I'm making a valiant attempt to maintaining a Friday schedule for some sort of post, no matter how erratic or irrelevant. Mind you, at this point I'm just talking to myself...
1) Bionic Woman: Not a bad new show, all things considered. First, the bad: the military-trained "prototype" bionic woman, of course, turns out to be a nutball. It's up to the slacker/bartender to be the "good" bionic woman. Why did the writers make her pregnant? Was it to add a little frisson of angst to the crash - as if getting one's limbs bisected wasn't enough? Finally, you find out your boyfriend - with whom you've just gotten pregnant by the way - is actually a Mad Scientist whose experimented on you, and your first reaction is...to sleep with him again! Hmm. Second, the good: Nice effects. Good fight scene. Characterizations might be a little sketchy, but there's not much one can do in a 45-minute pilot. Finally, most importantly, she doesn't fold up and become a whiny "why me" dishrag, but rather gets a bit of an attitude.
2) Writing. It's tough. Maybe it's because I see things so clearly in my head and am constantly frustrated by the inability of language to depict them the way I see them. It's hard work.
3) My certain doom, in the form of a 4-year-old girl. Reams of paper have been written about nature versus nurture, but I can state without fear of contradiction that I feel myself sliding into yielding to my daughter's slightest whims, much like a hapless asteroid being pulled into the crushing gravity well of a black hole. The latest trick in her quiver is for her to come up to me immediately after I come back from work, tilt her head, widen her eyes, and turn down the corners of her mouth in a irresistibly heart-breaking pout. "I'm sad," she announces, in a subdued voice. "Why?" asks her father (read: helpless patsy.) "Because Dada didn't give me a hug." A hug is promptly provided, at which point said daughter goes back to her ordinary schedule of activities (5:30 pm - 7:00 pm, giggling piercingly and chasing the cat around.) I'm dreading the point in time when the full power of the Pout is harnessed to more sinister objectives, i.e. "I'm sad because Daddy didn't buy me a ice cream cone." "I'm sad because Daddy won't let me invite all of my friends over for a sleepover." "I'm sad because Daddy didn't buy me a car." I'm just hopeful that my wife will be around to counter the force of such Evil Cuteness. Again, I'm not sure if it's a father-daughter dynamic which might be evolutionary or learned behavior, but I'm not going to survive it.
4) Men and Women. Speaking of nature versus nurture...I self-identify as a geek. I took my fascination with history to the ultimate level of geekiness by getting a doctorate - and still read history books for fun; I have collected comics; I play video and computer games; and, of course, my badge of ultimate geekiness is the fact that I saw the original Star Wars (before it was called "the New Hope") around 13 times in the theater. Fortunately for me, I managed to fall in love (and, more amazingly, obtain reciprocal love) with a woman just as geeky in her own way as I am. While my "flavor" is of the history-military-war movie-sci-fi type, hers is more the manga-anime-mystery novel type; we have common ground in our unhealthy obsession with certain computer games and a broad range of taste in the same sort of movies. She's trapped at home with the above referenced 4-year-old and spends a lot of time online, participating in the broad debates over women in fandom. She is unabashedly and unapologetically feminist - and I'm about as feminist as you can get and still be burdened with a Y chromosome. The particular debate of the moment concerns, of course, the Black Canary/Green Arrow Wedding Special, ending with the Perforation of Ollie (which, by the way, sounds like a really interesting band name, to borrow from Dave Barry.)
We both read this issue. I'll not list all of the outrages perpetrated in the book - Black Canary not defending herself, the triteness of the "horror of the wedding night" plot twist, etc. I'll just say that the whole issue was...boring. Let's list the sit-com tropes; Montage of people reacting to wedding news? CHECK! Last-minute argument? CHECK! Bad-guys-attack-the-wedding? CHECK! Oddly enough, the most interesting thing that could have happened was nothing...maybe everyone attending looking around with paranoid twitches, waiting for the shoe to drop - which it never does. But, to the ending...has this not been done to death? Oh! The tragedy! Oh! The horror! Forced to stab her beloved on their VERY WEDDING BED! Yawn. It trivializes tragedy by making it so ordinary. She becomes an object, reactive instead of active. We're supposed to feel sympathy, feel pain for her tragic choice, but instead the very passivity of her response and the unoriginal "twist" leave us non-plussed.
I've been writing for some time now - a few years - and the struggle is constantly to reach for something which is "real," i.e. the way that a given person would really react in the presented situation, and not to fall back on cliche and trope. Boiling the last scene down to its essence, one would think an experienced Super like Black Canary would have run across dozens of parallel situations, i.e. "attacked by someone who's a friend" and would have a range of appropriate responses. She wasn't tied down, incapacitated, or drugged (thank God those cliches were avoided.) She's a f***ing powerful Super, experienced, a veteran of countless battles - certainly she knows hundreds of non-lethal techniques. Ollie's not a Super - he's a highly-trained normal of the Batman variety. But no...let's slip into comfortable trope and have her stab him. Yep, notch another one up on the list of laziness and let's clock out for the day.
In more depth, why make the whole issue a series of boring and lazy nods to every Wedding sitcom or soap opera ever produced? There's twists out there that would be interesting, or at least untried. Put them in a situation where they're arguing about something substantive and real. Real couples argue about money, about relatives, about decision-making, about careers. Real couples argue about romantic rivals, old flames, jealousy and misunderstandings. Real grooms get nervous about "losing" independence, be it real or illusory, financial uncertainties, whether or not they are ready to be fathers...real brides worry about losing closeness, worry about money as well, worry about their identities being subsumed by becoming a "wife"...There's a twist for you, Green Arrow wakes up and realizes he's not ready to be a father, and they fight about it.
It's lazy writing, and it's boring. I don't know how much outrage I can pack into a yawn...and it certainly doesn't leave me really all that interested in running out and grabbing whatever issue of whatever comic will "resolve" the "twist."
Well...there you are, for now. More later...
