jedi_of_urth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jedi_of_urth) wrote2017-04-10 09:50 pm
jedi_of_urth) wrote2017-04-10 09:50 pm
Entry tags:
TV rundown...of sorts
Only two things to review here, but the LoT one is long...and probably focused on the wrong things, but these are things that matter to me.
Legends of Tomorrow 2x17
So there was a lot to like here, and plenty I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say on once the dust settles but I end the episode screaming NO NO NO NO NO NO NOOOOOO, NO. I assume Arthur Darville needed to go off to some other project again, or they were at least allowing for the possibility, but NO. Rip is favorite character on the show, I’m entertaining the possibility that he is currently my favorite character in this ‘verse, I’m not okay with this. Is this how fans of Snart and/or the Hawks felt last year when I was completely cool with the cast changes (or for that matter, Laurel fans when I spent the last day or two making a list of 20 characters I want back/treated better more than Laurel)? Literally any other character leaving would make more sense than Rip (Rip/Gideon shippers must not be in a good place).
At the moment I can’t even focus on my good feeling for my ship because I can’t support this. Fandom must write me all the fic about Rip coming back, ASAP and continuously until he does (which I hope is ASAP next season). Yes Rip basically got to tell Sara he loves her, and I will hold on to that, but then he left and I’m having a hard time thinking beyond that; I guess he’s running away from actual feelings or something...you know, I always said he’s basically the Doctor.
More thoughts to be added later...if I think of it, and I probably will...
Okay, so the more I think about it, the more I move beyond “but Rip’s my favorite” to “wait, this doesn’t work...like, at all.” They literally had a subplot last episode about how nuts Rip would be without the crew and now he just...leaves like that? And I can respect that they wouldn’t want to write just a repeat reason for Rip to miss half a season so they couldn’t have him just vanish again, but give him an actual reason to leave.
Rip was never there to teach the others anything, so he can’t just leave because they’re done learning. Yes they can stand on their own without him, that was the one aspect of him being missing this year that did work, having the team and especially Sara have to learn how to do this without him was...a valid story if not always handled well. It’s part of their development from a disconnected group on failed heroes and not so failed villains into a force to be reckoned with who protect and save time.
There are ways the story could have gone that would have better justified Rip taking off like this, some of which if I stretch are almost there. Most of the season Rip has not been very close to anyone on the team except Sara, and to lesser extent Jax (plus Gideon of course). I was glad at the time that we didn’t get a full on captain-off but for this we probably needed it; put the captaincy to a vote and therefore right out there how much the rest of the team doesn’t feel he’s needed (they care about him to varying degrees, but they don’t need him in charge right now). Have him at odds with Nate and Amaya since he never knew or chose them, have him fight with Stein about Lily, have him be super awkward around Sara (and Jax) after what happened while he was brainwashed. Or go a different way and have Doomworld-Rip say or do something, act a certain way, maybe Doom-Rip kept a journal or all the depression cakes he made (wait, which Waverider did they end up on at the end?), or whatever that makes Rip reevaluate himself (might work better if he hadn’t had to do that six times already this season) and decide he needs time away – again that doesn’t really line up with having the previous episode the way we got it, but there might have been a way. Or yet another way and give him a mission that he thinks he has to do alone, promises he’ll come back but this – whatever it is – he has to do alone; Sara would understand that some things one has to face alone no matter how much she’d initially protest that they (mostly she) have his back. There are plenty of options, I’m saying; but this doesn’t work.
To make any of those things work though, this episode would have had to be much more about Rip’s journey than it was. Because this is Sara’s episode, which is fitting both for this episode and the season over-all, but leads to some weaknesses in the end and not just Rip’s inadequately explained departure. So before we come back to that again (I’m working out my issues here before doing so in fic probably (...yeah)), let’s address kind of my other big issue; that the experiences of the Doomworld versions of the characters don’t have any impact.
Yes it’s what got them to the point where they’d go back in time and do something stupid crazy like this but outside of Nate we don’t see any way that what those versions of them went through have any impact on the past versions. Even Sara, for all that is a very good scene, is more sounding board than imparting any kind of wisdom to her past self. We don’t talk about the things Sara or Rip have gone through in the past year; Mick doesn’t lecture his past self about the mistake he made, Jax dies for Stein which is good after the year they had but didn’t have any lead up in this episode to remind us why it’s so important.
Mick doesn’t confront Snart, or even really have to face the man Snart is here. Whether or not it was ever fully Len, Mick needed to work out or at least have to deal with how he felt about it. Their goodbye scene was touching, but that’s not the Mick who saw the worst version of Len (or the version of Len who had done much of anything to Mick besides the fact that he killed Doom-Mick which...yeah that’s something Mick might have to deal with). And also, none of the rest of them have to face the way they treated Mick a couple episodes ago because it never ended up happening (yes at some point I will unpack my feelings on that episode but this review has enough rants). The Mick we’re left with probably hasn’t quite realized how much he loves Amaya even though that was super important to the last couple episodes. You can’t just stick Mick’s character development into episodes that never happened.
Of course Jax, Stein, and Ray have barely anything to do (aside from making Ray/suit a thing; this show); which has been the case for a surprising amount of the season, especially the back half as the plot gained steam (I don’t think it’s on Rip taking screen time, I think it’s the Legion who ate up that time). Nate and Amaya have mixed feelings on, I’m kind of glad that they weren’t just one season characters like Kendra and Carter, and I’m especially okay with Amaya deciding to forge her own destiny or at least wait and see where it takes her, that might be back to her expected life but it isn’t for now. But they’re also not exactly getting a ton of development here; enough to make their choices make sense certainly (as opposed to Rip’s) but not with a ton of depth. They are also the obvious love story next to Rip and Sara’s less obvious but very clearly there love story.
Because yeah, as much as I’m pissed at the end, and a not small part of why the end pissed me off, there was a lot of ship material this episode. Rip is so damned in love with her that running from his feelings would almost work as a justification for this, except that he shows absolutely no sign that he’s afraid of those feelings. And Sara loves him too, both versions of her need him in her life, not as captain but as partner. This version of Sara (I guess both versions) just got him back from the Legion, letting him go for poorly defined reasons doesn’t work. He sees her, whether it’s recognizing her when they worry she’s an imposter or seeing her strength when she isn’t sure she can, he simply loves her. I’m reaching a point where I almost believe they’re endgame, which is quite a feat considering even when he first came back I was quite willing to say I was probably seeing with ship goggles but by now am pretty sure they’re canon-approved ship goggles.
And that’s in spite of his poorly executed departure in this episode. We can assume that Rip said goodbye to Gideon (the more I think about it the more I’m kind of convinced he’s breaking up with Gideon by doing this) but the only other person the story needed him to talk to before he left was Sara, and it naturally was. Even that scene is so close to working if there was more basis behind it; of course he’s not going to stand in the way of her being captain, and if he has to go she has to let him and trust that they’ll find they’ll way back to each other. It’s failing remains that he has no reason to leave, though maybe an equal problem is that there’s no expressed hope for his return from either of them.
I don’t know the exact scheduling problems at work here, but if I had to guess and propose a solution: know up front that a LoT season is 16-18 episodes long but start airing in January, that should push production later and cut down the number of Rip-less episodes to maybe three which would be bearable (this does not help if Darville just doesn’t want to be on this side of the pond for a full season and only will do about 10 episodes a year). In story the Legends don’t need to prove they go on without Rip again, they already have, but as I sort of said when I wrote my sentence fic, they became a family without him and it’s time he got to part of the family.
We’ve got a couple weeks before I’m back to doing a lot of reviews, I’ll probably try and do a season review, once this need to rant has worn down a bit there are things I want to say about the season as a whole.
Agents of SHIELD 4x16
Before I get into a couple thinky thoughts, I hate the way the episode looks, and the rest of the arc probably will too. The super muted colors and general murky greyness is going to get real old real fast. It’s not like this show was super colorful to start with so dystopian world has to even less interesting looking I guess.
I’ll give this episode this much credit, the concept of the Framework makes more sense to me now. It’s not so much “a world with no regrets” as an virtual world with a few specific stipulations regarding what the people in it think are their main regrets. If (we can be pretty sure they will) they ever get out of the matrix they will be forced to realize that actually those things they thought they regretted were not to be regretted so much (except maybe Mack, I’m not sure how this will work for him).
So I currently (could be proven wrong) think we can’t read much into Jemma or Skye’s “regrets” in this; the Framework hadn’t actually scanned their minds to adapt the program around their big regrets, they just plugged into where the simulation had their avatars without their input. May and Coulson’s regrets were set up, even if I still maintain that Coulson’s supposed regret doesn’t hold for his character. We’re still not real clear on what Fitz’s regret was, but I’d guess having his father around; he casually mentions something “his father always said” as if he grew up getting input from his father. His position in the Framework is probably also influenced by Aida, but that’s a different kettle of fish that I’m touching for now.
Like I said, as “a world without regrets” this doesn’t work at all; May’s biggest regret has been replaced with an even bigger one. Though to fair I wonder if in this reality she was maybe Hydra all along, that say that Sausalito op at the beginning of her career where Phil and her became partners, I would speculate the simulation had Garrett in Phil’s place; Garrett never pulled her out of the bay but when she came back alive he told her she was a survivor and he knew people who would respect her strength. Though on the other hand I think what May really wishes was that she hadn’t had to kill the girl, not that she had simply made a different call in the moment, and this only addresses the later; also of the three we can judge so far hers is the only one that addresses something she fully did. Coulson and Fitz are more whole other lives ideas, where May’s is a specific regret.
So I’ve been spinning something over in my head for a while, it’s been building momentum for years, and I think I’ll finally try and throw them out there, it’s about the Philinda-FitzSimmons parallels. They’ve kind of always been there, sometimes more obviously than others, but a few months back I started to realize that in terms of which characters align with which, it’s Coulson-Simmons and May-Fitz. Coulson and Simmons are both very loyal to SHIELD, to the ideas of SHIELD, to lofty concepts of truth and service and for Simmons science; while May and Fitz are more loyal to the people they love first which just happens to include a lot of people in SHIELD. Fitz and May retreat into themselves when damaged (May emotionally by Bahrain, Fitz mentally and physically after s1) while Coulson and Simmons tend to put it all into the job rather than hurt. Fitz dove through a portal to bring Jemma back from another planet, May was barely held back from jumping through a portal to bring Coulson back from the other side in 4x07; the interrogation scenes back in late s1, Fitz and May’s answers show loyalty to their other halves while Coulson and Simmons have different levels of ‘what else am I going to do?’ There are definitely parallels between Coulson-Fitz and May-Simmons too (most notably to me the “May took off so I lost my right hand too” scene), but I tend to see the other others more strongly.
Now this is relevant because Simmons and Coulson are now shaping up to be in the same positions: trying to rescue the ones they love who don’t remember them. Who are presently the darkest, evilest versions of themselves we’re ever likely to see, while Simmons is still only Simmons and Coulson...well we’ll see but he does have another set of memories so it’s not quite as straight forward as Simmons. So far Fitz has shown more signs that he might have a sense of memory regarding Simmons, which makes me sort of go in guessing that Fitz will prove harder to turn than May.
Over-all I thought the episode was okay, had some nice twists, and isn’t a bad start to this arc. But I’m not ready to make any pronouncements on whether I’m particularly into this arc yet.
Legends of Tomorrow 2x17
So there was a lot to like here, and plenty I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say on once the dust settles but I end the episode screaming NO NO NO NO NO NO NOOOOOO, NO. I assume Arthur Darville needed to go off to some other project again, or they were at least allowing for the possibility, but NO. Rip is favorite character on the show, I’m entertaining the possibility that he is currently my favorite character in this ‘verse, I’m not okay with this. Is this how fans of Snart and/or the Hawks felt last year when I was completely cool with the cast changes (or for that matter, Laurel fans when I spent the last day or two making a list of 20 characters I want back/treated better more than Laurel)? Literally any other character leaving would make more sense than Rip (Rip/Gideon shippers must not be in a good place).
At the moment I can’t even focus on my good feeling for my ship because I can’t support this. Fandom must write me all the fic about Rip coming back, ASAP and continuously until he does (which I hope is ASAP next season). Yes Rip basically got to tell Sara he loves her, and I will hold on to that, but then he left and I’m having a hard time thinking beyond that; I guess he’s running away from actual feelings or something...you know, I always said he’s basically the Doctor.
More thoughts to be added later...if I think of it, and I probably will...
Okay, so the more I think about it, the more I move beyond “but Rip’s my favorite” to “wait, this doesn’t work...like, at all.” They literally had a subplot last episode about how nuts Rip would be without the crew and now he just...leaves like that? And I can respect that they wouldn’t want to write just a repeat reason for Rip to miss half a season so they couldn’t have him just vanish again, but give him an actual reason to leave.
Rip was never there to teach the others anything, so he can’t just leave because they’re done learning. Yes they can stand on their own without him, that was the one aspect of him being missing this year that did work, having the team and especially Sara have to learn how to do this without him was...a valid story if not always handled well. It’s part of their development from a disconnected group on failed heroes and not so failed villains into a force to be reckoned with who protect and save time.
There are ways the story could have gone that would have better justified Rip taking off like this, some of which if I stretch are almost there. Most of the season Rip has not been very close to anyone on the team except Sara, and to lesser extent Jax (plus Gideon of course). I was glad at the time that we didn’t get a full on captain-off but for this we probably needed it; put the captaincy to a vote and therefore right out there how much the rest of the team doesn’t feel he’s needed (they care about him to varying degrees, but they don’t need him in charge right now). Have him at odds with Nate and Amaya since he never knew or chose them, have him fight with Stein about Lily, have him be super awkward around Sara (and Jax) after what happened while he was brainwashed. Or go a different way and have Doomworld-Rip say or do something, act a certain way, maybe Doom-Rip kept a journal or all the depression cakes he made (wait, which Waverider did they end up on at the end?), or whatever that makes Rip reevaluate himself (might work better if he hadn’t had to do that six times already this season) and decide he needs time away – again that doesn’t really line up with having the previous episode the way we got it, but there might have been a way. Or yet another way and give him a mission that he thinks he has to do alone, promises he’ll come back but this – whatever it is – he has to do alone; Sara would understand that some things one has to face alone no matter how much she’d initially protest that they (mostly she) have his back. There are plenty of options, I’m saying; but this doesn’t work.
To make any of those things work though, this episode would have had to be much more about Rip’s journey than it was. Because this is Sara’s episode, which is fitting both for this episode and the season over-all, but leads to some weaknesses in the end and not just Rip’s inadequately explained departure. So before we come back to that again (I’m working out my issues here before doing so in fic probably (...yeah)), let’s address kind of my other big issue; that the experiences of the Doomworld versions of the characters don’t have any impact.
Yes it’s what got them to the point where they’d go back in time and do something stupid crazy like this but outside of Nate we don’t see any way that what those versions of them went through have any impact on the past versions. Even Sara, for all that is a very good scene, is more sounding board than imparting any kind of wisdom to her past self. We don’t talk about the things Sara or Rip have gone through in the past year; Mick doesn’t lecture his past self about the mistake he made, Jax dies for Stein which is good after the year they had but didn’t have any lead up in this episode to remind us why it’s so important.
Mick doesn’t confront Snart, or even really have to face the man Snart is here. Whether or not it was ever fully Len, Mick needed to work out or at least have to deal with how he felt about it. Their goodbye scene was touching, but that’s not the Mick who saw the worst version of Len (or the version of Len who had done much of anything to Mick besides the fact that he killed Doom-Mick which...yeah that’s something Mick might have to deal with). And also, none of the rest of them have to face the way they treated Mick a couple episodes ago because it never ended up happening (yes at some point I will unpack my feelings on that episode but this review has enough rants). The Mick we’re left with probably hasn’t quite realized how much he loves Amaya even though that was super important to the last couple episodes. You can’t just stick Mick’s character development into episodes that never happened.
Of course Jax, Stein, and Ray have barely anything to do (aside from making Ray/suit a thing; this show); which has been the case for a surprising amount of the season, especially the back half as the plot gained steam (I don’t think it’s on Rip taking screen time, I think it’s the Legion who ate up that time). Nate and Amaya have mixed feelings on, I’m kind of glad that they weren’t just one season characters like Kendra and Carter, and I’m especially okay with Amaya deciding to forge her own destiny or at least wait and see where it takes her, that might be back to her expected life but it isn’t for now. But they’re also not exactly getting a ton of development here; enough to make their choices make sense certainly (as opposed to Rip’s) but not with a ton of depth. They are also the obvious love story next to Rip and Sara’s less obvious but very clearly there love story.
Because yeah, as much as I’m pissed at the end, and a not small part of why the end pissed me off, there was a lot of ship material this episode. Rip is so damned in love with her that running from his feelings would almost work as a justification for this, except that he shows absolutely no sign that he’s afraid of those feelings. And Sara loves him too, both versions of her need him in her life, not as captain but as partner. This version of Sara (I guess both versions) just got him back from the Legion, letting him go for poorly defined reasons doesn’t work. He sees her, whether it’s recognizing her when they worry she’s an imposter or seeing her strength when she isn’t sure she can, he simply loves her. I’m reaching a point where I almost believe they’re endgame, which is quite a feat considering even when he first came back I was quite willing to say I was probably seeing with ship goggles but by now am pretty sure they’re canon-approved ship goggles.
And that’s in spite of his poorly executed departure in this episode. We can assume that Rip said goodbye to Gideon (the more I think about it the more I’m kind of convinced he’s breaking up with Gideon by doing this) but the only other person the story needed him to talk to before he left was Sara, and it naturally was. Even that scene is so close to working if there was more basis behind it; of course he’s not going to stand in the way of her being captain, and if he has to go she has to let him and trust that they’ll find they’ll way back to each other. It’s failing remains that he has no reason to leave, though maybe an equal problem is that there’s no expressed hope for his return from either of them.
I don’t know the exact scheduling problems at work here, but if I had to guess and propose a solution: know up front that a LoT season is 16-18 episodes long but start airing in January, that should push production later and cut down the number of Rip-less episodes to maybe three which would be bearable (this does not help if Darville just doesn’t want to be on this side of the pond for a full season and only will do about 10 episodes a year). In story the Legends don’t need to prove they go on without Rip again, they already have, but as I sort of said when I wrote my sentence fic, they became a family without him and it’s time he got to part of the family.
We’ve got a couple weeks before I’m back to doing a lot of reviews, I’ll probably try and do a season review, once this need to rant has worn down a bit there are things I want to say about the season as a whole.
Agents of SHIELD 4x16
Before I get into a couple thinky thoughts, I hate the way the episode looks, and the rest of the arc probably will too. The super muted colors and general murky greyness is going to get real old real fast. It’s not like this show was super colorful to start with so dystopian world has to even less interesting looking I guess.
I’ll give this episode this much credit, the concept of the Framework makes more sense to me now. It’s not so much “a world with no regrets” as an virtual world with a few specific stipulations regarding what the people in it think are their main regrets. If (we can be pretty sure they will) they ever get out of the matrix they will be forced to realize that actually those things they thought they regretted were not to be regretted so much (except maybe Mack, I’m not sure how this will work for him).
So I currently (could be proven wrong) think we can’t read much into Jemma or Skye’s “regrets” in this; the Framework hadn’t actually scanned their minds to adapt the program around their big regrets, they just plugged into where the simulation had their avatars without their input. May and Coulson’s regrets were set up, even if I still maintain that Coulson’s supposed regret doesn’t hold for his character. We’re still not real clear on what Fitz’s regret was, but I’d guess having his father around; he casually mentions something “his father always said” as if he grew up getting input from his father. His position in the Framework is probably also influenced by Aida, but that’s a different kettle of fish that I’m touching for now.
Like I said, as “a world without regrets” this doesn’t work at all; May’s biggest regret has been replaced with an even bigger one. Though to fair I wonder if in this reality she was maybe Hydra all along, that say that Sausalito op at the beginning of her career where Phil and her became partners, I would speculate the simulation had Garrett in Phil’s place; Garrett never pulled her out of the bay but when she came back alive he told her she was a survivor and he knew people who would respect her strength. Though on the other hand I think what May really wishes was that she hadn’t had to kill the girl, not that she had simply made a different call in the moment, and this only addresses the later; also of the three we can judge so far hers is the only one that addresses something she fully did. Coulson and Fitz are more whole other lives ideas, where May’s is a specific regret.
So I’ve been spinning something over in my head for a while, it’s been building momentum for years, and I think I’ll finally try and throw them out there, it’s about the Philinda-FitzSimmons parallels. They’ve kind of always been there, sometimes more obviously than others, but a few months back I started to realize that in terms of which characters align with which, it’s Coulson-Simmons and May-Fitz. Coulson and Simmons are both very loyal to SHIELD, to the ideas of SHIELD, to lofty concepts of truth and service and for Simmons science; while May and Fitz are more loyal to the people they love first which just happens to include a lot of people in SHIELD. Fitz and May retreat into themselves when damaged (May emotionally by Bahrain, Fitz mentally and physically after s1) while Coulson and Simmons tend to put it all into the job rather than hurt. Fitz dove through a portal to bring Jemma back from another planet, May was barely held back from jumping through a portal to bring Coulson back from the other side in 4x07; the interrogation scenes back in late s1, Fitz and May’s answers show loyalty to their other halves while Coulson and Simmons have different levels of ‘what else am I going to do?’ There are definitely parallels between Coulson-Fitz and May-Simmons too (most notably to me the “May took off so I lost my right hand too” scene), but I tend to see the other others more strongly.
Now this is relevant because Simmons and Coulson are now shaping up to be in the same positions: trying to rescue the ones they love who don’t remember them. Who are presently the darkest, evilest versions of themselves we’re ever likely to see, while Simmons is still only Simmons and Coulson...well we’ll see but he does have another set of memories so it’s not quite as straight forward as Simmons. So far Fitz has shown more signs that he might have a sense of memory regarding Simmons, which makes me sort of go in guessing that Fitz will prove harder to turn than May.
Over-all I thought the episode was okay, had some nice twists, and isn’t a bad start to this arc. But I’m not ready to make any pronouncements on whether I’m particularly into this arc yet.