This week’s somewhat-late recommendation was made possible by the letters A and N (with a little help from a music-software program). Admiral Neck found a program that would allow us to make “videos” of all the songs that don’t already have entries on YouTube. They’re a bit like those educational “videos” you watched in middle school where the people behind it were too cheap to actually film their script, so they’d simply take a handful of still photos of kids with bowl haircuts and bell-bottoms acting out a morality play and run a soundtrack of dialogue over them. Think of these videos as our homemade version of What’s Harry Got In His Mouth?
So, this week’s selection is a song by Jens Lekman, otherwise known as the Swedish Stephin Merritt. If you don’t know who Stephin Merritt is, you must this minute beg/borrow/download (i.e., steal) 69 Love Songs, his magnum opus (with one of his many bands, The Magnetic Fields). Or perhaps you are a hipster douchebag too, and know that 69 Love Songs is one of the essential albums required for membership. And that if “Grand Canyon” and “The Book of Love” don’t break your heart, you probably don’t have one. So there.
As I’ve mentioned before, Stephin Merritt is one of my all-time favorite lyricists; his lyrics are intelligent and clever and witty and occasionally incredibly sad. His arrangements are almost as interesting; his songs range over almost every conceivable genre, sometimes in loving tribute and sometimes in acid parody. They are sometimes a bit precious, but they are always knowing, willing to puncture their own importance.
Jens Lekman is very much in this mold — intelligent, hyperliterate, and best of all, funny. Most songwriters can string together some decent-enough lyrics — or at least make their lyrics so incomprehensible that people assume they must be deep (I’m looking at you, Michael Stipe, you jive-dancing, perpetually-terminally-ill-looking star). But Lekman is one of the few who make close attention worthwhile, and one of the even fewer who actually do it with humor. I could count on one hand the number of musicians who write (intentionally) funny lyrics (I’m avoiding your needy gaze, Weird Al Yankovic); it seems odd that there are so few lyricists that bother to try being funny, given that most other forms of entertainment, even dramatic or tragic ones, usually contain elements of humor.
Perhaps it’s because most songs catch your attention with their melody (still my first requirement; a song could be a mind-bendingly brilliant poem set to music and I wouldn’t care unless I liked the sound of it), and you often don’t especially notice the lyrics until you’ve had a few listens. Maybe it’s just harder to fit humor into music without sounding like a novelty act. Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen managed it, but their kind of talent is pretty rare. Or maybe it’s because so many musicians are self-important douchebags who can’t conceive of putting humor in their Art.
I’ve only listened to one of Lekman’s albums so far — Night Falls Over Kortedala — but only because of our hard drive failure and the fact that iTunes is a shitty program that won’t pull songs off my iPhone unless I’ve purchased them through iTunes and that won’t let me put any new songs on my iPhone now without wiping my current songs off it because it thinks I’m synced to a different library and I can fix all this but it’s incredibly time-consuming and annoying and arrggghhhhhhh I hate you Steve Jobs for making me love your product and then attempting to destroy that love at every turn!!!
Night Falls Over Kortedala is a good place to start, though — it’s Lekman’s second full-length album, and nearly every song on it is a gem. I’m not going to do a close reading of the song this week, since Lekman’s lyrics are so straightforward and front-and-center that there’s not much point, but I think it’s pretty obvious what’s appealing about this song. Lekman’s voice is Merrittian in its deep, resonant delivery, and the contrast of his throaty bass with the furious wind-up and clash of the orchestra creates a song of thrilling power. It’s called “And I Remember Every Kiss”, and it perfectly captures the feeling of a first kiss — the incredible build-up, the choral explosions, the naming of deadly weapons after a beloved. The following video, I remind you, was made by Admiral Neck. See if you can spot any tell-tale signs.
The song is drenched in emotion but still has an appealing wry detachment — “Your Arms Around Me” (the Admiral’s favorite song on the album) is much the same, making a trip to the emergency room into a bittersweet love ballad. Oh, and I can’t forget to mention my favorite Lekman pronunciation — in this case, his pronunciation of “soldier”. Most of the time you can’t even hear his accent, and I find it strangely endearing when it comes through on certain words.
Super-special bonus Jens!! Here’s the hilarious and touching retro-sounding “A Postcard to Nina”. Any song that can fit in the lyric “I send back Out of Office Auto-Replies” is a classic in my book (especially since the laugh is one of guilty recognition). I hope Nina and her girlfriend had a happy ending.
Last week Canyon and I were lucky enough to be able to enjoy a long weekend together (trapped in the house because public transport in the UK shuts down during holidays. True fact!), a period spent catching up on Mad Men (we warmed to it by the time it had finished) and eating large meals. However, our equilibrium was threatened by a very stupid decision made last Thursday. I bought the latest installment of the superb Burnout franchise for Xbox 360, and even though it has failed to do the one thing I wanted it to, it has taken over my life.
At about this time of the week I usually post a long long dissection of the most recent episode of Lost, a week late but just in time for the next episode. Of course, it’s off our screens for four more weeks, so I don’t have that time limit going against me, but I still wanted to get it done, because, you know, it’s Lost. Instead I have virtual-journeyed back and forth across the fictional Paradise City, from the Naval Dockyards to the Observatory, along Angus Wharf and then up around the top of the city into the windfarms, then down to the Wildcats Stadium, trying to memorise everything, find every hidden shortcuts and ramp and destructible billboard, all the time attempting to upgrade my licence and unlock better cars.
Last night I managed to find an untouched section of the city, and spent half an hour trying to crash into one billboard. I went up and down the same stretch of road about 100 times, each time missing my mark by a couple of inches and crashing into the same goddamn tree over and over again. When I finally smashed through that heinous billboard I screamed like Roy Scheider when Jaws blew up.
If you’ve not heard of Burnout before, a quick explanation. It’s a racing game, and an incredible one at that. At least, it started out as a racing game, in the first iteration, but with traffic and suchlike to complicate matters, as well as a Burn Gauge that allowed you to drive faster for a short space of time, like a nitrous injection to your engine. That meter was filled when you did reckless things, a feature that partially explains its popularity. The other was the use of the Renderware engine (designed by Criterion), which ran fast enough to allow crash moments to be animated with more detail than was usual.
It was this feature that allowed Criterion to add a Crash Mode to the sequel, Burnout 2: Point of Impact, which was my introduction to the franchise, and is possibly my favourite version of the game. Part of that is because it’s great fun and still remains a very entertaining racing game with only a few distracting bells and whistles (see below for more on the bells and whistles), but most of it is because a few years ago my mother fell very ill and while helping her convalesce I needed to switch off the clatter of worry in my brainblob, so I played this constantly. Like, for nine or ten hours at a time. And this coming from someone who only enjoyed one other racing franchise before (the futuristic craziness that was Wipeout), and usually think racing games are a load of old blah. Perhaps it’s because I can’t drive. (Another true fact!)
I also liked that it allowed you to play any music you liked while driving, and so I burned a couple of Blink 182 albums to the Xbox hard drive. Say what you like about that band, they are the perfect accompaniment to driving a virtual car at about 160mph into traffic. It’s a hell of a rush, made all the more exciting because the music gets louder when you hit the Boost button, and that’s before we get into the Burnout chains. Boost is only available once you’ve filled your Burn Gauge, and as you Boost, your Burn Gauge will run out. If you’ve managed to Boost without crashing, your gauge gets filled again, and you keep Boosting. If you keep doing it right, it fills up again and again, and you can keep Boosting until you screw up. I think my longest chain was about 13 Boosts in a row, though afterwards I realised I had forgotten how to blink and my hands wouldn’t release the controller.
If you’re not interested in the racing, Crash Mode in Burnout 2 allows you to use the car like a kind of wrecking ball, sending it hurtling into traffic and trying to cause as much damage as possible. That damage is calculated in dollars, and you get medals for surpassing certain targets. It’s great fun, though it was at this point that the series started to concentrate less on the racing and more on unique modes like Crash Mode and Canyon’s personal favourite Road Rage (where the tracks become demolition derbys and you have to destroy as many enemy cars as possible by slamming them into walls or traffic).
They’re kinda gimmicky, but that’s not to say they aren’t generally awesome, and they set the game apart from your bog-standard straight racing games. They also work well as a party game, and guests have been sucked into it completely (it’s one of those games that will be played by people without their own console who will subsequently talk feverishly about getting their own machine just to play that game). Though I’m nostalgic for the relative purity of the second version, the following editions with their insane multiplayer modes were where our obsession really took hold.
Burnout 3: Takedown generated a lot of attention for its increasingly complex crash physics and astonishing speed and beauty, and I love it dearly too, but it still felt a little gauche compared to its predecessor. There were little tinkerings with the game that annoyed me. The ability to listen to your own music was present but selecting songs was finicky, boosting using the Boost Gauge was made easier (which meant no more Burnout chains, and Boosting was available no matter how much flame you had in your Burn Gauge), Crash Mode was altered and less chaotic, though it was more fun to play with a group, etc.
Actually, I bitch about the music thing, but Burnout 3 features the best soundtrack of any of the games, with a brilliant set of “EA Trax”, as they’re called (yes, EA are trying to copyright a new word for “music”), including I Wanna Be Sedated by The Ramones, Orpheus by Ash, and many others, though none of which are as reality-alteringly awesome as Decent Days and Nights by The Futureheads [more like reality-stabilizingly boring. Zing! --Canyon], which remains one of my favourite songs ever, an opinion not affected by the weakness of their second album. With choices like that, not being able to play my own music wasn’t as big a deal as it would become in later versions where the music is much less interesting.
Burnout 4, or Burnout: Revenge as it is known, was the first game in the franchise to graduate to a next-gen console, and the result is staggering. The non-racing stuff is more prominently featured, often with differences from previous games that harm the game as much as they improve it, but those next-gen graphics were astonishing, making the experience even more exhilarating and immersive. I have both the Xbox and Xbox 360 versions, and playing the older version is now a waste of time. Burnout: Revenge is the version we’ve played the most (as Road Rage is particularly incredible in this version), though some of the choices (such as fiddling with the Crash Mode and adding Traffic Attack, where you can knock traffic out of your way if you crash into it) are not so great. [Admiral Neck only complains about Traffic Attack because he sucks at it. Traffic Attack is awesome! --Canyon] But that Road Rage. Hooboy! I’m serious, Canyon is more than formidable at it. In the apocalyptic Mad-Maxian future, I’m calling shotgun with her, soon-to-be-crushed bitches!
So, being huge fans of the franchise, we figured getting Burnout Paradise would be a smart choice, filling our long weekend with much Road Raging and Crash Moding, in-between watching Don Draper ruin that weaselly little shitball Peter Campbell. However, it was not to be. Much to our disgust, Paradise doesn’t feature offline multiplayer modes, so we can’t play it together. Canyon is particularly disgusted by that, and though she likes the game in general, she considers the loss of offline multiplayer is the biggest strike against it, and I have to agree.
This version is the most different of all, gambling on reinventing the franchise by creating an enormous and complex city to drive in, with four types of event – Race, Road Rage, Burning Routes, Stunt Run and Marked Man (the latter two new twists on old formulas) – starting at junctions throughout the metropolis. As expected, this new format has angered a lot of people. Screw up an event, and you have to drive back to the junction you started at to redo the race, which can be very difficult if you haven’t memorised the city. As I’m happy to forget about an event if I’ve screwed it up, I’ll just move on to something else. Canyon is much less happy about that, and I see her point. If you want to get an event right by redoing it over and over, it’s totally counterintuitive.
However, even though neither of us are fans of sandbox games (though I did enjoy Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction and Crackdown), the sheer size and complexity of Paradise City is a marvel. This interactive map of the city doesn’t even begin to show how much is going on. I’ve been playing it all week and have only completed 24% of the game, though I have been concentrating on exploring and trying to memorise the city instead of trying to finish the events. What’s most amazing is how real it feels. When trying to explain my love of gaming to others, I have tried to describe the joy I get from exploring virtual spaces and being moved by their design. A truly great game, like Halo or Silent Hill, will often exist in a virtual world so well designed that it feels like a real place.
Burnout Paradise is one of the best examples of that I’ve ever experienced. It has a character all its own, helped by the road names, range of different areas, Crash FM radio station (whose DJ Atomika is that rarity, an in-game narrator who is helpful and not annoying), etc. It’s cohesive and varied and beautifully designed. Plus, its theme song is Paradise City by Guns n’ Roses. Perfect.
The music in this version is frustrating. When I loaded it up the first few songs made me think I was onto a winner: Us v. Them by LCD Soundsystem, Would? by Alice in Chains, Stand and Deliver by Adam and the Ants, My Curse by Killswitch Engage, and a few other great choices (the Avril Lavigne song included, Girlfriend, works much better than you would expect). Then the generic rock anthems kick in, many of which sound like they’re sung by Chris Cornell imitators, made all the more embarrassing by the inclusion of the mighty Rusty Cage by Soundgarden to show them how it’s done. Once the rock tracks have stopped the game cycles through themes written for earlier versions of the game, and that’s kind of the whole point of the game, something I have grown to realise after hours of gameplay.
Beyond the enormous city with its shortcuts and secret playgrounds (and coming soon: downloadable expansions!), and the awesome visuals, and mostly great soundtrack, the best thing about it is the nostalgia. Different cars have different attributes, allowing you to play the game as if playing previous versions of Burnout. Some cars are powerful enough to use in a Traffic Attack mode, knocking smaller cars out of the way. Some allow Burnout chains (yay!). Many allow Boost whenever there is a flamey thing in your Burn Gauge. It’s like a compendium of previous versions, which is the sweetest surprise of all. Basically, you can make the game into the version of Burnout you want it to be by making a few selections. Though Canyon is right when she says that the amorphous nature of the game makes it less appealing than the very linear previous editions (especially in terms of being able to replay certain events), you still have the ability to make it resemble the game you once played.
And yet, and yet… That multiplayer option is still missing. Yes yes, I know, it can be played online, and is probably intended to be played online more than as a single player experience (Microsoft love to get people to subscribe to Xbox Live, after all), but a) it’s still too expensive (not prohibitively, obviously, but I still think subscription fees are steep) and b) playing Halo 2 online for a couple of months meant I’ve had a lifetime’s fill of being told to go fuck myself by 12 year olds. In theory I love the concept of online gaming, but the little jerks who are on there all the time waiting for their genitals to drop are not worth dealing with, and no, it’s not because they are much better at gaming than me. Seriously. It’s not that. Seriously. Oooh look, an interesting shiny object behind you! ::jumps into virtual car and drives into oncoming bus::
Really. Ferrell/McKay movies are, Chez Canyonneck, cultural events as significant as Scorsese/DeNiro collaborations are for others. Anchorman is possibly our favourite comedy, and Talledega Nights was almost as good, if it wasn’t for the slackening of the pace during the last half hour or so. This is their latest collaboration, with John C. Reilly forming the third corner of their Triangle of Genius.
Other than the incredible ensemble casts gathered for these movies, the thing I love most about them is the progression of the set-piece scenes in Talledega Nights and Anchorman, with the principals ad-libbing dozens of lines (most of which are generated during intensive rehearsals), which are then edited together according to which moments got the biggest laughs during test screenings. This annoys a lot of people (according to comments I’ve read online) as their films have a very slender plot that serves as a frame for stream-of-consciousness joking that is either your bag or not, but that relentless chain of absurdity is what I love most about these films.
Talledega Nights turned up on Sky Movies the other day and the first scene with Sacha Baron Cohen as Jean Girard is a great example of it. All it has to do is introduce the antagonist and his reasons for hating Ricky Bobby, but it goes on for about five minutes, taking in jazz, pancakes, redneck gay panic, and a dozen other things, all the time satirising some of the more ridiculous cultural cliches about America and France brought up during this insane War on Terror. Best of all, it is treated by McKay as if it is a serious dramatic scene (listen to the musical stings), making it all the funnier. It is sheer perfection.
Plus, the DVDs feature tons of extra material, which is the same for the other Apatow movies released recently, but they have nothing on the scale of the Anchorman/Wake Up Ron Burgundy disc set we have, which has hours of extra footage, almost all of it pure gold. So yes, we’re as excited about Step Brothers as Batman fans are for The Dark Knight, and we’re not ashamed to admit it.
I recently wrote about forthcoming summer movies, many of which were high on my own list of highly anticipated events though I foolishly missed off the Ferrell/McKay comedy Step Brothers. That should be a punishable offence, though it’s nowhere near as egregious a sin as releasing it in the UK two months after the US GAH!
Anyway, since then I have been haunted by an image from the trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s It’s My Happening, Baby, And It Freaks Me Out (as Canyon has retitled it). If you’re a regular reader, you know the one.
It definitely ruins that trailer, and I’m looking forward to seeing it on the big screen, in the hope that the audience will react in the same way. That said, it struck me that Mark Wahlberg has an amazing face for selling “OH SHIT!” moments, and it occurred to me that I need to lavish praise on those moments in film in which an actor memorably conveys the feeling of pooping their pants with shock and sudden realisation. And so, I present to you the inaugural Wahlberg Award, for Best Response To Global Ecological Catastrophe.
The statuette’s in the post, Marky Mark. Okay, it’s not an Academy Award, but it’s better than not winning one for The Departed and then having to put up with Ellen DeGeneres trying to involve you in an unfunny joke during the Oscar broadcast last year.
This wasn’t really the second song I wanted to feature, since we heard about the Guillemots a couple years ago and the thrill of discovery has worn off a bit. They’re pretty well-known in hipster douchebag circles — at least UK-based hipster douchebag circles (er, roundabouts?) — since they were nominated for the Brit Awards and the Mercury Music prize, and their album got pretty high in the charts. But as far as I can tell, they’re virtually unknown in the US, so my douchebag cred can remain intact in at least one English-speaking country.
I’ve used it now basically because I can’t find videos of the other songs I wanted to highlight, and it’ll take too much time to figure out how to make my own video to get any of those out today. Nevertheless, this is an excellent song, and just cause I’m a little inured to its loveliness, it’s certainly no knock on it. I was obsessed with it when I first heard it, and it gave me The Joy, more so than any other song in recent memory. (And I just found out through a stroll through Wikipedia that their next album is out in a few days, so hey! Relevant!)
So I was thinking I’d do kind of a close reading of these songs — specific moments that make the song for me, since it’s easy enough to say, “Oh, I love that song” but not so easy to actually explain why you love it. So here’s my best attempt:
:05 — Love the tuning up / tv coming on / distorted tape deck noises — they feel like the hesitation of someone who’s not quite ready to begin but forced to anyway.
:22 — “Love you through sparks and shining dragons I do” — dragons? They’d sold me 20 seconds in.
:25 — This simple little keyboard refrain, along with the wobbly distorted-circus sample (which metaphorically reinforces the song’s false starts), is what makes the first part of the song. We know it’s going somewhere and the lovely circular lead-up heightens the anticipation.
:3o — “Now there’s poetry in an empty Coke can” / “Now there’s majesty in a burned-out caravan” — These lines cut to the heart of what it’s like to be newly in love — the most ordinary, even depressing sights have a certain magic to them. I love that the image of an empty Coke can has made it into a love song — throughout the song, mundane images are contrasted with the operatic highs of the music.
:41 — Great little guitar/banjo/ukulele/whatever the hell that thing is riff here, as the various instruments seem to wake up to the song.
1:10 — Here the song kicks into a higher gear (and in the video, the images turn from a dingy black-and-white room to a full-color beach — obvious, maybe, but the song seems to demand it. However, the song does not demand Fyfe Dangerfield’s [!] seemingly earthquake-induced dancing. He dances like I imagine Faraday would dance). The bass and guitar take over the keyboard’s riff, pushing it to the front of the song and propelling it forward. The tension mounts through the next minute as the song builds towards its catharsis.
1:30 — “And the symmetry in your Northern grin” — this line always makes me smile, though that may just be because I understand the cultural meaning “Northern” has in England now that I’ve lived here and feel unduly proud of myself.
1:45 — Here a little barely-audible piano refrain sidles in, again propelling the song to even more tension as the tempo increases and the instruments all kick in.
1:47 — “You got me off the sofa / Just sprang out of the air / The best things come from nowhere” — Again, these are very simple, even cliched words, but in three lines Dangerfield’s able to capture the essence of falling in love — feeling like a whirlwind came from nowhere to propel you out of your ordinary life into something extraordinary (but still mundane because it’s so common).
2:00 — “I can’t believe you care” — the song reaches its catharsis here, both musically and emotionally. Where before Dangerfield sang that “I love you, I don’t think you care,” here he finally accepts it, extending the word “care” into one long, swooping, ecstatic note that is the musical equivalent of spinning around with your arms out on top of a mountain, feeling like you’re a part of the sky (or dancing like a maniac on a beach, as they do in the video). The instruments go nuts, and the chorus of backing vocals joins in. I fucking love this part, and I think it would be pretty hard not to feel uplifted by it. And though I’ve attempted to keep this pretty chaste so far, I’d be remiss in not comparing the song to a musical orgasm — the build of tension, the increasing urgency, the ecstatic release, and the dizzy, murmuring wind-down. (I don’t like thinking of Fyfe Dangerfield having an orgasm either, especially since it seems to involve screeching and copious throwing of luggage and cookie cutters.)
2:33 — And here we have the murmuring wind-down: “Yes I believe you” and “I’m in love” (I think) repeated over and over and mechanically slowed down to mimic a hazy afterglow. We could read this two ways: either Dangerfield has just convinced himself into believing the object of his love loves him back by pleasuring himself to thoughts of her, or the object of his love has just sexed him up to convince him of his/her devotion. Or I’m a sex-obsessed crazy and the song is about really appreciating your garbageman. Either way I think it works.
3:20 — We get little goodbyes from all the instruments here, winding the song down in much the way it wound up.
My only complaint about the song is that it’s not long enough — that glorious catharsis should go on longer, for two verses, though of course metaphorically it doesn’t work. We saw the Guillemots live a year or so ago, and I was looking forward to this song all the way through, but when they played it, it was a bit of a disappointment. I don’t know if it was just because the venue wasn’t big enough or they didn’t have enough instruments or what, but it just didn’t have the same joyous lunacy that the original did (their version of Sao Paulo was pretty great, though, and that’s got even more of a bonkers ending).
I’ve tended to go on a lot about each of the episodes of season four (and probably would have done to earlier episodes if this blog wasn’t so young), and I’ve been happy to do so. Absurdly happy, in fact. This week, however, I’ve been thinking of this post as a chore to get through, postponing it until so late that this will probably be kind of short, at least compared to the other Lost posts — and no, it’s not just because we only got a bit of Frank-time, during which he was a bit of a dick.
Partially it’s because it was a Sun/Jin episode. If I’m ambivalent about Kate episodes, I’m downright bored by these, even though I like both characters and find the quick glimpses of Korean corporate life interesting. Sadly, there is very little forward motion in them, and even with two characters, it often feels like they don’t have enough to do to justify a flashback episode (which is often the case with Kate and Jack as well).
Also — and I could be wrong here — I often wonder if these scenes are less an insight into Korean culture than they are a misapplication of preconceptions about Japanese culture. I’ve never seen any other film or TV show even attempt to portray that aspect of Korean life, and in Lost it seems very similar to the cliched scenes of salaryman who supplicate excessively when they meet corporate higher-ups. There’s a strong chance both cultures share this unfortunate heirarchical reflex, and I shouldn’t be so concerned about it. I’m afraid my many years as a stay-at-home nerd means my only real exposure to Korean culture comes from watching films by super-genius Park Chan-wook. Any information about whether my fears about this portrayal of Jin at work are justified would be appreciated kthx.
I will admit I got very interested in Sun and Jin’s backstory when it turned out that Sun’s life depended on the paternity of her child, and that was a very big part of why my admiration for the show went up about 100,000% last season. I love that the show took one of the things that gets criticised most and paid it off so well that only the most churlish of critics could have moaned about it. Of all the Sun/Jin episodes so far, D.O.C. was by far my favourite. This one, though? Not good. Not good at all.
Which is not to say it wasn’t without some great moments. This is Lost, after all. There’s always something of interest going on (I’ll get to that in a bit). First, though, I will moan, and after feeling like the only person who liked The Other Woman, it’s nice to feel a part of the mob again. It seems the odd commentator was okay with the big twist of the plot, but most weren’t, and I have to side with them. I like twists as well as the next guy, and this show has had some real corkers (the best being in Walkabout, which is still talked about as being the best episode yet in some corners of the internet). My other favourite was in Exposé, which did nothing to further the overall plot, and was straight out of a Twilight Zone episode or EC comic, but was thoroughly entertaining nevertheless. And hey! Maybe the cameo appearance of Nikki and Mr. LeShade hinted there was a twist to come! (Yes, that is a screencap of the Lostverse TV show Exposé on Sun’s TV.)
This episode was written by the Exposé team of Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis, and I’ve been a cheerleader for them for a while, but they lost me this time. Flashback/forward twists like the one employed here have been used to great effect so far. The end of Through The Looking Glass totally discombobulated us, and now that that new show format has been introduced, every episode begins with confusion, as we wait to see whether we’ll be in the past or the future. In The Other Woman, there was a bit of clunky writing about Juliet being a celebrity that led us to believe she was one of the Oceanic Six, even though I would have been very surprised if the showrunners intended to use one of those six slots on someone who was never on the plane.
Well, if that was clunky, having Jin be shown in flashback and Sun in flashforward was not only kind of obvious (Jin’s suit, hair, phone and generally hostile demeanour pretty much gave the twist away), but was done for no other reason than to screw with us. This is what many criticisms of the episode focused on. Most of the time, Lost is surprisingly rewatchable, considering it depends on slow revelation for dramatic effect. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed going back and seeing episodes from previous seasons, and AV Club writer Noel Murray is currently rewatching the first season while he recaps the current one.
They’re not all good, though. The Ana-Lucia, Boone and Shannon episodes feel like a huge waste of time, as those arcs went nowhere (though the quick shout-out to Ana-Lucia during The Other Woman was nice). I often feel the same about Eko’s episodes, although there was enough going on in those to make up for it. Same with Charlie’s. This flashback episode, however, contained no new information about Jin’s past, and what little tension it created was down to the strenuous efforts of first-time director Stephen Semel, graduating from the editing room after over 20 episodes splicing and Aviding and whatnot.
During the first viewing, the dramatic Michael Giacchino score, fast cutting, and panicky performance by Daniel Dae Kim certainly made it feel like we were watching a mad scramble to get to hospital in time for the birth of his daughter (though I started wondering what was happening early on, as this was very obviously pre-island behaviour for Jin, and the thought that he would become a wimp after being so fighty was disheartening). Second viewing, while getting these screencaps, and the whole thing looked ridiculous. Jin needs a panda! Will Jin get a panda! Yes! But no! It’s been improbably stolen! Hurry, Jin! Or Mr. Paik will be very angry! I couldn’t give a fuck about Mr. Paik being angry with Jin, and even worse, this is two months into Jin’s employment, which means that while his panic is justifiable (he was certainly this nervous when first employed), it serves no narrative purpose other than to be a plot device.
That the show had other good things about it has almost been overshadowed by the absurdity of these moments. It was as if Jason Bourne was buying a panda, not Jin. The only thing interesting moment came when an impassive stranger knocked his clunky phone out of his hand and it broke, and then someone stole his cab from him with the panda inside (the sort of thing that happens in bad movies set in New York), which led to another intense trip to the toy shop. For a moment I wondered if he was in hell, destined to eternally search for a panda toy, thinking he was missing his daughter’s birth and not knowing he was dead. Perhaps a step too far outside the boundaries of the Lost mythos, but it would have justified all the drama over something that, in terms of the show, means nothing. Though Jin’s anger face is always a joy to behold.
My only other hope for this season is that Mr. Paik will play a larger part in the show in future (he is in cahoots with evil Charles Widmore, after all). Maybe his daughter somehow figures into things. Or the panda had a virus in it. Or a bomb. Anything to make this bait-and-switch mean something! That said, though plotwise it was cheap and empty, of course the first time we saw the episode, it had an emotional charge, and though I’m mad at Kitsis and Horowitz for making this twist so mechanical and information-light, I have nothing but praise for Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjin Kim for selling it. And this panda plot did remind us of what Jin once was: a cog in a machine. Nothing like the man he became over four seasons of this show.
As usual, it was a joy to see the Kims together, but Semel (who did a good job first time out, though it was a shaky script to be working from) only put them in the same frame toward the start of the episode as they discussed what their baby would be called.
After that, as the flashback/forward separation progressed, we still saw them in the same frame, but distance was represented with the camera positioned far away (more on that use of distance in a bit).
How awesome is the island breakfast nook, btw? I’m beginning to think living on the island wouldn’t be such a bad idea, as long as Smokey keeps to him/her/itself. Of course, at this point in the island plot, Sun and Jin are getting on okay, but after Kate spreads some gossip about her island nemesis Juliet, Sun worries enough to confront Faraday about his (nonexistent?) rescue plans, which doesn’t quite go the way she expected. (Again the camera is positioned farther away.)
Sun is uneasy with Faraday’s non-answer, and she chooses to go to Locke’s camp. Jin acquiesces, and that’s when Juliet provides the episode highlight, telling Jin about Sun’s affair, something that came so completely out of nowhere that we wore this next face for the next five minutes. Wow, Juliet is cold. And awesome.
Special Bonus Screencap! Jin’s not the only one with a magnificent fury-face.
At that point Sun and Jin begin to become separated visually just as they are in the flashback/forward narrative. This is probably the last time they are properly shown onscreen in the same frame, and this is where Jin separates himself from her.
Kudos again to Daniel Dae Kim. There’a lot of speculation about whether he’s dead or just stuck on the island, and I really hope it’s the latter. I’ve liked DDK since first seeing him as the useless Gavin on Angel, and watching him get minor parts in almost every show on TV (most notably bringing Jack Bauer the phone a lot in 24) was simultaneously heartening (Hey! It’s Daniel Dae Kim in another show!) and frustrating (Oh, he’s dead). We need Jin to survive because one, he’s gorgeous and the ladies think he’s a hunk (I have this on good authority), so he needs more screentime, and two, he’s a good actor. Perhaps not Michael Emerson level good, but still, he really goes through the wringer in this one, selling a lot of the absurdity with his intensity. We need more DDK!
Of course, he comes to an understanding that the man he was in the past (that we’re seeing in flashback, though we might not know that at that point) doesn’t exist any more, and it’s all down to the ever-wonderful Bernard, played by Sam Anderson, to point this out.
Of course, this is a special moment for Angel fans, as Anderson played Holland Manners, Gavin’s evil boss at Wolfram and Hart. I’d like to think this was put there for us Mutant Enemy fans, and not just because Bernard is the only other husband on the island (at least, husband with wife present that we know of).
The final scene between Jin and Sun, with Jin explaining that he understands why Sun cheated on him, was simple and moving, but we don’t see them together, even though they’re in the same room.
At first we see them in profile, looking at each other from one shot to another.
Then we get third-person shots over their shoulders…
…but we can barely see the person in the foreground. (Sun is actually in this shot, but the way it’s lit means you can’t even tell it’s the back of her head taking up half the screen.)
They reconcile and hug, a powerful emotional moment, and beautifully played by both, but still we don’t see their faces together.
The next time we see Sun, she has a daughter, and then we find out that Jin isn’t coming (that silly contrived twist!), but we do find out that he has or would have had a daughter. The birth goes kinda okay, especially considering in an earlier scene, there’s a possibility that she might have to have a C-section. When her doctor give her the news, she freaks out and starts calling out for Jin, which is just another way to trick the audience prior to the twist. At the end of the scene, after the writers have put Sun in enough distress with the threat of surgery to call out Jin’s name, the birth gets back on track, and the C-section is forgotten. A low point for Lost in general. But look! Baby covered in ick!
Even though I didn’t like that narrative silliness, that birth, and Sun’s reconciliation with Jin, is made heartbreaking as the twist is revealed and we see that Sun is alone in the future, with only Hurley to keep her company, and only then so they can go and visit Sun’s grave. (And what’s with Hurley’s relief that only Sun would be there? Is this linked to his guilt over joining Locke’s group?)
And yes, I was annoyed with a lot of things in this episode, and yes, this scene contained no forward-motion information and some pretty simple dialogue, but my God it made me cry, and watching it again to get screencaps made me cry even more. As soon as you see the gravestone, and Michael Giacchino’s music rises up, I was finished off. I’m mad at Kitsis and Horowitz for the sloppiness earlier, but the final scene was so great it almost doesn’t matter.
Though really, how much did they do at the end? Any writing is going to shine when you have an actress as talented as Yunjin Kim involved. The scene’s simplicity was what made it work, and it made up for a lot of contrivance. Good job, too. But is Jin alive or dead? I’m hoping he’s alive, but bear in mind that the music that moved me so much is a theme from the first season called Win One For The Reaper. It might not count, but I’m not hopeful. I gather someone dies in this week’s episode. Maybe we’ll find out right away. ::sniff:: I know how you feel, Sun.
So, with the show in low-info mode, what did we learn this week? Precious little, really. I don’t think we even still know what the boat doctor’s name is. For now, as he’s played by Marc Vann from CSI: Classic, I’ll just call him Ecklie until I hear differently.
We also learned that that breakfast nook is seriously great. I got obsessed with it, and figured I would probably go on about it in this post. I was right!
I liked that they’re getting some use out of the boat that Kate and Sawyer stole from Other Prison Island, though it made me anxious that going too far out will trigger the time-travelling that affected Desmond and Minkowski.
Also, we discovered that Kate’s stinksheen cannot be banished for long, if this picture is anything to go by (and how catty can she be when one of her hunky fellas is being seduced by former cohorts of Ben? That was another episode highlight).
Most importantly, Sayid doesn’t like beans, apparently.
I’m forgetting something pretty important: this was the week we found out who Ben’s spy was. Frank had an important job to do; the task handed to him by Keamy, who approached our aviator hero from the shadows. Was Keamy the spy?
Not long after that we finally got to meet Regina, played by Death Proof superhero Zoe Bell. When we first see her she’s at the end of a corridor, her face obscured by her hair. Was Regina the spy??!!!?!
Erm, nope.
Or if she was, working for Ben was not much fun. Nice to see Cuselof made the most of having a stunt hero in the cast. The fact that you can see her face as she plummets into the ocean really sells that moment. Superb stuff. Of course, this event finally brought Captain Gault out of hiding. We first see him at a distance as well. Was Captain Gault the spy?
Seeing as how the spy has been warning Desmond and Sayid not to trust the captain, he would have to be playing a really convoluted game, even for someone working for the patron saint of convoluted plans. He takes our dishevelled heroes to his cabin, and shows them the black box of the fake Oceanic 815, and sticks the death (or exhumation) of 324 people on Ben’s shoulders. Okay, definitely not the spy.
Later on, Dr. Ecklie Until I Find Out The Character’s Actual Name finds a room for our hunky protagonists, but it’s all gross due to cockroaches (which Sayid seems to hate more than beans) and a big bloodstain on the wall. I mean, come on, someone blew their brains out in there? Seriously, there’s cabin fever, and then there’s Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Luckily there’s a janitor at the end of the corridor.
He approaches from a distance, his face obscured by shadow, and OMG IT’S MICHAEL!!!
Who would’ve thought it? Other than pretty much everyone who follows the show, who would have heard about Harold Perrineau’s return, either through the really big announcement last year or by seeing his name in the credits for the past six weeks. Still, it’s great to see him back as “Kevin Johnson”, and at least now we know who Ben’s spy is, though hopefully Michael the spy won’t go nuts and blow his brains out. With him gone, who would clean it up? Desmond and Sayid look like they’re in no mood to sort it out, though Dr. Ecklie has almost certainly seen worse.
Or do we really know for sure? We know Ben has a spy onboard, and know Michael is onboard (or that he’s an older Walt, if some of the online theories are to be believed), but that doesn’t mean they’re one and the same. Does Michael owe any debt to Ben? He only helped deliver Jack, Kate and Sawyer to Ben because of his debt to Walt, and not because he felt any fondness for the Others. For all we know Michael is just there because he feels the same pull toward the island that Beardy Jack and Hurley feel in their flashforwards. That could be enough to make Michael go to the trouble of hiding his identity and figuring out a way to get back onto the island.
Considering how Keamy and Regina were introduced this episode, it could be one of them. Certainly Regina was looking pretty tortured, either by island-generated brain-craziness, or guilt over working for Ben. As for Keamy, who knows what he’s up to. Actually, all of this is massive conjecture. It’s almost certainly Michael. Now we get to find out how he came to be involved with Ben in tonight’s episode. Or not, as is often the case.
Also in tonight’s episode, more Captain Gault!
More Desmond and Sayid yay!
Less Hurley in a suit boo!
And a lot less of another character, who will die tonight. Who will it be? Join us in our weekly chant: NOT SAWYER NOT SAWYER NOT SAWYER!!!!!!
In previous posts on this thread, we may have given the impression that what had once been seemingly beyond salvaging had become a potentially interesting show. Titles such as “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Torchwood“, “Martha Makes Everything Better”, and “I May Not Like The Taste Of Humble Pie But I’ll Happily Eat It” may have given the impression that what once had been the canker sore on the lip of British TV drama had become a soilbed from which challenging and intelligent sci-fi might one day spring.
We now realise that those flawed but interesting moments were an aberration, not a newly established status quo, and the usual standards of the show would be restored as soon as an opening was found. Future post titles such as “If In Doubt, Having A Character Wave A Gun About Will Fill A Minute Of Screentime”, “Dear God, Will Someone Inject Some Dignity Into This Debacle?”, and “Does Anyone On This Show Understand The Concept Of Plagiarism?” will hopefully restore normality to this blog. Thank you for your patience. (Again, apologies to Private Eye.)
I’m in two minds about this. It was great seeing the show stretch a little during the Martha Trilogy, but it wasn’t really enough for it to become “appointment TV” (oh how I hate that phrase), so I felt like the TV village idiot had been rehabilitated Flowers-For-Algernon-style, and I had no one to laugh at and throw rocks at anymore (though we do intend to start watching CSI: Miami again pretty soon). Last week’s “terrestrial” episode, Something Borrowed, was a return to previous shoddy form, giving Meat a run for its money, and brazenly referring to its own unoriginality in its title. Well, I reckon Something Stolen and Ineptly Rehashed would be closer to the mark, but you get my point.
Any seriousness of purpose the show might have built up over the patchy but promising Martha Trilogy was stripped away, replaced with knuckle-chewingly inane comedy, staggering contrivance, a total dismissal of all logic, replacement of human motivation with plot-furthering stupidity, poorly executed Evil Dead homages, and inept action moments. I can’t decide which is worse: Meat, this, or the season opener with James Marsters and his big fat paycheck.
What was so poor about it? Perhaps it was because it was a Gwen-centric episode. I’m really not crazy about the character at all, and couldn’t give two shits for her relationship with Jack. I also find it odd that she is suddenly cast as the comedy relief in the show, being sidelined almost entirely during the ostensibly more dramatic episodes of the Martha Trilogy. Maybe it’s a temporary thing, or just because this was the comedy episode of the season, but her line-readings and gestures were very very peculiar in this, as broad as you can possibly imagine.
Comedy episodes of most dramatic shows are to be avoided, unless of course the show has a strong comedic element already (Buffy, Angel, and Firefly did this better than most). Even a very dramatic show can pull it off. Lost did it with Expose and, arguably, Tricia Tanaka Is Dead, despite the oft-humourless tone of the show. By comparison, Torchwood is obviously under the impression that it’s already very funny, but the odd comedic line is either childish, obvious, or poorly delivered, and sometimes all three at once, so imagine the pain caused by an episode that concentrates solely on this kind of broad silliness. I know appreciation of what is funny or not is subjective, but how anyone could find this ineptly staged juvenile nonsense a joy to watch is a mystery to me.
So, in a effort to ensure that the overall internet opinion about this show doesn’t skew exclusively towards the positive, I present The Ten Worst Things About Something Borrowed, by Admiral Neck, aged 5 1/4.
10. The Pointless Editing In The First Scene.
After flashing back to Jack’s bizarre reaction to Gwen’s engagement from the season opener, we cut to a depressing Cardiff nightclub and two depressingly loud and obnoxious women in cowboy hats greeting Gwen with a depressing song about her having anal sex. Yay, hen nights! Is there anything more entertaining than drunk women talking about sex at the top of their lungs and then cackling? Still, I bet there’s a stripper.
This then cuts to Gwen chasing a shapeshifting alien, which is exciting! And then back to the hen night, where a stripper arrives! And then back to the exciting chase! And then back to the hen night! And then… You get the picture.
Firstly, as Rhys points out later, Jack’s an asshole for sending her out to kill aliens on the night before her wedding. Second, Gwen has friends? When did this happen? Third, while chasing the alien she gets bitten by it, which is the inciting incident. (I can imagine it was referred to as that during script meetings.) This fact is subtly revealed when one of Gwen’s gobby friends asks her what the time is, and Gwen suddenly unveils the biggest pre-wedding bandage you’ve ever seen.
What’s that on her arm, the viewer thinks. I wonder how she got that! Like this.
Look at the size of those space gnashers! Jack shows up to save Gwen (so he was obviously available for alien hunting, which once more begs the question as to why Gwen was getting into danger), and his reaction to this enormous wound is, “Owen should take a look at that.” You think?
He obviously doesn’t check it very closely, as she ends up getting pregnant from it. Stupid dead doctor. Anyway, though there are several things about this dire opening that annoyed me, it’s the editing that irked me the most. Is it a suspense scene? No, because we keep seeing Gwen alive and relatively healthy during that scene. Is the storytelling device useful for teasing us with hints about Gwen’s night and then paying it off with reveals? No, because we don’t have to wait very long to find out. Is it used to generate the funny? Next question. Is it just another way of showing the contrast between Gwen’s social life, which is the same as most lairy boozed-up people of her age, and her secret life chasing aliens and getting knocked up by them. Almost certainly, but we spent the entire first season doing this, and getting Rhys involved in Torchwood’s affairs should have drawn a veil over that (geddit?). Instead, we’re still banging away at that point. When I realised the show was slipping back into its bad habits I started to hear warning bells about the loss of momentum from the Martha Trilogy. Time elapsed: 3 minutes 15 seconds.
9. Alien Impregnation? Really?
For an start, it’s a cliched idea. Even a show I loved, Angel, featured Cordelia getting knocked up twice by demons (okay, so the second time was a way to get around her real-life pregnancy, and it did bring about the excellent season four arc with Jasmine, but still). Even the relatively tame Star Trek: The Nextest Generation had Troy get pregnantised by a glowing light; a Hallmark Card way to have a character raped.
Just on a personal level, stories about women being impregnated by aliens don’t really appeal to me much, mostly because it reduces the woman to a reproductive system that is vulnerable to invasion, and it’s icky and tasteless and kind of insulting. Admittedly it can be done well (Alien 3 handled it with the appropriate seriousness), but most often it’s done really really badly (I’m thinking Species II here; a despicable film, and poorly made to boot). I get the “appeal” of the concept, and my love of Cronenberg should give you an idea of my stance on body horror (short version; yay!), but done wrong these stories treat something very serious in an exploitative and distasteful way. It makes me feel very uncomfortable.
So imagine how I feel when it’s played for laughs. For fuck’s sake, Gwen has an alien egg in her belly! Only when the team realise childbirth involves her evisceration do they take it seriously. No amount of over-the-top pickle-chomping and high-larious wedding-day tantrum-throwing will disguise the fact that Gwen’s body has been invaded.
She’s gorging herself on phallic objects! My sides are splitting! Because I am the host for an alien foetus, obviously.
8. Gwen’s Desperation About Getting Married Blinding Her To The Consequences Of Such A Decision.
So, Gwen is the host for the egg of a shapeshifting alien. It’s the day of the wedding. Jack is concerned for her health, obviously, as he doesn’t know what the alien gestation is like (useless former Time Agent!), and both he and Owen strongly suggest she postpone the wedding while they figure things out. But Gwen really wants to get married anyway. So they let her.
It’s very generous of everyone to let Gwen do what she wants, and certainly it’s a tradition that the wedding day, while special for everyone, is even more special for the bride, but there’s a line to be drawn there. Right across her enormous pregnant belly. Why would anyone in the world think that this was a good idea? Jack and Owen and Rhys all know this is a bad idea, but she blunders on anyway, using yelling and weird acting tics do her arguing for her.
What’s worse is we tried to give the show the benefit of the doubt, and entertained the idea that this could be explained away as possible brainwashing by the alien in her body, that in its culture the birth demands some kind of ceremony, and it was making Gwen desire a wedding so that it could be born properly. The alternative was that Gwen is a halfwit. Sadly, she really is. She’s just a girl that wants her wedding day and won’t even postpone for a couple of days to sort out the whole possibly-deadly-egg-in-the-belly thing. Even worse, later on Tosh tells her she made the right decision, which means the guys are pragmatic about the whole impregnation thing, but the women are all about the pretty dresses and the wonder of the wedding day princess thing. Those dames sure do love a good wedding!
Seems like the writer, Phil Ford (more on him later) was aware that he was making Gwen do stupid things, as Gwen suddenly realises (after telling her parents that she is pregnant and then realising they’re excited about a grandchild that will never exist) that perhaps she is doing the wrong thing, but bringing attention to it doesn’t get rid of the fact that the episode was written to show a wedding framed within the format of Torchwood, using the alien pregnancy as a heavy-handed way to metaphorically dramatise the effect of Gwen’s wedding ceremony on our characters, and to get to that point it was necessary to remove all semblance of logical human behaviour from the show. It’s contrivance, pure and simple, and is utterly unforgivable. By now I realised the show was back to its usual dreadful state, and the scene that convinced me, featuring Gwen’s overjoyed parents and her sudden realisation that she’s made a mistake, is only eleven minutes into the episode, and the worst is yet to come.
7. Comedy Relief!
Gwen and Rhys’ friends are clumsily introduced (though I think I remember Rhys referring to Mervyn or Banana Boat in a previous episode. I should remember, as I usually hang on his every word), mostly to fill the cast out a bit, but also to provide laughs in this most amusing of comedy episodes.
All of them are lecherous jerks, which means they’ll probably be joining the Torchwood team very soon. It was all very depressing for the actors, especially Jonathan Lewis Owen, who plays Banana Boat as a cross between Prince William, a Welsh chav, and a lobotomised sex-addict.
He had to bumble through some awful dialogue, which wasn’t his fault, but I so dearly wanted him to die horribly. Sorry Jonathan Lewis Owen! I’m sure you’re a lovely chap in real life. However, he kept chatting up Tosh (of all people), and even managed to molest her while trapped inside a web of bin bags weaved by the alien. Here are the bin bags…
…and here is Banana Boat’s face as his genitals are crushed by Tosh in annoyance over his lechery and loudness.
Sadly, he was not to be killed in a terrible fashion. Instead it was the turn of Mervyn, the other lecherous wanker, who leered at the alien…
…and then got his genitals chomped off by her during what he thought was going to be a sexxy sex act.
So, men are mindless sex-obsessed beered-up pigs, and women want to get married despite alien inpregnation, the heartbreak of their parents, and terrible danger. They will also happily damage the gonads of any man in range. And gay men?
(Yes yes, this is all played for laughs, and if I was going to be really generous I would say it could be an un-PC spoof of the show’s usual admirably PC stance, but I think they were just going for easy gags. Let’s not go overestimating the intelligence of anyone involved in making Torchwood, okay?)
6. Tosh.
In Mad Men, Betty Draper memorably (and anvilliciously) asked a pertinent question about her husband; “Who is Don Draper?” (The answer to which is, “Don Draper is Dick Whitman!”) Well, I ask, who is Tosh? And should I care? (The answer to which is, “no”.) Early on in the episode she stalks Owen again, in an attempt to get him to attend the wedding. She keeps on that it isn’t a date, but obviously she thinks it is, what with her continual simpering and annoying passive-aggressiveness.
Five minutes later, she’s beating up Banana Boat and mouthing tough guy dialogue.
Oh my God! It’s like McKee says! Reveal the true character through action and not dialogue! So she’s a tough guy at heart, really. Except she’s all jittery and sentimental when she’s talking to Gwen about the wedding.
So what is Tosh? Whatever the scene needs at any given point. She’s just a cipher, and as such means nothing. That’s a criticism of Tosh and the lack of show bible that I’ve already gone on about in the past, and not a criticism of Naoki Mori. Rumour has it she’s being written out at the end of the season. Hopefully in future she’ll get a chance to bring to life a coherent character instead of this nebulous gap where a recognisable human should be.
5. What To Do With Dead Owen.
Having turned Owen into the only character other than Jack that’s not just a boring human who’s obsessed with sex, the show ran riot with the concept for two episodes (one of which was okay, the other was less so but still littered with interesting moments). Now? Well, it was a Gwen episode, so there wasn’t really anything for him to do. Other than wear badges for no apparent reason.
I can understand it. I don’t really have a problem with it, and the rumour about Tosh leaving extends to him too. A shame, as Burn Gorman has been growing on us, and we won’t get to experience his gun machismo. It’s often the episode highlight.
I really have to find a way to get his Countrycide effort on here. It was the funniest thing on TV in 2007 that didn’t include Alec Baldwin or Tracy Morgan.
4. Worst. Shapechanging Carnivorous Alien Antagonist. Ever.
Annoying enough that Cap’n Jack’s alien expertise is so incomplete that he doesn’t immediately realise the nature of the creature they’re up against despite having been alive for hundreds or dozens or however many years he’s been around, thus putting Gwen and her family in danger (yet more obnoxious contrivance). It’s up to Owen and his badges to figure out that it is a Nostrovite, which will kill Gwen to get hold of the egg.
Even worse was that the first shapeshifter they go up against is easily killed by a bullet and the second one becomes enraged with an alien babycraziness that makes it almost invincible, which is the sort of empty and contrived expositional nonsense used to justify plot developments that I often refer to as Reason X (“If we’re going to save the President’s daughter we have to disguise ourselves as nuns because [Reason X]!”). It’s like a MacGuffin, but even more contrived.
Worst of all is just how crap the alien is, convenient invulnerability notwithstanding. It’s killed one person and trapped two others in its non-biodegradable web, so does it change shape in order to ensure it will not be caught? Nope. It stands around with the same face, making no effort to find the woman carrying its child, and when confronted by human intervention in the shape of Tosh, it does this. Also, note that even though Jack and Tosh are equipped with normal guns, for some reason they sound like the old toy gun I had as a kid that had four different laser sound settings.
It then gives itself away by turning into someone at the wedding, i.e. Rhys’ mother, played by Nerys Hughes, abandoning all her dignity to run around with fake gnashers and bad fingers. It would be a good ploy, to become someone that the host of its egg knows so it can get closer to her. Sadly, it doesn’t go after Gwen, choosing instead to mingle and chat with Gwen’s mother, though Jack and co. assume it would go after Gwen. Because that makes sense. Instead, it just sets up this case of mistaken identity, which might be the worst ninety seconds of TV this year.
“Come to Mama!” That, my friends, is Nostrovite for EPIC FAIL!
3. Jack And Gwen, Sitting In A Tree…
I used a hammer on my head to try to unremember the first season of Torchwood, so I might be wrong here, but did Jack and Gwen spend as much time drooling over each other as they do in the second season?
It seems to be the emotional core of the show, this love story between the human and the immortal ::coughCordyandAngelcough::, and it’s worked in other shows, so why not here? Well, because they have no chemistry, and Jack’s got a cavalier attitude to relationships anyway which undermines his sudden sadness here, and Gwen is now happily betraying her husband while pretending to be loyal which makes her seem less like a sympathetic and tortured heroine and more like a bit of a cow, and Jack is frigging immortal and should have higher standards. For God’s sake, he was in love with the Doctor! He’s the ideal man for him, because they are equally galactic. You’re telling me Jack’s been around the cosmos and he’s getting depressed because a Suzi Quatro lookalike is getting married to this guy?
No accounting for taste, I guess. Still, that’s a failure of the series in general, but in this episode she barely acknowledges her lovepain for Jack until defending her decision to get married with an egg in her belly, where she says something along the lines of, “I’m marrying Rhys because he will have me and no one else will. No one. Right? No one at all. Eh Jack? No one at all.” Rhys is standing there the whole time and misses the coded signals and thinks she’s saying nice things about him, which proves what a dope he is. Even stupider, this entire scene, where Gwen seems to forget that speech about loving Rhys with barely any prompting, which leads to this hair-eating insanity.
Best thing I can say about it is that it gives John Barrowman his best acting opportunities, as shown by his inner turmoil here.
One day you’re going to be a big head in a jar, but it’s a long time to be sulking over Gwen. Oh Captain Jack! When will you be fun again?
2. Cliche, Plagiarism, and Laziness.
I’ve already pointed out that alien impregnation has been done before, and alien shapechangers or chameleons are staples of sci-fi, so if you’re willing to be generous to the show (and I know a lot of people are), you could say it’s unfair to criticise the show for using these popular plots. Okay. I’ll grudgingly give you that. But can I please rail against the wedding sequence in the middle of the episode, where Jack, Ianto and Owen race to the wedding to save Gwen from the Nostrovite and Jack bursts in two seconds after the vicar asks if anyone has any objection to the marriage going ahead? Can I? Please? Because that shit is just unacceptable.
If only there was a Wikipedia page listing all the times that plot development has been used, though I wonder if there is enough server space in the world. Pretty much every soap wedding features this moment, as well as every crappy romantic comedy made between 1980 and 1999, at the very least. It’s like littering. Just because everyone does it every so often doesn’t make it right. (For the record, I don’t litter. Not even that one time when I hid the polybag down the side of a Tube seat. That was someone else entirely.)
Even worse than that, the show plagiarises itself! A few weeks back, in Reset, Owen has to use a nifty gadget called a Singularity Scalpel to burn away the insects infesting Martha’s body, though he is not entirely sure how to use the machine. After a couple of near misses that blow up things around him, he succeeds in destroying the lifeform without blowing out her spine. This week, because his one hand is knackered (a consequence of his continuing status as a dead person), he can’t operate the scalpel, and has to hand it over to Rhys. The set up is acceptable, and it’s a nice reference to Owen’s new shortcomings, so I have no trouble with that. What does annoy me is that this means Rhys has to go through exactly the same thing Owen did just three episodes previously, with the panic and near-misses. Does BBC Wales think we have amnesia?
Just to make things even more annoying, during the dance scene at the end, Jack cuts in on Gwen and Rhys’ dance just so he can have a moment alone with her, which is yet another convention of this kind of plot, and then Ianto shows up to cut in as well, but he doesn’t ask for Gwen’s hand. He wants to dance with his boyfriend! It’s not the most amazing moment ever, but it’s easily the episode highlight, and a pleasing twist on that cliche.
So they can do it if they try. One of the best things about Buffy and Angel is that it would set up the potentially cliched plot early on, and then subvert it at least once if not more during the episode. It amazed me that they could keep doing that on a weekly basis. If the Torchwood showrunners are going to steal anything from Mutant Enemy, why can’t they steal that philosophy? It would instantly improve the show 1000%.
2.5. Ripping Off The Evil Dead.
Connected to that complaint, another pop culture legend stolen by the show came toward the end, with Rhys preparing to attack the shapeshifter, disguised as his mother, with a chainsaw, prior to it being blown up by Jack and his big gun, leading to black blood goop flying everywhere. Sounds like The Evil Dead? Jack agrees.
It definitely seems that this episode was meant to be a homage to that hyper-real Sam Raimi style of horror comedy, as well as the big silly sci-fi B-movies I grew up with, and I’ll bet Phil Ford is a fan of such and figured this was his chance to pay homage to that with over-the-top action, sex jokes, violence and exploding bodies. Of course, that’s all well and good in practice, but 1) pointing it out in dialogue is a failure of nerve, and 2) the show might have the confidence to think it can pull something like this off, but it doesn’t have the ability.
It’s the kind of amateurish stuff teenagers dream of filming, and I know when I was young I imagined myself as a West Midlands Peter Jackson, making horror movies with lots of aliens exploding and men standing around posing with big guns, because that’s what happened in all of my favourite films. There are so many of these plagiaristic films made on shoestring budgets littering the sci-fi/horror sections of HMV’s DVD shelves that we really really don’t need any more, especially if they have nothing new to offer. This certainly didn’t. And that gun looks stupid. And even if it didn’t look stupid, no one on this show looks cool with guns.
Torchwood showrunners, watch Planet Terror to see how it’s done. I may have parted ways with Robert Rodriguez in recent years, but that was a massive return to form, and exactly the kind of crazy horror blow-out Torchwood thought it was for one whole week. The gulf in quality between the two is vast, and it’s not a consequence of the BBC show having a smaller budget. It’s the lack of imagination that dooms the show, not the lack of pounds.
1. The Retcon Finale.
At the end of the episode, much to Jack’s displeasure, Gwen finally gets to have her happy moment with Rhys, alien egg disintegrated and everything back to a semblance of normality. The families watch with joyous faces as Gwen and Rhys share their vows, and Canyon and I assumed Jack had gone around to everyone with Retcon pills and erased their memories of the terrible day. BTW, I know the Retcon pills are a dreadful ripoff of the Neuraliser from Men In Black, but boldly calling them Retcon pills made me very happy as a comic nerd, reminding me of Dan Slott’s boldly named Retroactive Cannon (AKA Ret-Can) from She-Hulk.
We then cut to everyone having the dance and meal afterwards, and everything seems hunkydory, until suddenly the assembled guests start falling asleep. Turns out Jack has administered the retcon pills after the wedding ceremony, and not before.
So what they’re saying is that once the Nostrovite was defeated and Gwen returned to non-pregnant normality, the guests just accepted this turn of events, and went about celebrating the wedding. Even though they had been terrorised by a shapechanging alien threatening to kill the mother of the bride. Even though several of the guests had been running around with guns. Even though the best man’s dismembered corpse was lying in pieces in a room upstairs!!!
To make things worse, Jack’s use of the retcon pills robs everyone of their memories of the wedding. Perhaps there is a way for them to talk to the guests and make them think they saw it, as shown in Men In Black when J and K interrogate people post-neuralisation, but still, why not do it before the ceremony so that they can still have the full memory of the wedding and forget the gunfights and shootings and aliens and half-eaten best men for fuck’s sake!?!?!? There is no reason other than monumental stupidity on the part of the writer, director and showrunner. How can this be considered logical or defensible? How is this not insulting the intelligence of the viewers? I call super-colossal-gigantic BULLSHIT on the whole thing.
The thing that makes me most angry, though, is that this was written by Phil Ford, who was pretty much solely responsible for the scripts on the recent excellent revamp of Captain Scarlet, which was the most interesting and intelligent early-teen-targeted show on TV until ITV predictably got cold feet and cancelled it. Those scripts were tight and serious and sometimes shocking. I thoroughly recommend it to everyone.
I’ll grant that this episode was obviously conceived as a way to comment on real life using the trappings of sci-fi in the same way that Buffy and Angel used horror conventions to do the same thing, and as such Something Borrowed was chock-full of metaphors for marriage-as-horror-nightmare, but they were either crashingly obvious (mother-in-law jokes), half-baked (could the shapeshifter have represented the way your friends change their opinion of you once you get into a relationship? Or am I giving the show too much credit?), or severely malfunctioning (the impregnation could have represented the second thoughts she was having about marrying Rhys because of her love for Jack, but why dramatise that as subtext when it comes up as text over and over again towards the end of the episode?). That said, even if it did work, that contrivance at the end with the retcon pill kills the episode deader than dead. It’s just unforgivable.
So, once more, any fans wandering in here will ask why I’m still watching. Well, the next episode, already screened on BBC Three, is written by P.J. Hammond, who I’ve gone on about before. The preview looked peculiar, which is what we want and what he does very very well (if you get a chance, watch his wholly original sci-fi/horror series Sapphire and Steel to see him at full quirky strength). I have high hopes for it. But the next three episodes? All written by Chris Chibnall? Let’s just say I’m looking forward to them for different reasons. Look away if you don’t want to see the spoilers from the BBC Press Office.
When a local teenager disappears, Gwen is drawn into an investigation that reveals a darker side of Torchwood, as Doctor Who writer Russell T Davies’s award-winning drama continues. Hundreds of people have disappeared without trace, but Jack is obstructing attempts to find them. The answer seems to lie in the rift – literally – and as Gwen follows the trail, she makes a shocking discovery.
That sounds intriguing, I have to say, but Chibnall will find a way to screw it up. Making it another Gwen-centric episode is already a bad start. As for the next episode…
A booby-trapped building explodes and knocks the team unconscious, as Doctor Who writer Russell T Davies’s award-winning drama continues. As each team member’s life flashes before their eyes, viewers learn how each of them was recruited to Torchwood: Captain Jack was initiated into a shocked Victorian Torchwood in 1899; Toshiko went on a daring mission to trade alien technology for her mother’s life; Ianto wooed Jack with coffee and a flair for alien-catching; and Owen had a medical revelation that changed how he saw the world.
…::coughOutofGasfromFireflycough:: Also, Ianto woos Jack with coffee? I can’t wait for that! I wonder if he will mention his girlfriend Lisa, who got cybermanned in the first season. I seem to recall him mourning her for the majority of that season. If she doesn’t get even namechecked, I will certainly poke fun of it here. Oh boy, a special treat for the finale!
Captain John Hart returns to have his revenge on Torchwood in the concluding episode of Doctor Who writer Russell Davies’s award-winning drama. Taking Captain Jack prisoner, he sends him back in time for a long overdue reunion. Without their leader, Torchwood are faced with a city flooded with Weevils, on the brink of destruction. But who is Captain John really working for? Can anyone trust him? And how great a price must Torchwood pay to save the city?
Weevils everywhere! James Marsters! A great price to be paid that might feature the removal of two major characters if the rumours I heard are true! Don’t forget, it’s on tomorrow night and Good Friday. Set your PVRs, Torchwood fans!
In recent weeks I managed to anger and annoy several billion Torchwood fans with such posts as “Torchwood Smells Like A Big Old Poo,” “My Cats Can Write Better Than This And They’re Stupid Even For Cats,” and “I Fear The Weeping Will Never End.” Luckily a few hardy souls who had also watched the show were similarly appalled by it, and let me know they appreciated my attempts to sail my boat into the heart of darkness and kill the bald and overweight method actor waiting there.
Unfortunately, it was not to last. With the introduction of MARTHA JONES to the cast for three episodes, the entire show seemed to exorcise itself of some of its demons, with a high-watermark reached with the broadcast of Reset. The third episode of the Martha Trilogy (as it shall henceforth be known), A Day In the Death, was also okay, until the final moments, where it all kind of fell apart pretty badly (and not just because I don’t like Richard Briers). Still, this triggered a flurry of posts, including, “Vague Competence Is So Much Less Interesting Than Abject Failure,” “ZOMG Martha Is A Miracle Worker,” and “Is This A Thematic Coherence I See Before Me?”. I trust this new attitude will not confuse our readers. (Apologies to Private Eye for this rip.)
Yes, Torchwood finally improved, with MARTHA JONES’ temporary appearance pushing the show to a new standard. Other than in the first of her episodes there wasn’t much for her to do other than tread on Owen’s toes, but her natural charm was much easier to watch than Naoki Mori and Gareth David-Lloyd’s attempts, and gave the other characters something new to do, having exhausted every other possible interpersonal dynamic long ago.
Better than that, Owen’s death and awkward resurrection strengthened the show by not only giving the core team a new non-human member, but also mirroring Jack’s immortality, showing the dark side of such a power. He’s just a reanimated corpse with no cool powers, and as such is like a corporeal ghost hanging around and being mopey. It’s way more interesting than it sounds, and the idea has been developed pretty well, considering how this show usually does things in a half-arsed manner.
Torchwood has dealt with death before but in a looser way, and as the show cast around for ideas from other sci-fi stories to mimic, it got lost among the man-out-of-time, sex-alien, cannibal nonsense. Now that the show has set up a thematic arc (Resurrection Gloves, immortals and all), it’s become about something, instead of just being a silly macho no-brainer. Plus, Owen apparently likes the world-conquering math-rock goliath that is Atlas by Battles, which is okay by me.
Okay, those episodes weren’t perfect. Two of them ended with long emotional goodbyes to Owen, which came to nothing because even though he was in peril he survived. Also, Tosh has been portrayed as the unrequited lovefool of the team, someone to root for as her “charms” are ignored by Owen the heartless philanderer, only for A Day in the Death to show what she would be like if her wish was granted, i.e. a catty, self-centred dullard, which is yet more ammunition against RTD and Chibnall’s aversion to show-bible-derived character continuity. It might have worked as an ironic comment on viewer expectation, that we theoretically would have sided with her all along and guess what! She’s actually awful! Gotcha! Except not. I doubt that this was the intention, though.
Still, this was a good run for the show, and it’s sad that Martha is gone again, though rumours have it that two characters will leave in the season finale to be replaced by Martha. Shades of Caruso approves! Though whoever voted against her in our current Torchwood Gupta poll will be pretty annoyed.
ETA: It’s sadly not the full version, but if you’ve not yet come across the mind-bursting amazingness of Atlas by Battles (i.e. if you’ve been hiding from the good music in a cave or something), here’s some of it.
In an effort to start posting again more regularly, I’ve come up with my own (most likely not-so-) weekly feature: YouTube videos of songs I like! Nobody’s done that before, right?
Admiral Neck and I both spend a good deal of time reading The AV Club, so we have more than a passing knowledge of current internet-asshole trendy insults (based on the posters in comment threads after the articles, that is; the AV Club writers seem like very nice people who would totally want to be our friends if they got to know us). The most popular insult there for awhile — so popular, in fact, that it’s now an in-joke on the site — was “hipster douchebag,” which the commenters used to insult any writer they thought was just pretending to like something to seem cool (i.e., a writer whose argument they disagreed with). Writing about music in particular seems to be a minefield — if you like a band that’s too mainstream, you’re a hipster douchebag who’s being contrary by ironically liking crap enjoyed by the masses; if you like an obscure band, you’re a hipster douchebag who’s just trying to prove how cool and edgy you are; if you like an “indie” band that’s gotten some mainstream success (or even the rather limited success of being critically adored), you’re the biggest hipster douchebag of all, because all you’re doing is trying to fit in with the cool kids.
Sigh. Can we just agree, once and for all, that everyone is a hipster douchebag in his own special way and be done with it? I’ve had to stop reading some of the threads because they piss me off so much. Once there was an entire thread insulting Sufjan Stevens, who I adore and who I thought was pretty well-loved until that moment, and I had to shut down the window in case I accidentally broke the keyboard trying to put my rage into print.
With all that in mind, I’ve self-consciously used the insult as a title for this series, because God knows I’m not going to have music choices cool enough to appease everyone. I probably fall into the last category, internet-wise, because though I probably know more “indie” bands than people who mostly listen to Top 40, I basically just know the “indie” equivalent of Top 40. (I keep putting “indie” in quotes because that’s what the genre is generally referred to as, even though a lot of the bands are on major labels. Leave me, music paranoia!!) I got a late start on my education; as a kid practically the only music I listened to was my parents’ soft-rock, so I didn’t even know who the Top 40 cool bands were (do you realize how sad it is to feel bad that you don’t know who Boyz II Men are?); in high school I managed to get a grasp of that, but not “good” music; and in college I learned the gospel of Elliot Smith and Ben Folds and all the rest, but it was only when I met Admiral Neck that I learned how much music I’d been missing out on. I’d skirted on the fringes of “good” music for awhile, but I’ve always been playing a game of catch-up and I still am.
So basically, this feature will be an ongoing collection of songs I like right now — depending on your musical knowledge, you’ll either find something new or roll your eyes at my pedestrian choices. Or both! Don’t limit yourself. (That may sound bitter but really I’m just hoping there won’t come a day when I give up any pretense of coolness and link to my favorite Phil Collins song. You may think I am kidding but oh no I am not kidding.)
Anyway, here’s my first choice: “A Sunday Smile” by Beirut. It’s not a proper video, but it’s the best version of the song I could find (other than live versions, and while those are great, they’re substantially different from the original).
This song gives me chills and makes me happy to be alive (as I find almost all good music does). I defy you not to feel your heart swell a little at those gorgeous horns, the chorus of voices, the lolloping merry-go-round rhythm, the accordion (!). Zach Condon, the one with the mournful voice and the mastermind behind Beirut, is only 22. I figure that means I just have to have a really good year this year, equaling four of his, and I’ll be caught up. I’m about to finish this post, so I’d say I’m looking pretty good right now. Pretty. Darn. Good.
And a bonus video just cause it’s equally beautiful and should also be heard by everyone: “Postcards From Italy.” This one does have a video, and a very appropriate one at that.
Not much I can improve on there. Catch ya on the flip side, daddio.
