I grew up on Star Trek TNG. Seriously, my sister has joked that our religion growing up was Star Trek. The show started the year after I was born, and I remember the grief I felt when the first show I loved actually ended - not realizing that was a rather normal thing (the other - primetime - show I watched at the time, the Simpsons, is of course still going about two decades after it maybe should have stopped.)
Anyway, Captain Picard was always my Star Trek captain, and when you say Star Trek, it's the Enterprise D that I think of.
I think it's either a really interesting or really terrible idea to bring him back. But I do think there is some good and rich storytelling to be seen about a hero who has grown old - Picard might be a weird choice, given that he was already a font of paternal wisdom 30 years ago (actually what I loved about the Last Jedi was how it examined Luke's transformation from youthful audience surrogate to old, grizzled master.)
Anyway, the trailer introduces some new characters, but also teases the presence of some old ones.
First is Data, who of course died in Nemesis, but apparently there was some sort of not-quite retcon in which his memories were transferred into another Soong android, effectively bringing him back. Brent Spiner always did a good work with a very hard job, and while I don't know if he'll actually be a major part of the show, I'm curious to see what Data's up to.
Much more surprisingly, Jeri Ryan's Seven of Nine shows up. At first, I found it bizarre, given that she and Picard have never interacted on screen. Seven of Nine showed up in Voyager season four as a Borg drone that the crew disconnected from the collective, and her journey to rediscover her humanity was probably the most interesting arc on that show (that's my opinion at least, as someone who watched through it over a decade after it ended.)
Picard's time as Locutus of the Borg was brief - just the cliffhanger between TNG's 3rd and 4th seasons - but the trauma of that event always stayed with Picard. (There's an episode early in season four when Picard returns to France after the ordeal while he's on leave which I found very boring as a kid but watching again as an adult found it to be really, really good) but it makes perfect sense that he and Seven would have reason to connect and compare experiences - one wonders if there's a support group, though I think the number of people to actually escape the collective is very low.
Anyway, the plot seems to center around some woman with a secret - very vague - and Picard finding he can't be satisfied in his retirement to the family vineyard. Get that man a starship and a crew!
I'll be curious to see the show, though given that it's on CBS All Access, I might have to find some workaround because I ain't getting another freaking streaming subscription.
Saturday, July 20, 2019
Marvel's Comic Con Announcements
After Spiderman: Far From Home (did I not make a post about that one? I liked it) we were left technically not knowing what would come next from Marvel. Given the massive climax that was Endgame, it made sense to give us a little breathing room. But that billion-dollar dream machine that lets Disney print money is gearing up with a boatload of announcements.
First, the obvious ones:
Black Widow is really happening.
Doctor Strange's sequel is called Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, which I AM IN FOR. (They say it'll be "scary" which... we'll see, but if that means really leaning into Lovecraftian elements, I'm excited.) Scarlet Witch will be in this, which seems a good fit.
Thor will be the first Marvel series to make it to four movies with Thor: Love and Thunder, which will bring back Natalie Portman as Jane Foster - and specifically the arc in which Jane becomes Thor (in the sense of gaining the divine powers - was Steve Rogers technically Thor for a bit during Endgame?) Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, and Taika Waititi as director are all returning, which sounds great to me!
The Eternals are also going to be a thing, with Salma Hayek, Bryan Tyree Henry, Angelina Jolie, Kumail Nanjiani, and Richard Madden starring. This is some hipster-level obscure Marvel stuff, but it's the MCU - you'll know them well soon enough (assuming this doesn't go all Inhumans on us.)
Biggest shock? There's a new motherfucking BLADE movie starring MAHERSHALA ALI. This means a few things: first, sorry Wesley Snipes, whose movies were actually the first successful Marvel-based films. Also it means that we're officially freeing up people in the Netflix shows to play other roles. If only they'd saved Mads Mikkelsen until after they got the rights to Fantastic Four back, because he'd be the perfect Doctor Doom! Anyway, point is: Mahershala Ali is going to be a badass dhampir (look it up) vampire-hunter.
Moving on: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings will be the Shang-Chi movie, and will apparently finally show us the real Mandarin that Ben Kingsley was so infamously pretending to be in Iron Man 3. (A move I found delightful, though I know some people were very pissed.) (UPDATE: the Mandarin is being played by TONY LEUNG, which is awesome.)
Is that everything? No! Apparently there are some details about the Disney+ shows, like how yes, the split-timeline version of Loki is how there's going to be a show for him. But I ain't getting yet another streaming subscription, so I guess I won't be seeing that on Disney's vertical-integration platform.
Anyway, fitting that Comic-Con is seeing Marvel slam so many things down onto the table that they've been keeping secret for so long.
First, the obvious ones:
Black Widow is really happening.
Doctor Strange's sequel is called Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, which I AM IN FOR. (They say it'll be "scary" which... we'll see, but if that means really leaning into Lovecraftian elements, I'm excited.) Scarlet Witch will be in this, which seems a good fit.
Thor will be the first Marvel series to make it to four movies with Thor: Love and Thunder, which will bring back Natalie Portman as Jane Foster - and specifically the arc in which Jane becomes Thor (in the sense of gaining the divine powers - was Steve Rogers technically Thor for a bit during Endgame?) Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, and Taika Waititi as director are all returning, which sounds great to me!
The Eternals are also going to be a thing, with Salma Hayek, Bryan Tyree Henry, Angelina Jolie, Kumail Nanjiani, and Richard Madden starring. This is some hipster-level obscure Marvel stuff, but it's the MCU - you'll know them well soon enough (assuming this doesn't go all Inhumans on us.)
Biggest shock? There's a new motherfucking BLADE movie starring MAHERSHALA ALI. This means a few things: first, sorry Wesley Snipes, whose movies were actually the first successful Marvel-based films. Also it means that we're officially freeing up people in the Netflix shows to play other roles. If only they'd saved Mads Mikkelsen until after they got the rights to Fantastic Four back, because he'd be the perfect Doctor Doom! Anyway, point is: Mahershala Ali is going to be a badass dhampir (look it up) vampire-hunter.
Moving on: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings will be the Shang-Chi movie, and will apparently finally show us the real Mandarin that Ben Kingsley was so infamously pretending to be in Iron Man 3. (A move I found delightful, though I know some people were very pissed.) (UPDATE: the Mandarin is being played by TONY LEUNG, which is awesome.)
Is that everything? No! Apparently there are some details about the Disney+ shows, like how yes, the split-timeline version of Loki is how there's going to be a show for him. But I ain't getting yet another streaming subscription, so I guess I won't be seeing that on Disney's vertical-integration platform.
Anyway, fitting that Comic-Con is seeing Marvel slam so many things down onto the table that they've been keeping secret for so long.
Friday, July 12, 2019
Stranger Things' Third Season Synthesizes Much of What Didn't Work in Season Two
When Stranger Things first popped up on Netflix, it came out of nowhere. These days any major show or movie tends to get a massive hype lead-in, with a year or more of promotions, speculation about casting and other details. But somehow, Stranger Things slipped in. Of its regular cast, Winona Ryder was probably the only one most people would recognize, and at a point in her career when she wasn't really at the center of Hollywood awareness.
But the show absolutely nailed spooky 1980s style as a hybrid of Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, and probably most directly Stephen King. After all, while King's Losers' Gang was from the '50s, many of us who grew up in the 80s or 90s imagined those groups of kids to be from our time - indeed, see how the recent film adaptation of IT placed the childhood period in the '80s so that the modern era could be the present.
Stranger Things nails a certain authenticity - not necessarily to the actual midwest in the 1980s, but the way that it felt as portrayed in movies from that era. Suburban streets at night, damp from rain or condensation, lit by the occasional streetlight but flanked by shadows.
General Spoiler Warning!
But the show absolutely nailed spooky 1980s style as a hybrid of Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, and probably most directly Stephen King. After all, while King's Losers' Gang was from the '50s, many of us who grew up in the 80s or 90s imagined those groups of kids to be from our time - indeed, see how the recent film adaptation of IT placed the childhood period in the '80s so that the modern era could be the present.
Stranger Things nails a certain authenticity - not necessarily to the actual midwest in the 1980s, but the way that it felt as portrayed in movies from that era. Suburban streets at night, damp from rain or condensation, lit by the occasional streetlight but flanked by shadows.
General Spoiler Warning!
Saturday, July 6, 2019
Stranger Things Goes to the Mall in Season Three
I've now seen the first two episodes of Stranger Things 3 (because they have to be special and not use the word "season.")
So here's the things about 80s nostalgia:
I was born in 1986, one year after this season is set. The Duffer Brothers, creators and showrunners of Stranger Things, were born in 1984 (they're my sister's age,) which makes the first season's setting in 1983 kind of interesting: it's just far enough to be prior to their lives.
See, as someone born in the mid 80s, I only really started to become aware of popular culture and my place in an evolving environment once the 90s came about.
But decades don't swap over to a whole new culture in one go - usually you don't really start to feel a difference in a decade's culture until toward the end of it, when you have the perspective to actually see where things changed. I mean, Grunge sure as hell killed Hair Metal (thank God) but a lot of the cultural signifiers - and in this season of Stranger Things, it's very much the new Starcourt Mall - persisted.
What's interesting here is that the mall as this cultural touchstone and public forum is a species that now, as we approach the 2020s (I know it's only next year but it still looks futuristic,) seems to be kind of dying out. I mean, when's the last time you went to a Sam Goody to pick up some CDs?
Television and movies and especially books persist past these decade constructs, and so even if I was only a baby in the mid 80s, the small town horror vibe of Stephen King was very much a part of my cultural consciousness in the 90s (obviously, King has continued to write all this time, so it's not like he's gone away.)
But yeah, even if the (to my eyes) putrid 80s fashion doesn't translate to my childhood experience, there's a lot about Stranger Things, through its previous seasons and this one so far, that feels familiar. We were playing Super Nintendo or N64 instead of Atari, but things weren't too different.
There is one thing that we sure as hell didn't worry about though, and that was the Russians. (Ironic, then, that they're such a concern now.)
My very first memory of the Cold War - even though I'd been to Communist Hungary for by second birthday to visit family - was its end, when, as a kindergartener getting ready for school, I saw a picture on the newspaper of a Russian soldier sitting on a curb and some announcement about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The scope of Stranger Things has generally expanded over time. In season one, we never got any scenes that took place outside of Hawkins Indiana or its Upside-Down equivalent.
As season 3 begins, we see what looks very much like the kind of experiments that were going on in the lab where El was imprisoned most of her life, and we might assume that the US Government is back to its old dirty tricks, despite seeming assurances that they were done with that last season. But of course, it's natural to imagine that if the US had discovered this other world, the Soviets might have as well.
With the rift closed at the end of the previous season, it's natural that our heroes would have assumed things were safe now - time to return to some degree of normalcy. But not only do we have those creepy Russians to worry about, but we've also got some genuinely fucked-up imagery as rats swarm into the basement of an abandoned steel mill and explode into puddles of disgusting ooze, which we later see is animate, very much like The Thing.
Last season, we were introduced to a few new characters, including Max - the cool redheaded girl that Lucas winds up with, and her abusive brother Billy. Billy is a monstrous bully, and while season one deconstructed the "rich asshole boyfriend" trope by making Steve Harrington actually a fundamentally decent guy when push came to shove, Billy was straight out of the Stephen King book of irredeemable douchebags, in the vein of Henry Bowers from IT.
His purpose in season 2 seemed to just be to be horrible, but in season 3, he's given a more prominent role - which at first seems like a bad thing, but again, taking inspiration from King, this time Billy is somehow possessed or indoctrinated by whatever new monster - maybe the "Mind Flayer" or some other evil presence from the Upside-Down. (D&D nerd aside: the Demogorgon is actually one of the most powerful demon lords in D&D lore (it's not a type of demon - it's a specific, particularly powerful demon,) whereas Mind Flayers, while certainly scary and dangerous, are not nearly as powerful individually. I kind of think that they should have used the term Beholder for the Mind Flayer, given its tendency to sit back and plan and observe from a distance. Beholders are also less powerful than Demogorgon, but whatever.)
The true nature of the Upside-Down remains fundamentally mysterious, but after being possessed (seemingly having some flesh-tube made out of dead rats shoved down his throat,) Billy has a vision of the Upside-Down in which a crowd of human-like forms approach him, their leader being a copy of him, but one that speaks with a deep and creepy voice. They want to "build" something, and I'm not really clear on whether Billy's eventually go the way of those rats, if he's going to start donating people to that fate, or if others are going to get possessed like he is.
Meanwhile, the rest of our regulars are just getting on with life. El and Mike have become an obnoxious teen couple, much to Hopper's chagrin (and as someone who has only recently stepped into the role of El's dad, he's been thrown into the deep end of being a single parent for a teenager - a role that even parents with a partner struggle with when they've raised a kid since birth.) Lucas and Max seem to have things figured out a lot better, despite Lucas' constant messing up (Max is just too good-natured, it seems, to let small mistakes ruin things.) When Mike makes some rookie mistakes with El after Hopper puts his paternal foot down around all this making out every day, El goes to Max for emotional support, and the two quickly develop a charming friendship.
Which, on one hand, almost seems like a course-correction after the two seemed to develop some kind of accidental romantic rivalry last season. But it's nice to see these two girls just be girls together.
Dustin returns from science camp with a questionably-real Mormon girlfriend from Utah, and is troubled to discover that his friends aren't as into the idea of contacting her via HAM radio. But when he stumbles upon some strange Russian broadcast, he brings it to Steve, aka his partner in the most unexpectedly delightful pairing from last season. Working with Steve's cool co-worker Robin (who manages to establish herself very quickly as a great addition to the cast) they figure out that it's some kind of code language, and that the broadcast was coming from the mall.
Finally, Will, a bit like Dustin, isn't so free of concern. Perhaps due to his horrible connection to the Upside-Down, he has a sense of the terrible things that are afoot, but not enough that he can say anything for certain.
God, there are a lot of characters to check in with. Joyce is still dealing with Bob's death, and though she gives some friendly advice, parent-to-parent, to Hopper, she isn't having his theoretically platonic but definitely not just platonic advances.
Basically, there's a lot of life going on, with the mall killing the old downtown businesses, and Cary Elwes as a douchey mayor who I'm sure will be involved in something disastrous later in the season. So far, only Billy and the unfortunate fellow lifeguard he has sacrificed (in one way or another) to this awful monstrosity are really aware of the oncoming horror.
Sidenote: I live in LA, and we've had a couple of big earthquakes over the last couple days (centered far away, so no major damage, but they've lasted pretty long each time.) Anyway, it's a weird place to be to start watching a show about terrible portals to a nightmarish otherworld.
So here's the things about 80s nostalgia:
I was born in 1986, one year after this season is set. The Duffer Brothers, creators and showrunners of Stranger Things, were born in 1984 (they're my sister's age,) which makes the first season's setting in 1983 kind of interesting: it's just far enough to be prior to their lives.
See, as someone born in the mid 80s, I only really started to become aware of popular culture and my place in an evolving environment once the 90s came about.
But decades don't swap over to a whole new culture in one go - usually you don't really start to feel a difference in a decade's culture until toward the end of it, when you have the perspective to actually see where things changed. I mean, Grunge sure as hell killed Hair Metal (thank God) but a lot of the cultural signifiers - and in this season of Stranger Things, it's very much the new Starcourt Mall - persisted.
What's interesting here is that the mall as this cultural touchstone and public forum is a species that now, as we approach the 2020s (I know it's only next year but it still looks futuristic,) seems to be kind of dying out. I mean, when's the last time you went to a Sam Goody to pick up some CDs?
Television and movies and especially books persist past these decade constructs, and so even if I was only a baby in the mid 80s, the small town horror vibe of Stephen King was very much a part of my cultural consciousness in the 90s (obviously, King has continued to write all this time, so it's not like he's gone away.)
But yeah, even if the (to my eyes) putrid 80s fashion doesn't translate to my childhood experience, there's a lot about Stranger Things, through its previous seasons and this one so far, that feels familiar. We were playing Super Nintendo or N64 instead of Atari, but things weren't too different.
There is one thing that we sure as hell didn't worry about though, and that was the Russians. (Ironic, then, that they're such a concern now.)
My very first memory of the Cold War - even though I'd been to Communist Hungary for by second birthday to visit family - was its end, when, as a kindergartener getting ready for school, I saw a picture on the newspaper of a Russian soldier sitting on a curb and some announcement about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The scope of Stranger Things has generally expanded over time. In season one, we never got any scenes that took place outside of Hawkins Indiana or its Upside-Down equivalent.
As season 3 begins, we see what looks very much like the kind of experiments that were going on in the lab where El was imprisoned most of her life, and we might assume that the US Government is back to its old dirty tricks, despite seeming assurances that they were done with that last season. But of course, it's natural to imagine that if the US had discovered this other world, the Soviets might have as well.
With the rift closed at the end of the previous season, it's natural that our heroes would have assumed things were safe now - time to return to some degree of normalcy. But not only do we have those creepy Russians to worry about, but we've also got some genuinely fucked-up imagery as rats swarm into the basement of an abandoned steel mill and explode into puddles of disgusting ooze, which we later see is animate, very much like The Thing.
Last season, we were introduced to a few new characters, including Max - the cool redheaded girl that Lucas winds up with, and her abusive brother Billy. Billy is a monstrous bully, and while season one deconstructed the "rich asshole boyfriend" trope by making Steve Harrington actually a fundamentally decent guy when push came to shove, Billy was straight out of the Stephen King book of irredeemable douchebags, in the vein of Henry Bowers from IT.
His purpose in season 2 seemed to just be to be horrible, but in season 3, he's given a more prominent role - which at first seems like a bad thing, but again, taking inspiration from King, this time Billy is somehow possessed or indoctrinated by whatever new monster - maybe the "Mind Flayer" or some other evil presence from the Upside-Down. (D&D nerd aside: the Demogorgon is actually one of the most powerful demon lords in D&D lore (it's not a type of demon - it's a specific, particularly powerful demon,) whereas Mind Flayers, while certainly scary and dangerous, are not nearly as powerful individually. I kind of think that they should have used the term Beholder for the Mind Flayer, given its tendency to sit back and plan and observe from a distance. Beholders are also less powerful than Demogorgon, but whatever.)
The true nature of the Upside-Down remains fundamentally mysterious, but after being possessed (seemingly having some flesh-tube made out of dead rats shoved down his throat,) Billy has a vision of the Upside-Down in which a crowd of human-like forms approach him, their leader being a copy of him, but one that speaks with a deep and creepy voice. They want to "build" something, and I'm not really clear on whether Billy's eventually go the way of those rats, if he's going to start donating people to that fate, or if others are going to get possessed like he is.
Meanwhile, the rest of our regulars are just getting on with life. El and Mike have become an obnoxious teen couple, much to Hopper's chagrin (and as someone who has only recently stepped into the role of El's dad, he's been thrown into the deep end of being a single parent for a teenager - a role that even parents with a partner struggle with when they've raised a kid since birth.) Lucas and Max seem to have things figured out a lot better, despite Lucas' constant messing up (Max is just too good-natured, it seems, to let small mistakes ruin things.) When Mike makes some rookie mistakes with El after Hopper puts his paternal foot down around all this making out every day, El goes to Max for emotional support, and the two quickly develop a charming friendship.
Which, on one hand, almost seems like a course-correction after the two seemed to develop some kind of accidental romantic rivalry last season. But it's nice to see these two girls just be girls together.
Dustin returns from science camp with a questionably-real Mormon girlfriend from Utah, and is troubled to discover that his friends aren't as into the idea of contacting her via HAM radio. But when he stumbles upon some strange Russian broadcast, he brings it to Steve, aka his partner in the most unexpectedly delightful pairing from last season. Working with Steve's cool co-worker Robin (who manages to establish herself very quickly as a great addition to the cast) they figure out that it's some kind of code language, and that the broadcast was coming from the mall.
Finally, Will, a bit like Dustin, isn't so free of concern. Perhaps due to his horrible connection to the Upside-Down, he has a sense of the terrible things that are afoot, but not enough that he can say anything for certain.
God, there are a lot of characters to check in with. Joyce is still dealing with Bob's death, and though she gives some friendly advice, parent-to-parent, to Hopper, she isn't having his theoretically platonic but definitely not just platonic advances.
Basically, there's a lot of life going on, with the mall killing the old downtown businesses, and Cary Elwes as a douchey mayor who I'm sure will be involved in something disastrous later in the season. So far, only Billy and the unfortunate fellow lifeguard he has sacrificed (in one way or another) to this awful monstrosity are really aware of the oncoming horror.
Sidenote: I live in LA, and we've had a couple of big earthquakes over the last couple days (centered far away, so no major damage, but they've lasted pretty long each time.) Anyway, it's a weird place to be to start watching a show about terrible portals to a nightmarish otherworld.
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