tv reviews
Earn It – a Meditation for Person of Interest’s Apocalyptic Graduation
This is a story of how Person of Interest worked three long seasons to earn its surveillance dystopia, when other shows of the genre failed to show their work.
This week, Person of Interest returns to the screens for its fifth and final season. After a four season emotional roller-coaster, fans are eager but understandably apprehensive about the conclusion. No one promised us a happy end. In fact, as the show wore on, it became clear that its premise, which initially relied on crime drama with a thin dusting of ambiguous sci-fi, had become radically transformed. Viewers entering the fourth season now knew that the show’s world presents a freshly budding dystopia dominated by a conscious and independent artificial intelligence.
This entry was posted in Meta and tagged dystopia, person of interest, science fiction, tv reviews.
Every Hero Needs a Villain (Not a Supergirl Review)
Poor Supergirl. She never can seem to settle on a proper supporting cast of her very own. Sure, all comics superheroes go through endless permutations — power changes, costume changes, forgettable one-off villains — but always there is some sort of baseline to come back to. Always there is at least a mentor, or best friend, or love interest that recurs in every incarnation. And always, always a nemesis. A hero that doesn’t manage to establish a proper rogues gallery is bound to falter.
Supergirl, in her capacity as a spin-off hero, has a tendency to inherit Superman’s cast-offs. Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing, characters can grow and change and develop new roles in the mythology, when discharged from their role as third-tier Superman hangers-on. A few years ago, pre-New 52 when I was still following the ongoing Supergirl title, this was done to moderately good effect with Lana Lang. As an ex-love interest, the Superman comics didn’t really have room for her. Unfortunately, I was never really sold on the connection between them, and why Lana would specifically seek Kara out.
Other characters from that run stuck better, it seems. The Supergirl TV show has a couple of original supporting cast, but is replete with third-tier Superman characters, as well as ambiguous Checkmate-aligned Maxwell Lord. Side note: having Maxwell Lord in Supergirl and then notcrossing over with Legends of Tomorrow would be a crying shame. Still, it seems like the creators of the show are intent on keeping Kara firmly connected to the Superman mythos, while situating her in her own hometown with her own concerns.
I’m glad to see Kara getting a robust TV presence, even if the themes are lightweight and the dialogue is clunky. Granted, my enjoyment of the show — or any contemporary Supergirl comics — will always be capped by my own unnecessarily specific ideas for exactly what Supergirl should be. Of course, that point is largely moot, since the most recent iteration of Kara Zor-El had her ongoing title cancelled some time last spring. Not that I’m terribly worried, DC has the good sense to make sure that they have something on the shelves ready for fans of the show to pick up. Probably.
But the depth-problem is that each new volume (the most recent being the sixth) will have its own set of writers and artists sweeping in to “redefine” the character, without anyone having any idea of what exists at her core. Except me, obviously. All that means is that different iterations will have wildly different approaches. Of course, most comics superheroes go through this, but when Superman starts wearing T-shirts and punching people, everybody and their cryo-frozen cousin has an opinion on whether or not this is the “real” Superman.
The core of the problem, I think, is that very few Supergirl writers seem to have started out as readers. The TV show, curiously, might finally be an exception to this. If I had to guess, I’d say there’s at least one person in that writers’ room that read and enjoyed the Sterling Gates run — my own favorite, incidentally. Despite many flaws. Ultimately, comics continuity and the snarls that come with it are part and parcel of forming a superhero mythos, and they need to be formed out of an amalgam of more than one writer’s ideas about who Kara Zor-El really is.
The core idea behind the TV show, aside from Supergirl’s ongoing efforts to achieve an independent reputation, seems to be that Kara, unlike Clark, actually remembers Krypton. This, I think, is a good start. How it progresses remains to be seen.
Crossposted to Dreamwidth.
This entry was posted in Meta, Reviews and tagged comics, dc comics, supergirl, television, tv reviews.
“My Life for a Thousand” – Bounty Hunters in Space
I binge-watched the first season of Killjoys concurrently with reading Kameron Hurley’s God’s War. The latter sat at the top of my metaphorical TBR pile for years, after having received multiple enthusiastic recommendations. I started reading it and was quickly sucked in, although at intervals there were lulls in my reading. Not surprising, given the pervasive violence of the narrative, that now and then I needed a short breather.
Killjoys suffered somewhat in comparison… at first. At one point early in the first episode, I was very close to dropping the show and going back to my book. I figured if I wanted a story about a badass, no-holds-barred, mercenary-minded bounty hunter in space, I had one on hand that had already proven its merit. As others have said, Killjoys gets off to a shaky start, and I wouldn’t say that I was hooked until episode four (“Vessel”, not coincidentally the first appearance of Delle Seyah Kendry).
These two stories contrast well. On one level, there are superficial similarities in subject matter, both dealing with a formal bounty-hunting organization with institutional reach of authority. Both the killjoys and the bel dames set themselves up as keepers of peace and social order, to some extent or another, and both are pervaded with manipulation and power-play, often at the expense of the individual agent. Their machinations, in both cases, exist on a genocidal, planet-level scale. Of course, with similarities like these, there’s an immediate need to scrutinize the differences that distinguish them.
God’s War is a darker work, psychologically speaking. Dark in a deeper sense than the type of “grimdark” fiction I’m used to seeing in both novels and television, tangling its narrative hopelessly in fatal flaws and moral dilemmas that are not readily unknotted. Nyx, the protagonist, stretches what it means to be an anti-hero, especially for a female character. More on that later. The casual brutality of Nyx’s existence is handled so precisely as to be almost unnoticeable.
Killjoys is less subtle. A television series by necessity has different rules of pacing to a novel, and this series like many others before it makes the most of that. As such, the early episodes feel more like a pulp adventure or a space procedural, while in the background each episode sets aside the building blocks of the meta-narrative. For the diligent viewer, pushing through the less interesting early episodes pays off with a juicy conspiracy plot that culminates in a painful cliffhanger.
Beneath the superficial similarity, and the more analytical distinction, there is a contrast of theme that runs more interesting than discussion of plot. After all, the attraction of the badass anti-heroine can be traced back to a single trait, the same trait that has made similarly structured male characters staples of the action genre. The characters in these stories are survivors. This is especially true of Nyx and Dutch, but here also the distinctions are just as important as the similarities.
Nyx, an unemployable ex-soldier who’s had her entire physiology reconstructed so often she has none of her original organs left. Dutch, a woman from nowhere with no family and no people, a child raised for murder by a paternal shadow assassin. Patriotism and family loyalty, an impetus or an imperative to kill. Nyx’s nightmares drive her back to her military days and fuel her continuing attachment to the bel dame motto: “my life for a thousand”. Whereas Dutch does everything in her power to leave her past behind, but adopts another absolute motto: “the warrant is all”.
Arguably, the two mottoes are more similar than they initially appear. Arguably, the bel dame council works harder to present itself as a patriotic institution working to protect their nation. Meanwhile, the killjoys live in a planetary system dominated by the plutocratic, encroaching and ominously nameless “Company”. Maybe this is what makes them more inclined to broadcast their tolerance for ends justifying means. Which organization is more cynical in its presentation?
Planetary peace-keeping militias aside, there is another important difference between the two protagonists. Rather, between the two teams. Nyx builds around herself a team of competent expatriates and assorted other losers. Contrary to genre convention, they can’t really be described as a rag-tag bunch of misfits. The team members’ ambivalence is a thread constantly visible in the book, circumstantial loyalty always promising to give way to betrayal. Or rather, the each-for-themselves attitude that found family narratives exist to unwrite.
The process of leaving behind adverse circumstances and overcoming trauma is central to Dutch’s story, as well as her co-protagonists. Forming that very same found family is a critical aspect of this process. Dutch, Johnny and D’avin are all, for lack of a better term, fucked up. They make poor decisions, hurt each other, and spend a lot of time dangling psychologically by a thread — but climbing ever upward.
Two stories of survival from two complement perspectives. The story of Dutch and her compatriots, about the adversity of climbing your way out of trauma in a hostile world, identifying your people and building support structure. By contrast, Nyx’s story is fundamentally about a downwards spiral, the story of a woman who has driven away every friend and ally and support system she ever had. What makes Nyx so dreadful is her dedication to self-destruction, not by means of drinking or gambling or a thousand other vices, but by the process of willful estrangement.
As much as Nyx’s downwards spiral is the story of an inveterate survival refusing to give up, the central Killjoys character arc is an upwards spiral, centered around people building up their lives. The characters or Killjoys are notable not only for their pervasive mental trauma, but for their variety of coping mechanisms, positive and negative.
On a personal note: after ten-plus years of major depression, it’s gratifying to be able to tell the difference.
Crossposted to Dreamwidth.
This entry was posted in Meta, Reviews and tagged bel dame apocrypha, book reviews, god's war, kameron hurley, klljoys, tv reviews.
Hazel Gold 