Heroes Retrospective #2

Don't Look Back

Not much to say about this one...

1. Matt and Eden join the cast. There's something about Greg Grunberg that makes him instantly accessible and sympathetic no matter what role he's playing; Nora Zehetner, by contrast, telegraphs Eden's duplicity a mile away. I get the feeling Zehetner might not have been totally comfortable in the role at first, though she certainly grew into it later.

2. Lots of surprising guest-stars this episode: I liked Clea DuVall in "Girl, Interrupted", but the real surprise of the evening was Stacy Haiduk, who I'd last seen as Lana Lang in the toxic "Adventures of Superboy" live-action series from the '80s. In fairness to Haiduk, she's hardly the blandest Lana to ever darken our screen - that honor belongs to current mannequin-on-the-move Kristin Kreuk, whose upper lip moves only slightly more frequently than the western coast of the United States. It also took me a few minutes to peg where I'd seen Matt Lanter (Brody) before: he was a participant in "Manhunt", the male version of "America's Next Top Model" (which was astonishingly even more vapid and ridiculous than its template).

3. One Degree of Separation: Cristine Rose (Angela Petrelli) played Prue Halliwell's boss in "Charmed", where Zachary Quinto (Sylar) guest-starred as a warlock out to kill the Halliwell cat (yes, you can tell that was a later-season episode, can't you?).

4. There's such a thing as being too subtle: Peter's stick-figure drawing was meant to be the big red alert that he'd just used Isaac's powers (while hopped up on morphine, natch), but it's such an understated moment that when he references it in a later episode, I had completely forgotten about it.

5. Angela's visit with Peter is a bit odd, for two reasons. First, this is one of the very few times we hear anything about the Petrelli patriarch, a character who to this day remains shrouded in mystery; second, the implication is that Peter might be suffering from an inherited mental illness (which could be an interesting turn for a primary character), but this plot point is never raised again.

6. Claire is the only one who asks what happened to the man she saved from the fire last episode. It's little touches like that which made her stand out to begin with, and certainly helped shape her into an admirable heroine as time went by.

7. Adrian Pasdar and Milo Ventimiglia have amazing chemistry together - I've seen actual brothers who were less convincing on-screen.

8. Hiro's trip to the future, and what he sees there, is the first seasonal subplot to be introduced. One question the show hasn't really dealt with yet is the issue of free will vs. predestination - is the future set in stone or can it be changed? Everything Isaac painted (and will paint) comes true, which seems to suggest his death is inevitable (as others pointed out, the gun Hiro finds is the same gun Isaac will eventually use to shoot Simone). But "Save The Cheerleader, Save The World" implies that Claire wasn't saved the first time around.

Heroes Retrospective

To pass the time until April 23 (scrunching up my face really hard didn't work), I'll be re-watching "Heroes" from the top every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and making some observations along the way. Today: Genesis. Since this was the pilot, I'm going to be a little more forgiving of inconsistencies.

1. Okay, the very first scene sets up a plot hole that hasn't been resolved yet: how did Peter acquire his prophetic dreams? They're obviously not an extension of his natural ability - so far, every Hero has had just one power, even if they can use that power to achieve multiple effects (ie: Hiro, the Haitian). But as we learn here (and will see again in episode 10), Peter was having these dreams long before he could have copied them from Isaac, Charles Deveaux, or anyone else we've seen on-screen. My guess is he picked it up from his father, but there's no real evidence to support that.

2. Mohinder's accent was much thicker in this episode - Sendhil Ramamurthy was clearly making an effort to sound Indian, but that's pretty much gone now. Too stereotypical?

3. The first appearance of Mr. Bennet shows how Tim Kring and company approached the issue of generic expectations - given the context of his two scenes here, one might be forgiven for dismissing Mr. Bennet as yet another "shadowy malefactor" in the vein of the Cigarette-Smoking Man, Malcolm Janus and so on. And those expectations were subverted: he's only a pawn, and not an evil pawn at that, and he had nothing to do with Chandra Suresh's murder - had no desire to see the Professor dead at all, in fact.

4. While "Heroes" may suffer the occasional glitch, Niki's first scene serves as an excellent example of how well-coordinated and well-planned this series is. In hindsight, I realize that this scene actually introduces us to Jessica, not Niki. Jessica's the one doing the stripping - it's only after she walks past the mirror that Niki emerges. It's a very subtle moment, because you have no reason to suspect anything's wrong; Ali Larter plays the personality shift as befits a woman who just ran a stint of online porn and now must take her young son to school. In fact, if you review this episode knowing about the Niki/Jessica schism, it becomes a lot more complex in terms of who's doing what: which of them, for example, threatened Micah's principal? Which of them loaned money from Linderman?

5. Claire's growth as a character is astonishing; power-related angst aside, she's pretty much the typical self-absorbed cheerleader here, who thinks talking to an outcast in front of people is an appropriate reward for loyalty. I do wish, though, that we could've learned more about how she ended up confiding in Zach to begin with; it doesn't seem like something she'd think up on her own.

6. "Yoguruto?" Hee. :)

7. And here's another unanswered question: did Nathan know he could fly before he saved Peter at the end of the episode? If he didn't, the discovery doesn't seem to freak him out much; if he did, he would've reacted more strongly to Peter's claim that he could fly. Of course, there's a measure of artifice here because the interaction between Nathan and Peter was part of the reversal Kring used to mislead the audience - we expect Peter (the dreamer) to be right and Nathan (the skeptic) to be wrong, and that's not exactly what happens. But it serves as a very effective climax to the episode.

Like, Whatever: Postscript

And here's a thought that occurred to me today: Quesada, Millar and many of the current inhabitants of Marvel's talent (cess)pool grew up at a time when "Bastards Are Cool" was the dominant philosophy in superhero comics.

Is it any wonder, then, that when these kids came to power, they effectively forced the Marvel Universe into a position where The Bastards win?

(The irony, of course, being that by the time they got to act out their adolescent fantasies, we'd all moved on - The Bastard is nothing more than a cliche now.)

Like, Whatever (SPOILERS)

Actual conversation today:

LCS Guy: Di, you're not going to believe what they just did - Captain America is dead.

Me: Really? Huh. Well, when's he coming back?

Yeah, that's pretty much the sum total of my investment in this particular plot twist. Don't get me wrong, I trust Brubaker knows what he's doing, I'm just not inclined to play along as if I didn't remember Foggy Nelson and how Marvel swore up and down that he was dead too, "for reals".

Here's food for thought, though: by killing the one character who represents idealism and heroism for Marvel, the current regime has finally proven - once and for all - how far off-course they've gone, how skewed their perception is, and how they're utterly determined to make the Marvel Universe a place that's just not fun to visit anymore.

Morrison's Magneto: Success or Failure?

While randomly trawling the Internet, I stumbled onto a blogger who's been analyzing Grant Morrison's run on "New X-Men". I can't seem to find the link now, but what got my attention at the time was a side remark he made during a review of one of the earlier issues: he considers Morrison's Magneto to be the great failure of the run, for obvious reasons (out of character, raving lunatic, and so on).

It got me thinking about "New X-Men". I like that after all this time I'm still thinking about "New X-Men", I still feel like there's more to say about it. But anyway, Magneto. It's no secret that "Planet X" depicted the X-Men's nemesis in a very unflattering light - in later interviews, Morrison was quite candid about the fact that Magneto, in his eyes, was a "mad old twat". So one can certainly make the claim that this was just Morrison showing contempt for what he considered to be an archaic staple of the sub-genre.

And yet... I think part of the problem with reading (and understanding) "New X-Men" today is that Morrison based his entire approach on a paradox. On the one hand, his run implicitly asks the reader to sweep aside continuity and the gaudy superheroics of the past - the very first line of issue 114 is "Wolverine, you can probably stop doing that now." But at the same time, if you take everything Morrison did and look at it within the wider context of X-Men history... well, let's have a look.

Cyclops' affair with Emma Frost makes a certain amount of sense on Morrison's merits alone: he's having marital difficulties, he's coping with mental trauma, and Emma offers him a chance to escape and have a little fun. We might not agree with what he does, but we can at least understand why he does it. Of course, it doesn't hurt Morrison's case that Scott Summers has a history of infidelity: he dated Colleen Wing when Jean was presumed dead (Claremont), took off with Lee Forrester when Jean really was dead (Claremont again), married Madelyne (still Claremont) only to leave her for Jean (Simonson?), cheated on Jean with Psylocke (Lobdell/Nicieza), married Jean, and then he took off with his boyfriend Achmed (likeadeuce ;)). So Morrison, intentionally or not, is falling into step with many writers before him who all agree that Cyclops can't seem to keep it in his pants.

Which brings me to Magneto. Let's put aside the destruction of Genosha for a moment, and the fact that he's partly to blame for that (he gathered those mutants and offered them safety, only to get himself crippled by provoking the X-Men). If we take "Planet X" into the larger context of Magneto's history, here is a man who survived the Holocaust, who watched his firstborn daughter burn alive, whose other children despise him, whose grandchildren (real or Wandaspawned) don't even know he exists, who's alienated from his best friend and possibly the only person alive who understands him, whose students betray him (first the New Mutants, then Fabian Cortez, then Exodus).

You take that, and you add the deaths of sixteen million people who put their faith in him, and yes, that's a man on the brink of insanity. That is certainly the portrait of a man who will take power-boosting drugs and become dependent on them, who will leave himself open to Sublime's manipulation, and who will make a last, desperate bid to rule the world because he thinks this is mutantkind's last chance. And the terrible irony is that he's wrong - it's been his last chance all along, his time that was running out, and anything he does at this point is too little, too late; as Ernst tells him, "Nobody likes what you're doing ... it's boring and old-fashioned."

This has been Magneto's fatal flaw since Uncanny X-Men #150: he's so obsessed with his grand plans for world conquest and the utopia that will surely follow that he can never see past it, to ask what comes next. And Morrison capitalizes on that: Magneto wastes so much time infiltrating the Institute and playing the usual mind games with Xavier and the X-Men that, when he finally makes his move, he finds himself faced with a new generation of mutants that asserted itself in the interrim, and they only ever said "Magneto Was Right" when he was dead.

So no, I don't believe Morrison's Magneto was a failure at all. I think it's an image of a broken man, desperately clinging to the only thing that's keeping him going, the thing he wants to hear Xavier say - "you were right and I was wrong". And when he realizes he can never have that, death is the only alternative.

And, in retrospect, I think I prefer that to coming back to life, losing his powers, and blowing up on a SHIELD helicopter as an afterthought. Seems more... fitting, I suppose.

Game Review: "Elvira II - The Jaws of Cerberus"

This ancient contribution from HorrorSoft makes for an interesting - if deeply flawed - experience.

You play an anonymous hero-type summoned by horror hostess Elvira to her movie studios. The demon Cerberus has kidnapped our Mistress of the Dark, converting her three film sets into real nests of supernatural activity. You must search all three studios (a haunted house, underground catacombs, and an insect maze) for the captive Elvira, slaying Cerberus' minions along the way, and then gather the magical artifacts needed to banish the demon back to Hell.

"The Jaws of Cerberus" belongs to a particularly unforgiving sub-genre of adventure/RPG, the type where it's very easy to make a mistake (ie: drop or use an item at the wrong time) resulting in an unwinnable game, only there's no mechanism to let you know that you're stuck. You can just go on for hours, never realizing you can't proceed beyond a certain point. It's the sort of thing that makes playing without a walkthrough far too great a chore to be enjoyable.

Even with a walkthrough, gameplay leaves much to be desired; combat is pretty much randomly clicking on the enemy, and either you hit it or you don't. Spells are useful, but there's no way to recharge your MP aside from standing around for hours at a time - and unfortunately, the game will most likely force you into this position at least twice. Magic is also problematized by the enormous amount of dead weight, ie: a lot of spells and spell ingredients are just plain useless to you in the course of the game.

Fortunately, "The Jaws of Cerberus" excels at visual presentation, and that's enough of an incentive to at least give the game a casual run-through - there's plenty of gore (exploding eyeballs, blood, mutilation, giant insects, maggoty corpses), but more in the vein of how the '80s classics used it (to enhance frightening scenes) than the more gratuitous methods used in modern films like "Saw". The set designs are surprisingly detailed given the technology that was available when the game was made.

As a throwback, then, it's the sort of game you wouldn't mind watching as a film or television series, but actually playing it requires a great deal of patience - more, perhaps, than is warranted.

Passing Sentences #5

Heroes, Company Man: I'm a bit conflicted about this one. On the one hand, I liked how the flashbacks were worked in, and there were plenty of interesting revelations and strong character moments both in the past and in the present. But I'm not sure this episode actually answered any questions I brought to the table: What is Mr. Bennet's first name and why is it such a big deal? How did he get involved with the organization? If they don't have Suresh's list, how are they finding the Heroes? What exactly are they doing to the Heroes? (Bennet says tagging and releasing, but they're clearly responsible for powering up Matt, Ted and Isaac, and Claude mentions vivisections...) And where the hell did present-day Eric Roberts come from? A bit uneven, then, but very effective in terms of changing our perception of a character (possibly two, I doubt I'll be feeling any sympathy for Ted in the near future).

Brick: Oy, what a misfire. I'm sorry, I get it's supposed to be noir-meets-high-school, but hearing Joseph Gordon Levitt talk about taking the heat and shaking the trees and ratting out the finks just veers into comical territory for me. Like "Sin City" before it, there's something inherently ridiculous about the way "Brick" slavishly follows its chosen genre; for starters, we're not living in the pulp era anymore, so injecting archaic dialogue into a modern-day setting only serves to point out how silly noir can be in any other context (insert random Frank Miller parody here). Also, these films follow the pre-established generic patterns so closely that there's no real surprise - yes, the black-clad mystery girl will be a femme fatale, and she's probably the real mastermind behind the story, and drugs will be involved, and the crimelord's top thug has his own dirty secret, etc. On some level, "Brick" is just regurgitating the old tropes via new faces, and I imagine it'd be terminally boring to anyone who's experienced the genre before, in any capacity.

Runaways, Live Fast / Doctor Strange: The Oath: In which Marvel says goodbye to Brian Vaughan, and is all the more creatively barren for it. There was something suitably low-key about "Live Fast" as the coda to Vaughan's run; nobody died, no grand revelation changed everything we knew forever, but at the same time there's an air of finality even before Iron Man bursts in to remind everyone that there's this thing called "Civil War" and maybe you'd like to read it (the "death" of a unique book via invasion of a mega-crossover: meta-text? Surely not). But anyway, I'm definitely going to miss Vaughan on this series - with the news that Whedon's run is in fact limited to six issues, this feels much more like an ending than it should, with only an epilogue to look forward to.

Meanwhile, Joe Quesada and I have our differences, but one of the very, very few things we agree on is the problematic status of Doctor Strange. Specifically, the Sorcerer Supreme has always been a tempting figure for lazy writers to use as a deus ex machina - just wheel him in to do some hocus-pocus and the day is saved. Brian Bendis ever-so-helpfully demonstrated this during "Avengers Disassembled" and "House of M" (and God only knows what "New Avengers" will look like), and Quesada has a point when he claims that Marvel's amorphous definition of magic basically puts Strange in a quasi-omnipotent position. Vaughan offers the simplest solution: rather than try to redefine magic (a task apparently assigned to the upcoming "Mystic Arcana" miniseries), all that's required is to put Doctor Strange's enemies on his level and make the story a mystery that requires unraveling, rather than a solution that can be instantly achieved with some arcane alliteration. That way, Strange can't just wave a magic wand and set things right. In the process, Vaughan unsurprisingly delivers excellent characterization of Strange, Wong and the Night Nurse, so much so that I desperately wanted this to be the first arc of an ongoing series.

With "Y: The Last Man" going bimonthly as it enters its final arc, and only a four-issue run on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" in the immediate future, I can't help feeling like the industry is losing one of its brightest, most talented stars. And for sodding Lost, of all things. Let's hope Vertigo snatches him up for another 60-issue series, eh?