yet to get on the right track. But were the critics right? Did DC and Warner Bros. Finally right the ship, or is all of this talk of this film being good total bunk? Keep reading to find out.
Let me first start by saying that I absolutely called this a year or even more ago (it was either in a Suicide Squad review or in my Batman v. Superman review, I can’t remember. Although, now that I think about it, I’m not sure I ever posted my Suicide Squad review. I’m too busy to remember these things, and this parenthetical is already running too long, so...). What, you ask, did I call? The good movie reviews. I knew this was going to be a movie that you had to judge not just for what is on the screen but for all the things going on outside of the film, mainly politics and big money. I also called that this would be the first “successful” DC film as far as critics go. And, I even called some of the headlines that literally read: “Wonder Woman Shows the Men How to Do It” and “Of Course A Woman Would Save the DCEU.” OK, those are paraphrased or off by a few words, but I guarantee you can find those types of headlines all over the internet and in various publications. Remember, I called this before ever seeing the movie because I knew, regardless of whether the film was good or not, it was going to get a majority of good reviews. Why? We all know why, but before you push me aside and say I’m being sexist, hear two things: first, know that I’ve been pretty right on a lot of my predictions about the DCEU (still don’t know why we call it that instead of the DCCU) even dating back to Man of Steel, but that was before I had this blog and you couldn’t possibly know that so... Second, while I have been known to make plenty of remarks that can be construed as sexist, I am not, in any way, against female superheroes nor against Wonder Woman. And third—or, wait, did I say just two things? I meant and second part deux, while most of my criticism has nothing to do with the superhero being a woman, some of it does have to do with the fact that I still would like to write (read: reboot) the DC universe and do some Superman movies and a Justice League movie of my own, and know that the success of this current iteration may stand in the way of that if they decide to continue in perpetuity. Gahh! OK, we ready? We all good? Let’s get to it.
Do not believe the hype, Wonder Woman has fixed almost nothing in the DCEU. And, while I hate to say this let’s get this out of the way first before I level my criticism: yes, most of the reviews stem from the fact that she is a woman superhero, which has caused many critics and fanboys to overlook some of the film’s glaring mistakes. There, now with that said, let’s take the sexism blinders off and start looking at the film through the lenses of being the “third highest-rated superhero/comic book movie of all time” and being a “DCEU film.” We’ll start with the same criticism that some feminist might say to me: “Oh, if it was a guy, you’d love the film.” No, I would not. In fact, I know this unequivocally because it is essentially the mash-up of two other male-driven superhero films: Man of Steel and the first Captain America. Don’t get me wrong, I really liked Captain America, however, a lot of people didn’t and I understand why. But we can’t take some of the same criticisms we had of those films and completely ignore them here.
Women Warriors! Loved The Look. Story Is FlawedFor starters, at the beginning of Man of Steel and Wonder Woman, we see life as it is on the planet/island/realm from which our hero/heroine originates. I like that Themyscria is given some screen time, however, unlike in Man of Steel, I never quite felt as immersed in the island and its culture. To me, unlike in Man of Steel (which, I thought Krypton was one of the best parts of that movie), we don’t get as much world building and what we do get feels lackluster. OK, there’s some kind of hierarchy and they spend all their time training and fighting all day, but that’s about it. Not only do we not get great world building, the rules of the film are hardly defined here. I know, they did that little cartoon history lesson (again, just like in Man of Steel) to show how the island came to be, but everything went so fast, I only half-paid attention.
The rules? Right. As I was saying, while they are on the island I never get a full understanding of who the Amazons are. So, in that history story we have the gods, right? And we have the people. Did Zeus make a secondary race between gods and people in order to keep people from killing themselves and that’s what the Amazons are? Again, if we are just talking about the film and NOT the comics which are filled with lore and answers for every question, the film doesn’t properly answer this, because if they are just normal people, then how do they live so long? Does that island-protection spell also have something to do with keeping them ageless? Or has time stopped on the island? I just, I don’t understand. Assuming that they fought this great war back when Greeks ruled the world, that would make the island and every inhabitant thousands of years old, including Diana, right, because Zeus is dead and the last thing he did was make Hippolyta’s clay daughter Pinocchio to life. And if it wasn’t during Greek reign, then when (and why are they dressed akin to Greeks)? Or does the film technically start during ancient days (remember, historians, Greeks ruled even before Romans so we’re talking 3000 years ago here) and Diana slowly grows over the course of 100s of years? And for that matter, since she is the only child on the island, how is she the only one aging?I hope by this time you’re starting to see that a lot of my criticisms really aren’t going to be sex-based. Granted, you can say that this criticism was a nit-pick but it really confused me because of Batman v. Superman. In that movie, Diana is shown once again not to have aged since World War I. And while we know that Captain Steve Rogers in Captain America was put into a deep freeze that the super-soldier potion allowed him to live through into modern day, we are given no standard by which Diana ages neither on the island nor in the world of man. However, maybe she returns to the island in-between the end of Wonder Woman and Batman v. Superman, which could explain her absence during Man of Steel. If we think of it that way, then she only pops out every few years or so as a vacation into man’s realm, just so she can be seen on camera because the island itself is magic.
I wish the island criticism stopped there but it doesn’t because while I can piece together how Steve Trevor just happened to fly through the island’s barrier after it had remained hidden after however many years—Diana smacking her arm bracelets and sending out that power wave—I can’t, for the life of me figure out why it was so easy to kill these women. Again, what the hell are they? If they’re gods, how weak of them. If they’re demi-gods, same thing. If they’re just regular humans on a magical island, then shouldn’t the island have more magical stuff that could heal them from things like gunshots and whatnot? I know, a gun is a gun, but you see them all training for so long, so many years, and suddenly the slaughter is on when a tiny brigade of men come? Really? Really? So, in other words, ladies, you can work your ass off, get all the education you want and could possibly ever need, do everything right for years and as soon as you’re up against a man for anything, you’re never going to be good enough? Maybe that is the artistic point they’re trying to make there, an ironic commentary on real-life women routinely getting passed up for positions they are qualified for, and if it is, then I can accept that. But I also wish they had done it in a better way that set clear boundaries as to what these women can and can’t do. With Superman, while you’ve always had some abilities ambiguity, Krypton has always been portrayed as a planet with a bunch of regular people. Superman, therefore, gets his powers from our yellow sun and hasn’t been born with them. The whole Wonder Woman movie (before the end, which I could have guessed even if I didn’t know anything about the comics), I kept thinking to myself after that beach scene, “Why don’t they just shoot her? Just shoot Wonder Woman. Two to the gut and this’ll be over.” And not at her like all the gunmen did, but actually shoot her. Catch her from the back or in the leg. Her shins may have been guarded but her thigh was out and easily shot. But I digress.
Moving on, in this opening we get the textbook definition of, “Well, it’s not OK when I do it, but you can do it all you want?” that men and women have complained about to each other since the dawn of this current society's feminism. For years, we’ve heard a chorus of people say that little boys should be admonished for wanting to rough-house and seek out rather violent ways of expression. We’ve had articles on how little boys playing warriors or cops and robbers, or playing violent video games is wrong and it reinforces “the patriarchal archetype of boys wanting violence,” yet in this film, Diana explicitly wants violence as a child. Unlike, say... Rey in Star Wars, she doesn’t just want to go out to explore beyond her island home, she is looking to conquer. She is born and raised in a fight culture that glorifies battle and whose sole purpose is to train and ready themselves for a war against man and Ares.Now, while this criticism is overtly sexist, I have to also mention that some of the critics and fans didn’t like the first Captain America because of Steve Roger’s lust for war. Even though he wanted to go to WWII in order to help his brothers, some saw it as a lust for violence, which is the same thing Diana has here and throughout the movie. There literally is no other motivation, save for to murder.
Speaking of murder, this movie has the same exact problem that made so many critics hate Man of Steel: the death toll. Granted, maybe at this point in time we’ve gotten so used to our heroes killing people that we’ve become numb to it, but if that is the case, then I contend that we need to all go back and re-view Man of Steel in this light because it could change the entirety of how we view the film. In a universe where both Batman and Superman kill (two superheroes who were always determined not to kill at any cost), I thought maybe Diana would take the lead here and show the boys how it was done. But no. Yes, Diana is a warrior but again, why is it OK for her to kill at will and cause destruction but not any other superhero? We are shown a few scenes in which she slices the throats of some of the Nazi soldiers; she shield-bursts through a sniper’s tower (very similar, albeit fewer victims, to Superman and Zod bashing into buildings), and stabs through the guy who she thought was Ares all Terminator 2 style (remember that final scene where T-2 stabs Arnold through, then Arnold has to pull the rod out? Totally reminded me of that). And this, of course, is after the beach slaughter.
Granted, it’s war and people do die, but the whole point of superheroes was for them to be better than regular heroes like soldiers and firefighters. Batman didn’t kill Joker, even though he was evil incarnate. Superman wasn’t supposed to kill Lex Luthor even though, again, he was a bad guy. Wonder Woman? Eh! Kill whoever you want, they’re just Nazis.And as if that weren’t bad enough, we have to hear her run around the entire movie talking about how badly she wants to “kill” Ares. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word “kill” in a superhero movie that often, and especially not coming out of the mouth of the superhero. The villain, sure. But the hero (heroine) having a killgasm like that? No. As an aside, I thought this was actually bad writing as they couldn’t come up with another word other than kill? Even Deadpool had other ways of saying what he wanted to do.
And one more thing about the murder rate in this thing, that end scene where she goes all hell-hath-no-fury on all of those soldiers either proves my killgasm point or is the worst, most blatant, “See? They’re really not dead and all is well,” cover-up since Batman v. Superman’s line about “luckily downtown is empty and everybody’s gone home for this death battle with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Doomsday.” This woman was lifting up tanks and exploding through buildings just a scene ago. You’re telling me that when she loses her cool and can’t control her rage, her punches and kicks aren’t killing soldiers? Give me a break.
Then there are the characters. Steve Trevor is... sigh. To me, he was very one note. I liked the scene in which he and Diana are talking in the baths and he talks about his father. And I also liked the boat scene (though, I have gripes about that one too), but other than that, I found a lot of his scenes ushering on the movie. There was a lot of, “OK, Diana, we have to go. No, we can’t do that, we have to be here. Now we have to be here.” It felt more like he was a theater-house usher than a real character. And that dancing scene felt charmless to me. I don’t know, maybe I’m just not a fan of Chris Pine as he is also just OK to me in Star Trek. So, I’ll leave it at that. I suppose I can buy the romance between them. And also, what was he? I missed it when he said his rank and all of that. I know he’s a spy, but was he supposed to be American working with Brits? It just stood out because everyone else in the film has a thick accent, then he doesn’t. Confusing.
Anyway, the other characters were fine, albeit forgettable. I did find the scene between Diana and the Native American ironic, but I’m not going to waste time explaining why. But moving to the villains, well... sigh. To me, they were actually quite useless, almost as useless as most Marvel villains. I felt like Danny Huston’s character (can’t even remember his name he was so pointless; the general dude) was literally thrown into the movie as a red herring for the sake of having a red herring. Look, I don’t know the history of that particular character, so when I’m watching the film I want something explained to me. Why the hell is he taking that pill/capsule? Who was he really? And how did that capsule “restore him” or whatever? You see what I mean when I say red herring? He was there solely so you could think he was Ares. For a film that was touted as “reinvigorating the comic book genre,” I found this to be wholly unoriginal and uninspired. I didn’t even see the point of his evil, which is really hard to do with a character that is a Nazi. In comparing him to Red Skull, we at least knew that the red guy had other plans that superseded even the Furor’s and would continue regardless of what happened with the war. Here, does Huston’s character want to rule the world, is a psychopath that likes killing people for the sake of it, or what? He doesn’t seem to sway strongly either way. He doesn’t even seem to have a seething hatred for the enemy, he’s just... there, because why not?
Again, Huston’s character is there for the sake of throwing you off to think that he is Ares. A braver, smarter idea would have been to make Ares’ character genderless or gender-ambiguous in the opening story so that then they could have the doctor lady be suspected as Ares, only to have it be the British bloke or vice versa. I have not and will not ever understand women (and some men) who argue against a female superhero having a female villain to fight. The question of “why can’t they fight a man” is stupid to me. Yes, they can fight a man but when thinking about casting a film and the roles in a film, there are so few female villains, you’d think that Wonder Woman would have a strong one. Especially considering that villain roles are so often described as being some of the best, juiciest roles. Cate Blanchett looks absolutely wicked in the Thor: Ragnarok trailers and the female villains on ABC’s Once Upon A Time are so sinfully good. If the chemist woman was the main villain throughout most of the film, it would have made for a braver narrative. Instead, they had her as a secondary villain character, then are foolish enough to not even have a single scene of meaningful interaction between her and the heroine. And if you wanna talk patriarchy, Wonder Woman, after being raised in a matriarchal society, still somehow sees the evil woman as the delicate, helpless victim. And she spares her. Are you serious? “Yo, I’mma kill all these dudes because, you know, men are disposable and that’s what soldiers do, they die, but as soon as I see one woman, I’ve got to come to my senses and claim that love defeats all.” How is this any different than that Man of Steel family-at-the-museum scene that so many people hated? Seriously? The only difference is that Wonder Woman, unlike Superman, gets to actually say her piece on why she believes the villain is wrong, and uh... of course, it’s got somethin’ to do with love. But with that said, I believe Ares was pretty good for the tiny bit of screen time he had as the revealed villain. In fact, I dare call the performance inspired. Were he to have stayed around he could have been DC's Loki, but instead we are left with the sniveling Lex to fill that position, so... yeah.
While I thought that the linear storytelling was good this time around as opposed to Man of Steel’s time jumps, I still felt that the pacing was off here. There were huge swaths of this movie in which nothing of importance really happened. How many scenes do we honestly need of Trevor explaining the ravages of war to Diana? And the climax felt clunky and more distracting than anything as they switched back and forth between Wonder Woman and the others trying to stop the planes. It felt like they didn’t stay with one for longer than a minute at a time, which more so distracted than intensified the tension. It felt very much like how they kept cutting away from the Doomsday battle to show Lois being useless and the military being useless in Batman v. Superman. Hell, even the scene in which they’re trying to dress her goes on for too long. I can’t believe that a shopping montage went on for too long, yet it did. It blows my mind. But again, I digress.Now, there are a ton of other nitpicks that I can make that I’m sure will one day be pointed out on CinemaSins, so I’ll just run through them here. First off (and this is definitely a personal nitpick), why do all of the superheroes now suddenly have their costumes just lying around? And more importantly why are the costumes always the exact colors that just happen to align with America? “Oh, we’re going to fight on the Allied side of WWI? I just happen to have a red, white and blue costume ready to go (I know it red, gold and blue but you get the point). Oh, I’m Superman and I’m from another planet? I just happen to have a blue jumpsuit with a red cape. How coincidental those are American colors.” Face-palm! Again, this movie was touted as being refreshingly new and invigorating to the superhero genre, yet... Just like in Man of Steel we get a, “Noooo!” scene at the death of a key character; just like in Man of Steel we get a strange apocalyptic vision/dream sequence in which the real villain shows our hero/heroine the world that could be (sans the cool skull sinkhole); we literally even get the same shot/plot point of a character long-diving off of a structure and going into water (Jor-el did it in Man of Steel, Diana does it on the island to go save Trevor; we have no hidden identity (Trevor was always meant to know but he then proceeds to tell everybody who will listen what kind of a wack job he’s traveling with); we get the destruction of a small town (like Smallville); we get a clip of our heroine walking through fire at the end (like when Clark saved the oil rig); we get an alley fight to show that Diana can still be a badass even when dressed in office clothes (ala Captain America); we get someone dying in and/or exploding in a plane (ala Captain America and Man of Steel with Meloni’s character being sucked into the phantom zone/drive thing); we get literally the same scene but in reverse in which the main villain is dressing for the final fight (in Man of Steel, Zod shakes off his spacesuit armor piece by piece to reveal an all-black under-suit, whereas in Wonder Woman Ares assembles his armor piece by piece into an all-black exo-suit); just like in Man of Steel, our hero/heroine must destroy/kill/defeat the last remaining person of their race (Zod and Kal-el are the last remaining Kryptonians; Diana and Ares are the last remaining gods, though Diana is a demi-god), and finally we get no clear definition of a code of honor or what the hero lives by. And this is still discounting the flaws that her powers, for the most part, go undefined (so, she can be cut by a regular blade but never sustains any other damage? I mean, her hair isn’t even tousled at the end); Zeus’ powers also go somewhat undefined (so, a god can just make other gods without doing the, uh... you know? Or is it only demi-gods he can create from virtually nothing?); and she essentially, has the exact opposite origin of Superman (so, where Kal-el was the only child born from natural “make-sex” ways, bucking the trend of genetic engineering, Diana is the only child engineered from clay and given life by a god. Yes, it takes a very subtle amount of massaging, but they’re virtually the antithesis of each other). But this is one of the highest-rated comic book movies of all time? Then what is Man of Steel?
What’s my grade? I give it a slightly higher grade than Batman v. Superman, a C+. Listen, there is no way that this movie is anything other than average. Was it OK? Yes, but it does not deserve to be rated as one of the top three great comic book movies of all time, and that did, unfortunately, influence my grade. If we’re even going there, the general list should start off in no particular order: Superman, Superman II, The Dark Knight, The Avengers, Batman and Iron Man. But because it’s Wonder Woman and there’s a woman lead, there’s a glossiness here. To me, the gloss is made even worse by people saying that it’s the first female-led superhero movie, forgetting about Elektra and Catwoman. Hell, that is almost as big of a slight as those Hollywood execs who, every three years or so, claim “women-led films don’t make money” forgetting about Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, Misery, Aliens, Sixteen Candles, The Hunger Games, a ba-thousand horror films in which women play both canon fodder and heroine routinely and on and on. And the worst thing is that I know this will happen just the same when Black Panther comes out. Suddenly, everyone is going to forget about Blank Man, Meteor Man, Steel and Spawn, and claim, “Oh my god, it’s the first black superhero.” No, he is not. No, she was not.
I will, however, give them some credit because they did improve on some of the humorous elements, although that boat scene between her and Trevor almost epitomized the argument that some men and boys make against rape culture claims. Dressing how you want is one thing and I wouldn’t stop you from doing that, but don’t badger a guy to sleep next to you, talk about sex in innuendo fashion or otherwise, and then expect nothing to happen or for him to not have mixed signals. It just really made me feel uncomfortable because it’s telling both young girls and boys that courting/engaging in that kind of behavior is fine when neither of you should be putting yourself in a situation where something you don’t want to happen could happen. The conversation should literally have been, “Why don’t you want to sleep right next to me?” “Because you’re a woman and I’m a man. Period.” There’s nothing to argue about there. Don’t try to test him or his manhood by challenging him to do what you want, but I digress. I thought that the CGI was adequate and the acting was OK. Yes, I do still think that Gal has a lot of room for improvement but I thought she was bolstered by the cast of bit players and middling stars. Nobody in the cast was such a huge star that they outshined her just by being on the screen, not even Chris Pine who could often melt into the background.
While I will say that it is criminal that Patty Jenkins hasn’t gotten another film to direct since Monster, after watching this, I actually thought that this was the picture Zack Snyder wanted to direct more than anything. A lot of people kept saying after Batman v. Superman that Batman was more his style because of the darkness, but Wonder Woman was definitely his thing. If you look at the film, it has literally every hallmark of a Snyder film. It had the opportunity to be as dark as it wanted to be because it was a war film; had the blood and sandals style of 300; used the same type of slow-mo shots; followed a warrior who literally could kill anyone she wanted to; had a group of people protecting themselves from the encroaching evil that lurks just beyond their borders ala Dawn of the Dead; and like that Dawn of the Dead movie, has a band of misfits that come together to survive as they also wade through dangerous territory. You look at all of his films and he’s always done better with a bigger cast, rather than focused on one star and a bunch of supporting characters, whether that be in Dawn, 300, Guardians of Ga’Hoole, Watchmen or Sucker Punch. Focusing on darker world building was always his thing. That, however, does not make me more hopeful for Justice League.
I still think that it is as I predicted when I said that Wonder Woman would be accepted by most: Justice League will return to mediocrity for critics, there will not be a Justice League part 2 (at least not for a while), there won’t be a Man of Steel 2, they’ll continue for two more sequels with Wonder Woman, and they’ll have only one other successful character, but all the other plans will languish in development hell (currently, my bet on the other character is Aquaman but I reserve the right to see Justice League before calling it). In fact, I believe that the reason why they even chose WWI was to specifically distance Wonder Woman from the rest of the shared universe. They did everything they could to make it its own film completely apart from the JL universe. Yes, some will argue that they stayed true to the roots by using one of the world wars, but they could’ve chosen any war. The world has been in wars and conflicts ever since the fall of the British empire. They could’ve chosen the Vietnam or Korean war or et cetera, but we got WWI, and I partially think another reason the film rated so high is because critics love war films. For whatever reason, war films tend to almost always rate extremely high.
Just remember, folks, that these movies are based highly on the box office and while Marvel has cranked out the billion-dollar films, DC has yet to get one. But again, take everything I’m saying with a grain of salt as I always wanted to do a Superman and Justice League trilogy which look less and less likely as they keep on this path. Still keeping hope alive to write the Captain Planet film, though. Oh, and no, WB does not get credit for giving this film to a woman to direct. No congratulations for doing what you’re supposed to do, but I’ll definitely look at you sideways if you don’t at least add a female writer to Allan Heinberg for the sequel.
Oh, and just before I get outta here, I’d like to say that I was a little disappointed in the soundtrack as it played in the movie. I expected a little more, but... I don’t know. I don’t understand why they didn’t go with Junkie XL for this. Yes, I know he is doing Justice League, but he worked on WW’s theme for Batman v. Superman, it just seemed like he’d do all of the films and take over for Zimmer. I don’t know. Haven’t listened to the soundtrack raw and on its own yet, so I’ll probably be wowed by it there but it didn’t pull me further into the movie.
What do you think? Have you seen Wonder Woman, and if so, how did you like it? Did you see some of the many similarities between it and the other movies I mentioned? Do you think it is really deserving of the title of one of the greatest comic book movies of all time? And do you think this bodes well for the rest of the DCEU? Also, do you think this iteration of Wonder Woman can fly? Because I’m really confused by that. In BvS she was about to leave the city on a plane, right? But in this film, it looked like in the final battle she might have been flying a few times, or just had some serious hang time on her jumps. Anyway, let me know in the comments below.
Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend . #AhStalkingIf you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Both season 1 and season 2 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 3 coming summer 2017. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinary OUT NOW. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.
Until next time, “We’re gonna solve this thing with love, damn it! And if that doesn’t work, we’ve always got fists.”
P.S. So let me get this straight, Batman’s got a gun and loves running people over; Superman enjoys snapping a neck or two; and Wonder Woman’s got a sword and shield that she totally uses to slice through necks and stab through people, yet we’re only outraged by the first two? Really? Hmph! Interesting.
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May 6, 2017
Extraordinary Season 1 Preview #FreeComicBookDay #Serial #Extraordinary #Sci-Fi
Extraordinary Season 1 Preview #FreeComicBookDay #Serial #Extraordinary #Sci-Fi
So, in honor of Free Comic Book Day, I thought I'd share the first act of my new episodic novel series, Extraordinary. The first three episodes will be out tomorrow for purchase on Amazon Kindle. Click the Amazon link at the bottom of this post to get to more of my works. Hope you enjoy.
The Tease:
Extraordinary, in its first season will follow a small group of 16 people (I know, it seems like a lot but by the end of the season you'll know most of them intimately and have your favorites) in a not-too-distant future where Mars is hardly the space darling it used to be. Instead of obsessing over Mars, scientists and space-enthusiast alike have looked just beyond the red planet to a solar system anomaly referred to as The Eye. A wormhole that defies certain theoretical physics while supporting other theories, The Eye provides not only the next jewel for galactic fascination, but it becomes a portal to another world. An alien world. It is here that Colonel Nelson Corman makes a daring escape from the clutches of an insect-like race of aliens, jetting back through the stars to earth, determined to warn us all. His warning: Aliens soon shall come.
A dire warning, only a select few hear this. They set on a mission to change the world for the better before the aliens, good or bad, arrive to earth. But to do this, they'll need volunteers.
Enter Michael, one of the unappointed leaders of the group of volunteers for a strange new study by a company named Paradigm. He, along with 12 others, is chosen after a less-than-extensive search for desperate people in need of cash. A little daughter and ex-wife to support, he tries to do right by his family but finds that he must sink to low paths in order to get there. Little does he know just what Paradigm has really done to him and the others.
Think of Extraordinary in the same vein as the ABC series Lost or Stephen King's The Stand. You will see multiple stories from each character as they carve out their identities, and all experience this life-transforming happening together. It does have an adult tone so it will be rated for a mature reader. Reader's discretion is strongly advised (that means cursing, substance use and the like).
Note: the numbers are page numbers that will be properly worked into the completed format on Amazon. And now for your sneak preview. Enjoy!.
1Extraordinary achievements mark man's passage of time upon this earth. From wallowing in a sphere of dust and water, to blasting into the highest reaches of the firmament. Still, more achievements lie ahead. Yet, with all of the impossibles made elementary, many questions remain. What awaits beyond the sky magnificent? Will we ever truly etch our place into the stars? And if earthly trappings bind us only to here, to this rock, what will the limit to our potential be? Will we ever become more than that which we see before us? HGBLACK. PRELAP: An unidentifiable GUTTURAL SCREECH, like a mix of elephant's horning trunk, lion's roar, and rusty screech of a train's breaks halting on an old line.
EXT. PLANET – DAY Sparsely-clouded sky plays home to the wild imagination dripped at end of painter's brush. A magenta drapes the atmosphere. In the distance, a red dot—flames of a brutal star—plays sun. Ain't Earth.
Breathing. Panting... The right foot of a white boot stamps the orange clay-soil of the alien planet. The subject: An astronaut runs, with squirrelish fury, away from the white-grass thicket lining a dry clay field. He spills onto what resembles Earthly desert landscape with little time to savor its flawed, morbid beauty.
Like a greasy, acned face of a teen, divots, puddles and unsteady ground lay before him, pockmarks from an abused territory.
The suit svelte and white with reflective foil wrapped at the ankles and knees, he ran without restriction, an earthly gravity neither 2buoying nor bullying his stride. Worn, the suit and its wearer had seen the planet's worst. Clay skids sullied the once pristine white with the decoration of discovery, of desperation, of fear. The inside no better, the helmet—a less bulky, almost Hockey-like design—had a spider-webbing of dry spittle in the lower left corner nearest the astronaut's mouth. Remnants of a dehydration-sweetened saliva expelled in overexertion, it misted and fogged under the astronaut's hot breath. His brow sweat-lathered, eyes ghost-widened and with just as much fear, here ran astronaut Colonel Nelson Corman, PhD. A man of 43 years of age, white with brunette hair, a sharp triangular nose, a Neanderthal-model's jawline, and the rugged good looks of a Hollywood action star, he had served as the captain of the spaceship that landed upon the planet. Thousands of real-life flight experiences in everything from fighter jets to airbuses, two years training as an astronaut pilot and all the dreams in the world about following in his heroes' John Glenn and Neil Armstrong's footsteps couldn't prepare him for this. Until he got his wings again, he'd have to revert back to his basic training, and run. The out-of-breath panting of an over-ran marathoner, body fought mind as one wanted to slow and the other knew he couldn't. Not far behind, something wicked chased him. Goowarrrrr! Another gnarled roar thundered through the air, wetting the stale wind with grievous intent, sending Colonel Corman tripping and plummeting to the ground. Less than an inch of soil loosened on the orange peel of a planet, he hit hard upon rock, his chest and right side absorbing much of the blow. Pain his second nature, he flipped to his back to see what stalked him. Nothing? Whatever he fled from had yet to make it through the white field. Still, that could not erase from his face the look. That look that poet's 3 gone to war wrote about; that look that haunted the nightmares of murderers; that look that not even cameras could capture and that the devil himself rejoiced from. Abject terror lived on his face. In all the years he had toured and warred on Earth, nothing scared him like what lay just beyond the gentle sway of the tall white grasses. Spotting no movement, he felt around his suit, patting at his legs, his back and chest, searching. A mumbled question, he asked, “Holes? Rips? What is the suit integrity? What is the suit integrity?” Musings of a madman? No. The suits AI—an upgraded mix of Siri, Alexa, and HAL—answered, “Suit—suit—suit integ... -ty: 100 perc—perc—perc...” On the fritz, the AI's inter-suit communication system had taken a beating just as bad as the colonel. It stuttered, stammered, and auto-corrected worse than a clunky 80s computer. Corman got the gist. He started to breathe relief when it added, in smooth enunciation, “But breathable oxygen is now at two percent.” “Shit! Gotta get back to the ship! Gotta get back to the ship!”Goowaaarr! The creature grew closer. The colonel rolled to his knees and pushed to his feet, taking off down the straightaway. His direction predetermined, 20 feet ahead sat an outcropping of rocks. Half gray, half orange they stood out of the ground like elongated egg-shaped pillars. About the colonel's height—five-ten, five-eleven— they provided perfect cover from what laid before him. Corman ran to the rock outcropping and deliberately fell hard against the rocks, shouldering into the grayish-orange substance to hide from what was on the other side of the rock. Sounds of them stepping, he slowed his breathing and peeked out to the left side of the rock to spy on his objective and the beast. The goal: reach the escape spaceship that sat about 20 feet from a cliff's edge. A triangular pod dipped in white, black, blue, a metallic teal, and coated with the current planet's filth, it served as his only 4 escape. About a football-field's length away, he'd have no problem getting to it had he not spotted what stood in his way. Off to the left, and almost exactly halfway between ship and rocks, stood one of them. A metallic blue, almost as if someone had painted a truck with regular house paint then sprayed it with a glittery gray finish—the creature stood in dreary color. No less than 22-feet-tall, the hulking beast resembled a Frankenstein-like mix between furry animal, insect and spider. It moved with bone tentacles, standing only on two at a time as the other eight made circular patterns in the air like antenna looking for something. The tentacles each had no less than four knobby, knee-like joints allowing them the fluidity to whip like eel through water, or to fold like a blind-man's cane. Its body looked of nothing, the torso a mixture of a fat cockroach and cow. Silica-like, gray-teal hair hung from its underside and dotted its tentacles. Protruding from either side of its body hung scorpion-tail stingers that, when raised to the red sunlight, looked translucent with turquoise outline. A venom inside of them yellow in color and boiling in appearance. The actual stinger could open like a flower, even serve usefulness as a hand and arm. A frightening creature, it moved with its tentacles in unique ways, no buggish pattern or dance to its movement, though a slime excreted sometimes from the bottom of the tentacles. Though the blue creature stood closest to him, even farther away and more to the left stood a pinkish creature with similar attributes to a crab. Standing only 15 feet in height, it used all of its tentacle joints to walk at once. No stingers, it had claw-like joints with flattened white boards that looked like glued-together, elongated fingernails. Facing the astronaut and the blue alien, its face had a softness to it, almost appearing human or animal in shape and form: three proper holes from which illuminated its eyes; yellow-pyramid 5 beak, which opened into its mouth; three vertical slots that resembled an antique wood stove—all made for an actual face. Squared off against the blue alien, it moved side to side, slowly, methodically, strategizing its movements. Corman watched as it stepped to its right (Corman's left), and he thought, see me. See me! The glow of the pink alien's eyes shifted color as its head tilted down to look across the cliff to the rock outcropping. He spotted Corman's head peeking out from the rock. Corman nodded and smiled in agreement. His eyes turned from the alien to the ship in hopes big pink would know of his plan. As Corman looked once more at the ship, this time squinting to see harder, he spotted something lying far right of it. At cliff's side edge, sprawled upon the clay, laid another astronaut, a member of his crew, no doubt lifeless with their left arm outstretched and a book bag half-wrapped around it. Biology Officer Lacy Denaghue, he thought. Too many losses to count, he didn't have time to mourn them all now. He needed only to escape. He continued his scouting glance, spotting what looked like a large clay doughnut. Wise to the crude aesthetic, he knew it to be a weapon used predominantly by the blue creatures. Not thinking, Corman took one step toward the weapon and the dead officer only for his boot to kick a baseball-sized pebble. The noise just enough to draw the blue alien's attention, the elongated turtlenecked creature whipped around to see him. Far from the face of something recognizable, it had glowing eyes of yellow with a red ring around them that protruded like insect eyes; half a dozen of them on its face. Serpent fangs hung from the bottom of its neck and the entire neck opened to reveal a salmon-colored, gill-like flesh. Spotted, Corman ducked back behind the rock as the blue creature lowered its two most-rear tentacles and took two steps 6 toward him only to be called back to the gladiator battle between it and the pink alien. The blue thing whipped back around as the pink alien galloped toward it at full speed and lunged into it. The cries, roars and screeches of battle emanating from behind him, Corman concentrated only on his dilemma. Think, damn it! Think! Go for the ship, make it out alive. Go for the backpack and you've got a greater probability of dying. Even if that monster doesn't get you, you'll still probably run outta air. “Gah! Life or science? Life or science?” Always a soldier, he'd never be able to live with himself if he didn't complete his mission. “Aw shit!” Ker-booomp! The crackle of an unfamiliar storm rumbled through his ears. Still leaned against the rock, Corman looked out to the left of the cliff to see the sky darkening green as a storm rolled in. Far from an earth storm, the green was not clouds. The clouds that already covered the sky persisted, staying still as if glued to the atmosphere. Having lived through one storm, he knew what followed would trap him there. He had to get out before the rolling rain and striking plasma covered him and the ship. His eyes fixated upon the storm in the distance until a pink appendage flew up from the gorge below the cliff and spiraled toward him. A near hit, the pink limb landed to his right side, smacking hard against his shelter rocks and forcing him out into the open. He whipped back to the two aliens in battle only to find the pink alien atop the blue, ripping one of its tentacles in half and watching black pus spew from it. Maybe he can make it with those two distracted. He took one step toward his downed comrade, when—Goowaaarr! He whipped around to see another blue alien climb up from the gorge and get atop the cliff about 400 feet from him, just at the start of the white grass thicket. It locked eyes on him. “Oh my god!” Time to move. He started to dart across the clay... 7EXT. CLIFF, ALIEN PLANET – SAME
CRANE OUT to reveal landscape. From above, we look down on a marbled gorge on either side of the Lion King-esque cliff.
Brilliant whites, oranges and yellows – colors of the ground – reflect back, as we see and hear a much larger battle waged below. In the gorge, pinks vs. blues lay waste to each other, savaging one another as body parts flail and fly. Black goop from the blue aliens and green goop from the pink aliens smears on the ground.
An alien Gettysburg moves in rage as the green storm nears. Fire shoots pink aliens' mouths; ice from blues' eyes. A blue vomits onto a pink he's locked tentacles with, melting through its claws like acid.
Still fleeing like tiny white dot is the Colonel, the second blue alien gaining on him, using its many legs to zoom across the ground.
The sound of the approaching blue at his back, Corman ran for everything he ever held dear in his life, leaping and bounding from one stable bit of land to the other. He leapt over a blue puddle of unidentifiable liquid. Can't be water. Their water is clear, white even. His leap timed with the loogie of the second blue alien behind him, the spit hit and ignited with the blue puddle. Boooom! The explosion flung him across the cliff, jettisoning him farther toward the weapon and the backpack. Thud-landing upon his right side once more, he rolled to his back, shook it off and looked across the field. Snapped to attention, the first blue alien eyed him in full view. It started toward him when the pink alien tackled it from behind, pulling it back into their death match. 8Another lucky break. Then the suit began to sound as he scrounged to his feet. “Breathable air now down to one perc—perc...” “Engage air recycling filtration system,” he said, though he knew it busted nearly a day prior. “Negative. Air filtration system inoperable. Warning: Breathable air down to one perc—perc—perc...” “Ahh!” And up he went. Steps more sure than before, he took one look over his shoulder to spot the second alien close on his tail, now within 50 feet of him. Pushing his luck, he darted the last ten steps to the doughnut-shaped weapon. “Okay, how the hell do you work?” He had only seen it used once before, but he had only been on the planet for 30 days, so everything stayed fresh in his memory. Some kind of gun or cannon, it looked like a hula hoop standing upright and perfectly balanced without rolling forward or backward, but far from smooth. About six feet tall, he had no hope in moving it, but found a port at its back that just happened to point downhill toward the second alien. A port filled with a yellow snot-like substance, he jammed his hands deep into it, then wrapped the blue vine that hung from its side around his right foot, and kicked forward and down. A massive white energy blast ten feet in diameter shot from it like a softball toward the blue alien, blasting it halfway back down the hill. Stunned but not dead, the alien shook off the blast and got back upright to restart its approach. Enough distance between the two, Corman ran ten steps farther to reach his fellow astronaut at the end of the cliff. Worse than a cheap slasher movie, he looked down to his science officer to see the front glass of her helmet caved in and her face pulverized to such a messy pulp that nothing about her appearance looked human. Only her jawbone jutted forward with a few cracked teeth, the rest an Irish Blood soup of brains, flesh, eyes and other 9 sinew. A praying man, Corman closed his eyes in quick prayer for the blue's prey. A mumbled word to the heavens only God and his heart could hear, before he could say amen his communion found interjection in the victorious roar of the first blue. Corman opened his eyes to look across at the first blue standing at cliff-side's edge with big pink hoisted above head, half its tentacles torn off. Like Moses casting ten commandments down from on high, the blue hurled the pink off the cliff and roared once more in victory. “No.” Corman's one, quiet utterance called attention to him as the blue whipped around to spot him and pointed one of the sensor tentacles at him, reading its prey from afar. Distracted by the pull to survive, Corman started to take off, getting three steps away from his downed crew mate before remembering, “Science,” and whipping back around to grab the bag. He found the bag entangled with the outstretched left arm that had grown stiff. He crouched down, yanked at the bag's strap twice before ripping it off and flinging the one usable strap around his right arm. Beep! Beep! Beep! “Warning: Breathable oxygen will dissipate within 15 seconds. Warning: Breathable oxygen will dissipate within ten seconds... nine... eight...” Time low, he took off, running double-time as the AI counted down and the beeping wouldn't stop. Don't look back. Just keep moving forward. Forward, damn it! Forward! His mantra helping him speed up, he paid no attention to the second alien having doubled its rate of approach, now closing the gap, within 50 feet of him along with the first blue. For such big creatures they moved like lightning, scurrying quicker than ants across the plane, almost gliding with the ends of their tentacles as they pursued him. Gooowwaaarrr! 10“Don't look back! Don't look back!” he yelled at himself, tasting the salt of his sweat upon his lips. The beeping drove him crazy. “Four seconds... three seconds...” Almost there. Ten feet. You can do it, Corman! Six feet! The aliens zipped across, the second blue crunching into the body of the other dead astronaut, treating it like pavement gum. The back loading door of the spaceship down and its ramp deployed, he needed only a few more steps to get inside. Two steps... One step, and jump! He dove onto the ramp and crawled farther inside as he knew one had swung its lengthiest tentacle at him. A red lift button to his right, he smacked it and flipped onto his back to watch the alien's reach the back lift door. He scooted farther and farther into the ship as his suit continued to beep, out of oxygen. Lungs starting to swell, he held his breath as he watched the lift-gate close—wait! It's stuck? The hydraulic got stuck, sending out an airy mechanical zip like the sound of a copy machine on repeat. The first blue alien arrived as the door nearly closed. It stuck its tentacle into the open space and tried grabbing Corman. Not to be undone by them, and knowing he had to close the lift-gate in order to engage the ship's faux-earth atmosphere, he kicked at the lift pipe to his left, hoping it would click back into place or move. Come on you bastard! He willed the pipe to correct itself, finally kicking it smooth and allowing the lift-gate to close. The alien yanked its tentacle out just as the ramp closed. Still not clear, he started to feel the wooziness of having held his breath so long. Get to the front! You've got to get to the front. Only from the pilot's seat at front could he turn on the artificial environment. He tried pushing to his feet before feeling lightheaded from lack of oxygen. His legs gave out and sent him tumbling back to 11 the ground. From walk to army-man's crawl, he muscled to the front to smack a green button and swipe his hand across a screen to... “On-board artificial environment engaged,” the ship's AI said. The helmet heavy on his head, he unlatched it and threw it off to take a big gulp of air—“huooooohnn!”—before rolling onto his back and looking at the ship's ceiling. Goobababoom! Goobababoom! The ground rumbling from outside mixed with the storm still nearing and the metallic thwack of the tentacles upon the outside of the ship. Corman elevated to his feet, threw the backpack off and into the co-pilot's seat to his right and plopped down in his captain's chair. “Initiate emergency flight protocols! Skip check-through!” he told the AI. “Systems analysis skipped. Would you like to—?” “Start engines!” “Engines started. Would you like—?” “Engage thrusters!” Outside, the white heat of the spaceship's thrusters burned across the clay, turning its color from a dull orange to a shiny marbled red. Boomp! Gaaboomp!—two more hits from the aliens. Dang it! I can't wait for the engines to power up. If I don't get outta here now, I'll never get out alive. No doubt those things can rip this tin can apart. Having seen plenty of what they could do up close, he wasn't looking to be proven right. He looked out the front window that covered the entirety of the front of the spaceship like a visor, and spotted the rain hitting the battlefield below to the right. A touchscreen display before him with all sorts of buttons for the ship's operations, he dialed a few to initiate the piloting gear to come out from beneath the table and dock in front of him. “Lift-off ready!” He wrapped either hand around either pillar of the steering yoke 12 and yanked back. “Warning: Engines not to full power! Taking off without full power may result in fai—” Corman didn't want to hear it. He clicked a button-switch to the right of the touchscreen console to momentarily switch off the AI. And lift-off he did. Wobbly, the ship pushed off the ground about one foot, hovering in place as he struggled with the controls. “Come on! Come on!” Feeling the tug of the creature at back, he jostled with the yoke and yanked it left, hoping to fling the alien off. Half in control, the ship spun like a top, whirling twice in the air, scraping its right wing on the ground as it turned. And forward! It hop-skipped across the ground toward the edge, closing the 20 feet to the drop at a snail's pace as the engines fought the new weight. “Ahh!” Not until the second spin did Corman notice salvation out to the left of the window. The pink alien that had been tossed off the cliff's side threw one of its tentacles over the side. Then another, finally pulling itself back up onto the plateau. “Yes!” Angrier than Clint Eastwood in a Western, the alien scuttled its way across the cliff as fast as it could, moving no less than 30 miles an hour toward the ship. One final battle cry, it dive-bombed into the two blues, ripping them from their attachment to the ship. The momentum sent all three of them cascading off the side of the cliff, freeing the ship to sputter along until it reached cliff's edge. Sputtering, sputtering, sputtering, and... Drop! Corman looked out the windshield only to see ground not too far away. The engines' power was not fully restored. A daring pilot, Corman put his feet up on the dash and pulled up with all his might, freeing himself from the straight vertical plummet and leveling out just at the height of the blue creatures. War still waging, he looked across the ravaged plane at the mess of creatures entangled in battle and remembered the 13 kindness of the pink creatures. If he was forced to fly low, then he might as well do some damage. Yanking and jockeying with the yoke, he turned the ship sideways and bowled the right wing directly through a line of blue creatures like a sideways Frisbee. He boomeranged to his left and turned to take out two more of the deviant blues before the engines warmed enough for him to make the pull upward into the sky. No sooner had he braved and conquered one peril did another come. The storm fully upon him, now he had to fight against the malevolent weather of the planet. Rain splashed upon the windshield, hitting like balls against bats. Were it water, he'd be safe. But this was no ordinary H2O2. A liquid thicker than vegetable oil, and just as greasy, spit down from the heavens in brown droplets big as a child's hand or a god's tear. “No, no, no! I need visibility! I need to see, damn it!” Corman yelled at the window as the brown rain coated like thick gravy. He flicked the button-switch to turn the AI back on and instructed it to, “Defrost the windows.” “System has found no need to defrost th—” “Then do somethin', god damn it! I can barely see!” “There is an obstruction 100 feet away. I advise you to pull up!” The obstruction: a cloud. As nearly everything else on the planet, the clouds sat differently in the purple haze of day and green of the storm. Instead of puffs of condensed moist air consisting of white foam pushed by the geothermal breeze of the planet's rotation, these clouds seldom moved. These were gelatinous gray blobs that Corman and his crew never got around to thoroughly analyzing. His chief botanist hypothesized that they, similar to earth, consisted of condensed formulations of the planet's atmosphere. However, nothing on the ground supported such a theory. 14One thing they did discover: Hitting one, flying through it, shared traits with driving through quicksand or Jello—you felt the impact. Visibility low, Corman yanked on the yoke once more, pulling straight up in hopes of missing the curve of the nebulous dwelling before him. The rain hitting thick upon the ship forced the tail down and made it scrape through the clouds, catching a piece of the gel on the end as he dared not stop. “Detecting mass increase of ten percent. There is an 18 percent probability that the thrusters will be unable to lift us out of the stratosphere,” the computer said, hardly the news he wanted to hear. “Barometric pressure increasing to...” As the AI continued, Corman focused on the gauge that displayed at the upper left-hand corner of the touchscreen. It read the same as what the AI warned: “Mass increased by ten percent.” “Damn rain and... Clouds!” he said, feeling like an idiot for cursing the clouds. Another decision to make, any extraneous movement to shake free the cloud (now glued to the back of his ship) would waste thrust power and overtax the engine, and he needed every bit of power to get back through deep space. “Now piercing Explored Planet one's exosphere and entering into inner-space,” the computer said. Not cause for celebration, the colonel still flew with teeth grit and hands wrapped tight around the yoke. The absence of a fiery canopy to burn off the rain and the cloud nothing new to him, he zoomed into the darkness of space full speed. “We're not out 'til we're home,” Corman barked to no one. “Nearing Icarus One's warp dock. Warning: Severe damage of warp dock detected. Warning severe...,” the computer yapped. Nothing the colonel didn't already know, he looked out the rain-greased window to see a man-made ring satelliting the planet, a space-station docking that should have held the back-end of the ship 15 he currently piloted. This was just the planetary explorer. The rest of the Icarus One had met its untimely fate during a blue alien attack a few weeks earlier. It, along with parts of the circular ring it fit into, sustained maximum damage. Now, all Corman had to get home was the ring and the explorer. Luck on his side, the docking ring contained the warp-drive engines to get him far, and fast. Just in time to link up with its planetary rotation, he slowed the Icarus One explorer, ported into the ring, initiated the coupling protocol and locked together with the ring. “Initiate Icarus One supplementary thrusters now!” he yelled. As commanded, the thrusters kicked into gear and blasted him around a nearby planet and into a space where light and time warped, a black hole that had been dubbed The Eye. Down on the surface of the planet, one of the blues looked up past the clouds, and flicked a secondary lizard-like yellow eyelid over their eyes to see through the rain and right into space. It watched as a burst of energy blasted from the rear of the spaceship and sent it deep into the black hole. Corman's escape gave it license to let free one final roar! Gooowaaarrr! Ripping free from the black hole, Corman yanked back on the yoke with all his might as he felt himself going too fast. The Eye spit-out Icarus One into the belt of space junk and potential comets between Mars and Jupiter. Warp still engaged, the circular mechanism ripped apart at the onset of Mars' gravitational pull as he crested the bend. Corman looked down to the touchscreen's left corner. Sure enough, it still said that he was ten percent heavier in mass, meaning not even the worm hole and warp speed could peel off the gelatinous cloud substance. He wouldn't know it but somehow the cloud scraped through the space dust particles of Mars, spider-webbing a small part of the red planet's atmosphere as the ship 16 curved around the planet's gravitational ellipsis. Corman's worries extended far beyond that. Because of the warp-drive having been fitted for a ship much bigger than the tiny explorer, he had a problem. Shit! I'm going too fast. He'd be within earth's reach within minutes. His saving grace: “Wait, I should be able to contact them.” He swiped across a blue panel of the touchscreen to get earth on the communication line. “Icarus One Explorer to earth! This is Icarus One explorer to earth, do you copy?” No answer. The comms were just as dead as when he and his crew went through the worm hole. “Icarus One explorer to earth, do you read me?” Still nothing. “Somebody answer, damn it!” Try as he might, he'd get no response. Still, for posterity's sake, protocol stipulated that he speak out any problems encountered in space flight for the recorder. “OK, uh... This is Colonel Nelson Corman, captain of the Icarus One space explorer spaceship. I have re-entered our solar system and have already passed Mars. Due to unforeseen circumstances I have had to ditch the rear of the ship and am flying the planetary explorer. Because of my decreased mass, I am coming in way too hot to earth. I will—” “Warning: Approaching for a landing on earth at the current speed could result in a catastrophic event. Warning: Approaching for a landing on earth...” the computer blared. Corman reached for the button-switch and turned it off again before saying, “Basically, I splash down on the pre-coordinated target and I could cause the extinction of the world's entire ecosystem, if I'm lucky enough not to blast a hole through the entire planet and crack it like an egg.” Stopping to think, he finally smacked at the reverse-thrusters—a disappointment as they did virtually nothing to slow him. And then...17Eureka! As he looked at the world coming fast, he concocted a true flier's plan, “Currently, my only option is to use the gravitational pull in conjunction with the magnetic field of the earth to slow my trajectory and allow me to land with minimal damage to the earth. Computer, calculate how many revolutions around the earth I'd have to make in order to slow me enough for re-entry and—damn it!” He switched the computer back on and restated the command. The computer calculated three rotations within ten seconds of him hitting the exosphere and smashing through a Russian satellite. An experienced pilot and highly intelligent scientist, he flew around the earth the opposite direction of its rotation, and against the gravitational centrifugal force in order to slow the ship before hitting the heat of the atmosphere. “We're goin' down! Ahhhh!” “Warning: Brace for impact. Warning: Brace for impact. Icarus One explorer off course. Icarus One explorer off course,” the computer barked. The yoke unbearable to hold, it snapped to the right, breaking his arm in two as he tried to control it. Flames engulfed the windshield as the heat increased tenfold during re-entry. All the while his eyes kept glued to the console readout at the top left that insisted he still had the same mass as before—a ten percent increase due to the cloud. Shouldn't that melt off in the fire? His question for both the clouds and the filthy rain still smeared upon the front windshield. Off course from his original splashdown landing in the Atlantic, he fell through the night sky like a shooting star, hurdling toward an empty field near a farm in a foreign country. The rounded front of his ship dove into the ground more than 200 feet, carving out a massive cave 22 miles long—Kaboom-doom-doom-doom-doom-doooom!A disruptive quiet, inside the ship, he hung upside-down strapped 18 into the pilot's chair, unconscious. “Dah! Wha...? What?” he jolted awake. His first thought to free himself from the ship, he undid his seat belt without gravity's consideration, and fell to the roof of the vehicle, smacking hard against his left hip as he landed inches from the backpack. “Ah! Ah! Oh god!” he moaned and squealed as he writhed in pain. Not done yet, he hobbled to his feet and used his one good arm and leg to pull him up to the console so he could smack the emergency beacon he had put in just for this scenario. Out of breath, he grabbed hold of a detachable satellite phone hidden in the under-panel of the captain's chair and turned it on. Above the phone's static he could hear what sounded like hot piss hitting a radiator, and turned to look to the back of the busted ship. The back lift-door/ramp torn completely off, he spotted some kind of liquid leaking from the undercarriage of the ship. “That better not be somethin' flammable. That better not be somethin' flammable!” No fire in sight, he couldn't risk staying inside. He grabbed the backpack and managed to kick out a side door a few feet from him. Out went the door and out he went after it, tumbling to the ground of the newly formed cavern. A bluish-green glow still coming from inside the ship from the control panel was all the light he needed to take out the phone and push the “one” button. As the phone rang, he set it on the ground, ripped at a control panel on the suit around his broken arm, and turned on a flashlight equipped in the palm of the suit. The phone continued to ring. He grabbed the backpack, yanked it open and, using his flashlight-hand, looked inside to reveal a small blue creature in what appeared to be some kind of stasis pod, like an egg but with half of the shell clear. Coiled up inside, he watched as the clear-side of the egg fogged and hardened in the new atmosphere. 19His breath still not caught, the phone finally clicked over. He heard a human voice for the first time in two days. “Hello?” “Tur... Turn on your locator beacon. Come get me ASAP. They're dead. The rest are all dead. Hurry up!” He clicked the phone off and laid his head back against the spaceship. Fatigue had quickly eclipsed his first thought to run from an explosion or chemical leak. Now, he needed only a breath and his sanity.
Corman undid the glove on his left hand, pulled his right hand across his waist and dug his bare left hand through the disrupted soil kicked up by the spaceship. A rich, gritty black, it fell through his fingers like soot and brown sugar, every bit his expectation. He smiled, then laughed as he watched the soil fall, “I'm home. I'm home.” And with those words, he passed out.
And there you go. I do hope you liked it, and if it has wet your appetite, be sure to check on my Amazon page (click the word Amazon highlighted below) and check for the series premiere of the first three episodes tomorrow. Trust me, you won't want to miss this first season. It will be an emotional roller coaster that will have you both cheering and weeping for these characters.
Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend . #AhStalkingIf you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Both season 1 and season 2 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 3 coming summer 2017. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinary premiering soon on Amazon and my blog. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.
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So, in honor of Free Comic Book Day, I thought I'd share the first act of my new episodic novel series, Extraordinary. The first three episodes will be out tomorrow for purchase on Amazon Kindle. Click the Amazon link at the bottom of this post to get to more of my works. Hope you enjoy.
The Tease:
Extraordinary, in its first season will follow a small group of 16 people (I know, it seems like a lot but by the end of the season you'll know most of them intimately and have your favorites) in a not-too-distant future where Mars is hardly the space darling it used to be. Instead of obsessing over Mars, scientists and space-enthusiast alike have looked just beyond the red planet to a solar system anomaly referred to as The Eye. A wormhole that defies certain theoretical physics while supporting other theories, The Eye provides not only the next jewel for galactic fascination, but it becomes a portal to another world. An alien world. It is here that Colonel Nelson Corman makes a daring escape from the clutches of an insect-like race of aliens, jetting back through the stars to earth, determined to warn us all. His warning: Aliens soon shall come.
A dire warning, only a select few hear this. They set on a mission to change the world for the better before the aliens, good or bad, arrive to earth. But to do this, they'll need volunteers.
Enter Michael, one of the unappointed leaders of the group of volunteers for a strange new study by a company named Paradigm. He, along with 12 others, is chosen after a less-than-extensive search for desperate people in need of cash. A little daughter and ex-wife to support, he tries to do right by his family but finds that he must sink to low paths in order to get there. Little does he know just what Paradigm has really done to him and the others.
Think of Extraordinary in the same vein as the ABC series Lost or Stephen King's The Stand. You will see multiple stories from each character as they carve out their identities, and all experience this life-transforming happening together. It does have an adult tone so it will be rated for a mature reader. Reader's discretion is strongly advised (that means cursing, substance use and the like).
Note: the numbers are page numbers that will be properly worked into the completed format on Amazon. And now for your sneak preview. Enjoy!.
1Extraordinary achievements mark man's passage of time upon this earth. From wallowing in a sphere of dust and water, to blasting into the highest reaches of the firmament. Still, more achievements lie ahead. Yet, with all of the impossibles made elementary, many questions remain. What awaits beyond the sky magnificent? Will we ever truly etch our place into the stars? And if earthly trappings bind us only to here, to this rock, what will the limit to our potential be? Will we ever become more than that which we see before us? HGBLACK. PRELAP: An unidentifiable GUTTURAL SCREECH, like a mix of elephant's horning trunk, lion's roar, and rusty screech of a train's breaks halting on an old line.
EXT. PLANET – DAY Sparsely-clouded sky plays home to the wild imagination dripped at end of painter's brush. A magenta drapes the atmosphere. In the distance, a red dot—flames of a brutal star—plays sun. Ain't Earth.
Breathing. Panting... The right foot of a white boot stamps the orange clay-soil of the alien planet. The subject: An astronaut runs, with squirrelish fury, away from the white-grass thicket lining a dry clay field. He spills onto what resembles Earthly desert landscape with little time to savor its flawed, morbid beauty.
Like a greasy, acned face of a teen, divots, puddles and unsteady ground lay before him, pockmarks from an abused territory.
The suit svelte and white with reflective foil wrapped at the ankles and knees, he ran without restriction, an earthly gravity neither 2buoying nor bullying his stride. Worn, the suit and its wearer had seen the planet's worst. Clay skids sullied the once pristine white with the decoration of discovery, of desperation, of fear. The inside no better, the helmet—a less bulky, almost Hockey-like design—had a spider-webbing of dry spittle in the lower left corner nearest the astronaut's mouth. Remnants of a dehydration-sweetened saliva expelled in overexertion, it misted and fogged under the astronaut's hot breath. His brow sweat-lathered, eyes ghost-widened and with just as much fear, here ran astronaut Colonel Nelson Corman, PhD. A man of 43 years of age, white with brunette hair, a sharp triangular nose, a Neanderthal-model's jawline, and the rugged good looks of a Hollywood action star, he had served as the captain of the spaceship that landed upon the planet. Thousands of real-life flight experiences in everything from fighter jets to airbuses, two years training as an astronaut pilot and all the dreams in the world about following in his heroes' John Glenn and Neil Armstrong's footsteps couldn't prepare him for this. Until he got his wings again, he'd have to revert back to his basic training, and run. The out-of-breath panting of an over-ran marathoner, body fought mind as one wanted to slow and the other knew he couldn't. Not far behind, something wicked chased him. Goowarrrrr! Another gnarled roar thundered through the air, wetting the stale wind with grievous intent, sending Colonel Corman tripping and plummeting to the ground. Less than an inch of soil loosened on the orange peel of a planet, he hit hard upon rock, his chest and right side absorbing much of the blow. Pain his second nature, he flipped to his back to see what stalked him. Nothing? Whatever he fled from had yet to make it through the white field. Still, that could not erase from his face the look. That look that poet's 3 gone to war wrote about; that look that haunted the nightmares of murderers; that look that not even cameras could capture and that the devil himself rejoiced from. Abject terror lived on his face. In all the years he had toured and warred on Earth, nothing scared him like what lay just beyond the gentle sway of the tall white grasses. Spotting no movement, he felt around his suit, patting at his legs, his back and chest, searching. A mumbled question, he asked, “Holes? Rips? What is the suit integrity? What is the suit integrity?” Musings of a madman? No. The suits AI—an upgraded mix of Siri, Alexa, and HAL—answered, “Suit—suit—suit integ... -ty: 100 perc—perc—perc...” On the fritz, the AI's inter-suit communication system had taken a beating just as bad as the colonel. It stuttered, stammered, and auto-corrected worse than a clunky 80s computer. Corman got the gist. He started to breathe relief when it added, in smooth enunciation, “But breathable oxygen is now at two percent.” “Shit! Gotta get back to the ship! Gotta get back to the ship!”Goowaaarr! The creature grew closer. The colonel rolled to his knees and pushed to his feet, taking off down the straightaway. His direction predetermined, 20 feet ahead sat an outcropping of rocks. Half gray, half orange they stood out of the ground like elongated egg-shaped pillars. About the colonel's height—five-ten, five-eleven— they provided perfect cover from what laid before him. Corman ran to the rock outcropping and deliberately fell hard against the rocks, shouldering into the grayish-orange substance to hide from what was on the other side of the rock. Sounds of them stepping, he slowed his breathing and peeked out to the left side of the rock to spy on his objective and the beast. The goal: reach the escape spaceship that sat about 20 feet from a cliff's edge. A triangular pod dipped in white, black, blue, a metallic teal, and coated with the current planet's filth, it served as his only 4 escape. About a football-field's length away, he'd have no problem getting to it had he not spotted what stood in his way. Off to the left, and almost exactly halfway between ship and rocks, stood one of them. A metallic blue, almost as if someone had painted a truck with regular house paint then sprayed it with a glittery gray finish—the creature stood in dreary color. No less than 22-feet-tall, the hulking beast resembled a Frankenstein-like mix between furry animal, insect and spider. It moved with bone tentacles, standing only on two at a time as the other eight made circular patterns in the air like antenna looking for something. The tentacles each had no less than four knobby, knee-like joints allowing them the fluidity to whip like eel through water, or to fold like a blind-man's cane. Its body looked of nothing, the torso a mixture of a fat cockroach and cow. Silica-like, gray-teal hair hung from its underside and dotted its tentacles. Protruding from either side of its body hung scorpion-tail stingers that, when raised to the red sunlight, looked translucent with turquoise outline. A venom inside of them yellow in color and boiling in appearance. The actual stinger could open like a flower, even serve usefulness as a hand and arm. A frightening creature, it moved with its tentacles in unique ways, no buggish pattern or dance to its movement, though a slime excreted sometimes from the bottom of the tentacles. Though the blue creature stood closest to him, even farther away and more to the left stood a pinkish creature with similar attributes to a crab. Standing only 15 feet in height, it used all of its tentacle joints to walk at once. No stingers, it had claw-like joints with flattened white boards that looked like glued-together, elongated fingernails. Facing the astronaut and the blue alien, its face had a softness to it, almost appearing human or animal in shape and form: three proper holes from which illuminated its eyes; yellow-pyramid 5 beak, which opened into its mouth; three vertical slots that resembled an antique wood stove—all made for an actual face. Squared off against the blue alien, it moved side to side, slowly, methodically, strategizing its movements. Corman watched as it stepped to its right (Corman's left), and he thought, see me. See me! The glow of the pink alien's eyes shifted color as its head tilted down to look across the cliff to the rock outcropping. He spotted Corman's head peeking out from the rock. Corman nodded and smiled in agreement. His eyes turned from the alien to the ship in hopes big pink would know of his plan. As Corman looked once more at the ship, this time squinting to see harder, he spotted something lying far right of it. At cliff's side edge, sprawled upon the clay, laid another astronaut, a member of his crew, no doubt lifeless with their left arm outstretched and a book bag half-wrapped around it. Biology Officer Lacy Denaghue, he thought. Too many losses to count, he didn't have time to mourn them all now. He needed only to escape. He continued his scouting glance, spotting what looked like a large clay doughnut. Wise to the crude aesthetic, he knew it to be a weapon used predominantly by the blue creatures. Not thinking, Corman took one step toward the weapon and the dead officer only for his boot to kick a baseball-sized pebble. The noise just enough to draw the blue alien's attention, the elongated turtlenecked creature whipped around to see him. Far from the face of something recognizable, it had glowing eyes of yellow with a red ring around them that protruded like insect eyes; half a dozen of them on its face. Serpent fangs hung from the bottom of its neck and the entire neck opened to reveal a salmon-colored, gill-like flesh. Spotted, Corman ducked back behind the rock as the blue creature lowered its two most-rear tentacles and took two steps 6 toward him only to be called back to the gladiator battle between it and the pink alien. The blue thing whipped back around as the pink alien galloped toward it at full speed and lunged into it. The cries, roars and screeches of battle emanating from behind him, Corman concentrated only on his dilemma. Think, damn it! Think! Go for the ship, make it out alive. Go for the backpack and you've got a greater probability of dying. Even if that monster doesn't get you, you'll still probably run outta air. “Gah! Life or science? Life or science?” Always a soldier, he'd never be able to live with himself if he didn't complete his mission. “Aw shit!” Ker-booomp! The crackle of an unfamiliar storm rumbled through his ears. Still leaned against the rock, Corman looked out to the left of the cliff to see the sky darkening green as a storm rolled in. Far from an earth storm, the green was not clouds. The clouds that already covered the sky persisted, staying still as if glued to the atmosphere. Having lived through one storm, he knew what followed would trap him there. He had to get out before the rolling rain and striking plasma covered him and the ship. His eyes fixated upon the storm in the distance until a pink appendage flew up from the gorge below the cliff and spiraled toward him. A near hit, the pink limb landed to his right side, smacking hard against his shelter rocks and forcing him out into the open. He whipped back to the two aliens in battle only to find the pink alien atop the blue, ripping one of its tentacles in half and watching black pus spew from it. Maybe he can make it with those two distracted. He took one step toward his downed comrade, when—Goowaaarr! He whipped around to see another blue alien climb up from the gorge and get atop the cliff about 400 feet from him, just at the start of the white grass thicket. It locked eyes on him. “Oh my god!” Time to move. He started to dart across the clay... 7EXT. CLIFF, ALIEN PLANET – SAME
CRANE OUT to reveal landscape. From above, we look down on a marbled gorge on either side of the Lion King-esque cliff.
Brilliant whites, oranges and yellows – colors of the ground – reflect back, as we see and hear a much larger battle waged below. In the gorge, pinks vs. blues lay waste to each other, savaging one another as body parts flail and fly. Black goop from the blue aliens and green goop from the pink aliens smears on the ground.
An alien Gettysburg moves in rage as the green storm nears. Fire shoots pink aliens' mouths; ice from blues' eyes. A blue vomits onto a pink he's locked tentacles with, melting through its claws like acid.
Still fleeing like tiny white dot is the Colonel, the second blue alien gaining on him, using its many legs to zoom across the ground.
The sound of the approaching blue at his back, Corman ran for everything he ever held dear in his life, leaping and bounding from one stable bit of land to the other. He leapt over a blue puddle of unidentifiable liquid. Can't be water. Their water is clear, white even. His leap timed with the loogie of the second blue alien behind him, the spit hit and ignited with the blue puddle. Boooom! The explosion flung him across the cliff, jettisoning him farther toward the weapon and the backpack. Thud-landing upon his right side once more, he rolled to his back, shook it off and looked across the field. Snapped to attention, the first blue alien eyed him in full view. It started toward him when the pink alien tackled it from behind, pulling it back into their death match. 8Another lucky break. Then the suit began to sound as he scrounged to his feet. “Breathable air now down to one perc—perc...” “Engage air recycling filtration system,” he said, though he knew it busted nearly a day prior. “Negative. Air filtration system inoperable. Warning: Breathable air down to one perc—perc—perc...” “Ahh!” And up he went. Steps more sure than before, he took one look over his shoulder to spot the second alien close on his tail, now within 50 feet of him. Pushing his luck, he darted the last ten steps to the doughnut-shaped weapon. “Okay, how the hell do you work?” He had only seen it used once before, but he had only been on the planet for 30 days, so everything stayed fresh in his memory. Some kind of gun or cannon, it looked like a hula hoop standing upright and perfectly balanced without rolling forward or backward, but far from smooth. About six feet tall, he had no hope in moving it, but found a port at its back that just happened to point downhill toward the second alien. A port filled with a yellow snot-like substance, he jammed his hands deep into it, then wrapped the blue vine that hung from its side around his right foot, and kicked forward and down. A massive white energy blast ten feet in diameter shot from it like a softball toward the blue alien, blasting it halfway back down the hill. Stunned but not dead, the alien shook off the blast and got back upright to restart its approach. Enough distance between the two, Corman ran ten steps farther to reach his fellow astronaut at the end of the cliff. Worse than a cheap slasher movie, he looked down to his science officer to see the front glass of her helmet caved in and her face pulverized to such a messy pulp that nothing about her appearance looked human. Only her jawbone jutted forward with a few cracked teeth, the rest an Irish Blood soup of brains, flesh, eyes and other 9 sinew. A praying man, Corman closed his eyes in quick prayer for the blue's prey. A mumbled word to the heavens only God and his heart could hear, before he could say amen his communion found interjection in the victorious roar of the first blue. Corman opened his eyes to look across at the first blue standing at cliff-side's edge with big pink hoisted above head, half its tentacles torn off. Like Moses casting ten commandments down from on high, the blue hurled the pink off the cliff and roared once more in victory. “No.” Corman's one, quiet utterance called attention to him as the blue whipped around to spot him and pointed one of the sensor tentacles at him, reading its prey from afar. Distracted by the pull to survive, Corman started to take off, getting three steps away from his downed crew mate before remembering, “Science,” and whipping back around to grab the bag. He found the bag entangled with the outstretched left arm that had grown stiff. He crouched down, yanked at the bag's strap twice before ripping it off and flinging the one usable strap around his right arm. Beep! Beep! Beep! “Warning: Breathable oxygen will dissipate within 15 seconds. Warning: Breathable oxygen will dissipate within ten seconds... nine... eight...” Time low, he took off, running double-time as the AI counted down and the beeping wouldn't stop. Don't look back. Just keep moving forward. Forward, damn it! Forward! His mantra helping him speed up, he paid no attention to the second alien having doubled its rate of approach, now closing the gap, within 50 feet of him along with the first blue. For such big creatures they moved like lightning, scurrying quicker than ants across the plane, almost gliding with the ends of their tentacles as they pursued him. Gooowwaaarrr! 10“Don't look back! Don't look back!” he yelled at himself, tasting the salt of his sweat upon his lips. The beeping drove him crazy. “Four seconds... three seconds...” Almost there. Ten feet. You can do it, Corman! Six feet! The aliens zipped across, the second blue crunching into the body of the other dead astronaut, treating it like pavement gum. The back loading door of the spaceship down and its ramp deployed, he needed only a few more steps to get inside. Two steps... One step, and jump! He dove onto the ramp and crawled farther inside as he knew one had swung its lengthiest tentacle at him. A red lift button to his right, he smacked it and flipped onto his back to watch the alien's reach the back lift door. He scooted farther and farther into the ship as his suit continued to beep, out of oxygen. Lungs starting to swell, he held his breath as he watched the lift-gate close—wait! It's stuck? The hydraulic got stuck, sending out an airy mechanical zip like the sound of a copy machine on repeat. The first blue alien arrived as the door nearly closed. It stuck its tentacle into the open space and tried grabbing Corman. Not to be undone by them, and knowing he had to close the lift-gate in order to engage the ship's faux-earth atmosphere, he kicked at the lift pipe to his left, hoping it would click back into place or move. Come on you bastard! He willed the pipe to correct itself, finally kicking it smooth and allowing the lift-gate to close. The alien yanked its tentacle out just as the ramp closed. Still not clear, he started to feel the wooziness of having held his breath so long. Get to the front! You've got to get to the front. Only from the pilot's seat at front could he turn on the artificial environment. He tried pushing to his feet before feeling lightheaded from lack of oxygen. His legs gave out and sent him tumbling back to 11 the ground. From walk to army-man's crawl, he muscled to the front to smack a green button and swipe his hand across a screen to... “On-board artificial environment engaged,” the ship's AI said. The helmet heavy on his head, he unlatched it and threw it off to take a big gulp of air—“huooooohnn!”—before rolling onto his back and looking at the ship's ceiling. Goobababoom! Goobababoom! The ground rumbling from outside mixed with the storm still nearing and the metallic thwack of the tentacles upon the outside of the ship. Corman elevated to his feet, threw the backpack off and into the co-pilot's seat to his right and plopped down in his captain's chair. “Initiate emergency flight protocols! Skip check-through!” he told the AI. “Systems analysis skipped. Would you like to—?” “Start engines!” “Engines started. Would you like—?” “Engage thrusters!” Outside, the white heat of the spaceship's thrusters burned across the clay, turning its color from a dull orange to a shiny marbled red. Boomp! Gaaboomp!—two more hits from the aliens. Dang it! I can't wait for the engines to power up. If I don't get outta here now, I'll never get out alive. No doubt those things can rip this tin can apart. Having seen plenty of what they could do up close, he wasn't looking to be proven right. He looked out the front window that covered the entirety of the front of the spaceship like a visor, and spotted the rain hitting the battlefield below to the right. A touchscreen display before him with all sorts of buttons for the ship's operations, he dialed a few to initiate the piloting gear to come out from beneath the table and dock in front of him. “Lift-off ready!” He wrapped either hand around either pillar of the steering yoke 12 and yanked back. “Warning: Engines not to full power! Taking off without full power may result in fai—” Corman didn't want to hear it. He clicked a button-switch to the right of the touchscreen console to momentarily switch off the AI. And lift-off he did. Wobbly, the ship pushed off the ground about one foot, hovering in place as he struggled with the controls. “Come on! Come on!” Feeling the tug of the creature at back, he jostled with the yoke and yanked it left, hoping to fling the alien off. Half in control, the ship spun like a top, whirling twice in the air, scraping its right wing on the ground as it turned. And forward! It hop-skipped across the ground toward the edge, closing the 20 feet to the drop at a snail's pace as the engines fought the new weight. “Ahh!” Not until the second spin did Corman notice salvation out to the left of the window. The pink alien that had been tossed off the cliff's side threw one of its tentacles over the side. Then another, finally pulling itself back up onto the plateau. “Yes!” Angrier than Clint Eastwood in a Western, the alien scuttled its way across the cliff as fast as it could, moving no less than 30 miles an hour toward the ship. One final battle cry, it dive-bombed into the two blues, ripping them from their attachment to the ship. The momentum sent all three of them cascading off the side of the cliff, freeing the ship to sputter along until it reached cliff's edge. Sputtering, sputtering, sputtering, and... Drop! Corman looked out the windshield only to see ground not too far away. The engines' power was not fully restored. A daring pilot, Corman put his feet up on the dash and pulled up with all his might, freeing himself from the straight vertical plummet and leveling out just at the height of the blue creatures. War still waging, he looked across the ravaged plane at the mess of creatures entangled in battle and remembered the 13 kindness of the pink creatures. If he was forced to fly low, then he might as well do some damage. Yanking and jockeying with the yoke, he turned the ship sideways and bowled the right wing directly through a line of blue creatures like a sideways Frisbee. He boomeranged to his left and turned to take out two more of the deviant blues before the engines warmed enough for him to make the pull upward into the sky. No sooner had he braved and conquered one peril did another come. The storm fully upon him, now he had to fight against the malevolent weather of the planet. Rain splashed upon the windshield, hitting like balls against bats. Were it water, he'd be safe. But this was no ordinary H2O2. A liquid thicker than vegetable oil, and just as greasy, spit down from the heavens in brown droplets big as a child's hand or a god's tear. “No, no, no! I need visibility! I need to see, damn it!” Corman yelled at the window as the brown rain coated like thick gravy. He flicked the button-switch to turn the AI back on and instructed it to, “Defrost the windows.” “System has found no need to defrost th—” “Then do somethin', god damn it! I can barely see!” “There is an obstruction 100 feet away. I advise you to pull up!” The obstruction: a cloud. As nearly everything else on the planet, the clouds sat differently in the purple haze of day and green of the storm. Instead of puffs of condensed moist air consisting of white foam pushed by the geothermal breeze of the planet's rotation, these clouds seldom moved. These were gelatinous gray blobs that Corman and his crew never got around to thoroughly analyzing. His chief botanist hypothesized that they, similar to earth, consisted of condensed formulations of the planet's atmosphere. However, nothing on the ground supported such a theory. 14One thing they did discover: Hitting one, flying through it, shared traits with driving through quicksand or Jello—you felt the impact. Visibility low, Corman yanked on the yoke once more, pulling straight up in hopes of missing the curve of the nebulous dwelling before him. The rain hitting thick upon the ship forced the tail down and made it scrape through the clouds, catching a piece of the gel on the end as he dared not stop. “Detecting mass increase of ten percent. There is an 18 percent probability that the thrusters will be unable to lift us out of the stratosphere,” the computer said, hardly the news he wanted to hear. “Barometric pressure increasing to...” As the AI continued, Corman focused on the gauge that displayed at the upper left-hand corner of the touchscreen. It read the same as what the AI warned: “Mass increased by ten percent.” “Damn rain and... Clouds!” he said, feeling like an idiot for cursing the clouds. Another decision to make, any extraneous movement to shake free the cloud (now glued to the back of his ship) would waste thrust power and overtax the engine, and he needed every bit of power to get back through deep space. “Now piercing Explored Planet one's exosphere and entering into inner-space,” the computer said. Not cause for celebration, the colonel still flew with teeth grit and hands wrapped tight around the yoke. The absence of a fiery canopy to burn off the rain and the cloud nothing new to him, he zoomed into the darkness of space full speed. “We're not out 'til we're home,” Corman barked to no one. “Nearing Icarus One's warp dock. Warning: Severe damage of warp dock detected. Warning severe...,” the computer yapped. Nothing the colonel didn't already know, he looked out the rain-greased window to see a man-made ring satelliting the planet, a space-station docking that should have held the back-end of the ship 15 he currently piloted. This was just the planetary explorer. The rest of the Icarus One had met its untimely fate during a blue alien attack a few weeks earlier. It, along with parts of the circular ring it fit into, sustained maximum damage. Now, all Corman had to get home was the ring and the explorer. Luck on his side, the docking ring contained the warp-drive engines to get him far, and fast. Just in time to link up with its planetary rotation, he slowed the Icarus One explorer, ported into the ring, initiated the coupling protocol and locked together with the ring. “Initiate Icarus One supplementary thrusters now!” he yelled. As commanded, the thrusters kicked into gear and blasted him around a nearby planet and into a space where light and time warped, a black hole that had been dubbed The Eye. Down on the surface of the planet, one of the blues looked up past the clouds, and flicked a secondary lizard-like yellow eyelid over their eyes to see through the rain and right into space. It watched as a burst of energy blasted from the rear of the spaceship and sent it deep into the black hole. Corman's escape gave it license to let free one final roar! Gooowaaarrr! Ripping free from the black hole, Corman yanked back on the yoke with all his might as he felt himself going too fast. The Eye spit-out Icarus One into the belt of space junk and potential comets between Mars and Jupiter. Warp still engaged, the circular mechanism ripped apart at the onset of Mars' gravitational pull as he crested the bend. Corman looked down to the touchscreen's left corner. Sure enough, it still said that he was ten percent heavier in mass, meaning not even the worm hole and warp speed could peel off the gelatinous cloud substance. He wouldn't know it but somehow the cloud scraped through the space dust particles of Mars, spider-webbing a small part of the red planet's atmosphere as the ship 16 curved around the planet's gravitational ellipsis. Corman's worries extended far beyond that. Because of the warp-drive having been fitted for a ship much bigger than the tiny explorer, he had a problem. Shit! I'm going too fast. He'd be within earth's reach within minutes. His saving grace: “Wait, I should be able to contact them.” He swiped across a blue panel of the touchscreen to get earth on the communication line. “Icarus One Explorer to earth! This is Icarus One explorer to earth, do you copy?” No answer. The comms were just as dead as when he and his crew went through the worm hole. “Icarus One explorer to earth, do you read me?” Still nothing. “Somebody answer, damn it!” Try as he might, he'd get no response. Still, for posterity's sake, protocol stipulated that he speak out any problems encountered in space flight for the recorder. “OK, uh... This is Colonel Nelson Corman, captain of the Icarus One space explorer spaceship. I have re-entered our solar system and have already passed Mars. Due to unforeseen circumstances I have had to ditch the rear of the ship and am flying the planetary explorer. Because of my decreased mass, I am coming in way too hot to earth. I will—” “Warning: Approaching for a landing on earth at the current speed could result in a catastrophic event. Warning: Approaching for a landing on earth...” the computer blared. Corman reached for the button-switch and turned it off again before saying, “Basically, I splash down on the pre-coordinated target and I could cause the extinction of the world's entire ecosystem, if I'm lucky enough not to blast a hole through the entire planet and crack it like an egg.” Stopping to think, he finally smacked at the reverse-thrusters—a disappointment as they did virtually nothing to slow him. And then...17Eureka! As he looked at the world coming fast, he concocted a true flier's plan, “Currently, my only option is to use the gravitational pull in conjunction with the magnetic field of the earth to slow my trajectory and allow me to land with minimal damage to the earth. Computer, calculate how many revolutions around the earth I'd have to make in order to slow me enough for re-entry and—damn it!” He switched the computer back on and restated the command. The computer calculated three rotations within ten seconds of him hitting the exosphere and smashing through a Russian satellite. An experienced pilot and highly intelligent scientist, he flew around the earth the opposite direction of its rotation, and against the gravitational centrifugal force in order to slow the ship before hitting the heat of the atmosphere. “We're goin' down! Ahhhh!” “Warning: Brace for impact. Warning: Brace for impact. Icarus One explorer off course. Icarus One explorer off course,” the computer barked. The yoke unbearable to hold, it snapped to the right, breaking his arm in two as he tried to control it. Flames engulfed the windshield as the heat increased tenfold during re-entry. All the while his eyes kept glued to the console readout at the top left that insisted he still had the same mass as before—a ten percent increase due to the cloud. Shouldn't that melt off in the fire? His question for both the clouds and the filthy rain still smeared upon the front windshield. Off course from his original splashdown landing in the Atlantic, he fell through the night sky like a shooting star, hurdling toward an empty field near a farm in a foreign country. The rounded front of his ship dove into the ground more than 200 feet, carving out a massive cave 22 miles long—Kaboom-doom-doom-doom-doom-doooom!A disruptive quiet, inside the ship, he hung upside-down strapped 18 into the pilot's chair, unconscious. “Dah! Wha...? What?” he jolted awake. His first thought to free himself from the ship, he undid his seat belt without gravity's consideration, and fell to the roof of the vehicle, smacking hard against his left hip as he landed inches from the backpack. “Ah! Ah! Oh god!” he moaned and squealed as he writhed in pain. Not done yet, he hobbled to his feet and used his one good arm and leg to pull him up to the console so he could smack the emergency beacon he had put in just for this scenario. Out of breath, he grabbed hold of a detachable satellite phone hidden in the under-panel of the captain's chair and turned it on. Above the phone's static he could hear what sounded like hot piss hitting a radiator, and turned to look to the back of the busted ship. The back lift-door/ramp torn completely off, he spotted some kind of liquid leaking from the undercarriage of the ship. “That better not be somethin' flammable. That better not be somethin' flammable!” No fire in sight, he couldn't risk staying inside. He grabbed the backpack and managed to kick out a side door a few feet from him. Out went the door and out he went after it, tumbling to the ground of the newly formed cavern. A bluish-green glow still coming from inside the ship from the control panel was all the light he needed to take out the phone and push the “one” button. As the phone rang, he set it on the ground, ripped at a control panel on the suit around his broken arm, and turned on a flashlight equipped in the palm of the suit. The phone continued to ring. He grabbed the backpack, yanked it open and, using his flashlight-hand, looked inside to reveal a small blue creature in what appeared to be some kind of stasis pod, like an egg but with half of the shell clear. Coiled up inside, he watched as the clear-side of the egg fogged and hardened in the new atmosphere. 19His breath still not caught, the phone finally clicked over. He heard a human voice for the first time in two days. “Hello?” “Tur... Turn on your locator beacon. Come get me ASAP. They're dead. The rest are all dead. Hurry up!” He clicked the phone off and laid his head back against the spaceship. Fatigue had quickly eclipsed his first thought to run from an explosion or chemical leak. Now, he needed only a breath and his sanity.
Corman undid the glove on his left hand, pulled his right hand across his waist and dug his bare left hand through the disrupted soil kicked up by the spaceship. A rich, gritty black, it fell through his fingers like soot and brown sugar, every bit his expectation. He smiled, then laughed as he watched the soil fall, “I'm home. I'm home.” And with those words, he passed out.
And there you go. I do hope you liked it, and if it has wet your appetite, be sure to check on my Amazon page (click the word Amazon highlighted below) and check for the series premiere of the first three episodes tomorrow. Trust me, you won't want to miss this first season. It will be an emotional roller coaster that will have you both cheering and weeping for these characters.
Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend . #AhStalkingIf you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Both season 1 and season 2 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 3 coming summer 2017. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinary premiering soon on Amazon and my blog. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.
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