It's Grrrrrreat!

So. Anyone want to try and argue that The Walking Dead isn't getting campy now? Last night's new episode, "The Well", took a drastic shift in tone from the premiere episode of this season to focus on Carol and Morgan and their introduction to a settlement called The Kingdom and its extravagant ruler, King Ezekiel. It was rather pleasant. Carol's facial expressions alone were worth it.

For quite some time now, I've felt The Walking Dead has needn't to break out of its shell and explore territory beyond the terrible need to kill in order to survive. This conflict lead to some of the series' greatest episodes but it starts to lose meaning if that's all you keep coming back to. Morgan's (Lennie James) story last season was a great way of wrestling with it and now as the show is adopting increasingly unrealistic turns of plot, it's gone all in with Ezekiel (Khary Payton) whose philosophy of inspiring others by way of imagination is sort of beautiful, and a logical thematic next step after Morgan's story in season 6.

A bit of lampshading goes on as Ezekiel laughs and admits to Carol (Melissa McBride) that having a pet tiger isn't practical, partly because it eats as much as ten people. Yeah . . . yeah, impractical. Or downright untenable in the current environment. Unless he feeds it Walkers and the implication at the end of this episode is that this is not a healthy diet. I certainly never had the impression that this pretty cgi kitty was a real tiger, anyway.

I think maintaining an air of realism would have been nice but now that that ship has sailed, I think the writers are wise to go all in on fantasy. Just the idea of Carol, after all the trauma she's been through, having to deal with a magical tiger is incredibly sweet. Ezekiel makes me want to believe in it, too.

All this emphasis on pomegranates. Is Carol a Persephone now to Ezekiel's Hades? That seems a bit of a stretch.

If I were in charge of the show, I'd kill off Rick and try to give all his material from the comic to Carol. In addition to Carol being a more interesting character, I find Andrew Lincoln chews ten times the scenery of Melissa McBride. If Rick does stay around, I think he should start wearing a cape.

Happy Halloween, everyone, by the way. I only wish I had time to celebrate it this year. At least I have plenty of candy.

A Well Chosen Colour

Few suspense or horror films are as stylish or beautiful as Dario Argento's 1975 film Deep Red. With a saturated Art Nouveau production design and a driving rock score by Goblin, the film resembles Argento's even greater follow up, Suspiria. But Deep Red is a wonderful film in its own right in a more realistic setting with a teasing stab at gender phobias.

Well, the setting isn't entirely realistic. This place looks pretty fantastic:

I don't know, maybe this was a real diner, but it pretty clearly looks like it's meant to emulate Edward Hopper's famous painting Nighthawks. With the "Blue Bar" sign, it seems to evoke 1940s America in the middle of this Italian film with an English star--David Hemmings as Marcus Daly, a wealthy pianist.

His tortured soul colleague, Carlo (Gabriele Lavia), works at the diner and he points out to the always cool and composed Marcus how lucky he is not to have to play piano for a living. After the two have finished talking by the fountain, Marcus witnesses the murder of a psychic named Helga (Macha Meril), who's pushed through a nearby window.

The murder victim has a pretty striking taste in art, as one of the police officers remarks to Marcus:

At the crime scene, Marcus meets Gianna (Daria Nicolodi), a reporter who attaches herself to Marcus and undercuts his masculinity at every turn. In a couple very funny scenes, she gives him rides in her absurdly decrepit little car in which the passenger seat invariably sinks below the driver so Marcus has to look up at her at all times.

She even beats him at arm wrestling at one point.

Meanwhile, Carlo seems to be on a downward spiral and Marcus visits him at his lover's apartment, a thin young man. Marcus really doesn't seem to care that his friend his gay and he remains supportive but one gets the feeling at this point that Gianna and Carlo are the two prime suspects for the killer's true identity; will the killer be crazy because he's gay or because she's a feminist? The answer, fortunately, isn't quite so regressive though Carlo's fate takes the film into a truly odd, grotesque comedic tangent. I hope it doesn't arise from homophobia on the filmmaker's part but there's nothing explicitly there say so except the very inexplicability of what happens to Carlo.

The fact that we know Gianna is physically stronger than Marcus contributes to the tension pretty effectively. At all times, we know if she does turn out to be the killer, she could probably overpower Marcus.

The film also features an effectively strange murder scene in which a woman accidentally stabs her pet bird with a knitting needle. Another couple sequences has Marcus investigating a gorgeous Art Nouveau mansion accompanied by a great Goblin jam.

Twitter Sonnet #927

A slowly dawning paper peels the wall.
A mirror made important moves insane.
Divided masks can love no kingdom all.
A story's written by the steam in pain.
A platinum electric brain attacks.
The plans in string were wrought and dashed at night.
In storm, the hands were caught in cataracts.
On board, you see the shadows shape a wight.
A pumpkin cracked beneath a floating grin.
The weight of shadows pulled the porch to dust.
The telling wrappers gleam in pail and bin.
The clouds have gathered now in dark'ning rust.
A freezer bulged above the wash and sighed.
A heady dream has spiked the inky tide.

That Pesky Key to Time

It's now pretty normal for a season of Doctor Who to have a unifying story arc but it was an unusual season in 1978/79 that had the Fourth Doctor and Romana looking for new segments of the Key to Time every episode. In 2009, Big Finish released a series of three Fifth Doctor audio plays that form a sequel arc to the original Key to Time season, a mostly entertaining effort that takes care of a few loose ends from the original story in satisfying ways.

The Judgement of Isskar, The Destroyer of Delights, and The Chaos Pool ran through the first three months of 2009 and featured Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor and Ciara Janson as Amy, a companion who joins him in this series for the first and last time. She looks like an adult but she's a recently manifested spirit of time related to the Black and White Guardians, the two omnipotent entities who seek to control the Key to Time. The original Fourth Doctor television arc had the Doctor and Romana collecting the pieces of the Key scattered throughout space and time as part of a mission given to them by the White Guardian. The Black and White Guardians later appeared in an arc of Fifth Doctor episodes in which the Black Guardian manipulated the Doctor's companion, Turlough, to commit foul deeds, something the Doctor doesn't fail to bring up in these audio plays.

Unlike the other Doctors, there's no pocket of time established on the television series when the Fifth Doctor was travelling alone so it's a little trickier for the audio play writers to introduce new companions for him. The Pharaoh audio companion, Erimem, travelled with the Fifth Doctor along with his final television companion, Peri. But in every episode of the television series where a companion departs, either the Doctor has other companions with him who stay on for the next episode or his next companion is also introduced. For the few audio plays where the Fifth Doctor has not had a companion, the writers have been forced to throw in an explanation about how he left them on a planet somewhere for a vacation or something. The Judgement of Isskar has the Doctor vaguely alluding to Peri being lost somewhere.

In The Armageddon Factor, the Doctor had substituted a synthetic segment in the Key to Time in lieu of the actual segment which turned out to be a person. In The Judgement of Isskar, Amy reveals this has caused the Key to come apart again so, like in the original story, she's drafted the Doctor into tracking down all the pieces. Written by Simon Guerrier, The Judgement of Isskar features the Ice Warriors and Amy and the Doctor visit their world, Mars, long before they became a warrior civilisation. In fact, they're an extraordinarily peaceful people with an economy based entirely on freely given gifts. The story reveals how they went from this to being a warlike people in a nice way. Also of note, this was the first time I've seen or heard any female Ice Warriors.

The second story, The Destroyer of Delights by Jonathan Clements features guest star David Troughton (son of Patrick) as the Black Guardian himself. In an interview included with the CD, Clements discusses how he hates to write omnipotent characters so he decided to render the Guardians almost powerless due to the absence of the Key. So the Black Guardian assumes the identity of an ancient Sudanese lord in a story based on an actual incident in the ninth century where a lord, for unknown reasons, refused to pay taxes one year. The story has some thoughtful explorations on slavery as Amy is mistaken for a slave when she's separated from the Doctor and is taken under the wing of another slave. Clements explains in the interview that he feels there's something fundamentally misogynist about the typical Doctor/Companion relationship, an assertion he doesn't really back up with a cogent argument, so having Amy as a slave was somehow supposed to be a comment and subversion of that. He seems to have thought the best way to do this was have Amy and the other slave spend a lot of time talking about how much they'd like to please their men. This combined with his idea that omnipotent characters are invariably boring wouldn't have filled me with a lot of confidence in him as a writer but the story does turn out to be a pretty entertaining adventure.

The final story, The Chaos Pool by Peter Anghelides has Amy abruptly becoming a much more assertive, even rather catty companion as the two find themselves on a strange spacecraft being attacked by another ship. The Doctor hears communications from the attacking ship and he recognises the captain's voice. Lalla Ward appears as the second incarnation of Romana in this one which nicely not only resolves the human Key segment problem but even attempts to tackle Romana's bizarrely casual regeneration in Destiny of the Daleks. "It seemed funny at the time," remarks Romana, which doesn't quite cover it. The explanation provided by the story doesn't feel quite solid but I'm certainly glad someone tried to explain it.

Dekpa, Deborah, and Fleet Ditch

A new chapter of my web comic, The Devils Dekpa and Deborah, is finally online. Trouble continues to brew in 1674 and our heroines are in Newgate prison in this new eight page chapter. This is a series about piracy.

The series is now at 73 pages which is pretty slow work for me considering I started it over a year ago.

I had the pencils for this one done in August and crawled through ink and colour over the past couple months. I wish I could figure out some way to work faster while going to school full time. Anyway, enjoy. Happy birthday to Edith Head, Elsa Lanchester, Annie Potts, and Matt Smith.

I'm Looking at the Horde in the Mirror

Zombie apocalypse has become the go-to genre to tell a story about the breakdown of civilisation. 2009's La Horde blends the gangster film and the zombie film and achieves both the satisfying pulp idea of "Gangsters vs. Zombies" and uses the situation to show, somewhat broadly, the breakdown of social order for which the zombies may just be a poetic coincidence.

The film begins with Ouesse (Jean-Pierre Matins), a cop, reluctantly getting talked into going after the gang who kidnapped another cop. The plan is a very off the books rescue and vengeance killing.

So from the beginning, you have cops acting like criminals. Unfortunately for them, it all goes sour and they're taken hostage by the gang headed by Adewale (Eriq Ebouaney) who coolly executes one of the cops when none of them responds to questioning.

In the middle of all this, zombies, who are of the fast moving variety, are appearing in the building and after an initial, bloody fight, the remaining few cops and gangsters realise they need to work together in order to survive.

Now the cops aren't just acting like criminals--the whole world has suddenly changed outside and the distinction between cop and gangster is completely gone. One of the injured cops even asks a gangster for some cocaine to help him with the pain of his injury.

Later they run into an older tenant, Rene (Yves Pignot), who's an army veteran from one of the French wars in Indochina who seems to be taking a sadistic delight in the memories evoked by killing zombies. He takes the blurring of civilised lines further in a reminder of just how uncivilised even the most venerable citizens of this civilisation can be.

The only person who keeps her eye on the ball is Aurore (Claude Perron), the only female character in the film, who was the lover of one of the people Adewale's gang executed. She resists agreeing to the truce and while everyone else seems to be bonding due to the shared trauma, she keeps tight hold to her vendetta. The film nicely avoids passing explicit judgement on Aurore and the audience is left to decide for themselves if it's better to recognise the common humanity of our foes or if keeping a purity of purpose prevents one from falling into aimless chaos.

Twitter Sonnet #926

An artificial cherry graced the hill.
A guiding crimson masked the water sky.
Imploding stars of indigo and will;
A maple copse collates the bold and shy.
The same visage reflects from plastic glass.
In pockets full there's candy money stocks.
You can't now barter with your Easter grass.
Much faster than his wings are ostrich socks.
Determined eyes descend along the nose.
Beloved by bakers' flour gills concede.
Unseen, the feral trees' temptation grows.
A sea of batter's better than a seed.
A flying hat was seen upturning carts.
The coach, the box, the purse; they're all Black Bart's.

The Mask that Doesn't Give

Michael Myers is like an invader from another reality. In John Carpenter's 1978 original Halloween, the man escapes from an asylum and sets about killing teenage girls. Performances from Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasence as well as a restrained directorial approach by Carpenter make this film a nice portrait of lives horrifically disrupted by a human being who displays inhuman behaviour. I realise that sounds pretty mild and, yeah, I guess I'd say this is a surprisingly low key horror film.

I don't think that's merely because the stakes have risen so much in recent years for horror movies in terms of gore and shock value. There are plenty of 70s giallo and exploitation horror films that stack up well enough to a violent horror film to-day. This may be because Halloween was intended for a more mainstream audience. The only piece of back story we get for Michael is a prologue where Michael as a prepubescent child murders his sister in a really unconvincingly shot stabbing sequence.

Carpenter has said, and recently reiterated when speaking disparagingly of Rob Zombie's remake of the film, that he intended Myers to be "a force of nature" without the psychological motives typically given to killers in such films. A classroom scene where Jamie Lee Curtis' character, Laurie, listens to a lecture about religious and secular views on fate as an insurmountable, determining force supports this view, especially as it's accompanied by a nicely spooky shot from Laurie's point of view of Michael across the street, watching her.

That mask, too, as I talked about a couple weeks ago in connexion to Donald Trump, has this wonderfully eerie, prototypical man quality, this theoretical blank page that frustrates the instinct of an adult human to find a like creature on the other side of a discourse.

But there's so much that's hard to believe was accidental that suggest things about Michael's psychological issues. The fact that his first murder victim is his sister, who he finds topless right after she's had sex, or the fact that he consistently targets teenagers who are expressing their sexuality, or in the case of Anne (Nancy Kyes), just has the nerve to be topless where he can spy on her.

One might argue that this is meant to be less about Michael's motives than it is about creating a situation of physical and moral vulnerability for the characters. The preoccupation with sex as forbidden expressed by the forces of fate as Michael's assaults. It's really hard to disentangle the effect from interpretations of cause, though. If he quacks like a duck, and murders fornicators like a duck, he's probably a psycho puritanical duck.

I found myself wondering at connexions drawn between Laurie and Michael, too. Although it's really apparent she's not wearing a bra--this may just be a 70s thing--Laurie is established as more chaste than her friends, not even wanting to think about asking a boy out on a date. This gets us to the standard slasher film setup where the survivor girl is rewarded for her sexual virtue but an extension of that reasoning is that Laurie is on some level in agreement with Michael's worldview. A connexion between the two seems further emphasised by that fact that Laurie's the only person who takes Michael's knife from him--twice--and uses it against him. But the weirdest thing is the poster of James Ensor in Laurie's bedroom.

James Ensor painted things like this:

Not the typical painter a teenage girl would have a poster of on her wall. But you would think the atypical teenage girl who did like James Ensor would have a more extravagant example of Ensor's work on her wall. So with this poster it seems less like Carpenter is trying to say something about Laurie as he is just trying to send a clue out to the audience on how to read the film itself. The uncanny, masked and skull faces in Ensor's painters are freer to exist without circumstances that apply motives to them. Their strangeness asserts itself as strangeness, striking in their mystery. And yet, Carpenter's trapped by the inevitable logic in the scene--Laurie has put a poster of Ensor on her wall. It contributes to a feeling of spiritual connexion between her and Michael. The effect of this connexion, I suppose, adds weight to an impression of disapproval towards open sexual expression.

Ash vs. Walking Dead

The busted open skull of a loved one was also a subject broached in Saturday's Ash vs. Evil Dead, though I actually watched it after Sunday's new Walking Dead. It's an interesting contrast. Why does it work better on Ash vs. Evil Dead? I realise I'm coming from a premise not many people might agree with, at least if comparing the ratings of the two shows says anything.

Spoilers after the screenshot

The new Ash vs. Evil Dead episode, "DUI", written by Ivan Raimi, follows up from last week's which ended with Ash's father, played by Lee Majors, getting hit by Ash's possessed car, his brains graphically exposed. In this episode, we even see one of his eyes lodged in the car grill.

The colourful lighting and the less realistic physics to the violence gives Ash vs. Evil Dead a more cartoonish feel. I do think this is a problem--it drifts into the territory that diminished Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, the feeling that everything's sort of in a Loony Tunes reality and nothing that happens carries emotional weight. But the sudden death of Ash's father helped divert the show from the impression it was starting to give that certain characters are effectively immortal--this is the main problem with Pablo and Kelly. A big part of what made the Evil Dead movies work was the feeling that the Deadites could basically kill or possess someone at any time, in a seemingly infinite variety of ways, and their motives were mysterious beyond pure malevolence.

I think the main reason this part of the new Ash vs. Evil Dead worked so well is because, once again, of Bruce Campbell and the character he's created with Ash. His emotional reaction to his father's death is pointedly subdued. He seems upset but of course, after all he's experienced, he'd have trouble truly accessing his grief. This is normal for him, as he tells Pablo.

I found the showdown with the car much too cartoonish. But I found myself imagining an Evil Dead/Walking Dead cross-over. Someone like Ash would probably be a good step towards the much needed diversity in ideas on Walking Dead. Just hearing Ash call Negan a primitive screwhead would be worth it.

Ash vs. Walking Dead

The busted open skull of a loved one was also a subject broached in Saturday's Ash vs. Evil Dead, though I actually watched it after Sunday's new Walking Dead. It's an interesting contrast. Why does it work better on Ash vs. Evil Dead? I realise I'm coming from a premise not many people might agree with, at least if comparing the ratings of the two shows says anything.

Spoilers after the screenshot

The new Ash vs. Evil Dead episode, "DUI", written by Ivan Raimi, follows up from last week's which ended with Ash's father, played by Lee Majors, getting hit by Ash's possessed car, his brains graphically exposed. In this episode, we even see one of his eyes lodged in the car grill.

The colourful lighting and the less realistic physics to the violence gives Ash vs. Evil Dead a more cartoonish feel. I do think this is a problem--it drifts into the territory that diminished Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, the feeling that everything's sort of in a Loony Tunes reality and nothing that happens carries emotional weight. But the sudden death of Ash's father helped divert the show from the impression it was starting to give that certain characters are effectively immortal--this is the main problem with Pablo and Kelly. A big part of what made the Evil Dead movies work was the feeling that the Deadites could basically kill or possess someone at any time, in a seemingly infinite variety of ways, and their motives were mysterious beyond pure malevolence.

I think the main reason this part of the new Ash vs. Evil Dead worked so well is because, once again, of Bruce Campbell and the character he's created with Ash. His emotional reaction to his father's death is pointedly subdued. He seems upset but of course, after all he's experienced, he'd have trouble truly accessing his grief. This is normal for him, as he tells Pablo.

I found the showdown with the car much too cartoonish. But I found myself imagining an Evil Dead/Walking Dead cross-over. Someone like Ash would probably be a good step towards the much needed diversity in ideas on Walking Dead. Just hearing Ash call Negan a primitive screwhead would be worth the pleasure.

Because Rebels is New

So Ezra has finally explained the plot behind the prequels in the new Star Wars: Rebels. In yet another episode that harkens back to the Clone Wars series Disney really obviously shouldn't have cancelled, all the male protagonists leave Hera and Sabine on the Ghost to explore and loot a ruined Separatist base where a group of battle droids are surprisingly still active. It's exciting to see all this Clone Wars stuff and the sense of layered time is nice but the mechanics of the plot aren't great and Ezra comes off as even more annoying than usual.

A droid general in charge of this lost group of Separatist droids captures the Ghost crew and then forces them to try and rescue Zeb in an effort to prove who had the better strategy, the Republic or the Separatists.

Ezra eventually explains how the Empire is in fact what used to be the Republic so therefore the Ghost crew and the droids are on the same side. Apparently this fact had eluded everyone for fifteen years. Anyway, it's fun to see battle droids versus the Empire.

Working together, they come up with the brilliant strategy of having the Jedi swatting droid blaster bolts into the Imperial forces, combining the droid firepower with the Jedi's greater accuracy. Of course, they could skip a step by simply having the Jedi shooting the guns themselves, but whatever. At least this way everyone gets to be involved.

I have to admit, I do find those battle droids pretty amusing. They just can't get any respect. I loved how the stormtroopers just talked right over the group that tries to parley with them.

Class Quota

For years, fans have wanted a Doctor Who spin-off set in London about a gay couple, a human and a non-human. But instead of the Madame Vastra and Jenny series everyone wanted, to-day we got the première of Class, a spin-off series based on the unpopular Coal Hill School subplots from the Twelfth Doctor's first season. It might not be fair to judge from just the first episode but, judging by the fact that the first two episodes were shown to-day and I couldn't work up the energy to watch the second, it's not very good.

Is that too glib? I don't think anything's too glib for this show which had one character mention in conversation with another that they'd just failed the Bechdel test by mentioning a boy. This is a conversation between Tanya (Vivian Oparah) and April (Sophie Hopkins) and although April doesn't seem to understand at first what Tanya's talking about she says Tanya's funny. This is more comprehension than most characters seem to have when one of the primary characters says something really obviously smug and insulting or flirtatious, as when Tanya rambles a bit about how normal it is for her to be talking to a boy on Skype and he doesn't seem to notice her intensely transparent awkwardness. And the characters can't seem to speak without uttering grating Chandler Bing-isms.

This is an intensely self-conscious show, which I suppose directly mentioning the Bechdel Test demonstrates. There's also the fact that the cast looks like they could summon Captain Planet if they combined their power rings.

We've come full circle. In the atmosphere of late 1980s "We are the World" optimism, putting together a group of improbably diverse friends seemed like a great way to promote empathy and recognise our common humanity. But by the late 90s, this looked like painfully awkward pandering that required the writers ignore many of the realities about cultural assimilation for an artificial Happy Land. Now the demand for representation is so great that those who demand it may full well know how artificial it is but consider the benefits of equal representation greater than any artificiality it might entail. I realised, though, the show harkens back to an older hopeful representation of diversity than Captain Planet--all the characters actually work out as pretty solid analogues of the original Star Trek bridge crew.

April (Sophie Hopkins) the Captain Kirk of Class

The leader of the bunch, this is the only white heterosexual apart from possibly Miss Quill. Like Kirk, April does things which would in real life be counterproductive and anti-social but which in the context of the show somehow makes her really endearing, like when she's trying to warn everyone at prom about their impending doom but takes a moment to snap at them about how they'd pay attention to her if she was a commentator on Instagram telling them they looked fat.

Charlie (Greg Austin), the Spock of Class

An alien who finds he has trouble understanding the emotional responses of humans sometimes, frequently leading to adorable misunderstandings. He and April quickly establish a close bond but, since he's gay, like Kirk and Spock they'll probably never hook up romantically. Or will they . . . ? In the 1960s, audiences would have been offended by the idea of Kirk and Spock getting together, and to-day's audiences would be offended by April and Charlie getting together. And yet, such fertile grounds for slash fiction.

Matteusz (Jordan Renzo), the Chekov of Class

Where Chekov idolised Spock, Class takes it further by actually making them a couple. We don't learn much about Matteusz in the first episode--I'm not entirely sure he's Russian. His accent sounds Russian to me but Matteusz comes up as a Scandinavian name in Google.

Tanya (Vivian Oparah), the Uhura of Class

A beautiful young black woman with impressive technical skills. Her mother seems to be Jamaican and very conservative; we don't learn much else about her.

Miss Quill (Katherine Kelly), the Doctor McCoy of Class

The only character I liked, she's older than the other characters and poses as their teacher. Irascible and unafraid to insult them for acting like the morons they are. I'm still not sure if she's supposed to be able to hear them when they talk in their normal voices in the classroom or not.

The Doctor (Peter Capaldi), the Scotty of Class

Well, I like this guy, too, on his own show. He's a deus ex machina here and doesn't do much but wave his screwdriver around, mostly just serving to remind me how much I'd rather have a season of Doctor Who this year than this spin-off.

Ram Singh (Fady Elsayed), the Sulu of Class

In the U.S., people who are called Oriental in Britain are called Asian and in Britain, Ram Singh, apparently from Pakistan or India, would be called Asian. Like most stock Indian British characters, he's really good at football. His girlfriend is also Indian, I think, which is probably why she's killed off so quickly. She fails to make an impression, so much so that when Ram Singh later says he'll never get over what happened this night it took me a moment to remember what he was talking about.

So, wait, you're saying, there's no Oriental character? No-one with ancestry from Japan or China or Korea? Ha! When was the last time we had such character on Doctor Who? The Talons of Weng-Chiang? Tsk. Class! You're so regressive! Muahahahaa! Better luck next time. Why not try something really crazy, like include a character from . . . Ireland?!

I will say this, it's the torquoisest show I've seen in years.