Another TV rundown
Mar. 25th, 2017 01:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jedi_of_urthSo I got really wordy about a couple of these episodes, with more complaining than I usually like to do, but one of these episodes really pissed me off and another I found pretty underwhelming but needing a lot of words for. It does bring into focus why I’m not really reviewing my non-superhero shows as those reviews would be very short comparatively; a lot of “It was okay, I liked some bits, am not sure about others.”
Supergirl 2x16
I am...not sure how I felt about that one. I didn’t love it, but I can’t tell how much of that is on this episode and how much is on how I’m not particularly invested in much of what’s involved here. It was trying (well, until the end, but that’s the fault of whoever decided on this crossover), and there are definitely moments where if I cared more in general I think I would have deeply cared here. I care more about Winn and Lyra’s relationship than I do Kara and Mon’el’s, and we haven’t really gotten enough lead up on W/L to really feel what happens here (to be fair, this plot would have made much less sense if it had taken longer to happen).
I’m also continually disturbed by how this show seems to think blind faith is a valid basis for decision making. In this one, people following Winn’s blind faith is a good thing, where it’s been bad in episodes where people justifiably wanted actual evidence before trusting someone the evidence went against. Not that it works badly here, as I think most investigative shows would have gone with the assumption that if there was someone who needed saving they should try that, but coming on the heels of recent episodes I’m a little put out.
And then the last bit was just...pretty bad. Why at this moment is Winn giving Kara the interdimensional disk? Our musical badguy couldn’t have planned for that certainly, because there’s no valid reason for it to have been happening at that moment. And this crossover seems like a terrible idea.
The Flash 3x17
I am giving that a solid fuck you for one simple reason, Kara/Mon’el doesn’t deserve to be saved while Oliver/Felicity aren’t together. If Music Meister is evil or more trickster god than guardian angel I’ll take back some of that specific objection, but taken at face value, fuck you writers. Or I suppose if you give us an Olicity guardian angel that puts your actual good ship back together...well it will be cheap since at this point it’s been sitting on the shelf so long, but half the lines in “Running home to you” are Oliver lines about Felicity being his light in the darkness (Barry doesn’t even live in the darkness) so again, fuck you.
I have put us with a lot of shit regarding my OTP this season with only moderate complaining and most of that about the writing of them as individuals rather than the mere fact that they aren’t together. But I’m sorry, Kara/Mon’el do not have a fraction of a shadow of the bond between Oliver and Felicity and yet *they’re* breakup gets cosmic forces to intervene to fix them? And what Mon’el did was just as bad as what Oliver did with much less reason, both in terms of in text reasons and well established character reasons why Oliver fell into the trap he did with Samantha and William. And this from someone who doesn’t even really blame Oliver for the choice he made or Felicity for her reaction; but if cosmic forces care about characters in pain because they’re romantic relationships fell apart for maybe-valid-maybe-not reasons then they should damn well have gotten involved when it was Oliver and Felicity.
Now, you may notice I don’t have as much objection to pulling this with Barry and Iris. Partly because this is happening on Flash and if it were confined to Flash there are explanations that would make this...if not entirely acceptable, a little easier to forgive. If it was just a Flash story it would feel less cosmic; more likely the Speed Force which of course cares more about Barry than Oliver, or an isolated meta somehow that is more likely to cross paths with Barry. Also partly because Barry and Iris’ reasons for ending things were...not particularly valid; not entirely invalid but not done because someone did anything deeply wrong (even in a debatable sense – if what Oliver did was wrong, it was pretty wrong; if what Barry did was wrong it still wasn’t that bad); so just making them see past their immediate issues to reconnect isn’t such a big hurdle as it would have been for Olicity last season.
If it was on Flash and still cosmic forces I would still probably be partly pissed off, just not as much. And a lot of it would be again railing about the fact that Barry never faces real consequences or has to make the hard choices where you are going to make a bad call whatever call you make. That and/or pointing out that gods are dicks who will only step in when the cause is easy rather than actually caring about more difficult scenarios. But if you (cosmic forces) are going to pull two universes into it, and take sides in at least one iffy relationship you’d damn well better be able to say it’s about helping the heroes out and by ignoring Olicity’s pain and suffering they can’t say that.
As far as the episode itself and not the fact that it seems like a fuck you to Olicity shippers? It was...meh. The plot was weak as hell and the songs were hit and miss. It was a wasted opportunity on the crossover front most of the time although those were some of the better moments when they happened. I had not realized I was capable of shipping Martin/Joe, but I kind of am it turns out (not really though since Martin/Clarissa exists in the real world), they harmonize nicely. But I do have to question why Malcolm is here; oh I get why musical theater actor John Barrowman is here, you don’t do a musical episode in this ‘verse without him, but Barry has literally met Malcolm for like a minute in his life and Kara has no idea who he is so why would be lurking around their unconsciousnesses to show up here? If this episode deserved it I might allow it on the basis that he does kind of look like he could be Mon’el’s father but they had the gall name him Tommy (who Barry has never met) and if that’s anything but foreshadowing that real Tommy is getting resurrected, again more fuck you writers.
One small thing that I wish to god I thought was intentional but have a hard time thinking was in this episode (in this show), is that there’s an element of Kara being really...naïve. Her world doesn’t have a League of Assassins (if the world itself does it doesn’t infringe on her personal world), and she and Mon’el basically patch things up right off the bat while even Barry seems aware it’s really not that simple. Yes he and Iris do make up at the end, but it comes off as less immediate forgiveness or even certainty of getting back together than Kara and Mon’el show (though I do wonder how this will play on the next SG ep). But it’s kind of ironic for Barry, since he seems to be the one thinking “it’s not exactly that easy” next to Kara’s optimism; when he spends more of his time standing next to Oliver “moron, I’ve been telling you that for years” Queen.
But mostly, fuck off writers.
Legends of Tomorrow 2x15
I wish I liked that one more than I did, it wasn’t bad but I know I don’t have a lot to say about it as it didn’t do a lot to appeal to my interests. In this case I’m not bothered by the fact that it wasn’t tailor made for me but it remains a fact that it wasn’t. I have liked Mick a lot more this season than I had last (or on Flash) but he’s still not exactly my favorite; so while this was a pretty good Mick episode (with some issues) that doesn’t give me a lot. I got a kick out of the Tolkien stuff, though I couldn’t quite decide how I felt about Rip taking Aragorn speech, in that I was torn between loving watching it play out and just wanting to cuddle Rip because he’s being adorable.
I want to have more to say, but this episode exists to get us to the big showdown and does so in a way I don’t entirely connect to. So it was...okay, will reevaluate once the season ends probably. (Actually even the more I think about it, the more I kind of want to pull it apart because there are a lot of little bits worth commenting on, definitely moments I liked in the first section and then need to process fully once we got to WW1.)
Well, except one thing that’s been bugging me through this whole arc but I didn’t care to focus on while there a brainwashed Rip plot that I cared deeply about. I hate time travel stories that make Jesus super special like this. As a historical figure I’ll grit my agnostic-that’s-barely-not-atheist teeth and get through it, but I do not like this. It’s also something else if all the mythologies are true to some degree (Hercules fought Jesus while Loki and Coyote took bets and Shiva just watched, etc.), and since this is the DC universe the Greek Gods for example are definitely supposed to exist. Or on the flip side they could offer some debatably advanced science explanation for this. But they were wishy-washy on the Egyptian Gods last season, whether there was a pseudo-scientific explanation for the Hawks powers coming from Thanagar or if it was Horus who made them; and Amaya has never discussed what her faith is behind the amulet she uses. And yet Jesus is super important apparently and they can’t dare go anywhere near that time and I hate everything about that (except Rip and Sara debating the issue, and the fact that apparently Gideon has no safeguards against what Rip says must never ever be done – she double checked with Amaya about looking into her own future just last episode, she couldn’t say “Captain, such a time jump is ill-advised” when Sara set the course?).
Also, hate to point this out, but it does just say unmade with blood right? Couldn’t they try anybody’s blood? Even if they found it had to be unmade with the same blood that made it I sort of feel like immediately jumping to Jesus blood wasn’t the natural assumption.
Oh, and Sara’s back in her old White Canary outfit with the halter top. So the other version was her missing-Rip outfit? The version of her in Rip’s head wore this version, maybe that has something to do with the switch back, though not the initial switch.
All told...kind of angry-making night of DC-CW shows.
Arrow 5x17
That wasn’t very good either, so kind of a lousy week all around here. To be fair, the flashback heavy episodes have never really been ones I responded well too; and torture episodes are a hard sell and this wasn’t very good at that either. The final moral of the story doesn’t even feel like it fits; it’s not wrong, it’s a lot right even, but it doesn’t feel like a revelation to me I guess. Anatoli’s view I think works, and not just for Oliver five years ago but as a truth Oliver hadn’t quite understood about himself ever. Oliver never quite did accept that he and ‘the monster’ were one and the same, while still giving himself plenty of rein to be ‘the monster’ as needed. But I also don’t think that is a spirit breaking realization for Oliver at this point, because...he already knows that.
This is the Oliver who told Felicity he didn’t know how to fight the darkness without giving into it (one assumes, that was pre-Flashpoint). Yes it’s a level of thinking he can ignore the darkness in him by not putting on the hood but it’s also not like he ever dissociated himself so far as to not think it was still him in the hood. And Oliver has never been entirely comfortable with the way other people look at him as a hero, he tries to live up to it, but that view has been put on him by a lot of other people more than by himself. (Just as reference that I was already thinking along those lines, back around the crossover I was playing with writing some Sara-Oliver stuff where she observes that everyone there is looking to Oliver to lead them just as the Waverider crew decided that she ought to be captain and she is the only one there who remembers the teenage screw-ups they used to be, the broken souls barely surviving on Lian Yu, that she’s an assassin and he’s a killer; and the rest of them have the luxury of not seeing that but only see the heroes they’re trying to become, which they don’t see when they look in the mirror.)
I’ve mentioned several times this season how Oliver is in fact a serial killer, because he is; and I’m largely okay with the idea that he was always deluding himself to think he could turn that into a hero but I honestly don’t see how that idea is a huge revelation to him. John decided that he should be more than a mad killer and then Felicity decided he should be a hero, and Oliver let them lead him into that, but he has told them all repeatedly that he doesn’t see himself that way.
I also don’t think everyone’s reactions when Oliver comes back ring true. Thea should be there, Felicity and John should be rushing to support and comfort him, we should at least have been told that Quentin wasn’t there because he’s working to hold things together at City Hall because otherwise he would have been there. And while I feel like Oliver’s decision to shut everything down comes naturally from what he’s been through this episode (as much as I don’t quite agree with those revelations), I hope someone tells him that it’s really not up to him anymore. He can walk away, he’s done it before, he probably should again in this state, but he doesn’t get to decide if the rest of them go on.
This really does feel like a plotline that was originally conceived to bring an end to Oliver as the Green Arrow, and is being squished and reformed since this ended up not being their last season. Although I have a growing sense that the DC-CW verse is maybe going to a time jump after this season. Probably five years, so Arrow can continue to do five years ago flashbacks, and would allow Flash s5 to lead to the Crisis we’ve been shown was coming from almost the beginning; Legends doesn’t actually have to be as non-contiguous at all since it’s a time travel show anyway but they can play with it how they want. The outlier is Supergirl, where I’m not sure this would work, but while I have a sense it could happen I’m far from sure that it will and even less confident it will be done well because that would take a lot of planning that I don’t think these folks really do.
A late thought, but possibly relevant. Early in the season they made a B5 reference, and this episode had a level of Intersections in Real Time about it; I’d even go so far as to say that in a couple of things it improved on that (mostly Evelyn rather than random Drazi we got there, and in showing the hero actually break down) but mostly it’s a lesser shadow of B5’s torture episode. The main thing I see it trying to borrow from Intersections is that it doesn’t show us anything with the rest of the team and leaving us with just what happens in the cell...except in this case we keep cutting to the flashback story. Part of what makes the B5 ep so powerful is that is a bare bones stage play, taking place almost entirely in one room between two actors for the whole episode; there’s no action and no reprieve from watching our hero try and endure, the only slim chance of success is managing to say “no” one more time than they say “yes you will.” Now, I’m not saying this should have been a straight up redo of IiRT, I’m not certain it could have been even if the CW would have let them do it, and since the show has a history of doing flashback heavy episodes I am pretty sure this was meant to provide a lot of space for said flashbacks. But if they were trying to tell a claustrophobic story about horror and isolation and torture then it doesn’t pair well with a semi-climactic battle , well populated scenes in several locations, and friendly/brotherly support.
Though again, it could just be that I don’t really care for flashback heavy eps.
Supergirl 2x16
I am...not sure how I felt about that one. I didn’t love it, but I can’t tell how much of that is on this episode and how much is on how I’m not particularly invested in much of what’s involved here. It was trying (well, until the end, but that’s the fault of whoever decided on this crossover), and there are definitely moments where if I cared more in general I think I would have deeply cared here. I care more about Winn and Lyra’s relationship than I do Kara and Mon’el’s, and we haven’t really gotten enough lead up on W/L to really feel what happens here (to be fair, this plot would have made much less sense if it had taken longer to happen).
I’m also continually disturbed by how this show seems to think blind faith is a valid basis for decision making. In this one, people following Winn’s blind faith is a good thing, where it’s been bad in episodes where people justifiably wanted actual evidence before trusting someone the evidence went against. Not that it works badly here, as I think most investigative shows would have gone with the assumption that if there was someone who needed saving they should try that, but coming on the heels of recent episodes I’m a little put out.
And then the last bit was just...pretty bad. Why at this moment is Winn giving Kara the interdimensional disk? Our musical badguy couldn’t have planned for that certainly, because there’s no valid reason for it to have been happening at that moment. And this crossover seems like a terrible idea.
The Flash 3x17
I am giving that a solid fuck you for one simple reason, Kara/Mon’el doesn’t deserve to be saved while Oliver/Felicity aren’t together. If Music Meister is evil or more trickster god than guardian angel I’ll take back some of that specific objection, but taken at face value, fuck you writers. Or I suppose if you give us an Olicity guardian angel that puts your actual good ship back together...well it will be cheap since at this point it’s been sitting on the shelf so long, but half the lines in “Running home to you” are Oliver lines about Felicity being his light in the darkness (Barry doesn’t even live in the darkness) so again, fuck you.
I have put us with a lot of shit regarding my OTP this season with only moderate complaining and most of that about the writing of them as individuals rather than the mere fact that they aren’t together. But I’m sorry, Kara/Mon’el do not have a fraction of a shadow of the bond between Oliver and Felicity and yet *they’re* breakup gets cosmic forces to intervene to fix them? And what Mon’el did was just as bad as what Oliver did with much less reason, both in terms of in text reasons and well established character reasons why Oliver fell into the trap he did with Samantha and William. And this from someone who doesn’t even really blame Oliver for the choice he made or Felicity for her reaction; but if cosmic forces care about characters in pain because they’re romantic relationships fell apart for maybe-valid-maybe-not reasons then they should damn well have gotten involved when it was Oliver and Felicity.
Now, you may notice I don’t have as much objection to pulling this with Barry and Iris. Partly because this is happening on Flash and if it were confined to Flash there are explanations that would make this...if not entirely acceptable, a little easier to forgive. If it was just a Flash story it would feel less cosmic; more likely the Speed Force which of course cares more about Barry than Oliver, or an isolated meta somehow that is more likely to cross paths with Barry. Also partly because Barry and Iris’ reasons for ending things were...not particularly valid; not entirely invalid but not done because someone did anything deeply wrong (even in a debatable sense – if what Oliver did was wrong, it was pretty wrong; if what Barry did was wrong it still wasn’t that bad); so just making them see past their immediate issues to reconnect isn’t such a big hurdle as it would have been for Olicity last season.
If it was on Flash and still cosmic forces I would still probably be partly pissed off, just not as much. And a lot of it would be again railing about the fact that Barry never faces real consequences or has to make the hard choices where you are going to make a bad call whatever call you make. That and/or pointing out that gods are dicks who will only step in when the cause is easy rather than actually caring about more difficult scenarios. But if you (cosmic forces) are going to pull two universes into it, and take sides in at least one iffy relationship you’d damn well better be able to say it’s about helping the heroes out and by ignoring Olicity’s pain and suffering they can’t say that.
As far as the episode itself and not the fact that it seems like a fuck you to Olicity shippers? It was...meh. The plot was weak as hell and the songs were hit and miss. It was a wasted opportunity on the crossover front most of the time although those were some of the better moments when they happened. I had not realized I was capable of shipping Martin/Joe, but I kind of am it turns out (not really though since Martin/Clarissa exists in the real world), they harmonize nicely. But I do have to question why Malcolm is here; oh I get why musical theater actor John Barrowman is here, you don’t do a musical episode in this ‘verse without him, but Barry has literally met Malcolm for like a minute in his life and Kara has no idea who he is so why would be lurking around their unconsciousnesses to show up here? If this episode deserved it I might allow it on the basis that he does kind of look like he could be Mon’el’s father but they had the gall name him Tommy (who Barry has never met) and if that’s anything but foreshadowing that real Tommy is getting resurrected, again more fuck you writers.
One small thing that I wish to god I thought was intentional but have a hard time thinking was in this episode (in this show), is that there’s an element of Kara being really...naïve. Her world doesn’t have a League of Assassins (if the world itself does it doesn’t infringe on her personal world), and she and Mon’el basically patch things up right off the bat while even Barry seems aware it’s really not that simple. Yes he and Iris do make up at the end, but it comes off as less immediate forgiveness or even certainty of getting back together than Kara and Mon’el show (though I do wonder how this will play on the next SG ep). But it’s kind of ironic for Barry, since he seems to be the one thinking “it’s not exactly that easy” next to Kara’s optimism; when he spends more of his time standing next to Oliver “moron, I’ve been telling you that for years” Queen.
But mostly, fuck off writers.
Legends of Tomorrow 2x15
I wish I liked that one more than I did, it wasn’t bad but I know I don’t have a lot to say about it as it didn’t do a lot to appeal to my interests. In this case I’m not bothered by the fact that it wasn’t tailor made for me but it remains a fact that it wasn’t. I have liked Mick a lot more this season than I had last (or on Flash) but he’s still not exactly my favorite; so while this was a pretty good Mick episode (with some issues) that doesn’t give me a lot. I got a kick out of the Tolkien stuff, though I couldn’t quite decide how I felt about Rip taking Aragorn speech, in that I was torn between loving watching it play out and just wanting to cuddle Rip because he’s being adorable.
I want to have more to say, but this episode exists to get us to the big showdown and does so in a way I don’t entirely connect to. So it was...okay, will reevaluate once the season ends probably. (Actually even the more I think about it, the more I kind of want to pull it apart because there are a lot of little bits worth commenting on, definitely moments I liked in the first section and then need to process fully once we got to WW1.)
Well, except one thing that’s been bugging me through this whole arc but I didn’t care to focus on while there a brainwashed Rip plot that I cared deeply about. I hate time travel stories that make Jesus super special like this. As a historical figure I’ll grit my agnostic-that’s-barely-not-atheist teeth and get through it, but I do not like this. It’s also something else if all the mythologies are true to some degree (Hercules fought Jesus while Loki and Coyote took bets and Shiva just watched, etc.), and since this is the DC universe the Greek Gods for example are definitely supposed to exist. Or on the flip side they could offer some debatably advanced science explanation for this. But they were wishy-washy on the Egyptian Gods last season, whether there was a pseudo-scientific explanation for the Hawks powers coming from Thanagar or if it was Horus who made them; and Amaya has never discussed what her faith is behind the amulet she uses. And yet Jesus is super important apparently and they can’t dare go anywhere near that time and I hate everything about that (except Rip and Sara debating the issue, and the fact that apparently Gideon has no safeguards against what Rip says must never ever be done – she double checked with Amaya about looking into her own future just last episode, she couldn’t say “Captain, such a time jump is ill-advised” when Sara set the course?).
Also, hate to point this out, but it does just say unmade with blood right? Couldn’t they try anybody’s blood? Even if they found it had to be unmade with the same blood that made it I sort of feel like immediately jumping to Jesus blood wasn’t the natural assumption.
Oh, and Sara’s back in her old White Canary outfit with the halter top. So the other version was her missing-Rip outfit? The version of her in Rip’s head wore this version, maybe that has something to do with the switch back, though not the initial switch.
All told...kind of angry-making night of DC-CW shows.
Arrow 5x17
That wasn’t very good either, so kind of a lousy week all around here. To be fair, the flashback heavy episodes have never really been ones I responded well too; and torture episodes are a hard sell and this wasn’t very good at that either. The final moral of the story doesn’t even feel like it fits; it’s not wrong, it’s a lot right even, but it doesn’t feel like a revelation to me I guess. Anatoli’s view I think works, and not just for Oliver five years ago but as a truth Oliver hadn’t quite understood about himself ever. Oliver never quite did accept that he and ‘the monster’ were one and the same, while still giving himself plenty of rein to be ‘the monster’ as needed. But I also don’t think that is a spirit breaking realization for Oliver at this point, because...he already knows that.
This is the Oliver who told Felicity he didn’t know how to fight the darkness without giving into it (one assumes, that was pre-Flashpoint). Yes it’s a level of thinking he can ignore the darkness in him by not putting on the hood but it’s also not like he ever dissociated himself so far as to not think it was still him in the hood. And Oliver has never been entirely comfortable with the way other people look at him as a hero, he tries to live up to it, but that view has been put on him by a lot of other people more than by himself. (Just as reference that I was already thinking along those lines, back around the crossover I was playing with writing some Sara-Oliver stuff where she observes that everyone there is looking to Oliver to lead them just as the Waverider crew decided that she ought to be captain and she is the only one there who remembers the teenage screw-ups they used to be, the broken souls barely surviving on Lian Yu, that she’s an assassin and he’s a killer; and the rest of them have the luxury of not seeing that but only see the heroes they’re trying to become, which they don’t see when they look in the mirror.)
I’ve mentioned several times this season how Oliver is in fact a serial killer, because he is; and I’m largely okay with the idea that he was always deluding himself to think he could turn that into a hero but I honestly don’t see how that idea is a huge revelation to him. John decided that he should be more than a mad killer and then Felicity decided he should be a hero, and Oliver let them lead him into that, but he has told them all repeatedly that he doesn’t see himself that way.
I also don’t think everyone’s reactions when Oliver comes back ring true. Thea should be there, Felicity and John should be rushing to support and comfort him, we should at least have been told that Quentin wasn’t there because he’s working to hold things together at City Hall because otherwise he would have been there. And while I feel like Oliver’s decision to shut everything down comes naturally from what he’s been through this episode (as much as I don’t quite agree with those revelations), I hope someone tells him that it’s really not up to him anymore. He can walk away, he’s done it before, he probably should again in this state, but he doesn’t get to decide if the rest of them go on.
This really does feel like a plotline that was originally conceived to bring an end to Oliver as the Green Arrow, and is being squished and reformed since this ended up not being their last season. Although I have a growing sense that the DC-CW verse is maybe going to a time jump after this season. Probably five years, so Arrow can continue to do five years ago flashbacks, and would allow Flash s5 to lead to the Crisis we’ve been shown was coming from almost the beginning; Legends doesn’t actually have to be as non-contiguous at all since it’s a time travel show anyway but they can play with it how they want. The outlier is Supergirl, where I’m not sure this would work, but while I have a sense it could happen I’m far from sure that it will and even less confident it will be done well because that would take a lot of planning that I don’t think these folks really do.
A late thought, but possibly relevant. Early in the season they made a B5 reference, and this episode had a level of Intersections in Real Time about it; I’d even go so far as to say that in a couple of things it improved on that (mostly Evelyn rather than random Drazi we got there, and in showing the hero actually break down) but mostly it’s a lesser shadow of B5’s torture episode. The main thing I see it trying to borrow from Intersections is that it doesn’t show us anything with the rest of the team and leaving us with just what happens in the cell...except in this case we keep cutting to the flashback story. Part of what makes the B5 ep so powerful is that is a bare bones stage play, taking place almost entirely in one room between two actors for the whole episode; there’s no action and no reprieve from watching our hero try and endure, the only slim chance of success is managing to say “no” one more time than they say “yes you will.” Now, I’m not saying this should have been a straight up redo of IiRT, I’m not certain it could have been even if the CW would have let them do it, and since the show has a history of doing flashback heavy episodes I am pretty sure this was meant to provide a lot of space for said flashbacks. But if they were trying to tell a claustrophobic story about horror and isolation and torture then it doesn’t pair well with a semi-climactic battle , well populated scenes in several locations, and friendly/brotherly support.
Though again, it could just be that I don’t really care for flashback heavy eps.
