This is not a review. I haven't seen Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice. If I were to say this was a review, I'd be obligated to see the movie before I started talking about it. But this isn't a review. In a way, it's an explanation for why I'm not interested in seeing it. The reviews that have come in have seemed to confirm my suspicions about the movie. There's another big movie coming about a conflict between a clean-cut guy with super-strength who represents an idealized version of old-fashioned values fighting against a genius with no true superpowers who still manages to go toe-to-toe with those who do because of his vast wealth and ability to use that wealth to arm himself with gadgets, and I sure as shit am going to see that one.
Why is Marvel so much better at film adaptations these days? You can basically go into any Marvel movie and at least have fun (ok, maybe not in the Incredible Hulk, and the Thor movies just barely squeak by thanks to Tom Hiddleston.)
The popularity of Dark and Gritty style was a clear reaction to 9/11. For a brief period before then, The Matrix had defined the look and feel of action movies - dark, yes, but slick. This was in a period where the biggest threat seemed to be boredom and malaise - a society where people weren't feeling challenged. But once we started this era of terrorism, people weren't going to be satisfied with action heroes looking like they had just come from a fashion show. Jason Bourne was the new action hero (despite coming from novels written well before that period.)
The Dark and Gritty led to two very influential reboots. Casino Royale and Batman Begins took two series that had plummeted into excessive camp (their immediate antecedents were Batman and Robin and Die Another Day.) In both cases, they hit the reset button.
Casino Royale and Batman Begins are both origin stories for characters who had been part of film series with vague continuity. James Bond had been played by five actors over about 40 years at the time (not counting the original Casino Royale, which was a weird parody of the series.) Sometimes the series admitted the existence of other movies, but usually only within the same actor's tenure. Still, Casino Royale began a reboot that truly erased all previous Bond movies from its continuity (though the continued casting of Judi Dench as M confuses the hell out of any attempt at figuring out a timeline - unless you just imagine that her Brosnan-era M and Craig-era M are from entirely different continuities and she was just such good casting that they kept her.) The Bond movies pre-reboot had gotten into a deadly escalation spiral, where gadgets had to be one-upped until we had straight sci-fi like the invisible car. Rebooting allowed them to get rid of that embarrassing stuff, with the only science fiction element being Bond's continued sanity, apparent lack of venereal diseases, and the fact that he's not dead (in Skyfall, there is no explanation for how he's still alive after Moneypenny accidentally sniped him off of a train off of a bridge into a ravine other than "he's Jame's Bond.")
Tim Burton's Batman is very much a product of its time (the Prince soundtrack... I won't say it hasn't aged well, in case you're into that sort of thing, but man does it date the movie.) Still, it was a genuine attempt to replicate the feeling of the comics on screen, and the heightened reality of Burton's Gotham was fun. He did another movie, but then we got Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, where they seemed to take the idea of a heightened reality and just blew it all the way into camp. Christopher Nolan wiped the board clean and started anew, attempting to ground Batman in a version of Gotham that felt more like the real world. I wrote a few months ago about how the first of the "Dark Knight" trilogy actually had more of that heightened feeling - not quite Burton-level, but not our reality - and then pushed the Dark Knight into a realm that felt very much like it could be a real city dealing with a real terrorist threat.
Nolan's Batman trilogy stripped things down so that we could see the most stone-cold badass version of Batman. It had its flaws, of course. Nolan suffers from convolution disease, which sometimes serves him well (The Prestige is one of my favorite movies) but sometimes leaves you with a bit of a mess on your hands (Dark Knight Rises.)
Nolan co-produced Man of Steel - DC's attempt to do for Superman what Nolan had done for Batman. There was one recent Superman movie, directed by Bryan Singer of X-Men fame. Singer actually deserves a lot of credit for the current popularity of superhero movies, given that his first X-Men kind of kicked it off (Sam Raimi's Spiderman was a big deal as well.) But for whatever reason, Superman Returns did not do well, and never really led anywhere in terms of franchise.
The problem, though, is that Man of Steel (which, full disclosure, I haven't seen) took "do for Superman what Nolan did for Batman" way too literally, creating a bleak, colorless world where Superman is a force of destruction. He doesn't go out of his way to hurt any innocents as far as I know, but given that Superman is supposed to be the epitome of the lawful good, always strives to do the right thing kind of hero, it's pretty surprising that he doesn't seem to be doing much to actually save people. There's cinematic precedence in the Marvel movies, after all. The Avengers spend most of their time in the Battle of New York protecting civilians and getting them out of harm's way. In Age of Ultron, there's a huge amount of screen time in the climax devoted to getting people onto the little hover-skiffs to get them out of the city before it is destroyed. Captain America has out-Supermanned Superman.
And I think it's because there's some sort of disconnect between WB, DC, and Zac Snyder, who has been given the reins to what they're trying to make into the DCCU.
Marvel Studios, even after being bought by Disney, has always striven to make sure that the superheroes feel right. Captain America I think is their biggest success. They manage to make him a good person with "Boy Scout" values that nevertheless knows how to handle himself in complex situations like the threat of Hydra in Winter Soldier. But while the Captain is a beacon of reservation-free Red White and Blue in a series of movies that test that patriotism but ultimately affirm it, Marvel can also have characters like the Punisher exist in the far darker and more disturbing segment of the world that exists within their "Netflix-verse." The Captain can have his relatively bloodless combat against clearly evil villains while Daredevil aspires to that while finding himself in a much darker and gruesome setting.
The point being: you can have both, but you should know which tone works for which character.
I've only seen two Zac Snyder movies. The first was 300, which I saw in college before it even came out in theaters. It was clear that Snyder had seen Robert Rodriguez's (and Frank Miller's, who got a directorial credit) Sin City and basically just did 300 in the same way - a kind of direct comic book translation. But I've got problems with both films, to be honest, because I think there's something fascistic about Miller's obsession with violence and domination as the sole ethical constant in the universe. 300 in particular bothered me because of the unsettling parallels between its story and the contemporary state of the Iraq War - in which the Spartan senator who doesn't want to send more troops to back up the 300 is actually a cowardly traitor, this being at a time when George W. Bush was trying to secure a "Surge" in Iraq and there was still a culture of jingoism that labeled anyone critical of the war as "letting the terrorists win."
The fact that Snyder wants to make a movie of the Fountainhead certainly backs up my theory that this is a guy who wants to tell America extreme-right-wing fables.
The other I saw was Watchmen. To be honest, I thought it was a decent adaptation. I was even fine with the way they handled Doctor Manhattan's role in Ozymandias' plot. I only saw it the one time, though. I don't think I could tell you precisely what Alan Moore was going for in that story - in truth, he was probably going for a whole lot of things - but I know there are some readers who erroneously think that Rorschach - the crypto-fascist who has a Punisher-like facility with brutally murdering the "bad guys" - is the book's true hero. My interpretation has always been that the book has no true hero, and that every one of the superheroes ultimately fails the people they intend to protect.
Having only seen the movie once, I probably projected my interpretation of the book onto the movie, and so the fact that most of the plot points were translated pretty directly was enough to satisfy me.
So is Zac Snyder the problem here? It seems that what draws him to these comic book movies is the idea of clashing Titans - figures that are larger than life and more exciting than the little people who can't destroy buildings. There's a place for that, but I'd argue that it misses the point of, perhaps not all superheroes, but certainly its two most iconic examples.
Superman, I think, represents a being who is greater than any person, but within that greatness is also a greater capacity for compassion. The fact that he is so much more powerful a being than we mere mortals is counter-balanced by the fact that he has a superhuman power to care about us. That makes him the paragon, and that's why he deserves to be in stories that affirm the message of optimism he represents. A lot of filmmakers have interpreted him as a Christ figure, which works fine for this. But I think it's important to remember that his creators were Jewish, and Superman's origin story was based on Moses. This is not a guy who suffers through misery to shoulder our sins (as an aside, I actually think the teachings are way more important than the Passion for Christianity,) but a guy who does his best to live as an example for the people who follow him, with the hope of a promised land somewhere down his path.
Batman works in a dark setting. Nolan proved that. But that's what makes him a good foil to Superman. Batman has a strong moral code, but he's not a role model. He's there to make the people who usually strike fear into the hearts of the innocent feel that fear themselves. The problem is that if Superman's already living in this bleak and depressing world, then what does the darkness that Batman brings really add to the story?
I think that there was this switch that got flipped in 2001 where we decided that a story couldn't tell us anything important unless it was dark and gritty, and that upbeat and colorful storytelling was just a kind of opiate to distract us from the truth. But in the time since then, surely we've learned that this dark and gritty stuff can be just as much of a distraction. Convincing us that everything is terrible can be just as useful to some people as convincing us that everything is perfectly fine. Nuance requires a consideration of both of these aspects of life. And if we're talking about comic book movies, I think Marvel's getting the balance right while DC is not.
Thursday, March 24, 2016
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
The Magicians and Book-to-Television Adaptation
Game of Thrones showed that you can do a pretty good adaptation of a novel by turning it into a television series. Game of Thrones does cut a significant portion of the novels, but if you compare their current 50-hour set (with ten more coming soon) to even a generous 8-movie series (assuming they follow the Harry Potter novel and split the last book - though maybe that's only for YA stuff,) you'd still find yourself with a tiny fraction of what you could get on TV.
I had heard about The Magicians, but it was only after I watched the pilot episode that I picked up the first book and started reading it. I'm currently a bit over halfway through the second book in the series.
It's very clear that the show is not following the book's plot directly. There is a similar primary threat and certainly some familiar scenarios, but some of the main cast is totally different, and they are of course trying to cover Julia's backstory in the first season instead of waiting for the second, as the books do. But much like what's happening in Brakebills, Julia is dealing with a very different plot.
Being familiar with an original work makes watching an adaptation tricky. Most of the time, you find yourself disappointed, often because things are changed so significantly. Sometimes, there's a sort of weird uncanny valley feeling - for example, I watched the movie version of John Dies at the End shortly after reading the book, and was shocked to see the plot appear almost word-for-word faithful until it suddenly bridged the gap between an event about halfway in to events that were maybe the final fifth of the story. It made perfect sense - they couldn't do the book's three major adventures in a single film, and they managed to stitch it together decently, but it was still a strange feeling.
The Magicians, the novel, is actually pretty light on plot (in stark contrast with the second novel, the Magician King, which feels very structured.) It's really more about Quentin Coldwater's disastrous lack of satisfaction with all the awesome (literally awesome) things life has given to him, and thus has a fairly episodic structure.
The show tosses away a lot of the book's events and even shuffles out some of the characters for new ones. Josh is nowhere to be seen, while Janet seems to have simply been renamed Margot and there's a whole new character named Kady. Dynamics are shifted as well, integrating Penny into the main cast. Some of that's practical - novelists can throw in a new character easily, whereas shows have to cast someone and keep them interested enough to stay on.
So really, what is preserved is the personality of the characters (with some changes - show Quentin is a bit more likable than the one in the book) and much of the series lore. In the book, the reemergence of The Beast and the revelation of who it really is was designed to catch us just after we might have filed away those questions as no longer important (though I totally called who it was.) On the show, the Beast serves as a clearer Big Bad of season one.
Even though I'm a neophyte to the books (being really only halfway through the series,) part of me bristles at these changes. On the other hand, the show seems to be having more fun. One of the sort of masochistic elements of the books is that it's clearly written for readers who enjoy fantasy literature, but it then more or less chastises us for wanting to live in a magical world. It's a novel approach to the genre and earned through the characterization, but it casts a bleak light on any thoughts of escapism. The show is plenty dark (in fact, that darkness has been ramped up quicker than it was in the books,) but somehow manages to maintain the idea that, yes, even if you learn magic you have to find a way to deal with your shit, but having magic will not inherently fuck your shit up.
I had heard about The Magicians, but it was only after I watched the pilot episode that I picked up the first book and started reading it. I'm currently a bit over halfway through the second book in the series.
It's very clear that the show is not following the book's plot directly. There is a similar primary threat and certainly some familiar scenarios, but some of the main cast is totally different, and they are of course trying to cover Julia's backstory in the first season instead of waiting for the second, as the books do. But much like what's happening in Brakebills, Julia is dealing with a very different plot.
Being familiar with an original work makes watching an adaptation tricky. Most of the time, you find yourself disappointed, often because things are changed so significantly. Sometimes, there's a sort of weird uncanny valley feeling - for example, I watched the movie version of John Dies at the End shortly after reading the book, and was shocked to see the plot appear almost word-for-word faithful until it suddenly bridged the gap between an event about halfway in to events that were maybe the final fifth of the story. It made perfect sense - they couldn't do the book's three major adventures in a single film, and they managed to stitch it together decently, but it was still a strange feeling.
The Magicians, the novel, is actually pretty light on plot (in stark contrast with the second novel, the Magician King, which feels very structured.) It's really more about Quentin Coldwater's disastrous lack of satisfaction with all the awesome (literally awesome) things life has given to him, and thus has a fairly episodic structure.
The show tosses away a lot of the book's events and even shuffles out some of the characters for new ones. Josh is nowhere to be seen, while Janet seems to have simply been renamed Margot and there's a whole new character named Kady. Dynamics are shifted as well, integrating Penny into the main cast. Some of that's practical - novelists can throw in a new character easily, whereas shows have to cast someone and keep them interested enough to stay on.
So really, what is preserved is the personality of the characters (with some changes - show Quentin is a bit more likable than the one in the book) and much of the series lore. In the book, the reemergence of The Beast and the revelation of who it really is was designed to catch us just after we might have filed away those questions as no longer important (though I totally called who it was.) On the show, the Beast serves as a clearer Big Bad of season one.
Even though I'm a neophyte to the books (being really only halfway through the series,) part of me bristles at these changes. On the other hand, the show seems to be having more fun. One of the sort of masochistic elements of the books is that it's clearly written for readers who enjoy fantasy literature, but it then more or less chastises us for wanting to live in a magical world. It's a novel approach to the genre and earned through the characterization, but it casts a bleak light on any thoughts of escapism. The show is plenty dark (in fact, that darkness has been ramped up quicker than it was in the books,) but somehow manages to maintain the idea that, yes, even if you learn magic you have to find a way to deal with your shit, but having magic will not inherently fuck your shit up.
Sunday, March 20, 2016
Daredevil Post-Binge
Season Two of Daredevil might be subtitled "Murdock Multitasking." There are a lot of elements that come together, or don't quite come together.
Given that this is going to cover the entire season, let's just put a big old spoiler warning on this whole thing.
SPOILERS AHEAD.
Given that this is going to cover the entire season, let's just put a big old spoiler warning on this whole thing.
SPOILERS AHEAD.
Saturday, March 19, 2016
Daredevil Season Two - First Five Episodes
I was quite happy with Daredevil when Marvel's first Netflix show came out. While the general consensus (and I'd probably agree with that consensus) is that Jessica Jones had a more solid first season, going back to see Daredevil's first season again and now watching several episodes of the new season have reminded me that yes, this one's good too.
This is the year of superheroes fighting superheroes. We have Batman vs Superman over on the DC side (and while those two are pretty much the unequivocal biggest superheroes int he genre, it's Zack Snyder directing, so my expectations are low,) and then in the MCU, Captain America will be coming to blows with Iron Man pretty soon.
Daredevil's in the MCU, but it's rather separated off, down at the street level. Daredevil absolutely has superpowers, but they're subtle enough that he could never go toe to toe with the Captain. Indeed, the Netflix heroes are oddly in the unique position of actually fighting crime, as opposed to threats that are too massive to really be considered crime in the classic superhero demesne. For the Avengers, it's enough that they stopped the Chitauri from literally conquering the world. The street-level crime is way too small potatoes when they have things like Hydra or Ultron to deal with.
So Daredevil fights crime, and that puts him in the realm of the vigilante (despite a trailer that has General Not-Yet-Red-Hulk call Captain America a vigilante, he's pretty much always been operating under some sort of official banner - either the Army or SHIELD.) Daredevil's contrast (well, initially,) is The Punisher.
Now, between Captain America and Iron Man, I'm obviously going to consider Captain America the more heroic. He basically never does anything wittingly that isn't guided by a deep moral code. Iron Man is clearly a good guy, but he's a bit too Ayn Rand-y to let go of his ego - though unlike Rand's ideal hero, Tony Stark does have at least some sense of altruism. It's just that it really has to be coaxed out and sometimes backfires (like Ultron.) Still, both Steve Rogers and Tony Stark are ultimately good guys whose ideologies are based on making the world safe for people who can't fight agains the monsters that threaten it.
Daredevil shares that ideal, though it is shrunken down to the more manageable size of Hell's Kitchen. But his counterpart this season, the Punisher, is arguably more of a villain than a hero. He doesn't have a sense of there being some kind of normality to return to (certainly nothing like Cliff Barton's lovely farmhouse where the Avengers go to regroup in the middle of Age of Ultron.) And he has absolutely no mercy when it comes to the people he considers the bad guys.
Daredevil has his Catholic guilt constantly serving as a check on his violent instincts, and Catholics are opposed to the death penalty. There's a code of ethics there - he'll hurt people, even pretty badly, but he doesn't want to rob them of a chance of redemption, even if they're unlikely to make that choice. The Punisher takes no prisoners.
So for the first few episodes, the Punisher is portrayed simply as the new villain of the season - the Big Bad, to borrow a rather useful concept from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and when writing about TV, that's usually a good source.) Someone is massacring the gangs that have moved in to fill the vacuum left by Wilson Fisk. They strike with military precision, but the legend grows that it's actually just one man (which is of course true: it's Frank Castle.)
Some of the questions that are raised are actually pretty well-tread - questions about the limitations on power. Matt Murdock is simultaneously a lawyer with a great deal of respect for the law but also a vigilante who operates outside its bounds. Frank Castle has no qualms because he has reduced his worldview to a pure black-and-white.
While Season One of Daredevil brought with it much more graphic violence than we had seen elsewhere in the MCU, I'll contend that the Punisher has brought things to perhaps a gratuitous level, such as a drill going into a person's foot and a man's face being blown in by a shotgun. I think that graphic violence can be an effective storytelling tool - I thought the decapitation-by-car-door last year really demonstrated new information about just what kind of guy Wilson Fisk was - but here it is perhaps too much. At most, it shows us that the Punisher is more comfortable living in a world with all this butchery, but that's not really something that we haven't figured out by then. (Lest I seem to be selling the character short, he does carry with him a great deal of menace but also a fair amount of nuance, thanks largely to the performance.)
The gears shift profoundly as episode 5 (of 13) shifts gears and we are introduced to Elektra.
Just as the TV show has presumably erased all memory of Ben Affleck's ill-liked turn as the Devil of Hell's Kitchen, I suspect that this version of Elektra has already been crowned the definitive version. In one episode, it becomes very clear that Elektra was Matt's most toxic relationship in his past (well, Stick might give her a run for her money, though at least Matt got his cool training from that.) Possessing similar fighting prowess, Elektra is another character who dips over into the villainous side of the spectrum. But unlike Frank Castle's humorless crusade, Elektra essentially considers herself an ubermensch (well, uberfrau) who is free to do as she pleases because she can. She seems to have a similar dedication to beating the bad guys (with murder absolutely on the table) but she makes no effort to hide the fact that she does this because she wishes to, and not for any noble reasons.
Elektra shows up after a mini-arc with the Punisher concludes. While there's some closure, it's apparent that the character will come back later in the season, as the clear main arc of the season has to do with some sort of vast conspiracy that involves Frank Castle.
In Punisher and Elektra, we get two quasi-villains on top of whatever the more shadowy true villain of the season will turn out to be. Obviously, there's a huge Wilson Fisk-sized hole in the show this season, but these two characters may succeed in filling it. Given that Fisk was by far the most sympathetic and humanized villain the MCU has had (not that there's been much competition on the sympathy front - maybe Winter Soldier, if you count him as a villain and not a victim,) it's fitting then that we focus on these characters who either straddle ore at least stray very close to the fuzzy area between hero and villain.
I'm five episodes in. I'll have more reflections I'm sure once I've finished the season, which I expect will not be too long from now.
This is the year of superheroes fighting superheroes. We have Batman vs Superman over on the DC side (and while those two are pretty much the unequivocal biggest superheroes int he genre, it's Zack Snyder directing, so my expectations are low,) and then in the MCU, Captain America will be coming to blows with Iron Man pretty soon.
Daredevil's in the MCU, but it's rather separated off, down at the street level. Daredevil absolutely has superpowers, but they're subtle enough that he could never go toe to toe with the Captain. Indeed, the Netflix heroes are oddly in the unique position of actually fighting crime, as opposed to threats that are too massive to really be considered crime in the classic superhero demesne. For the Avengers, it's enough that they stopped the Chitauri from literally conquering the world. The street-level crime is way too small potatoes when they have things like Hydra or Ultron to deal with.
So Daredevil fights crime, and that puts him in the realm of the vigilante (despite a trailer that has General Not-Yet-Red-Hulk call Captain America a vigilante, he's pretty much always been operating under some sort of official banner - either the Army or SHIELD.) Daredevil's contrast (well, initially,) is The Punisher.
Now, between Captain America and Iron Man, I'm obviously going to consider Captain America the more heroic. He basically never does anything wittingly that isn't guided by a deep moral code. Iron Man is clearly a good guy, but he's a bit too Ayn Rand-y to let go of his ego - though unlike Rand's ideal hero, Tony Stark does have at least some sense of altruism. It's just that it really has to be coaxed out and sometimes backfires (like Ultron.) Still, both Steve Rogers and Tony Stark are ultimately good guys whose ideologies are based on making the world safe for people who can't fight agains the monsters that threaten it.
Daredevil shares that ideal, though it is shrunken down to the more manageable size of Hell's Kitchen. But his counterpart this season, the Punisher, is arguably more of a villain than a hero. He doesn't have a sense of there being some kind of normality to return to (certainly nothing like Cliff Barton's lovely farmhouse where the Avengers go to regroup in the middle of Age of Ultron.) And he has absolutely no mercy when it comes to the people he considers the bad guys.
Daredevil has his Catholic guilt constantly serving as a check on his violent instincts, and Catholics are opposed to the death penalty. There's a code of ethics there - he'll hurt people, even pretty badly, but he doesn't want to rob them of a chance of redemption, even if they're unlikely to make that choice. The Punisher takes no prisoners.
So for the first few episodes, the Punisher is portrayed simply as the new villain of the season - the Big Bad, to borrow a rather useful concept from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and when writing about TV, that's usually a good source.) Someone is massacring the gangs that have moved in to fill the vacuum left by Wilson Fisk. They strike with military precision, but the legend grows that it's actually just one man (which is of course true: it's Frank Castle.)
Some of the questions that are raised are actually pretty well-tread - questions about the limitations on power. Matt Murdock is simultaneously a lawyer with a great deal of respect for the law but also a vigilante who operates outside its bounds. Frank Castle has no qualms because he has reduced his worldview to a pure black-and-white.
While Season One of Daredevil brought with it much more graphic violence than we had seen elsewhere in the MCU, I'll contend that the Punisher has brought things to perhaps a gratuitous level, such as a drill going into a person's foot and a man's face being blown in by a shotgun. I think that graphic violence can be an effective storytelling tool - I thought the decapitation-by-car-door last year really demonstrated new information about just what kind of guy Wilson Fisk was - but here it is perhaps too much. At most, it shows us that the Punisher is more comfortable living in a world with all this butchery, but that's not really something that we haven't figured out by then. (Lest I seem to be selling the character short, he does carry with him a great deal of menace but also a fair amount of nuance, thanks largely to the performance.)
The gears shift profoundly as episode 5 (of 13) shifts gears and we are introduced to Elektra.
Just as the TV show has presumably erased all memory of Ben Affleck's ill-liked turn as the Devil of Hell's Kitchen, I suspect that this version of Elektra has already been crowned the definitive version. In one episode, it becomes very clear that Elektra was Matt's most toxic relationship in his past (well, Stick might give her a run for her money, though at least Matt got his cool training from that.) Possessing similar fighting prowess, Elektra is another character who dips over into the villainous side of the spectrum. But unlike Frank Castle's humorless crusade, Elektra essentially considers herself an ubermensch (well, uberfrau) who is free to do as she pleases because she can. She seems to have a similar dedication to beating the bad guys (with murder absolutely on the table) but she makes no effort to hide the fact that she does this because she wishes to, and not for any noble reasons.
Elektra shows up after a mini-arc with the Punisher concludes. While there's some closure, it's apparent that the character will come back later in the season, as the clear main arc of the season has to do with some sort of vast conspiracy that involves Frank Castle.
In Punisher and Elektra, we get two quasi-villains on top of whatever the more shadowy true villain of the season will turn out to be. Obviously, there's a huge Wilson Fisk-sized hole in the show this season, but these two characters may succeed in filling it. Given that Fisk was by far the most sympathetic and humanized villain the MCU has had (not that there's been much competition on the sympathy front - maybe Winter Soldier, if you count him as a villain and not a victim,) it's fitting then that we focus on these characters who either straddle ore at least stray very close to the fuzzy area between hero and villain.
I'm five episodes in. I'll have more reflections I'm sure once I've finished the season, which I expect will not be too long from now.
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