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Pex Lives 26: The Chase

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We’re pleased to announce this month’s second installment of Pex Lives, which I literally had no idea was even happening until it popped up in my inbox yesterday, and which I hope will be as pleasant a surprise for you as it was for me. You can get that right here. And here’s the description:

Crack yourself open a can of classic Pex Lives, with Kevin and James talking about the month long horror movie marathon that is their Halloween tradition, how they feel about the latest episodes (they don’t), and the mind boggling serial from 1965, the Chase.

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“An ageless light”: Chain of Command, Part II

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Last time on Star Trek: The Next Generation…

“And that’s an important thing to remember here: Most of the stuff fans like to praise the most about ‘Chain of Command’, namely the truly gruesome and unsettling torture scenes that are justifiably held up as a human rights statement, are from Part 2. Part 1 in hindsight feels much more like a setup, not just to Part 2, but to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Because that’s what this episode is really about, at a metatextual level if not an explicit one.” 
“That’s a historical fact I feel is frequently overlooked: This is the first two-parter in the history of Star Trek: The Next Generation to actually come right out and advertise itself as a two-parter from the very beginning. ‘The Best of Both Worlds’, ‘Redemption’, ‘Unification’ and ‘Time’s Arrow’, the previous stories of this ilk, all hung on their cliffhanger endings: You were meant to watch them for 39 minutes assuming they were going to play out like a normal episode, and then be gobsmacked by a left-field revelation…’Chain of Command’, however, makes it perfectly clear to us from the outset it’s telling a story too big and too epic (and also too expensive, which was the main reason Michael Piller suggested splitting it in half) to be contained in one episode. Given the strategic December airdate, it thus also becomes Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first proper mid-season finale, which seems like the only fitting way to reify Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.”
“Ro Laren’s absence in ‘Chain of Command’ is really, strikingly noticeable and one can’t help but wish they held Michelle Forbes’ annual guest spot over for this story instead of shunting her into the teaser for ‘Rascals’. Especially considering she had already turned down the gig over at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, it would make sense to get her perspective on the Cardassians’ withdrawal from her homeworld…” 
“Because I do suspect that former ROTC man Ron Moore looks at Captain Jellico as someone he probably admires to at least some degree due to his bombastic and unapologetic old-fashioned masculinity. The kind of captain he’d probably like to serve under if he was in the military…And a story that lionizes Edward Jellico cannot hear the voice of someone like Ro Laren because it cannot imagine that voice exists. And this story, and both incoming Star Treks, are the poorer for it.” 

And now, the conclusion…

It’s possible to read “Chain of Command” as a kind of narrative collapse. With Star Trek: Deep Space Nine imminent, and even though it at least should have been plainly obvious by now that both it and Star Trek: The Next Generation were going to exist in tandem rather than conflict with one another (well…at least not *artistically*, but we’ll get to that when we get to it), spinoffs still don’t tend to happen in a TV show’s imperious phase: It’s entirely likely there was lingering anxiety about this, especially considering no-one except insiders had actually *seen* Star Trek: Deep Space Nine yet.…

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Lost Exegesis (Pilot Part 2)

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One would think, given they pretty much share the same title, that Pilot Part 1 and Pilot Part 2 would be rather similar, that the two parts would fit together as a functional whole. It’s true that both episodes were shot as part of the same production block. However, the two parts aired a week apart. Which was probably wise, for Pilot Part 2 is a very different beast compared to Pilot Part 1.

And one might wonder if the two parts had a different director, but they did not; JJ Abrams helmed both parts. Yet they have a very different feel from each other. Pilot Part 2 is rather visually distinct from its predecessor, as all of it is terribly bright; there’s an awful lot of sunlight. The first episode, on the other hand, had moments of “day becoming night,” scenes dominated by cloud cover and shadow, and even one shot at night. Pilot Part 2, on the other hand, is terribly bright; there’s an awful lot of sunlight. But then, Part 1 covers Day One on the Island, Night One, and the beginning of Day Two. All of Part 2 happens during Day Two.

While much of that could be attributed to the vagaries of the weather, we cannot say the same about the episodes’ structures. The structure of Part 1, as we noted in the previous essay, was split in two. The first half ran for twenty straight minutes, without commercial interruption. It had several very long scenes – Jack running out of the jungle and playing the hero while the remnants of the plane exploded. Then a long montage of the wreckage, and people milling about, accompanied by a morose musical score. A few short scenes serve to very briefly introduce a few of the other characters, but there’s some long conversations between Kate and Jack (as she stitches up his wound, and as they talk about the plane crash by a campfire) before the Monster brought that half to a climax. After Jack’s Flashback, the rest of the episode is almost entirely concerned with a trek to the cockpit to retrieve the airplane’s transceiver, and another attack by the monster. The whole episode is largely focused on Jack, secondarily on Kate and Charlie, and is very much in the mold of an action-adventure.

Pilot Part 2, on the other hand, consists of 27 vignettes that eventually feature all of the ensemble cast. The episode runs only 40 minutes. The final scene is five minutes long, and each of the two flashback scenes run about three minutes. As such, most scenes barely last a minute. This gives the episode a very different pace.

And yet it’s not nearly as propulsive as Pilot Part 1, for most of the vignettes are very languorous on their own. Sure, there are a few action sequences – both Flashbacks are on the crashing plane, and there’s the charge of the polar bear – but these are not the focus of the episode.…

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Blood Makes Noise (E.V.O. The Search for Eden)

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Arguably the most Hegelian moment in all of video games, at least in an aesthetic sense, comes at the start of E.V.O. as the player’s avatar – at this particular moment in the game a fish – meets a jellyfish and is welcomed to the dialectical process of evolution. The jellyfish explains the three rules of evolution: fight for survival and for food, only move forward never back, and evolve and become strong. At which point the dialogue ends, the player bites the jellyfish in the head twice, and then eats the juicy roast his corpse converts into thus regaining some health and gaining experience. The process reiterates until eventually the player evolves into a human being, defeats the monstrous Bolbox, and reaches Eden where he is finally allowed to become Gaia’s consort and bring about civilization.

It is, to say the least, one of those games that stops you short, critically speaking. Its psychochronographic space is a British coast, expanding endlessly the closer you look at it. Every detail is strange, the explication of one leads inexorably to another. There is too much meaning here; in every direction lies rabbit holes to topple down.

And yet at its core this is an almost obvious game. Evolution is a more or less inevitable thing to pair with an experience system, and I’m sure prior art exists, although this is the earliest instance of it I’m aware of. Everything else slots into place at least reasonably sensibly around the clever gameplay mechanic in a very classic function follows form bit of game design. Add the detail that it’s an Enix game (not from the Quintent sub-studio that produced ActRaiser and Soul Blazer, although it shared production staff with the former) and almost the entire thing clicks into place. RPGification of existing game styles was very much their thing, so of course the RPG side-scroller is a thing.

But it also helps explain the game’s strangest and most interesting aspect, which is its curious mishmash of an ideology and worldview. It has the characteristic slight obliqueness of a Japanese game – a phenomenon we’ve discussed previously – and the tendency towards slightly distorted and cracked mirror versions of European cosmologies, a tendency emphasized by the slightly dodgy translation in E.V.O. In this case the player is shepherded by Gaia, a personification of the Earth, who is apparently the direct daughter of the Sun. But this is laid alongside an almost-sensible version of evolutionary biology – one that’s not even close to scientifically accurate, but that has at least seen a science textbook at some point in its life. And then on top of that there are Martian bird people perverting the course of human evolution.

The Martian bird people in many ways distract from the real strangeness here, which is the attempt to merge the eco-hippy rhetoric that Gaia is being plucked from with the pop-evolutionary biology, which, inevitably, gets simplified down to “survival of the fittest.” These are in some key regards a rough fit.…

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“A Voiceless Song”: Chain of Command, Part I

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The reputation of course precedes it. Not just its own, but that of what it sets into motion. We know what’s coming next. And so did everyone who saw this on initial transmission: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was the show on everyone’s minds that was getting all the industry buzz. The promo spots were already airing on TV, and we’d seen the new crew and the new space station. Anyone who followed science fiction would have known the new show was going to be set near Bajor and feature the Cardassians, so everyone knew what a mid-season finale involving the Cardassians over at Star Trek: The Next Generation *really* meant.

And that’s an important thing to remember here: Most of the stuff fans like to praise the most about “Chain of Command”, namely the truly gruesome and unsettling torture scenes that are justifiably held up as a human rights statement, are from Part 2. Part 1 in hindsight feels much more like a setup, not just to Part 2, but to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Because that’s what this episode is really about, at a metatextual level if not an explicit one. The teaser starts, and right away we get a series of bombshell revelations: Captain Picard is being reassigned, the Enterprise is getting a new captain and the Cardassians are withdrawing from Bajor. We’re given practically no time to process any of this, just like the crew who are given no time to process the transfer of command from Jean-Luc Picard to Edward Jellico. And yet at the same time, we also know that none of this is going to be permanent, because we follow the entertainment rags enough to know Patrick Stewart isn’t leaving the show and also because this episode is literally entitled “Chain of Command, Part I”.

That’s a historical fact I feel is frequently overlooked: This is the first two-parter in the history of Star Trek: The Next Generation to actually come right out and advertise itself as a two-parter from the very beginning. “The Best of Both Worlds”, “Redemption”, “Unification” and “Time’s Arrow”, the previous stories of this ilk, all hung on their cliffhanger endings: You were meant to watch them for 39 minutes assuming they were going to play out like a normal episode, and then be gobsmacked by a left-field revelation: Captain Picard got turned into a Borg. Tasha Yar is still alive, and a Romulan. Spock is back (even though we kind of knew he was coming). Data gets sucked into the past, where we know he’s going to get killed. “Chain of Command”, however, makes it perfectly clear to us from the outset it’s telling a story too big and too epic (and also too expensive, which was the main reason Michael Piller suggested splitting it in half) to be contained in one episode.…

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Before the Flood Review

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Well, that’s what I get for getting my hopes up about a Whithouse story I suppose. This was just crap. Unambitious, unimaginative, uninteresting crap made at best semi-competently. By some margin the worst episode of the Capaldi era, and saved from being Whithouse’s worst script only by the fact that A Town Called Mercy is appreciably worse. Maybe. I’m not even sure. God this was shit.

Where do I even start? The beginning, I suppose – the tediously overlong description of the bootstrap paradox, which, let’s recall, was basically the resolution to the entire Madame Kovarian saga back in Time of the Doctor where it was considered simple enough to just dash off in a line of dialogue. Or, for that matter, the setup of Blink, which managed to make its entire length without having to go out of its way to explain its plot resolution in the abstract before doing it. But now, apparently, time-wime is something that has to be explained in advance of its invocation in what has to be the single least suspense-laden cold open in series history.

But it’s not as though things start looking up afterwards. I remarked in last week’s podcast that Whithouse’s stories have an unfortunate tendency to collapse into “x in a y” formulations, but never before has he managed anything quite so spectacularly pointless as the inexplicably empty fake Russian village. I can only assume it was selected because someone realized that an abandoned generic village and an underwater base almost completely lacking in interesting visual design was going to add up to the least visually engaging episode ever and so decided to throw some Soviet propaganda posters around. Because why not.

At least O’Donnell finally gets some interesting characterization and background after being neglected for most of the first episode. Oh wait, it’s just so she can be fridged to provide angst for the story’s most pointless character, not that this angst translates into Bennet actually doing anything in the entire story. I mean, aside from the obligatory “scold the Doctor for being callous” scene, because evidently Whithouse really can’t go a story without hitting that note. Actually, he doubles down by doing the exact same thing with Clara, which is even more depressing given that it’s the first thing Clara’s actually been given to do since she figured out where the Doctor was for Missy, such that Whithouse’s autopilot setting actually qualifies as interesting for her in context.

Then, for good measure, the O’Donnell/Bennet “relationship out of nowhere” move only exists to set up the equally out of nowhere Cass/Lund relationship at the end. Because apparently Cass’s emotional investment in her interpreter can only be explained by a desire to fuck him and not just by the fact that, you know, they’re longtime friends and colleagues. (I don’t know nearly enough about the deaf community to know whether falling in love with one’s interpreter is a stereotype, although it seems so obvious and uncreative a move that the only way it would fail to be a stereotype is due to insufficient deaf representation in the first place.)…

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Weird Kitties: Best Dramatic Presentation (Longform) Open Thread

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Or, as I really do think of the category, “all the stuff that’s probably going to lose to Star Wars,” a film I would be shocked to find on my ballot given my dislike for both the franchise and the director. Call me cynical.

I’ll almost certainly be nominating Ex Machina, Mad Max: Fury Road and, as the image suggests, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, in its entirety (as I think it’s better-suited to this category than short form, where one would have to pick an episode). I’ve kind of got a slot pencilled in for The Martian, but I also probably won’t actually get around to seeing it in theaters to make sure of this. (I’d love to hear opinions of it.) 

Past that, I’m keeping my last slot open. The Force Awakens. Right now neither of the Marvel movies are making my list. I’m tempted to look at Daredevil, which I feel is better-suited due to the “all at once” release model of Netflix, but I’m also loathe to put too much television here. Jessica Jones is also a much more likely pick if I go that route. It Follows is also distinctly possible.

Also, as usual, more reviews for tomorrow are needed. I’ve got a couple of people who have suggested they might get me something, but nobody who has, so the cupboard may end up being bare, unless I get an Ex Machina review together or something, which I might do I suppose. …

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“I’ve got a date, remember?”: The Quality of Life

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The immediate problem with “The Quality of Life” is that it’s “Home Soil” again. This is something like the fourth or fifth time Star Trek: The Next Generation has done this brief, and, like clone degeneration or VHS signal decay, each iteration has been a successively less effective version of “Home Soil”.

The secondary problem with “The Quality of Life” is that it’s not “Cost of Living”. Prior to this watch I tended to conflate the two stories (in my defense, those are *criminally* similar titles: Almost as bad as “A Matter of Honor/Perspective/Time”: I’m stunned I never got *those* mixed up). This error on my part actually elevated the two stories considerably in my memory, as I had assumed the Lwaxana/Alexander story of “Cost…” was the A-plot of “Quality…”, with the Exocomp stuff as the B-plot (and also that it was a Season 5 story, which elevated that whole season considerably in my memory). The tertiary problem with all of this is that “Cost of Living” sucks canal water and the Lwaxana/Alexander story would have done nothing but drag this hypothetical episode down: As much of a retread as “The Quality of Life” might be, it’s still solid and watchable, even if it is also mediocre and forgettable.

That’s not to say, however, that I don’t have problems with this episode apart from it being a retread. My biggest issue is its handling of Captain Picard and Commander Riker, the captain in particular: Michael Piller-era Star Trek: The Next Generation has a bad habit of trying to force conflict amongst the Enterprise crew by writing someone, usually one of those two, in ways that seem weirdly and spontaneously out of character to me in order to put them at odds with somebody else in the crew. So we get things like Geordi’s humiliation conga in his solo outings, Riker flipping out at Worf in “Ethics”, Deanna Troi being a codgy stick-in-the-mud in “Cost of Living” and most things involving Captain Picard and artificial intelligence post-“The Measure of a Man”. It seems like whenever the story needs someone to play the role of a stodgy bureaucrat or square oldster who needs to have their worldview shaken up, the team would rather throw out Captain Picard’s established characterization instead of actually being creative.

Both Riker and Picard are off-puttingly out of sorts when it comes to the possibility the Exocomps might be thinking life-forms, Picard especially. I simply cannot buy that they would require an entire episode to become convinced that the Exocomps are alive when they live on a starship inhabited by hyper-evolved androids and sentient holograms. Painfully, “The Quality of Life” even *knows* this and gives us a whole scene where Data has to defend the Exocomps’ right to exist using the same rhetoric Captain Picard did in “The Measure of a Man”, even name-checking that very episode. It feels like it exists solely to try and handwave away this rather glaring affront to characterization continuity, which indeed it does and the creative team have all but admitted as much in subsequent interviews.…

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Tricky Dicky, Part 2: The Mirror Effect

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Bit of an unplanned diversion for the Tricky Dicky series, this. Normal service to be resumed soon. (This series was always intended as a free-associating ramble.) We’re going to Shakespeare, albeit not in the way originally planned, so Spoiler Warning… um, for a play first performed about 423 years ago. Oh, and Trigger Warning, for discussion of recent violent acts, and some hardcore misogyny.

Apparently, the guy who recently murdered nine innocent people at Umpqua Community College in Oregon – let his name go unmentioned and unspoken, and be forgotten, for he is unimportant as an individual; and he made himself so – had the audacity to leave behind lots of written complaints at the site of his killing spree. They were mostly about not having a girlfriend, and about feeling that everybody else was crazy.

Oh, boo hoo. Join the fucking club, you fucking asshole. Most people have gone through the same or similar things at one time or another. A lot of people have gone through a lot worse.  What gives you the right to express your displeasure at a routine and banal human experience by violating other people’s right to live?

Thing is… this is basically the opening of Richard III by William Shakespeare. (And by that I in no way intend to glamourize or dignify the murders.)

 

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Richard opens the play by addressing the audience and telling them (us) his plans, much like one of these real-life murderers posting a manifesto (on paper, online, on YouTube, whatever) before embarking on his killing spree. (Because that’s basically what Richard does: go on a killing spree, albeit a rather more structured one.) Having whinged about how all the jocks are going around having fun and behaving like idiots now that peace has broken out, and about how ugly he thinks he is, and how he can’t dance and fuck and have girlfriends, Richard declares:

                    since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Almost immediately after this, Richard begins his campaign of sowing discord and blaming absolutely everything wrong with the world (which, to him and everyone he speaks to, means the court) on a woman, the Queen and her family – whom he asserts are all her tools.

Remember last time we talked about the ambitious, arriviste Woodville family who married into the Yorkist monarchy? The Queen in the play is the former Elizabeth Woodville, later Lady Grey (widowed), now Queen Consort Elizabeth, wife of Edward IV – Richard’s eldest brother. The play depicts her and her family as essentially innocent and good, which is historically doubtful but serves to underline Richard’s villainy, especially when he badmouths them and, at length, engineers the deaths of many of them. Lots of people will tell you that Shakespeare had to depict her positively as she was the great-grandmother of Elizabeth I (it’s complicated) but the play is actually very far from simply being Tudor ‘propaganda’, and Shakespeare depicts Edward IV (Elizabeth I’s great-grandfather) in decidedly mixed terms in the three plays in which he appears as a character.…

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