Quick Notes on the Smallville finale

After you give up on something, it's natural, after some time has passed, to reconsider your feelings -- was your judgment rushed earlier? Were there qualities you'd forgotten about when you chose to walk away? Would time and distance give you a new perspective if you made the choice to come back?

Thank you, Smallville, for renewing my faith in my own instincts.

After sort-of keeping up to date on the season thanks to SV loyalist @ThePeterPixie, I tuned in for last night's season finale and saw the same things that drove me away. It's not about canon -- that got thrown out the window the minute Lois was brought into the picture. It's the relentless monologuing by everybody about everything they're going to do. This particular episode, it was the tease of a Legion return and possibly a team-up with the Little League, which yielded a pointless cameo by Cosmic Boy, and the rest of the team looking like imbeciles. Really? Hog-tying Doomsdreamy was the big plan? Would a Wet Willie have "crossed the line"? It's little wonder Bruce Wayne hasn't been allowed to associate with this batch of whiners -- it'd be like sticking Denis Leary on a soap opera:

Bruce: Okay, we're gonna send Doomsday to the Phantom Zone. Here's what we --
Chloe: But there's still a real person there!
Bruce: SHUT THE FU*K UP! NEXT!
Bruce: After that's done, we're taking down Lexcorp.
Ollie: Um, I already had an idea about --
Bruce: SHUT THE FU*K UP! NEXT!

Ok, maybe that sounds more like Frank Miller. But you get my point.

And then there was the long-promised throwdown between Super ... guyClark and the Doomsday entity, which lasted all of a good three minutes, sacrificed for the sake of, what, Lois and Tess hurling pronoun modifier smack at each other? Bart Allen's Spicoli impersonation? Look, Clark Kent's morality and immigrant issues can make for a good story. But sometimes, Clark just needs to beat somebody down.



See how satisfying that is for everybody? Anyway, I'll spare you more vitriol. If you check out my twitter feed, you can see how upset I got watching the show. And if you check out the HOUR 42 show blog, wonder of wonders -- Peter didn't like the show either!

FRIDAY MORNING FORMAT!

This week I felt like giving you something on the funky side -- so I went with one of my favorite hip-hop acts of the decade: London's own DJ Format. Format and his crew only released two albums, but they were light years ahead of a lot of what you're hearing from the radio. We'll start making our case with his collaboration with Jurassic 5's Charlie 2na and Akil, "We Know Something You Don't Know."



That same album, Music For The Mature B-Boy, also featured the track that introduced me to Format, "Vicious Battle Raps," featuring Abdominal:



Abdominal would return for Format's second album, If You Can't Join 'Em ... Beat 'Em, and joined fellow Canadian D-Sisive on "3 Feet Deep" -- and I'd definitely play the video game featured in this video.

Examining The Body: Arturo v. Dollhouse 1.12!

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

I can only imagine "Omega" was difficult to write, because it certainly became difficult to watch at times. And not for the right reasons.

As much as "Briar Rose" seemed to propel the series further into the deeper, darker themes Dollhouse delivered on at its' best, the season (series?) finale seemed to mostly backtrack.

The worst offender, unfortunately, was Alpha. While the idea of 48 different personalities getting dumped into -- and apparently mixed with -- that of a "born" killer, it was off-putting to see that his spokes-personality seemed, at times, to be a one-off Buffy villain. And that's not exactly a bad thing; that type of character, striking the cartoonish "HUZZAH!" pose as Wendy is being turned "into" Caroline, is just out of place in this world.

The scenes between Wendy/Caroline and the multi-booted Echo herself played out well, even if Echo's "ascension" into the more fully-realized version of her heroic "authentic" self was, unfortunately, telegraphed the moment Alpha dubbed her Omega. For a genius, he should've known that naming her something like Olivia might have had better implications for his plan to work. And the "climactic" chase and escape scene in the power plant just fell flat and felt rushed; the wedge just falls into Ballard's hands and Alpha walks off-stage without even a "Until next time!"? Ugh.

As has tended to be the case, though, the "B" plot in this episode outshone the main event. This time, the reveal behind Whiskey/Dr. Saunders wasn't just handled efficiently -- seriously, less than 5 lines before confirmation -- but the character's journey from No. 1 Doll (and Alpha's first target) to her bitter reprisal of a defenseless Victor to her apparent self-acceptance was packed with emotional shrapnel. And there's still the question: why would Topher program her to hate him?

The rest of the ensemble was handled inconsistently, perhaps due to time constraints. Toph and DeWitt were on point, but the budding bromance between Boyd and HeloBallard was undercut by Ballard apparently taking the lead thanks to Super-Detective-Fu Skills. There didn't seem to be any questions or conclusions coming from him that Boyd, a former cop himself, wouldn't have arrived to, based on his actions earlier in the series. And Ballard's deal to offer himself as a 'House "contractor," though based on a nice gesture, has one major hole: what leverage could he possibly have on DeWitt to make her accept his terms? Dude outright told Agent Badger the truth and got blown off. Unless Badger is revealed as another "sleeper" Doll, there was nothing stopping Paul from taking the scoop to somebody more sympathetic.

Meanwhile, Sierra and November ... did nothing. They got prepped for Super Hot Girl Bounty Hunter Action! - and then we never saw them again. Well, at least we didn't see them again; thanks to Ballard, November is allowed to return to her civilian self, Madeline. Still, as underwhelming as the pursuit of Alpha turned out, you'd think that having a couple more shooters on the ground couldn't have made things any worse.

Even if the series weren't seemingly on the chopping block, grabbing a season-low share of viewers for its' finale can't help Dollhouse's chances at getting a second season. You can thank Star Trek for those ratings, methinks. So unless the super-duper DVD set (which will reportedly contain both the unaired pilot and the much-discussed "Epitaph One" epilogue) sells like crazy at SDCC this year, this might have been Joss' last stand on traditional television: certainly flawed, occasionally brilliant, but always reaching for some greater meaning. Joss' own Doll -- built for us.

Ch-ch-ch-CHANGES!

Come in, make yourself comfortable. Like what we've done with the place?

The makeover wasn't a rash decision; it came about when I created the new official blog for the podcast, which @ThePeterPixie and I will be maintaining from here on out. Plus, the new title conveys the spirit of what I've been sharing in this space, anyway. Have you tried explaining Callbacks to a non-RHPS person? Not the most effective use of one's time.

Of course, the TIC stuff will stay in the archives, and stuff like the Friday Morning Jukeboxes and other features will also stick around. But stay tuned for more surprises, True Believers!

Back To The Future: Arturo v. Star Trek!

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Let's get the questions out of the way now:

* Is the command structure in the new Star Trek entirely ridiculous? Yes!
* Is the “Red Matter” the epitome of flimsy sci-fi “science”? Yes!
* Is a small, evil part of me disappointed that we didn't see Tyler Perry as Admiral Madea? Kinda!
* Is Classic Spock's entire presence a series of plot-connecting contrivances? Definitely!
* Does any of this make the film any less enjoyable? Absolutely not!

No, the new Star Trek (iTrek, for short) is barely at all like the original series. That's the whole damn point, one that's acknowledged early on. This is a different timeline – doesn't mean prior canon doesn't count; just that the game is different from here on out.

And even then, this story and this ensemble nailed the most important aspect of any Trek movie – the relationships between the Enterprise's core group – while at the same time redefining them. In short: Uhura hooking up with Spock? Good. Uhura hooking up with Spock over Kirk? Very good.

That romantic development underscores the biggest difference between iTrek and 8-Track Trek: Chris Pine's version is decidedly not the Alpha Dog here. In this timeline, JTK is more like a wolf in the old Kipling poem: without this team around him, he's effectively useless. He needs Pike to motivate him; he needs Uhura to confirm he's not talking out of his ass; he needs Sulu to save said ass on Nero's mining platform; and he needs both Spocks and Scotty in order to save the day. Everybody gets to shine, and the ensemble is so much the stronger for it.


Now, people are going to complain that this is “a dumb action movie,” but stop and ask: did anybody seriously expect anything involving this bunch to go smoothly? What did people want, Degrassi in space? The return of V'ger? The Phantom Menace? This story zooms along at a more ludicrous speed than Spaceball One, the heroes constantly cheat to win (the Kobayashi Maru sequence; Sulu's embellishing his “combat training;” Classic Spock shattering about 50 different time-travel tropes) and the villain – Eric Bana's under-developed Nero – gets punked out way too easily.

But the character work was too good to harp on any of that for too long. To wit:

The Racialicious Scorecard:
Uhura: No character benefited more from both the reboot and the re-vamp of their origin. Here we saw her as not just a determined, successful cadet, but one who brought a real skill-set to the table. Bring on the Uhura/Spock slash-fic ... er, and hopefully some insight into how those two crazy kids got together in the first place.

Sulu: Again, Kirk only survives the fight atop the first drilling platform because of young Hikaru – in a lesser movie, Sulu's “fencing” confession would have been a set-up to make him look inept in actual combat. We got quite the opposite here. The “parking brake” bit gave us a chance to see the patented John Cho Frustrated Face. Interesting note about Cho's casting: apparently director J.J. Abrams was concerned about having a Korean-American inheriting a role played by a Japanese-American, but was told by George Takei that the character was meant to represent “all of Asia.”

Spock: And now we come to the Big Other. The nature of Spock's heritage gets addressed early on, and it was a little ham-handed to see Vulcans being so openly prejudicial for two reasons:
1.Would Logic not show racism to be ... well, illogical?
2.We never saw him encounter racism from anybody in Starfleet – weird to think of that as “wrong,” but we'll talk more about Starfleet in a bit.

When it came to addressing Spock's basic inner conflict, though, Zachary Quinto pulled it off. He even brought a bit of swagger to the character (“I have no comment on the matter” and “Out of the chair” were two of my favorite lines in the movie). And when he met his elder self, I recoiled in horror because that's what they teach you on Doctor Who, yet I must confess ... ah, it got a little dusty in the theatre.

Nero: Was anybody else thrown off by us seeing an extraterrestrial villain who didn't sound British? The guy's working-class patois made him sound almost like a Tarantino character, but the fact he was a working-class guy almost made it work. Of course, as a villain with an ugly-as-sin ship, he was no Montalban. But who is?

Starfleet: Ok, so all of the power players were men. This is nothing new, unfortunately. (According to Memory Alpha, of the admirals seen in prior canon, most were men, only four were POC, and the only female was Vulcan. Six women, including Voyager's Kathryn Janeway, were Rear or Vice Admirals.) But the shots of extraterrestrials and POC serving together, without anybody looking at anybody else as weird – Kirk was a misfit because he's just that big of a clueless putz – was encouraging in the sense that, rather than the audience getting the “lesson” of tolerance handed down as a plot point, we got to see it in action. Let's hope for some more active examples as the series continues. One more note: the doomed Capt. Robau of the Kelvin was played by Faran Tahir, an Angeleno of Pakistani decent.

Join us TONIGHT with The Nerdy Bird!

We're just three hours away from an extra-packed edition of HOUR 42! Tonight, @ThePeterPixie and I welcome The Nerdy Bird, Jill Pantozzi, as she makes her podcast debut!

Jill will join us to talk about the online controversy surrounding the upcoming Marvel Divas series. We'll also discuss the debut of the new Power Girl solo series, and we'll share our thoughts on the summer's big releases and hero news -- Star Trek! Dollhouse! Deadpool! All this plus a strange story out of Cincinatti: are you ready for Real Life Super-Villains? Join us for the fun this Sunday at 11pm EST (8pm Pacific) on HOUR 42!

The Bird is the word on HOUR 42!

@ThePeterPixie and I have something special for you this Sunday on HOUR 42: the podcast debut of comics blogger, radio personality and all-around media maven The Nerdy Bird herself, Jill Pantozzi!

Jill will join us to talk about the online controversy surrounding the upcoming Marvel Divas series. We'll also discuss the debut of the new Power Girl solo series, and we'll share our thoughts on the summer's big releases and hero news -- Star Trek! Dollhouse! Deadpool! All this plus a strange story out of Cincinatti: are you ready for Real Life Super-Villains? Join us for the fun this Sunday at 11pm EST (8pm Pacific) on HOUR 42!