Also they solve mysteries!

Three new series this season struck me as odd ideas, with one central theme: take a property from a few years ago, and re-purpose it as a mismatched-duo crime procedural. You know, when someone with a unique skillset teams with a no-nonsense cop or agent to solve murders? Of course you do, they’re everydamnedwhere.

Minority Report the movie was about a society where three psychic siblings spend their lives hooked up to a machine so that the police can use them to predict crimes, arresting people before they have a chance to commit them. The title, “Minority Report,” refers to incidents where one of the psychics (if I recall correctly, often if not always the sister, who was the most powerful) has a differing view of the future. These “minority reports” were discarded, when in fact they were evidence that the entire system was flawed and needed to be discarded. Minority Report the TV show, which would have been the title of Larry Wilmore’s “Nightly Show” if these assholes hadn’t bogarted it, conveniently forgets that last part, and has one of the two brothers start working with a no-nonsense cop to prevent murders.

Limitless was a Bradley Cooper vehicle based around that stupid “We only use 10% of our brains” myth, but the TV show mostly ducks around it so whatevs. Basically, Cooper’s character Eddie Morra takes a pill called NZT that turns him hyper-intelligent, and uses it to… do stuff? Except there are side effects? I honestly don’t know. Been meaning to watch that movie for like a month. Anyhoo, the series takes place some time later, when Eddie Morra is a Senator who everyone assumes is planning a run at the White House. Brian Finch is a slacker musician whose father is sick, but gets a chance to turn his life around when, while working a mind-numbing temp job, an ex-bandmate gives him a hit of NZT, which allows him to easily access every memory from his entire life, processing information like a human computer. Said ex-bandmate is murdered shortly thereafter, and Brian finds himself on the run from the FBI while using his old friend’s NZT stash to solve the crime, diagnose his father, and other issues. When the withdrawal starts getting bad, and the real murderer manages to shoot Brian in the leg, Senator Morra turns up, offering Brian an injection that will let him use NZT free of side effects, provided he do two things: 1) work with the FBI, and 2) never, ever tell anyone about this meeting or the injections. Anyone. Ever. So he and an FBI agent solve murders. Which is weird because murders typically aren’t FBI jurisdiction (barring hitmen and serial killers), but whatever.

The comic book Lucifer follows the adventures of fallen angel Lucifer Morningstar as he tries to make a life on Earth after abandoning his post as ruler of Hell in the pages of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. The Fox series Lucifer assumes that his life on Earth involves solving crimes with the LAPD, why not.

Now, I could complain here. I could ask “Why are you digging up old movies (and Lucifer) and trying to turn them into The Mentalist?” But frankly Minority Report (and, in all probability, Lucifer) will be gone soon, and I actually kinda like Limitless. So instead, let’s go nuts with it. Here’s some other properties that weren’t at all about solving crimes that I’ve forcibly and illogically reinvented as Castle clones.

Networks looking to hire me, I’m on Twitter and Instagram but not Snapchat. Should I get Snapchat? I feel like I should. Sorry, got distracted. Onwards!

Short Circuit

Short-Circuit

 

The Movie: a military robot is struck by lightning, becoming self-aware. When his sudden sentience is seen as a glitch, he hides out with Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy) until he can convince his programmer (Steve Guttenberg, someone younger readers might be surprised to learn was once a legitimate movie star) he is now truly alive.

The Show: Number Five is alive… and he’s looking for justice! The first true AI, granted official citizenship last time we saw him, realizes that human police can’t be trusted to investigate crimes which may involve other emerging AIs on their own. So he teams up with computer-hating NYPD detective David Prescott (Brooklyn 99’s Vulture, Dean Winters) to solve murders involving high-tech. Number Five is hungry for input, Detective Prescott is hungry to fight crime, and together they’ll chart a path. Hell, you could probably get Guttenberg and Sheedy to pop up now and again. Neither of them seem busy.

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventurers

B&T

The Movie: Bill S. Preston Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan are destined to found a band (The Wyld Stallyns) that ushers in a golden age of world peace and harmony. Unless they fail history class, in which case Ted’s father will send him to military school in Alaska. Thus, in the far future, The Most Important People in The World send a man named Rufus back in time so that he can lend Bill and Ted a time machine with which to ace their history project. So begins Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure!

The Show: Not everyone wants to see the Wyld Stallyns’ utopia come to fruition. Someone is messing with history, trying to ensure that the future is changed. As such, Bill and Ted recruit a few people to protect the time stream: rock-hating jazz-loving FBI agent Nora Dawson (Alcatraz/Vegas’ Sarah Jones), historian Vivian Thorn (Leverage’s Beth Riesgraf), and the founders of Drag Me Away, the number one Wyld Stallyns cover band. With frequent guidance from Bill and infrequent help from Ted (during sweeps, if Keanu’s not busy filming John Wick sequels, which he should absolutely keep doing), Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventurers track temporal anomalies while seeking whoever is trying to undo Utopia.

Zero Effect

Darryl Zero is… no, wait, Zero Effect was just a modernization of Sherlock Holmes. There are already two different TV shows about that. Moving on.

I Heart Huckabees

huckabees

The Movie: Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman) hires existentialist detectives Bernard (Dustin Hoffman) and Vivian (Lily Tomlin) to figure out if sleazy corporate stooge Brad Stand (Jude Law) is out to get him. In the process, Bernard and Vivian (and seemingly rival existentialist detective Caterine Vauban) trick Albert and Brad into facing deep, unsettling truths about themselves. And a bunch of other stuff. It’s a hella weird movie. I impulse purchased it on DVD, I should really watch it a second time one of these days…

The Show: LAPD officer Jill Quinn (Summer Glau) has a gift for identifying probable murderers, but her aggressive investigation style often keeps her from closing cases. As such, she starts working with Bernard and Vivian’s proteges Alec and Tamlin (Agents of SHIELD’s B.J. Britt and Arrow’s Rila Fukushima) to identify murderers and trick them into confessing through existentially making them confront their guilt.

Cross About Crossovers

That’s enough of a break from blogging, don’t you think?

Later this season, the forensic-science-based crime procedural Bones will do a crossover with Sleepy Hollow, the show in which time-displaced Ichabod Crane works with the police to battle the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse and other magic-based menaces. It’s like Murder She Wrote crossing over with The X-Files. It makes no sense. But the network clearly liked the idea, so now that is a real thing that is going to happen.

And yet Supergirl is still forbidden from crossing over with fellow DC shows Flash and Arrow. Thanks, television. Way to make sense.

So with that in mind, here are some other TV crossovers that would make at least as much sense as, and I would rather see than, the impending Bones/Sleepy Hollow team-up. Hopefully they’re all as entertaining as this one (forgive the Quiznos product integration):

Resisting the urge to just slap Doctor Who into each of them.

Arrow of Interest

AOI

Arrow is about Oliver Queen’s evolution from brutal vigilante the Hood to Justice Leaguer Green Arrow as he fights to protect his city with the help of his team. Over on Person of Interest, reclusive billionaire Eric Finch (not his real name) teams with presumed-dead ex-special forces operative John Reese (probably also not his real name) to stop murders before they happen with the help of Finch’s slightly-alive supercomputer, which can predict violent crimes and feed Finch the social security number of either the victim or the perpetrator.

Yes, they’re on separate networks, but the street-level superheroics of Arrow would mesh surprisingly well with the cyber-paranoia of Person of Interest. Both combine the brutal combat skills of one (or several) team members (Oliver, Reese) with the improbable hacking skills of another (Felicity Smoak, Finch). Both have an ally they can never really trust, but not until their third seasons, so I won’t name them. So here’s how I see it going down…

On Person of Interest, Finch receives a new number: that of computer expert Felicity Smoak, visiting New York from Star City. Reese initially assumes from her awkward and dorky manner that she must be the victim, but Finch is less certain when he uncovers her connection to hacker group Brother Eye, also recently arrived in New York. Reese begins to agree when his attempts to tail Felicity lead him not only to Brother Eye’s founder, her ex-boyfriend, but also into a confrontation with Star City’s vigilante, the Arrow. However, by the end of the first hour, it becomes clear that the Arrow and Reese have a mutual enemy in Brother Eye, who are attempting to expose and revive a super-soldier program called OMAC. Over on Arrow, Felicity and Finch attack Brother Eye electronically while Oliver and Reese must deal with the awakened OMAC soldier, a combination of digitally-inserted fighting skills and chemically enhanced strength and speed, alarmingly similar to that of Oliver’s frenemy Slade Wilson. In the end, they part as… well, not friends per se, but not enemies.

If the network thing is an issue, swap out Arrow for Supergirl.

iSuperZombie

superzombie

Supernatural is about the ongoing struggles of Sam and Dean Winchester to defend the world from whatever supernatural menaces they can find. On iZombie, recently deceased surgeon Liv Moore takes a job in the city morgue in order to a) get access to the brains she needs to stay mostly human, and b) solve murders by accessing the memories and personalities of the victims through eating their brains. There’s a fair amount of brain eating, is what I’m saying.

They seem an obvious match-up, but there’s one twist… despite having an undead lead character, there’s not much supernatural about iZombie. The zombie outbreak facing Seattle (and beyond?) is believed to be caused by either a tainted batch of ecstasy-style drug Utopium, or by energy drink Max Rager. But the addition of Supernatural elements might be a neat twist, and wouldn’t be totally out of place, which is not something Bones can say.

Liv’s SPD colleague, Detective Babineaux, has a tricky case on his hands: a victim who died in inexplicable circumstances. When Liv eats his brain, she receives a vision of something horrible: a humanoid figure that is clearly not human. Liv has discovered the existence of monsters. Her partner and confidant Ravi assures her there’s no such thing as monsters (while finding an awkward yet witty way of addressing the fact that he is technically talking to a monster), but when she looks into it further, she discovers that the victim was a Hunter, a person who hunts demons, ghosts, and monsters. Like zombies. When two men claiming to be FBI agents named after classic rock band members arrive to investigate the murder, she realizes they, too, are Hunters: the Winchester brothers.

Liv uses her brain-transferred memories and personality traits to impersonate a hunter in order to help the Winchesters must find the monster. She is also torn: if she can tell the Winchesters about zombies, maybe they can help curb their growing numbers. But they might also realize that she’s one of them, and decide she has to go too. She also tries to hide the truth of the crime from Ravi, lest discovering the existence of magic deter him from his efforts to cure her condition through science. Liv has discovered a larger world she can’t tell anyone about, whereas Sam figures out the truth, but worries that Dean will see Liv as simply a monster rather than an ally.

Writes itself, people.

Modern Muppet Family

modern muppets

No, too easy. Frankly, I’d be amazed if this didn’t happen in some way or another by next year’s Emmys. Nope, moving on.

Elementary 99

Elementary 99

 

Elementary is a modern-day retelling of Sherlock Holmes set in New York. Brooklyn 99 is a workplace comedy about police detectives in Brooklyn’s 99th district.

One’s a drama, one’s a single-camera sitcom. But both have, as their central character, a spectacular egotist who defines himself by his ability to solve crimes. So this shouldn’t be hard.

Detective Jake Peralta is not having a good day. A consultant from Manhattan, Sherlock Holmes, has been called in to help with a rash of homicides. Jake refuses to acknowledge that anyone in New York can out-solve him, while Sherlock refuses to acknowledge Jake’s presence in anything but condescending tones. Captain Holt doesn’t much care for Holmes’ presence either, being largely against outside consultants, but nonetheless orders Jake to work with him, having been encouraged to do so by Manhattan’s Captain Gregson. But when the case proves tough to crack, and… Wunch? No… the Vulture? No, he doesn’t steal tough cases… the federal agents who Jake made enemies of in Windbreaker City threaten to steal the case, Jake and Sherlock must join forces to solve the crime. Also Boyle has a crush on Watson. Seems like something he’d do.

Halt and Catch Doctor

Halt Doctor

So I folded.

If you read this blog, you know what Doctor Who is. Halt and Catch Fire is a cable drama about five people in the early to mid-80s trying to stake their claim in the growing computer market: manipulative would-be visionary Joe MacMillan, married hardware engineers Gordon and Donna Clark, punk programmer protege Cameron Howe, and John Bosworth, a lifelong salesman whose life is upended by exposure to Joe but redeemed by friendship with Cameron.

One’s a high-energy science-fantasy show about a brilliant, undying space wizard and his human companion; one is about broken people hurting each other while trying to create something worthwhile, be it an IBM clone, a video game company, or an early version of the internet. These two shows have no business even touching each other. But therein lies the game.

Your average episode of Halt and Catch Fire involves the team facing as many crises to their current project as can fit inside of an hour, while finding ways to hate each other. So we’ll give them a big ol’ doomsday crisis. While trying to design a new interface for her company, Mutiny, Cameron encounters a weird rash of setbacks. Viruses, hardware failures, sudden power outages, all of which are leaving the whole staff scrambling, especially Cameron, Donna, and Clara, their new hire from England. Cameron suspects interference by Joe MacMillan (because every goddamn thing that happens to you must be Joe’s fault, right, Cameron?) or a screw-up by Gordon (historically plausible), but despite both of them having meetings with the same Scottish venture capitalist, there’s no proof they’re involved. Cameron turns on Donna, Donna turns on Gordon, Cameron and Donna both turn on Joe who delivers a great if condescending speech about their need to blame him for every problem they have, but by the time Bosworth pieces together that Clara and that venture capitalist who kept calling himself “The Doctor” were responsible, they’ve both vanished, and Cameron has to ditch the entire program in order to keep the lights on at Mutiny. Everyone scrapes by, but learns new ways to be angry at each other, because that’s Halt and Catch Fire for you. It’s better than I’m describing it.

Meanwhile, on Doctor Who, the exact same story happens, but this time it’s a screwball comedy about The Doctor and Clara trying to prevent five kinda jerky people from developing a piece of code that will eventually become part of an unstoppable Cyberman OS. It’s all fun and games until Clara realizes they’re actively crushing Cameron’s dreams of reinventing computers and how we interact with them, leading to a powerful but heartbreaking rant from The Doctor about how one woman’s dream has to be measured against countless lives, and that in the end he can’t ever really prevent the Cybermen. The Cybermen are inevitable. All he can do is try to delay them, to reduce the damage they’ll do when they finally arrive. If forcing Cameron to compromise on her vision (something reality makes her do once a year, minimum) saves even one planet from the Cybermen… don’t they have to at least try? This is the burden of the Time Lords… to know the outcomes, and the price for achieving them.

Shit. I’d watch the hell out of that one.

Next time… a weird trend in the new TV season.

Superhero Season in Review: The Final Chapter

And so it’s come to this. But before we get to my superhero rankings, let’s see how some other geek shows would have done in my earlier categories.

Because it’s my blog and I do what I want.

Beyond the capes

There are a handful of geek-oriented TV shows I like that I disqualified for not being superhero shows. But they’re worth some kudos. So let’s do a speed run through the previous categories. Warning: this is even less comprehensive than my previous entries, because I don’t watch Once Upon a Time and am seriously behind on Sleepy Hollow (thought I’d catch up on Netflix, that still isn’t an option) and Supernatural.

Though Supernatural’s a little long in the tooth and probably wouldn’t have made it anyway.

Best Male Lead: Sherlock Holmes, Elementary

Or as you know him, the OTHER Sherlock.
Or as you might know him, the OTHER Sherlock.

Sherlock Holmes is a misanthrope. All recent adaptions can agree on that. Good with mysteries, bad with people, and generally fine with that, and Johnny Lee Miller’s Sherlock is no exception. But where BBC’s Sherlock is better at tackling the big, canonical mysteries and making events out of them (only having to write three episodes every two years helps), CBS’s Elementary has more time for character growth and development, and to my surprise, they’ve been making use of it.

Sherlock is still Sherlock, still blunt, still generally bad with people and uncaring about social niceties… but he’s become a genuine friend to Joan Watson, better able to open up. Their partnership has evolved from Detective/Assistant to Detective/Protege to essentially equals. He took on a new apprentice in Kitty Winter, demonstrating new depths of emotional investment in another human being beyond their use to him. Miller’s Sherlock has become a rich enough interpretation of the character, one I’ve become so invested in, that the threat of him having a relapse into heroin addiction was genuinely frightening. And that’s quite an accomplishment for a show that started as “Crime procedural but with Sherlock Holmes,” or as it seemed some network executive was picturing it, “House, but instead of fighting disease he solves crimes.”

Honourable mention: the 12th Doctor, Doctor Who. He may be less cheerful and cuddly than Ten or Eleven, but he’s still the Doctor, as seen in this speech.

Best Female Lead: Liv Moore, iZombie

LivLiv Moore (get it?) had it all: a promising medical career, a perfect fiance, friends and family… now she’s single, working in a morgue, and pushing away anyone close to her, because after a boat-party-turned-horror-movie, she’s a zombie. If she eats a steady supply of brains, she stays mostly normal (if pale), hence the morgue job, but the brains come with a consequence: she absorbs the owner’s memories, so she uses that to help Seattle police detective Clive Babineaux solve mysteries by pretending to be psychic. All part of adapting to life after death.

In addition to memories, Liv also absorbs some of the deceased’s personality. Thus far she’s been a passionate (in more ways than one) artist, a sociopath hit man, an extreme sports junkie, a would-be relationship guru, an agoraphobic gamer/hacker/troll, a military sniper, an alcoholic journalist, and more, all while still being Liv. And like I said last time, Rose McIver is nailing it each and every week. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the creator of Veronica Mars knows how to write a kickass detective heroine.

Honourable mention: Joan Watson, Elementary. Like Sherlock, Watson’s evolved over the last three seasons, from a doctor-turned-sober-companion to a skilled detective in her own right. Not a traditional Watson, but a damn fine one.

Best Supporting Character: Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti, iZombie

Ravi

Liv’s boss and sole confidant, Ravi figured out her secret pretty quickly (he noticed chunks of brain kept going missing from the bodies), but instead of being horrified, was simply fascinated. The only person Liv can be 100% honest with (or even 30%, really), Ravi’s become her (excuse the term) lifeline… and is convinced he can find a cure to her condition. Plus he’s got a charm to him, is pleasantly nerdy, and brings an enthusiasm to their casework that keeps things lively. All without any unnecessary romantic tension.

I mean, he cares about Liv, but he’s not an idiot. She is just SUPER contagious.

Honourable mention: Kitty Winter, Elementary. Survivor of a horrifying crime, she turned to investigating criminals. But her trauma made it hard to be taken seriously, as it made it hard for her to even make eye contact with strange men, let alone be convincing about her findings. But a chance encounter after a failed attempt to make a report to the London police got her noticed by Sherlock Holmes, who takes her under his wing, and trains her in his techniques. Sherlock’s tutelage never reduces her to a victim, even in his slightly ham-fisted attempts to be protecting, and in a flashback, we learn the full truth: Sherlock didn’t save Kitty. Mentoring Kitty saved Sherlock, right when he was at his lowest. She’s gone now, as her story (adapted from one of the classic novels) always had an endgame, and her farewell to Sherlock was a little heartbreaking. Here’s hoping she finds her way back to New York someday.

Best villain: Missy, Doctor Who

Missy

Spoilers for Doctor Who, Series Eight. Skip over this if you want to stay unspoiled.

Throughout Peter Capaldi’s debut season as the Doctor, we get glimpses of an eccentric woman named Missy, who seems to be collecting all of the people who die during the Doctor’s adventures. Villains, allies, bystanders, all find themselves in one of Missy’s offices. That’s all we’re told at first… her name is Missy, she has a particular interest in the Doctor, and she claims to run Heaven. It’s not until the two-part finale that we learn the truth… and it’s a hell of a thing. Who is Missy?

[spoiler title=’Big-time spoiler here.’ collapse_link=’true’]Missy is classic Doctor Who nemesis The Master, regenerated from John Simm into Michelle Gomez, and she’s used the dead to build an army of Cybermen.[/spoiler]

Michelle Gomez was so good in the role that I liked her as a villain even when she was doing things designed to be painful to watch. And it was her motivation that pushed Missy to the top of the list… she wasn’t trying to conquer all of time and space, she was giving the Doctor a dark and terrible gift. She wanted him to admit that he isn’t better than her, that they share the same darkness, because then they could be friends again. She’s a monster, yes, horrifying, to be sure… but this time around, she just wants her best friend back.

Honourable mention: Blaine DeBeers, iZombie. Turned into a zombie at or shortly prior to the same party as Liv, Blaine found an upside to zombie life… scratch a few one-percenters, and he’s living the high life, making tens of thousands of dollars a week keeping the rich and undead in fresh, haute cuisine brains. Evil? Sure, he’s monetized being a literal predator and doesn’t care who gets hurt. But he’s played by Alias/the Revenant’s David Anders, who’s never not fun to watch.

The Main Event

Okay, let’s wrap this puppy up. Who’s the best series? Instead of giving you the three best and one worst, here’s my full rankings of super hero TV.

#7

gotham

For every one thing that works about Gotham (Bullock, Cobblepot, the brewing mob war), there are three that don’t (Barbara, Nygma, seriously how old is Harvey Dent gonna be when he becomes Two-Face if he’s already a prosecutor, Barbara again, she’s that awful). The Wayne Enterprises conspiracy plot has no real momentum, and the series premise basically guarantees a great deal of wheel-spinning. There’s enough there that I’m gonna watch at least the start of season two, but if they don’t want to get their asses kicked by Supergirl, they’d better do some serious course-correction instead of doubling down on their flaws.

#6

con3

Constantine loses some ground in the standings for getting off to a weak start. The show had strong potential, especially in its lead character, but took a while to start seizing that potential. And they didn’t do the best job with canon characters Felix Faust or former Constantine nemesis The First of the Fallen. But they started to find their feet, it was still a fun watch, it was sad to see it go, and the tiny hope that Matt Ryan’s Constantine may yet find his way to Starling City is exciting.

#5

SHIELD

Certainly an improvement over their lacklustre first season, but as is their habit, they may have overcorrected a smidge. In season two, they burned through plots almost too quickly. Hydra only lasted half the season and their primary nemesis, paving the way for Dark SHIELD (amazed no one else ever called them that…), which skidded to a halt so that their last three hours could be devoted to something else entirely, war with the Inhumans. And right in the middle of that last, most awkward gear shift, a token movie tie-in that was almost as half-assed as The Well, their bait-and-switch Thor: the Dark World “tie-in” that remains the show’s worst episode.

But unlike a year ago, I’d have actually been sad if the show got cancelled. If there’s one thing Agents of SHIELD is good at, it’s reinvention and course correction, so let’s see what season three can do.

#4

arrow-2-09I love Arrow, always have, and I’m as surprised as anyone to see it not make the top three. But you can love something and admit it’s had problems. A less cohesive season arc than season two, flashbacks that felt less essential, a little too much weepy Felicity… I believe in the show, love the larger universe its responsible for, and look forward to season four, but I’ll admit this wasn’t their best year. Still good, not quite great.

#3

Carter

Perhaps Agent Carter’s short run-time did it favours. It’s amazing what freeing yourself of the filler episodes a 22-24 episode season requires can do for your narrative. But if a great lead, reliably entertaining banter between Carter and Edwin Jarvis, and a glimpse into the history of the people who trained Black Widow aren’t enough for you, Agent Carter was also about something. They used old-school spy action to lure you into a look at the difficulties of women in post-war America, as the returning men tried to push them back into the background, and how even “safe places” like the ladies’ apartment complex Carter moves to are places of control and puritan judgement. Agent Carter was smart, fun, and necessary.

#1&2… And we have a tie

flashdevilLook, I’ve given this more thought than anyone rationally should, and… I can’t. I just can’t. I cannot, in good conscience, tell you which of these shows is better.

You see, the thing about rating things from one to ten, is that there is no objective ten. Or at least that’s what I read once, and it made sense to me. The notion was, a ten is simply a nine that fills a personal niche. Daredevil and The Flash are, and it is not just me saying this, it’s all over the web, they are nines. They are both excellent television shows. As it happens, Flash hits more than one niche for me, having been a massive Flash fan starting in the 90s, a Firestorm fan in my formative years, and an Arrow fan recently.

So while it would be tempting to declare Flash the best superhero show on TV, I can’t ignore the fact that it is almost custom-tailored to my exact tastes (having Mark Hamill reprise his role as the Trickster from the 90s series? I’m not made out of stone).

Daredevil and Flash have the best supporting casts, the best leads, the best plotlines, but they each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Daredevil has the better production value. It plays less like a series and more like a 13 hour film. Every episode is tied to the central narrative (save two things), something a shorter runtime makes easier to do. It’s gripping, yes, but grim. And it doesn’t quite stick the landing in its finale. Also, it suffers the same issues as Age of Ultron, in that they occasionally break from their own story to set up other properties. Want to know what Matt’s mentor Stick was doing in New York, or who he’s reporting to? Sorry, you’ll have to wait for (I assume) The Defenders in 2017.

The Flash is more joyful. Brighter, more fun, and more, for good or ill, comic-booky. Daredevil tries as hard as it can to not be a superhero show, despite taking place in the same universe as the Avengers. Matt’s traditional costume, and the name “Daredevil,” don’t show up until the end of the last episode. I don’t think they ever use the word “Kingpin.”

Flash, on the other hand, is loud and proud about its comic book origins. Easter eggs are, simply put, cooler and more frequent. Where Daredevil tried to keep its villains as grounded as possible (except, okay, for the ninja and the mandated tie-in to Iron Fist’s mystical city of Kunlun), Flash caps off a steady stream of comic book supervillains by having Barry fight a telepathic gorilla. And it’s great. And it should be said… for all that the MCU’s selling point is that everything is connected, Flash and Arrow’s DCWverse is just better at being a shared universe.

On the other hand, The Flash had an Iris problem for most of the season. You wouldn’t catch Daredevil half-assing Karen Page because they didn’t know what to do with her.

They’re both great. They’re both better and worse than the other in different ways, and which you prefer will come down to personal taste.

And with that… we’re finally done. On to other topics. Such as the delayed-but-imminent season finale of Writers Circle. Is “Decisions and Deneuments” as good as Flash’s “Fast Enough?” Well… it’s not as heartbreaking. Some might say… it’s the reverse.

mic drop

 

Superhero TV Season in Review Part 2

So last time, I went over my favourite and least favourite characters from the year’s superhero shows: male leads, female leads, supporting cast, and the most controversial of them all, best villain.

I admit… maybe Wilson Fisk was overlooked. Perhaps Daredevil suffered in my rankings because I watched all of it over a month ago, while the finales of everything else (except Constantine) were fresh in my head. I’d totally forgotten about Fisk’s speech in which he realizes he’s been the villain this whole time.

And even beyond that, there’s Wilson Fisk’s international cartel, Captain Cold and the Rogues, Gotham of all things managing to make Victor Zsasz as fun to watch as he’s ever been, it’s been a great year for bad guys, somebody was going to get left out, I’m sure I’m sorry.

I think those were the only oversights, so… wait… no… iZombie is based on a comic book… we’re not calling it a superhero show, are we? Because if we are… well, Best Female Lead would have gone differently. Oh Rose McIver. You are nailing it.

No. No, we’ll assume it doesn’t count.

Anyhoo, round two!

Best fight!

Your average superhero show needs some action. Sadly, not every show gets this. Smallville spent its entire eighth season building up a battle between Clark Kent and Doomsday, and said battle lasted about fifteen seconds. Heroes gave rivals Sylar and Peter Petrelli dozens of powers to play with, then limited their big climactic fight to punching.

Thankfully, those days are gone. For two years, Arrow was the gold standard, but then Daredevil happened, and Agents of SHIELD let Mortal Kombat: Legacy’s Kevin Tancharoen go to work. As a result, onscreen action has kicked it up a notch this season.

Some honourable mentions: Melinda May vs. Melinda May’s doppelganger in Agents of SHIELD’s “Face My Enemy” for a double-dose of extra-cool Ming Na fighting; the Flash vs. the Arrow in The Flash’s “Flash vs. Arrow” (okay, maybe I didn’t need to specify the combatants… I said “Flash” a lot just then) for nailing a fight based around Oliver Queen’s skill and experience vs. Barry Allen’s sheer speed; Arrow vs. an unarmed Ra’s Al Ghul just for Ra’s’ opening line (“I will take your swords, when you’re done with them,”); and pretty much every fight from Daredevil. All of them, always. But here’s the winners.

Bronze medal: Reverse Flash vs. Err’body, “Rogue Air”

Mild spoilers for Flash’s first season.

After an episode filled with self-doubt, betrayal, and defeat, the Flash faces down the Reverse Flash, a man he’s never been able to beat one-on-one. At first, the other was simply faster: but even as Barry works to improve his speed, his opposite number has been fighting the Flash a lot longer than the Flash has been fighting him (wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey), and so at this point in Barry’s career, Reverse Flash is simply the better fighter. So… it ain’t looking promising.

And then, at the last moment, in swoop Firestorm and the Arrow. Me, I’m a sucker for all things Firestorm, as I’ve said, and having the Arrow go a few rounds with the Reverse Flash (with the help of Ray Palmer’s nano-tech) was a treat. Plus there was just something inherently pleasing about seeing everyone come together to take on the Reverse Flash.

Check it out if you like. Although there are potential spoilers for Flash’s first season and Arrow’s third.

Silver medal: Skye vs. Like Half a Hydra Facility, “The Dirty Half Dozen”

A year ago, Skye was just starting to learn how to be a SHIELD agent. She started the first season as a hacker with basically no combat skills. Now, in one single take, we see what nearly a year training under Melinda May can do.

No spoilers, no context really needed, so check it out. This is some John Wick-level stuff right here.

The only way that sequence could have been better is if Skye remembered she has super powers.

Gold medal: The Daredevil Hallway Fight, “Cut Man”

Come on. You’re on the internet. You knew where this was going. Daredevil had the best fight chroeo on anything that could be called television this season, and its crown jewel is the scene in which a bruised, bloodied, clearly exhausted Matt Murdock still punches and flip-kicks his way through at least nine Russian gangsters in one single take.

Let’s just watch it, shall we?

Worst: Flash vs. Clyde Mardon, “Pilot”

This was a tricky one. Like I said, the days of Smallville-style anticlimactic one-punch-and-it’s-done battles with Doomsday or Darkseid, or Heroes never delivering a proper fight between Peter and Sylar, are currently over. Currently. Heroes Reborn is coming, we’ll see what happens.

I considered throwing Constantine under the bus here, but Constantine isn’t based around physical combat. He magic and deceit, you can’t really blame them for not having big fight scenes. Might as well accuse Elementary of not having enough time travel.

But the fight between Flash and weather-powered Clyde Mardon (his more powerful brother Mark would actually be named Weather Wizard) basically came down to Flash running really fast in a circle. And it could have been shot better. But they’ve improved at making Flash’s speed-battles visually interesting as the series progressed.

Best emotional moment!

Nothing like a good old-fashioned feels-bomb. Some of the best Doctor Who episodes can also be the most heartbreaking. And like fight scenes, superhero TV’s attempts at these have also evolved since Smallville.

Potential mild spoilers.

Bronze medal: “I can’t take one more step.” Daredevil, The Ones We Leave Behind

Daredevil gets… kinda dark. Well, that’s not true. It starts dark and it stays dark. And that takes its toll on the central characters. In the back half, a wedge gets driven between Matt Murdock and his best friend Foggy Nelson, a wedge they both accidentally take out on their assistant Karen Page, who ends up alone in what used to be a group effort to bring down Wilson Fisk.

But by the end of the episode, Matt has learned an unpleasant truth about one of Fisk’s allies, and how they finance their operations. And after pushing his friends away (as his former mentor said he would), after suffering defeat after defeat against Fisk, this unpleasant truth is his breaking point. And when Karen, who is suffering from her own trauma, confronts him, he confesses… not that he’s the “Devil of Hell’s Kitchen,” as the media has called him, but that fighting this crusade alone has become too much to bear.

“I can’t take one more step on my own,” he says. And while Matt and Karen are still keeping huge secrets from each other, they reconcile, and Nelson and Murdock begins to come back together. It’s a nice moment.

Silver medal: “I don’t want to die down here.” Arrow, [episode redacted]

Team Arrow loses a valued friend and ally, a painful blow to the entire team. For the whole episode, however, Oliver doesn’t openly react. He doesn’t cry, he doesn’t mourn. He remains the big shoulders, because he knows that his team has no one else to turn to. No one else they can rely on. In his words… if he grieves, no one else can.

Until the end.

Oliver began the season feeling he needed to shed the last remnants of Oliver Queen to focus on being the Arrow, but in one moment, his grief, his fear, his sadness is too much to bear.

The killer hasn’t been found, but the initial shock has died down. The team makes their way out of the headquarters, until only Oliver and his first and closest ally, Diggle, remain.

“John?” Oliver says, his voice cracking. And honestly, it’s odd enough that he doesn’t call him “Dig.” Then, standing over the body of someone he’d been close to, who had been claimed in his crusade…

“I don’t want to die down here.”

Stephen Amell kind of nailed that moment. And yes, it got to me a little.

Gold medal: Basically the whole damn thing, Flash, “Fast Enough”

Flash’s season finale is an emotional roller coaster. Barry finally has the chance to do what he’d never thought possible: go back in time and stop the Reverse Flash from killing his mother. But there are consequences. Martin Stein warns that changing this moment could change everything in the lives of Barry, those around him, or any life the Flash has touched. Which is a lot of them by this point.

Barry seeks out advice from Iris and all of his dads. Joe says Barry has to do it, even though he’s afraid of what he himself would lose: the joys of having helped raise Barry into the man he’s become. Barry’s actual father, who would get his wife and fifteen years of his life back, begs Barry not to do it, and says his mother would agree. Henry Allen is proud of who Barry is, even beyond being the Flash, and is against Barry risking any of that by altering the chain of events that forged him. Iris says to listen to his heart, because why wouldn’t she. And Harrison Wells… has his own agenda.

Every big conversation leading up to Barry’s choice is not just a pull but a yank on the heartstrings, and they nail every one, and the episode is just getting warmed up. As far as heartbreak goes, saying goodbye to the man who’s been a second father, knowing they might lose everything they’d been to each other is the warmup act.

But I can’t elaborate. It’s the perfect end to a stellar season, but it will stab you right in the heart, over and over.

Worst: Barbara leaves Jim, Gotham, “The Mask”

After thinking “I bet if I ask Gotham’s reigning mob boss, like, super nicely, he won’t kill my fiance for trying to arrest him” was a great plan, Barbara Kean has herself a little breakdown, and decides to a) leave Jim Gordon, b) start using drugs again, and c) hook up with Rene Montoya again.

And I didn’t care about a single bit of it. Except by being annoyed that she and Montoya were back together again, because their whole thing was just the worst. Rene Montoya, shining star of Gotham Central, the former Question, should not be stuck in a plotline where she’s trying to prove Gotham’s last honest cop is corrupt because she wants to bang his girlfriend, then becoming an enabler.

God damn you, Barbara, and anyone who wrote for her.

Best storyline!

Stories are neat! Sorry, don’t really have a clever opening for this category. I’ll just… I’ll just start, shall I?

Honourable mention goes to Agents of SHIELD for their introduction of the Inhumans. The story worked well, gave new depth to Skye, and moved faster than any plot from season one. It would make the podium if I honestly believed that it was setting up anything in the movies, be it the source conflict in Civil War or even the actual Inhumans movie. But given that it never seems like the movie branch of the MCU cares even a little what the TV branch is doing, I just… I just don’t.

Bronze medal: Rise of the Atom, Arrow

Given all my various rantings about Ray Palmer on Arrow, I don’t think I need to say much here. Quality origin story for a quality character.

Silver medal: The Long Game of Harrison Wells, The Flash

The twists and turns of Harrison Wells’ schemes surrounding the Flash, his love/hate relationship with Barry, and the mega-emotional payoff were a masterclass in long-term storytelling. That’s really all I can say without spoiling stuff.

Gold medal: “I’m just trying to make my city a better place,” Daredevil

The thing that made Daredevil really excel, and had people demanding to know why I ranked anyone over Wilson Fisk for best villain, let alone Oswald Cobblepot, is that Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk have matching goals. Both are trying to save Hell’s Kitchen, both believe themselves righteous, but they’ve taken drastically different and equally self-destructive paths. Matt is (often physically) fighting the city’s criminals and corruption, while Fisk is using them in an attempt to burn down the city and rebuild it. Both lose allies along the way, though one of them loses allies a bit more deliberately and permanently. Both see themselves as saviours, while being painted as devils.

Having more time to breathe helps make the struggle between Murdock and Wilson much richer than the average movie hero/villain relationship, and it’s a treat to see.

Worst: Theta Protocol, Agents of SHIELD

I’d say something with Barbara on Gotham, but she never really had a “story,” per se. She’d just show up, be a mixture of boring and annoying, do something we didn’t like that felt unmotivated, then disappear for a few episodes and we’d all be happy. She couldn’t even do “be in a bad plotline” right.

Instead, I’d like to toss a few jeers at Agents of SHIELD’s super-forced attempt to connect to Age of Ultron. In the second half of the season, we learn that Coulson’s band of misfits aren’t the only people trying to rebuild SHIELD, and that the rival SHIELD doesn’t trust Coulson in charge. They begin to lure Coulson’s right hand, Melinda May, to their side by revealing the various things he hadn’t been telling his team, including something called the Theta Protocol. What is it? Why hasn’t he told anyone? Will this dark secret project tear apart Coulson’s allies?

No. He was just fixing up the old helicarrier for Nick Fury so that he could swoop in and save the day in Age of Ultron. That established in a thirty second cold open bit, everyone said “Sure, fine,” formed a single SHIELD basically immediately, and got back to dealing with the Inhumans.

They spent three episodes on the Theta Protocol, made finding out the truth a huge deal to May and Simmons, and then tossed it aside in a thirty-second cold open and forgot it ever happened, all so that they could try to give Agents of SHIELD some sort of connection to Age of Ultron. Which is kind of all for nothing, because there is still a goddamn Chinese wall between the movies and Agents of SHIELD.

According to Age of Ultron, the Avengers had been hitting Hydra base after Hydra base for months, probably ever since Winter Soldier. Hydra was the primary nemesis for the first half of SHIELD’s season. You’d think, if the Avengers were fighting Hydra at the same time, somebody on the show, either Coulson or one of the Hydra bigwigs, would have noticed it and thought it worth mentioning.

But they didn’t. And Age of Ultron made no reference or even vague allusion to Coulson or Theta Protocol. So the whole thing ends up feeling like a desperation play to be relevant, a Mary Sue fan fiction where Coulson is totally involved in stopping Ultron even if nobody notices. And then it’s back to our utterly non-Ultron-related plot.

Man these things get long on me… next time, the wrap-up, including my picks for best show.

Superhero TV Season in Review (Part 1)

We begin our segue into a post-Writers Circle Confidential world… at least while the brain trust figures out what between-season bonus material we’re doing.

So in the meantime, now that I’ve managed to get through all of the big comic series for the TV season… okay, except Walking Dead… let’s do a Year-in-review! No, I’m not going to dig up my blogs on what I wanted to see from geek TV this season, that’s no fun for you or me. Instead… let’s do us an award show! Best and worst in a variety of categories.

That’ll be fun for at least me.

(I considered calling it “Geek TV” instead of “Superhero TV” so that I could accuse Game of Thrones of not being “geek friendly,” because this season it isn’t friendly to any of its audience, it hates its audience and wants us to suffer, but… Walking Dead kind of screwed me out of that by existing and being a show I haven’t watched in over two years.)

This week, best and worst characters!

Best male lead!

Sadly, as far as comic book shows go, saying “Male lead” is virtually redundant. Hurry up, Supergirl.

This year, Oliver Queen failed to avenge a loved one and Phil Coulson lost his team’s trust plugging a plot hole from Age of Ultron… which did nothing at all for the plot of his own show… so three freshmen take the podium.

Bronze medal: Matt Murdock, Daredevil

daredevil

Matt Murdock spent the first season of Daredevil in a dark, dark place, fighting against insurmountable odds to make post-Chitauri Hell’s Kitchen a better place. Charlie Cox did a brilliant job portraying Matt’s exhaustion, growing isolation, and resolve to keep swinging no matter what.

Silver medal: John Constantine, Constantine

con3

To put it simply, Matt Ryan was note-perfect as John Constantine. He nailed the look, the darkness, the cynicism, the self-hatred, the way that Constantine has to be practically press-ganged into doing the right thing, but when he does, he’s unstoppable.

He’s the perfect magic-slinging con-artist wizard. Sadly, there seemed to be slightly less market for that than needed. If they can’t find a new home for the series, I’m hoping against hope that Constantine finds his way to Starling and Central Cities next year. Maybe do a magical consult for the Legends of Tomorrow.

Gold medal: Barry Allen, The Flash

THE-FLASH-Full-Suit-Image

It’s not just that relatively young Grant Gustin has been unexpectedly good as Flash’s Barry Allen. Which he has. I no longer flinch at hearing a cast member of something is a Glee veteran. It’s not just that he sold every heartbreaking moment in the finale, which oh gods he did, don’t get me started.

It’s that Barry Allen is, simply, the best hero. The inspiration, the light in the darkness, the one who struggles to be on the right side, even in his first year as a hero. The Flash had a stellar first season, and it couldn’t have done that without a stellar lead.

Worst: Jim Gordon, Gotham

Look. He tries as hard as he can. He doesn’t do a bad job as Jim Gordon. But the problem is, “Angry that the system is corrupt” and “So dedicated to doing the honourable thing that he gets himself in trouble” only takes you so far when the show doesn’t let you move forward. As such, Jim gets in a rut while his partner gets all the development.

Best female lead!

Gonna have to stretch the definition of “lead” here, but our gold medallist demanded the category exist.

Ohhhh this is hard. This shouldn’t be so hard. Why aren’t there more female leads. Why are the ones who exist so underwritten. I want to say Laurel from Arrow, but that whole “I’m-a lie to my father for a year until it explodes in my face” thing isn’t doing her any favours… Flash’s Caitlin Snow is not what you’d call a lead… the women on Gotham are almost unilaterally terrible… This isn’t why we can’t have nice things, nerd culture. Shit like this. Okay. Doing my best.

Bronze medal: Skye, aka Daisy, aka Quake, Agents of SHIELD

Skye

Skye takes the bronze just for being Agents of SHIELD’s most-improved character. A weak link of the first season (better than pre-Hydra Ward, not on par with Melinda May), she came into her own in season two both as a SHIELD agent and our perspective character into the world of the Inhumans. While I’m still hesitant to believe that this plotline will have much if any impact on the Marvel movies (even the actual Inhumans movie), it gave Agents of SHIELD something to do besides sit around and wait for a movie to react to, which after their first season they sorely needed.

Skye met her murderous father (a highlight of the season), discovered she’s an Inhuman (and that Inhuman is a thing you can be), gained seismic powers, and became enough of a badass that even without powers she managed a couple of John Wick-level one-take fight scenes that rival any action sequence this season.

Silver medal: Karen Page, Daredevil

Karen-Daredevil

Daredevil had a slight problem with throwing its female characters into peril for plot purposes, but I give Karen Page props for never fully becoming a damsel in distress. She saves herself about as often as Matt and Foggy do (Really? She needs Foggy to save her at one point? Goddamn), even if in one case she potentially does considerable damage to herself in the process. On top of that, she’s instrumental in the crusade to expose and convict Wilson Fisk, and when Matt can fight no longer, it’s Karen who picks him back up.

Matt saved her physically, and she saved him spiritually.

Plus Deborah Ann Woll was amazing in the role. That helps. It was the kind of performance that gets characters brought back from the dead in the comics. Assuming she survives season two, anyway… no guarantee there…

Gold medal: Peggy Carter, Agent Carter

Carter

Was there any doubt? Comic TV was hit and miss at best when it came to writing female characters, but with Peggy Carter they nailed it. Having female showrunners couldn’t have hurt. Haley Atwell made Agent Carter’s eight-episode run appointment viewing. And Haley herself is advocating increasing the diversity on their white-ass cast.

The best written and best developed female character in geek TV, and a certified badass to boot.

Worst: Iris West, the Flash

Ugh. Again, it’s not the actor’s fault. The Flash didn’t have many flaws in season one, but their treatment of Iris goes right to the top. Greg Berlanti and His Amazing Friends learn as they go… mostly… and one thing they’re learning is that “I must protect my identity from those closest to me” gets old FAST.

It certainly did with Iris.

The problem is, the wider the circle of characters who know the hero’s identity becomes, the weirder it gets when certain characters are left out of the loop. So it was with Iris. When nearly the entire cast knew Barry’s secret by the end of the pilot, “We can’t tell Iris to protect her” just… lacked credibility. It stuck her in a shallow and unflattering story for nearly the whole season.

Also… if you’re going to set up a romance plotline between two characters, you really need more than “Well, they got together in the comics” if you’re going to ask your audience to get invested in them. That’s all that Oliver and Laurel had on Arrow, and by the end of season one, the writers wisely moved on.

Best supporting character!

It’s generally understood that a comic book show needs an ensemble. Obviously team shows like Agents of SHIELD and Legends of Tomorrow need an ensemble, but even shows based around one guy like Arrow, Flash, and Daredevil still need a strong supporting cast, like the team from STAR Labs or Wilson Fisk’s cabal of international stereotypes. And man, by and large it’s working. The Daredevil cast helps build a surprisingly blood-soaked 13-part epic, the Arrow ensemble saves us from the godawful voice-over narration from the first episodes, and the crew from the SSR in Agent Carter are what sell the overall theme of “the difficulties facing women in post-war America.” Here’s some standouts.

Bronze medal: Harvey Bullock, Gotham

Bullock

Gotham’s supporting cast is one of highs and staggering lows, but Harvey Bullock is one of the highs. Gotham could jump from often okay to great if they fired most of the cast and just made it Bullock and Alfred solving crimes while Penguin conquers the underworld in the background.

Where Jim Gordon was stuck in a holding pattern of “Curse this city’s corruption that by the nature of the show can’t change in a hurry,” Harvey Bullock could grow and evolve. Harvey started out symptomatic of the GCPD’s corruption, but has been gradually changed by exposure to Jim Gordon’s honest ways. If the entire show could be a little more like Harvey Bullock, they might get somewhere.

He also gets basically all the best lines.

Silver medal: Ray Palmer

Arrow

As I said when I talked about Legends of Tomorrow, the best thing Arrow’s third season did was introduce Brandon Routh as Ray Palmer. Sure, they turned him into a nerdier, ad-hoc Iron Man, but damn it it’s working. Routh’s quirky charm made Ray Palmer a highlight of any episode he was in, and justified making a second spinoff, which means DC is now the CW equivalent of CSI at its peak.

Gold medal: Joe West, The Flash

West

 

His mother may have died when he was a kid, but Barry Allen has a wide variety of dads. His actual father, Henry Allen, who he hopes to one day see out of prison; Harrison Wells, his mentor, the man who’s teaching him to be the Flash; and Joe West, the cop who took him in after his father went to jail. And while nearly all of Barry’s scenes with his father are touching, and Harrison is there to teach him how to use his speed, there’s a real love between Joe and Barry. Joe was Barry’s lifeline, the first in line to help him through his tough times. By midseason, I was terrified that the bloodlust Greg Berlanti and the Funky Bunch demonstrated on Arrow would turn on Joe.

And to be honest… he might not have gotten the gold a week ago, but his scenes with Barry in the finale were incredibly touching. Barry wasn’t born Joe’s son, but damned if Joe hasn’t become the father he needs. A father willing to make a sacrifice beyond measure for the benefit of the man he raised.

He’s also the conscience of Team STAR Labs, Barry’s first and best ally in the quest to find the Reverse Flash, and has the best reactions to Barry’s powers.

Worst: Barbara Kean, Gotham

God damn. Barbara is just the worst. The absolute worst. Remember what I said about needing something other than “they get together in the comics” to make us invested in a character? At least the Flash writers tried. Barbara is… she’s nothing. She started useless and kind of whiny, became something to throw in danger to motivate Jim, and when it was clear that she was the worst character on a show that wasn’t exactly knocking their whole ensemble out of the park, instead of trying to course correct they doubled down. It was like they went out of their way to find new awful plot points for her.

She ruined Renee Montoya. Created for the animated series, hero of No Man’s Land, primary character of Gotham Central (one of the best Batman spinoffs ever), heir to the title of The Question, that Renee Montoya. In a better world, she’d be the lead character of a Gotham Central TV show. Instead, she’s the second worst character on Gotham, was barely in the back half of the season (did she or her partner even show up after the fall finale? I can’t remember, they were that unmemorable), because her story was tied to Barbara and Barbara was fucking toxic.

As of the season finale, she may be god damned irredeemable. This woman cannot possibly be Batgirl’s mother. I will not accept that.

Best Villain!

Now here we have an embarrassment of riches. If you’re a comic book fan, then this season brought you Ra’s Al Ghul and the League of Assassins, Amanda Waller and the Suicide Squad, Deathstroke, Absorbing Man, Hydra, the Kingpin, a 1940s Black Widow, Felix Faust, Eclipso, most of Flash’s rogues gallery, Mark Hamill reprising the Trickster, and even Gorilla Grodd.

Gorilla Grodd. On network television. What a time to be alive.

And those aren’t even the three who made the podium.

Bronze medal: Cal Zabo, Agents of SHIELD

Cal

 

The first season of Agents of SHIELD, like any Marvel movie but the first Thor, had a villain problem. None of them were interesting until after Winter Soldier. Season two fixed that with Hydra’s Daniel Whitehall, but more than that, Skye’s murderous father, Doctor Cal Zabo, known to comics fans as Mr. Hyde. They never said that on the show, though. Which would never happen on The Flash. Someone would have been calling him Mr. Hyde by the end of his first episode. Just sayin’.

Cal flipped from genial to rage filled at the drop of a hat. He was capable of sudden, brutal, even horrifying violence. But deep down, he was just a man trying to bring his family back together, after they were torn apart (metaphorically, and in one case disturbingly literally) by Hydra. All he really wanted was to find his daughter, and bring her home.

And thanks to Kyle MacLachlan, he was riveting.

Silver medal: Oswald Cobblepot, Gotham

Oswald

Is Oswald even really a villain? His main targets are Fish Mooney and Sal Maroni, far worse villains than he was at the start. But I guess he does kill a lot of people along the way… that flower delivery guy didn’t deserve what happened…

What he is, though, is the most fascinating character on the show. Jim’s crusade to clean up Gotham can’t really succeed, because if it did, why would the city need a Batman? But Penguin’s bloody climb to the top of Gotham’s underworld? That’s good television.

Although… he is weirdly selective about when he’s capable of violence. When Fish or Maroni confront him, he cowers. Any other time, he takes the knife train right to throat town. Which is enough to bump him down to second place.

Gold medal: The Reverse Flash, I think you can guess which show he’s on

Reverse Flash

“I’m not like The Flash at all. Some would say… I’m the reverse.”

Fifteen years after Barry’s mother was killed by a mysterious man in yellow, Barry came face-to-blurry-face with him in Flash’s fall finale. He uttered those words above, and we had our arch-villain. Those words, along with his other signature quote, “To me, you’ve been dead for centuries,” are still echoed across the internet wherever Flash fans find a chance to comment on something.

Reverse Flash’s long game provided The Flash’s central mystery, and its conclusion was the season’s best finale. That’s really all I can say. There’s some serious spoilers involved here.

Worst: Raina, Agents of SHIELD

God I hate Raina. She was insufferably smug when she thought she was on the right side. She moved from villain to villain, be it the go-nowhere Centipede plot of season one, Agent Garret, Cal, Hydra, or the Inhumans, so that every major plot had Raina smugging it up. She was obsessed with “What we become,” something that only made sense because corporate synergy kept the show on the air long enough to reach the Inhuman plot, and when she finally did “become,” she was instantly whiny about what she got, blaming everyone but her own hubris. Until she saw a way to use her newfound powers to be a big shot again, and then bam, right back to smug.

Thank god the actress playing her is on Preacher now. Season three should be Raina-free.

Next time… best stories, fights, and more!

Let’s Talk Legends of Tomorrow

Thursday I took us through a deep examination of the trailer for November’s Supergirl series. A deep, deep examination. And yet, still missed a couple of details. For one, it’s struck me that the Supergirl trailer has managed to anger both feminists and MRAs. Not sure if that’s an accomplishment or a red flag. Regardless, I chose to only address the feminist complaints, because I’ve yet to hear an MRA complaint about anything, ever, worth addressing.

Second, I forgot to mention that two of her supporting cast have names that suggest they turn evil eventually, becoming The Toyman and the Cyborg Superman. But since, as of this writing, Caitlin Snow has yet to become Killer Frost, let’s put a pin in that.

I also wondered why the show is set in “National City.” I mean, I get it, I know, DC has a long and storied history of using fictional cities, but if breaking that habit and using, say, Chicago is so hard, why not use any of the many, many fictional cities that already exist?

But then it hit me. They can’t use Metropolis, because Superman’s probably still lurking around there. Even if it made sense for Supergirl to live in Gotham, that’s being used by some other show whose name escapes me. And as for Central City, Star(ling) City, Opal City, Coast City, and Blüdhaven, they’re all being used by the people behind our next entry.

Ladies and gents, the unfortunately named but promising looking DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.

Let’s take a look.

0:06 “I started this alone.”

Our first 45 seconds are a montage that serves as both a brief history of, and victory lap for, the DCW-verse, as I’ve come to know it. As Oliver says… it began with just Arrow. They weren’t trying to build a three-show empire. They were just trying to tell a story about Green Arrow, and then piece by piece, decided to see who else they could work in. As evidenced by the shot of the Arrow leading Arsenal, the proto-Canary, Nyssa Al Ghul, and a horde from the League of Assassins into battle.

And thus came The Flash.

0:19 “And then things just got stranger.”

I could talk a lot about The Flash’s stellar first season, how it rose to become the best comic book show on TV… but I just want to flag the music.

The Flash’s primary theme is four notes at its longest. You can hear it right at 0:19. But for four notes, it can do a hell of lot.

The history concludes with a few team-up shots of Flash and Arrow, which, yes, were a highlight of each show’s season. Flash and Arrow manage team-ups and cross-continuity in a way not even the Marvel cinematic universe does. And then… we see the next level.

Okay I think I’m done sweet-talking Flash and Arrow. Let’s get into what we see here.

0:52 “Sometimes the world needs a team.”

Okay, one more quick handy to Greg Berlanti and company, masterminds of the DCW-verse. Upon being told that they would not tie into Man of Steel or be featured in the planned Justice League movie, they said “Fine. The DC Universe is full of cool characters. We’ll build our own team.”

Okay, maybe slightly less photogenic than Henry Cavill and Ben Affleck.
Okay, maybe slightly less photogenic than Henry Cavill and Ben Affleck.

At first glance, they might not look like much. But with one exception (she’s new), you’re looking at a collection of the best recurring characters the last two years of superhero shows have produced. Okay, let’s call them the best recurring characters from the DCW-verse, I’d really rather not get into a whole thing about Daredevil right now. Or Kyle MacLachlan’s work on Agents of SHIELD. For those unfamiliar, let me introduce you to some folks.

1:01 “A girl with wings and a past lives complex.”

The newbie.
The newbie.

Hawkgirl, frequent partner and occasional paramour of Hawkman, is one of three newcomers on the show. Hawkman is one of those characters who’s had a rough ride as far as continuity goes, and Hawkgirl was dragged along with him. In the 40s, They were Carter and Shiera Hall, an archaeologist and his girlfriend-turned-wife who believed themselves to be the reincarnation of Egyptian prince Khufu and his lover, Chay-Ara, who used wings made out of a substance called Nth-metal to fight crime. In the 70s and 80s, they were Katar and Shayera Hol, hawk-themed police officers visiting from Thanagar, the planet Nth metal comes from. In the 90s… I don’t have time to get into that. Let’s just say Hawkman got weird, and then ended up being retired for a while.

This Hawkgirl is the one that showed up after that, in the late 90s. Kendra Saunders is haunted by past lives, including Shiera Hall and Chay-Ara. Throughout the centuries, she’s been reincarnated as a series of adventurers and crime fighters, always falling in with the reincarnation of Khufu (aka the eventual Hawkman), her eternal lover.

As indicated, TV Hawkgirl is haunted by past lives (one of which popped up on a movie poster in an early Flash episode), but I wouldn’t expect to see Hawkman in a hurry. The Kendra Saunders Hawkgirl has preferred to work separately from Hawkman more often than not. Anyway, Hawkgirl can fly and whoop your ass with a mace. We mostly see the flying here. Since she hasn’t shown up yet, there’s not much more I can tell you.

1:07 “A deceased assassin.”

Okay. Some spoilers for Arrow here. Skip forward if you want to avoid them.

Still here? Okay then.

When Arrow viewers first met Sara Lance, she was the sister of Oliver Queen’s girlfriend, Laurel, who he’d chosen to invite along on the disastrous yacht trip that left Oliver stranded on an island and everyone else apparently dead. A year later, Sara turned up in Starling, now played by Caity Lotz, while we learned that she and Oliver had also met up on the island back when. Was the recast an attempt to obfuscate the newcomer’s identity? Maybe, but it was a smart move.

Sara was now on the run from the League of Assassins and fighting crime in a costume reminiscent of frequent Green Arrow paramour Black Canary. The thing is, we’d assumed that Laurel, full name Dinah Laurel Lance, was destined to be the Black Canary. Which implied a dark end for Sara.

As the Canary, Caity Lotz soon became a key and valued member of Oliver’s supporting cast, both in the present and his flashbacks to the island. She brought heart and a healthy degree of ass-kicking to the show’s second season. But since Sara Lance doesn’t exist in the comics, just her sister Dinah (or Laurel, to Arrow viewers), it seemed inevitable she’d meet an unpleasant fate. I won’t spoil when, but she wasn’t called a “deceased assassin” for no reason. Hence a great deal of confusion when she was announced as part of the cast. But one thing seems pretty clear from the trailer.

Well, okay, it's not super clear out of context...
Well, okay, it’s not super clear out of context…

For those who haven’t seen the back half of Arrow’s third season, that right there is Sara Lance emerging from a Lazarus Pit, magical waters capable of extending life and raising the dead. Somehow, Sara’s body must find its way to one of the pits. Not improbable, since Sara’s on-again, off-again lover Nyssa Al Ghul, daughter of Ra’s Al Ghul (yes, Sara’s bisexual), has access to the pit and motive to bring Sara back. But as Oliver was warned, the person who comes out of the pit isn’t always the same as whoever they were before. So the impact of her resurrection remains to be seen.

She still kicks ass, though.

That's her with the staff, surrounded by fallen foes.
That’s her with the staff, surrounded by fallen foes.

1:14 “A pair of criminals.”

Second most confusing in the cast announcements? Wentworth Miller as Captain Cold, followed by Dominic Purcell as Heat Wave. Captain Cold and Heat Wave are two key members of the Central City Rogues, a band of Flash villains who were returned to prominence as some of DC’s best supervillains by Geoff Johns, an executive producer on Flash and Arrow, and Chief Creative Officer of DC Entertainment, a job he landed by being DC’s best writer. Johns made it a mission to give all of Flash’s villains time in the spotlight, and took a particular interest in Leonard Snart, aka Captain Cold, striving to put him on the same level as, if not the Joker or Lex Luthor, certainly the Riddler or Brainiac.

As of this writing, Captain Cold has made four appearances on the Flash’s TV show (Heat Wave, only two), plus a brief cameo in the season finale, and each one has been a highlight. He’s one of the only villains able to outsmart the Flash more often than he doesn’t, and Wentworth Miller makes him a joy to watch. Which led to a dilemma… if he’s on the spinoff, then how can he ever lead the fully formed Rogues? But on the other hand… it would mean way more appearances by Captain Cold next year, and that can’t be a bad thing.

And from the trailer, he’s still having fun, even if circumstances have him on the opposite side as normal. Although what’s weird? The only shots of Heat Wave are from his first appearance on The Flash and the Superhero Fight Club short they released a couple of weeks back. Maybe he’s not in the pilot? And yet he’s referenced… huh. Time will tell, I guess.

1:20 “More tech than he clearly knows what to do with.”

The third season of Arrow had some flaws. The season’s arc was a little muddy, it’s been accused of catering to shippers too much, discarding a relationship that made sense in favour of one fans seemed to prefer (clearly not all of the fans, from the online complaints…), and having a conclusion that, while good, was less massively satisfying than their second season blowout battle royale against… well, just watch it.

But there’s one thing they did absolutely right, and that is Ray Palmer.

Yes, fine, hello Ray.

Ray Palmer in the comics is a scientist who used white dwarf star matter (don’t give me that look, it made sense in the 60s and now we’re stuck with it) to build a belt that let him shrink to sub-atomic size, becoming Justice Leaguer The Atom. Ray Palmer on Arrow’s third season is a much, much richer scientist who builds himself a flying, ray-shooting suit of armour that he intends to use to protect the people of Starling City (which he wants to rebrand Star City to distract people from the fact that terrorists try to wipe it off the map every May). Sure, he talked about miniaturization and nanotech a lot, and still calls himself the Atom, but he didn’t get around to shrinking this season.

So, yes, a little more Tony Stark than classic Ray Palmer, I’ll grant you. But damn it, he works.

Brandon Routh, known best for his last attempt at playing a DC superhero, brought a wit and charm to the character that Arrow had lacked since Oliver’s best friend Tommy learned his secret identity and got all broody about it. Ray is more than a little nerdy, super enthusiastic about his mission and tinkering with his suit, and despite his dark, admittedly women-in-refrigerator-y motivation, generally a beam of light on what was otherwise a fairly grim season. When rumours of a third DCW-verse show began swirling, I was torn between The Atom and our next entry for who I wanted to star.

Oh, and the final seconds of the trailer reveal that yes, The Atom will finally learn how to shrink. Here’s hoping Ant-Man doesn’t ruin that for him.

1:29 “Half a hero.”

The other character I wanted to see in a spinoff? Firestorm. The Flash took Firestorm back to his roots: a nuclear-powered, flame-headed hybrid of Ronnie Raymond (played by Robbie Amell, cousin to Arrow’s Stephen Amell, and upgraded from college student to structural engineer) and physics professor Martin Stein.

I started reading comics seriously back around 1985. Back then, Firestorm was at his prime. He/they had a major role in the mother of all “event books,” the universe-redefining Crisis on Infinite Earths, and was soon added to the latest iteration of the Saturday morning cartoon equivalent of the Justice League, the SuperFriends.

In short, I loves me some Firestorm. And the fact that Alias’ Victor Garber was playing Martin Stein was icing on the cake. So when it was announced that the new spinoff would feature both Brandon Routh’s Ray Palmer and Victor Garber’s Martin Stein? Move over, Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, we have a new set of Science Bros on the way.

However.

Above “But she’s dead, isn’t she?” and “But they’re villains, aren’t they?” the biggest question being asked of Legends of Tomorrow is “But where’s Robbie Amell?” Firestorm is still, last we saw, a hybrid of Ronnie Raymond and Martin Stein, and when fused, still looks like Ronnie. So why isn’t he on the show? And it’s not because Stein doesn’t become Firestorm anymore. While a lot of the shots of Firestorm in the trailer come from Flash episodes, he’s right there in the “big action” section.

FWOOSH
FWOOSH

Well… Martin Stein, in his breakdown of the group, did refer to himself as “Half a hero.” And when he goes on to say “My other half is… combustible,” they cut to another shot when he says “combustible.” Which implies that that isn’t how he actually ends the sentence. Makes one suspect that he uses another word, like, say, “gone.” Maybe early next season, something happens to Ronnie.

Because there’s one more character who doesn’t appear and isn’t mentioned in this trailer: Franz Drumeh as Jay Jackson, a name that means nothing, absolutely nothing, to DC fans. So it’s possible that Martin now fuses with Jay Jackson to become Firestorm. Which would be an odd choice. Firestorm lore already has an alternative to Ronnie Raymond: Detroit teenager Jason Rusch, who has been at least half of Firestorm in the comics since 2004, has been introduced on The Flash, and would even add to cast diversity in the same way Jay Jackson does. But whatever, give me more of Victor Garber’s Martin Stein and I’ll make do.

Final thoughts

  • This was supposed to be shorter than the Supergirl entry. That did not happen.
  • Casting Doctor Who vet Arthur Darville as time traveller Rip Hunter is a genius bit of fan service. Proving again that Greg Berlanti and company live to please me specifically. And that swagger on “I’m from East London. Oh, and the future,” looks good on him.
  • Do I need to tell you anything about Vandal Savage that the trailer doesn’t? No, probably not.
  • They sure do like that giant battle scene at/in the dam. We spend almost half the trailer there. Looks okay so far. Arrow has always had good fight choreo, but they might need to step up their game to compete with Daredevil. Blending proper fight choreo with powers is a good start. Something Agents of SHIELD should start experimenting with.
  • I do not want to wait until January for this thing. I really very do not.
  • I can only hope that in a year or two, this fan-intro becomes more accurate:

Alright. Done now. No new Writers Circle this week, so on Friday we’ll talk about… something.

Let’s Talk Supergirl

Last September, I took a look at all the geek/comic TV heading to screens, including then-reigning champ Arrow’s third season and comeback kid Agents of SHIELD’s second.

Well, there’s some new kids on the block, and they both have trailers out, so let’s take a deep-dive into Supergirl and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.

…Still do not love that title.

Supergirl!

The first look at Supergirl has been a little controversial. Some like it, some find it too… for lack of a better word, “girly,” as though that’s a bad thing for a show about Supergirl that might be trying to attract a younger female audience. Some compare it to the satirical Saturday Night Live sketch in which Black Widow’s solo film is a romcom.

I do not agree, but we’ll get to that. Let’s take a good, close look at this trailer.

0:04: “My name is Kara Zor-El.”

Yup, it’s from the Arrow/Flash guy alright. Wouldn’t be a Greg Berlanti joint if the main character wasn’t telling us their name and a brief synopsis of their life at the start of each episode.

Well, one of them doesn't have it down yet...
Well, one of them doesn’t have it down yet…

Although, since we’ve paused… I found it odd they pronounce it “CAHR-ah.” I usually think of it pronounced “CAIR-ah,” and certainly Smallville backed me on that. But, you know, whatever.

0:09 “My cousin, Kal-El…”

Let’s go ahead and address the elephant in the trailer right now. I don’t know why, but they never once use the name “Superman.” It’s always “Him” or “Your/my cousin.” There cannot possibly be a legal reason why a show about Supergirl can’t say “Superman” out loud, I refuse to believe in something that pointlessly stupid. Spider-man used the word “Superman.” I can imagine a narrative reason why Kara and company wouldn’t say it, maybe she knows him as “Kal” or “Clark” and hearing him called “Superman” feels weird to her, but… this whole “Don’t say his actual name” thing is just off-putting right now, and it’s not just me who thinks that.

I SEE him. He's right there. He's not bloody Voldemort, say his name!
I SEE him. He’s right there. He’s not bloody Voldemort, say his name!

0:26 Montage!

Wow, we just skimmed over a lot… I mean, a lot. All of Kara’s teen years on Earth, and our only glimpse at her adoptive parents, played by former Supergirl Helen Slater and former Superman Dean Cain.

In case you blinked. Or had a seizure.
In case you blinked. Or had a seizure.

This is something that Flash, and before them Smallville, liked doing. What I call Legacy Guest Stars. Heck, both of these actors were on Smallville at least once, now that I think about it. As Clark Kent’s birth mother Lara and a guest villain who was almost but not quite Vandal Savage, who we’ll be talking about when I get into Legends of Tomorrow.

That we just fast-forwarded through that much exposition makes me wonder if this is gonna be a two-hour pilot. I mean, there’s a decent chunk of plot in this six minute trailer even without all that backstory.

0:48 “Fun. Dating’s… fun.”

Kara at work. Where we meet her friend and co-worker whose crush on Kara is either unnoticed, or she’s just trying to be gentle about how unrequited it is. Guys? If I may? Let’s add “friendzoned” to our list of forbidden words instead of “Superman,” okay? Please? Trust me, you’ll be better off.

0:53 Enter Cat Grant

Cat Grant is a decent character when done well. Will that be the case here? Only TIME… will tell. Now, I can see why some people would think, at this point, that the series feels a little more Devil Wears Prada than Agent Carter, but let’s press on.

1:11 James Olsen

Too good for "Jimmy" all of a sudden?
Too good for “Jimmy” all of a sudden?

And here enters Jimmy–sorry, James Olsen, Sup–“That guy’s” best pal. There’s been a lot of race flipping in comic properties lately. Man of Steel’s Perry White, Powers’ Deena Pilgrim, Daredevil’s Ben Urich, Preacher’s Tulip, Thor’s Heimdall, Flash’s Joe and Iris West, and that’s just off the top of my head. And I’m fine with that. It’s more than okay, it’s a good thing. As a white male Superman fan, I don’t feel I’m losing something by having Perry White or Jimmy Olsen be black, and if that causes a black viewer to gain something, then by all means, let’s make the superhero world a little less gleamingly white. The only real issue is that an article about Asian representation in Daredevil made me notice that with the exception of Polynesian Aquaman, the positive examples of race flipping (that is, the ones where a traditionally white character is cast POC and not the other way around… looking at you, Prince of Persia…) are all going to black actors. There are other ethnicities to choose from.

What I’m less okay with is tall, buff, pretty, confident James Olsen. I don’t care that Jimmy Olsen isn’t white. I care that he isn’t a nerd.

But, you know, I’m sure I’ll bounce back.

1:28 “Oh… gosh…”

You can tell me Kara going a little awkward fangirl over Jimmy–James, sorry, still feels weird– is a little romcom. But you can’t tell me it isn’t adorable.

IT'S CUTE, GOD DAMN YOU
IT’S CUTE, GOD DAMN YOU

1:46 “I feel like I’m not living up to my potential.”

So I feel like this is where the people bringing up Black Widow: Age of Me stopped watching. Up until this point, the trailer for our TV show about a superhero has involved Kara stressing about work, not noticing her friend’s crush, being tongue-tied because she met a boy, and needing her big sister to help her pick out an outfit for a date. Not exactly Peggy Carter, and bringing up comparisons to David E. Kelley’s failed and apparently awful Wonder Woman pilot, which tried to make the Princess of the Amazons and current God of War into a crime-fighting Ally McBeal. (The presence of Ally McBeal herself, Calista Flockheart, doesn’t necessarily help with this.)

But if you pay attention to this scene, she is saying that all of those things people seem to be complaining about shouldn’t be the things that define her. She wants to be more than that. Why don’t we all calm down and see if she gets there? Alright?

1:57 “I can fly! At least I think I can.”

I also think the haters missed some significance here. Kara is a woman who, for the last decade and change, has had to work every single day to keep a huge part of herself secret. She’s so committed to hiding her Kryptonian heritage that she’s never even tried to fly. Why wouldn’t someone like that be a little awkward around people? Especially if they’re trying to model themselves after their cousin’s (great, now I’m doing it) mild-mannered routine?

2:00
DC…Not “From the producer of Arrow and The Flash?”

Okay, so, there is a second, more action-oriented trailer that briefly leaked but has been pulled which does remind us that the guy behind this show, Greg Berlanti, also brought us Arrow, which as a reminder is great, and The Flash, which is amaze-balls. Seems they’re experimenting with ads targeted at different demos, and this main trailer isn’t aimed at the people who gravitate to the DCW-verse. Or maybe they wanted to downplay the connection since they won’t be crossing over anytime soon.

Or at least they really shouldn’t. Superman exists in Supergirl’s world (even if no one will say his name), and has for at least a decade. Over on the CW? Not so much.

Anyhoo, this is the part where Kara learns to fly in a panic so she can save an entire plane. Don’t remember any parallel to that in Age of Me.

2:51 Kara gets squeeful

She gets a little excited, yes.
She gets a little excited, yes.

Given that the primary complaint about DC properties is that they’re too grim (with the sole exception of The Flash), maybe we should all be okay with a Supergirl who gets a little excited seeing herself on the news after her first flight successfully saves an entire plane. I know I am.

3:18 “What do you think is so bad about… girl?”

This would be a nice little speech about reclaiming the word “girl” as a positive term, and how calling her “SuperGIRL” doesn’t diminish her as a person… if I didn’t kind of suspect it was written by someone named Greg.

Perhaps I’ll just move on. Except to say that I really, really don’t see why anyone thinks Botox is a good idea.

No reason. Just a random observation.
No reason. Just a random observation.

3:36 “I’m going to tell you something about me…”

Clue number two that the Flash/Arrow braintrust is behind this… she’s already telling her friend her secret identity.

Good.

If three seasons of Arrow and one of the Flash have taught us anything, it’s that “I must hide my identity from the people closest to me” gets old fast. And kind of illogical. Before long you’re thinking “Wait, the entire League of Assassins knows Oliver’s secret, but not his sister? That makes what kind of sense?”

Plus giving the hero confidants helps immeasurably from a narrative standpoint. Arrow didn’t really take off until Diggle became Oliver’s partner.

So yeah, tell Ducky or whatever his name is your secret. Especially if it allows this next montage.

I like that it takes some experimentation to figure out a) how to successfully fight crime (her steering’s a little off when flying after a car), and b) her outfit. Especially when they open with one that seems to make fun of all of Supergirl’s past questionable costume choices.

Nope. But thanks for trying, love-struck best friend dude.
Nope. But thanks for trying, love-struck best friend dude.

Also, does that guy die later? He’s not in the preview at all after this section.

4:58 “Welcome to the Department of Extranormal Operations.”

The DC Universe has its share of shadowy governmental or extra-governmental organizations. There’s international operatives Checkmate, about whom I could write an entire separate article; there’s ARGUS, who in the comics exist to monitor/liaison with superheroes (especially the Justice League), and do… other stuff, I guess, on Arrow and the Flash; there’s SHADE, who specialize in the freakily paranormal… and then there’s the DEO.

The DEO are dicks.

I say this because their most recent appearance, comics-wise, involved hunting down Batwoman, almost letting her cousin die to uncover her secret identity, and then using the information to blackmail her into being their operative and going after Batman.

Here, they deal with all things alien, which sometimes leads to a group you can trust (Doctor Who’s UNIT), and sometimes really quite does not (Doctor Who’s Torchwood, pre-Captain Jack).

So, in short, no, I’m not surprised that the guy in charge is kind of a dick to Supergirl here.

5:17 “Go back to getting someone’s coffee.”

Okay, so, yes, it super looks like the general or whatever from the DEO was mean to Kara and she went home to cry about it and consider giving up being Supergirl. The second, leaked trailer lends some important context: she also gets her ass whupped by the bald alien with the axe. So her first time out goes badly, and she wonders if this was a good idea. Before you complain that makes Kara too much of a girly-girl, an observation.

The same thing happened in the pilot of The Flash.

Barry tried to catch a villain, did it so badly a civilian died, and he needed Oliver Queen to convince him not to give up, and Harrison Wells to convince him to keep fighting when round two proved difficult. That’s a part of the Hero’s Journey monomyth, called the Ordeal. The Green Lantern movie took some flak for spending its entire second act here, but it’s still an important step. This time, it’s Kara’s adopted sister (who is played by Chyler Leigh, who is awesome, so shut your pie holes) who inspires her to keep going.

I wonder why they cut this trailer to skip that kind of important context. I wouldn’t have. It’s just so helpful to explaining things. Making it look like she quits because the DEO guy was a dick isn’t helping your pitch, guys.

End montage

This first-look trailer has one key thing in common with the Flash trailer from a year ago… both kind of sum up the entire pilot. But while Flash ended with a 25 words-or-less summary of the climatic battle between Barry and Clyde Mardon (not-quite-Weather Wizard), this ends with a montage of action beats and Kara flying… oh yes, and James Olsen knows who she is too. In fact, Superman may have sent him to check in on Kara, and certainly gave him a gift to pass along.

Which, like I said… sure. Fine. The secret identity thing gets old, like I said.

And there’s this, which… oh my yes.

Damn right.
Damn right.

As movie/game critic and unofficial Marvel pundit Moviebob said… it’s a light-hearted comedy/adventure show geared towards a female audience, which is exactly what a show about Supergirl should be.

Overall? Kara’s adorable (still pronouncing it CAIR-ah in my head…), the action looks well done, the humour works for me… yeah, I’ll give it a go when it starts up.

In six months. Dang it.

Well. No time left to talk Legends of Tomorrow. I guess we’ll get into that over the weekend, after tomorrow’s Writers Circle Confidential.

Writers Circle Confidential: Jeff’s Head

DA NA NA-NA NA

New episode!

DA NA NA-NA NA

Telling you stuff about it!

DA NA NA-NA NA

First header!

Jeff Stuff

The arcs in season one mostly came about in the same way: Keith would write something (Phil and George, Becky and Ted), I would think “That’s neat,” and throw in additional references to it, leading to the finale where everything blows up.

Jeff, on the other hand, went a little differently.

This week, we meet Jeff’s on-again, off-again sex buddy Claire. Through flashbacks, primarily. And through Phil’s description. At the risk of joining spoiler culture (a call ahead reference to a blog I haven’t written yet), this is not the last we’re seeing of Claire. But the point is, the first Claire episode I wrote is yet to come.

I’ll tell the story of that episode soon enough. The relevance here is that it created a writing challenge for me. I wrote the payoff to Jeff’s arc for the year, then had to find a way to build the set-up into the rest of the season. The major part of which happens this week, as the name “Claire” is said for the first time and Victoria Souter makes her debut.

So when writing this episode, I was both following up on moments Keith and I had written from Night Moves and Favour For a Friend, while setting up things I’d written in episodes yet to come. Well, in one episode. I hadn’t written the finale yet.

More to come on Claire as it develops.

The Brain Trust Screws Up a Little

This episode has what might very well be my favourite shot of the whole season. This one, right here.

Look at all that fancy camerawork and whatnot.
Look at all that fancy camerawork and whatnot.

Like it? We really, really hope you do. Because along with “renting the space for the writers room,” it is one of the two biggest expenses for the whole damn season.

And not even for a good reason, like permits or fancy cameras or buying a proper boom mic instead of MacGyvering something together for me to hold while Ian and I ran a lap around Aaron. No, it was possibly our largest expense because we were a little dumb about getting the shot.

That’s the roof of our friend Ben’s building. Hence Ben being found in the “special thanks” portion of the end credits.

There he is.
There he is.

Everyone in this shoot had been on that roof multiple times. We used to watch fireworks from that roof. It never occurred to anyone, even Ben (who had let us shoot in his home despite not being present), that we weren’t technically supposed to be up there, given the lack of railings and whatnot.

We did a few takes, from a few angles, and once we were convinced we’d gotten the shot visually, gathered around to test whether the sound had recorded properly. A not-exactly-top-of-the-line microphone on a slightly windy roof, there could have been issues.

Let’s call that “Things we could have been smarter about #1.”

While we were packing up the equipment, someone emerged from the staircase, along with either a superintendent or a member of the condo board. Turns out that Keith yelling “action” and Aaron kicking the door open over and over drew a level of attention that fifteen intoxicated people watching fireworks never did. Whoever this basically-pyjama-clad authority figure was, she was super curious who we were and what we were doing up there. Not friendly curious, either. We tried to explain that we had a friend in the building, and he let us on the roof. Ian, ever helpful, even told her which unit.

“Things we could have been smarter about #2.”

I mean, she wasn’t a cop, she couldn’t legally detain us. We could have just left. Darted down the stairs for a few floors then doubled back to Ben’s place. All these things we thought of after Ian had sold out our host.

Turns out knowing a resident was insufficient, as for insurance reasons, he wasn’t allowed up there either. As a result, they changed the locks on the rooftop door. And sent Ben the bill. Which we paid, as we’re not sociopaths, and are capable of recognizing when we’re at fault.

If we’d done the sound check inside, or if we’d been even a little clever dealing with Angry Building Lady, maybe this could have been avoided.

The shot’s pretty as hell, though. Just pretty as hell.

Trash the set

The writers’ room has one episode left to air, but this is the episode where we wrapped it. Which obviously called for a celebratory photo.

That's a wrap for our largest location.
That’s a wrap for our most frequent location.

(I’m wearing a jacket because I’d been rehearsing Frost/Nixon next door while they’d been shooting)

There is a very simple reason that this episode included our final shot in the writers room. Bet you can guess what it is.

Yeah, man. You got it.
Hint: he flipped the bitch.

We deliberately scheduled the table flip to be the very last thing in this room. Because we suspected that when Jeff flipped the table, we were going to break the shit out of it. So before we let Aaron flip it we made sure that we weren’t going to need it again, save as a possible breakaway set piece in Cry Havoc 3 (that poster with Jeff’s head on it). It meant shooting that scene in two goes on two different days, but we were right. That table be broken.

Phil and Zoe

For Phil and Zoe’s relationship, we borrowed a trick from Dan Harmon, creator of Community. On that show, he decided he wanted to try something not normally seen on TV with Jeff and Britta: they’d bang once, to resolve some tension, but wouldn’t become boyfriend/girlfriend. They’d just continue having sex without romance, and that would be fine. But the only way that he could sell that on an American sitcom was to keep it a secret (save for some subtle hints along the way), then reveal that it had been happening the whole time.

So it went with Phil and Zoe. They have their moment back in Origin Stories, a moment that couldn’t help but be ridiculously cute as Ryan and Anna are, in the words of the age, “totes adorbs,” but then next episode George shows up and we forget all about it… until Becky starts to suspect in Favour For a Friend. The reason for this is exceptionally simple.

I will not do “will they/won’t they.” Ever.

Classic 90s sitcom Newsradio had my attention when they cast my favourite Kid in the Hall, Dave Foley, in the lead role. They had my respect when they skipped over “will they/won’t they” and had Dave and his rival Lisa hook up in episode two.

Because will they/won’t they is narrative death. Get two characters into a will they/won’t they situation, and you’re stuck with three equally doomed outcomes: 1) the characters get together but become boring, since the thrill was in the chase (Ross and Rachel from Friends, Sam and Diane from Cheers); 2) your audience gets so frustrated waiting for the characters to get together that they tune out (what actually happened to Moonlighting, no matter what you’ve read); 3) it turns out nobody gives a fuck if they get together, and all the teasing is barely more than dead air (Jeff and Britta).

Will they/won’t they is an invention of narrative devices like comics and four-camera sitcoms, which present at best the illusion of change since they thrive on stability and predictability. When your characters’ relationship is based around almost but never quite getting together, because either hooking up or losing interest in each other damages the status quo, there’s nowhere for it to go. It will go stagnant, because that is the only option. To paraphrase the Master from Doctor Who… that relationship was born out of death. All it can do is die.

So I will not write one. I hope to launch other series in the future, in addition to more seasons of Writers Circle… I hope to be telling stories ’til eternity claims me… but I will not succumb to will they/won’t they. I hate it and it’s awful.

So, yeah. Zoe and Phil banged. Wasn’t a big deal. They might do so again, and it still won’t be a big deal. Relationships have so many more shapes and faces to pursue than “These two are perfect for each other but just won’t see it (until the finale)!” That includes casual sex between friends, exes who get along despite ugly breakups, the bizarre debauchery of  Jeff and Claire, and… well we won’t get into what’s in store for Becky. Because that’s just more fun for everyone.

Random fun facts

I meant to write a scene for Jeff and Tina into this episode, because more Tina is always welcome (because we like the character, not because Kirstie’s a delight to have on set or anything), but the page count told me that I was running out of time and had to get to the punchline. Which, for the record, was Ian’s idea. He’s quite proud of that. As it turns out, I may have been wrong, because this one’s relatively short, but it is right in the sweet spot we’d been aiming for when we set out on this venture, so I stand by the choice overall.

Jeff’s therapist tells him not to do a Tree of Life thing because Tree of Life is terrible and shouldn’t even be considered a “film.” You probably knew that, but it’s been a while since I mentioned it.

I have started to type a fun fact about this episode no less than three times before realizing, each time, that the scene I’m thinking of is next week. Probably a sign that I’m done.

Next week… an interlude in the growing tensions, as Jeff drags Phil into what he’s described as a ghost problem.

Writers Circle Confidential: In The Depths

You know the drill. Watch this, then we chat.

Okay. Here goes.

Finding it as you go

The beginning of this episode shifted somewhat between casting and production. Originally, it was Zoe who’d failed to notice that Jeff was in the room. And when Anna (who plays Zoe) and Aaron (who plays Jeff) read that at Anna’s audition (Aaron having been cast some time earlier), it was certainly funny… but as you may recall from two weeks ago, we had a running gag building in which Jeff was habitually unable (or unwilling, maybe?) to tell that Zoe was in the room. Or recall her name. Zoe not noticing that handsy womanizer Jeff Winnick wasn’t in the somewhat small writers’ room would be a) weird, and b) actively contradictory to the other bit, which had more legs.

(Yes, I shift between actor name and character name a lot. Yes, I know it’s potentially confusing. No, that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop.)

So while it always pains me a little to cut a joke, I rewrote the opening of the episode to reflect this new status quo that several other episodes established. And hey, the new joke turned out possibly even better. Because as funny as Anna’s reaction was to Aaron sneaking up on her, that pan over to reveal she’s been in the room the whole phone call just killed me the first time through. Hopefully you agree.

There’s a lot of this. On network television, they’re producing episodes from August until April, and get a chance to react to audience expectation. Play to their strengths, work on their weaknesses… well, in theory. Lord knows the writers of Gotham haven’t done much to make Barbara Kean less of a train wreck, but Arrow certainly adapted. Other shows, like House of Cards or Game of Thrones, film their entire seasons in one go, then release afterwards. All 13 episodes of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt come out in one burst, so if there’s oh, I don’t know, a controversy about how they handle their minority characters, there’s not much they can do about that until season two.

We’re in a similar situation (he said, desperately trying to avoid saying “We’re like Game of Thrones,” aka. the most egotistical thing he could say in this context), in that the entire series finished photography three months before our first episodes went live. We didn’t even shoot episode by episode… as I said earlier, anything involving all four writers in the Writers’ Room had to be shot during Super Fun Happy Good Times Week. So it’s not like we could shoot a couple of episodes, review the dailies, learn what we could do better and brush up the next episode before we rolled cameras.

It’s a learn-as-you-go process. You just hope the seams don’t show too much. This topic got away from me a little. Let’s move on.

Like, Share, Subscribe

I probably watch the most internet videos of any of the executive producers (he said, his tone implying this wasn’t so much a brag as a shameful confession). This means that I put the most thought into little things like the difference between YouTube, Vimeo (YouTube’s pretentious cousin), and DailyMotion (the cousin from a dysfunctional family that YouTube and Vimeo don’t like to talk about), or more relevantly, how to do a good “Like, Share, Subscribe” short (or, as we call them, LSS) to run under the credits. Vlog-style channels like Jenna Marbles will just sign off for the week by reminding you to subscribe to the channel; more production-intensive channels like Cracked Studios and College Humor (spelling it without the U kills me a little, but that’s how they spell it, so…) have to run actual credits, so they fill that time with a quick bit to encourage you to like and share and subscribe, those things that don’t seem important until you’re on the other side of the video, when they become everything.

Now there’s a couple of ways to go here, and my two examples use both interchangeably. You can do an LSS custom tailored to the video… examples include Cracked’s Rom.Com (season two, anyway) and After Hours, or at least half of College Humor’s Adam Ruins Everything videos… or you can shoot something quick and generic that you can slap on the end of basically any video. Cody from Cracked or Emily from College Humor pointing out the like, subscribe, or “Watch more videos” buttons. Effective, but I find something disengaging about Cody saying “Thanks for watching… whatever that was.” I’d rather the request to subscribe be accompanied by Daniel O’Brien explaining that Soren Bowie wrote “Everyone is eating pie” into the stage directions for no reason other than he wanted pie.

I sort of split the difference. On occasion, our LSS bits are tailored towards the specific episode… most notably Brent’s on episode two… but for the most part, I wrote LSS bits for all of the main characters, and we figured out the best episodes to pair with each one. For instance, an episode about the horrors of the comments section fits well with an LSS about Zoe being traumatized by the comments section (one of my two favourites).

Random facts!

I directed the section with Zoe and Jeff locked in the side room. Which, let me tell you, was a bit tricky. The side rooms aren’t very big: we needed room for Zoe, Jeff, lights, the camera, the sound equipment, plus me and Ian, and possibly Tawni, who was typically on slate, but might not have been there that day. So I was cramped into one corner, directing the shots while running sound, with no chair. I have had old-man-knees since I was 15. I would typically lose all feeling in my legs during the shot.

The poster you can see on the window (albeit backwards) is for a band we know called Thwomp. They do rock covers of video games. They’re pretty awesome. You can find their music right here if metal covers of Mega Man music appeal to you, and how could they not.

I needed something for Zoe to be listening to on her way into the building, to cover the fact she didn’t notice Jeff’s ranting, or, as it turned out when we actually staged and shot it, Becky waiting in ambush. Zoe seemed the exact type to enjoy Jonathan Coulton. Because she’s on the geeky side and has a heart and feelings, so of course she likes Jonathan Coulton.

The trick about punchlines

In the punchline of this week’s episode, Jeff asks if Zoe deals with this sort of thing on her blog. After saying “I’m a woman. On the internet,” she decides he’s had enough for one day, and says that, no, everyone who comments on her blog is totally respectful.

Wasn’t the original punchline.

Because I spend a lot of time online, and have these crazy thoughts that maybe every woman I’ve ever cared about or will ever meet shouldn’t have to deal with a misogynist culture or live under the constant threat of sexual violence from men, I am well aware about what Zoe would have to deal with on her blog.

Jeff gets mean comments that his film might not be very good. Zoe gets threatened with rape and death if she expresses an opinion about a comic book.

And this episode was written before the real-life horror movie that is GamerGate got started, and “doxxing” and “Swatting” entered the common lexicon.

So I considered having the punchline of the episode be a little different, acknowledging what I was sadly confident would be part of Zoe’s day-to-day life. But we decided that might be a little too dark. Dark’s all well and good in the set up, but if you’re working it into the punchline, you’d better be confident your audience is going to be okay with that. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia trains its audience to expect a dark punchline to a dark premise; we didn’t have that expectation. So I went the other way. I think it works better. Provides a nice end moment instead of something that would just get Jeff spun up again.

Which is not to say that we shy away from controversial jokes. As we’ll see next week, when we talk about the yelling fight Keith and I had in a pub about… well, I wouldn’t want to give it away.

Seriously, like, share, subscribe, and comment on the videos. YouTube pays attention to that stuff.

Cinematic universe or Cinematic multiverse?

It is, as Hardison from Leverage often said, the Age of the Geek. And nothing drives that point home like the massive surge in superhero properties being adapted to the big and small screens. There are those in the media questioning whether the market’s getting saturated, but my opinion remains largely unchanged:

I'm pretty much okay with it.
I’m pretty much okay with it.

The two largest players in the superhero market, Marvel and DC, are developing two very different tactics to exploit this.

Marvel, as anyone in western society is now aware, has the Marvel cinematic universe, a series of interconnected films that range from “kind of okay” to “amazing” in terms of quality, but “acceptable” to “massive hit” in terms of box office. After Guardians of the Galaxy became the year’s biggest success story (beating out Captain America, the X-Men, Spider-Man, and the Transformers) despite having no A or even B list characters, Marvel Studios is seen as pretty much bulletproof at the box office. They’re also trying to expand into television, but Agents of SHIELD’s so-so reception and slow-bleed ratings mean it’s come the closest to being their first failure, it remains to be seen how Agent Carter will do at midseason, and their Netflix series are still at least a year away.

DC, on the other hand, is swiftly moving to dominate the television landscape. Arrow is into its third season, and now has a spinoff in the Flash; Gotham has opened strong on Fox; Constantine and iZombie are still on the way; and deals are in the works to bring the Titans and Supergirl to TV next year. If even half these projects achieve Arrow-level success (the first step towards Smallville-level success, something I am defining here exclusively by its ten-year run and not how warranted said run was), DC will be dominating the TV market. On the other hand, they haven’t had a movie that’s an unqualified success since 2008. Since The Dark Knight, they’ve managed “moderate hits that aren’t fondly remembered” (The Dark Knight Rises, Man of Steel) and “outright failures,” (Green Lantern, Jonah Hex), with their next big movie raising a few concerns.

But who’s dominating which medium isn’t what I wanted to talk about. No, it’s clear that both companies want a piece of all the pies. The difference in tactics comes down to how their various properties are interacting. Marvel and DC have taken different paths here, with Marvel bringing all of their film and TV projects into one shared universe, while DC has built a Chinese wall in between film and television, and with their shows already spread across three networks (five by next year if everything goes forward), that looks to get worse before it gets better.

So let’s take a look at each strategy. See how they stack up.

Pro for Marvel: Everything is connected!

Well, everything except Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four. You know, the A-list properties.

This is slightly harder to describe than I thought. Let’s try a story.

There’s a moment in Batman Forever when Bruce Wayne asks newly orphaned Dick Grayson what he’s going to do next. “The circus must be halfway to Metropolis by now,” he says. And so excited was Young Me in that moment, that quick little reference to Superman’s home city, that I barely even noticed how wooden Val Kilmer’s delivery was, and briefly forgot how ridiculous this movie was in general. And this is something Marvel movies manage each and every time. They are filled with references to each other and Easter eggs pointing elsewhere in Marvel lore.

And if one quick reference to Metropolis can brighten Batman Forever, imagine what that can do for movies that are actually fun, like Iron Man or Captain America. Or, to a lesser extent, Thor. And when all the various characters get to interact in one movie? Well, The Avengers happens. A massive success that everyone loves. Yes, okay, getting Joss Whedon to write and direct it certainly helped. Just throwing all the characters into one movie and hoping it works out isn’t a recipe for The Avengers, it’s a recipe for the largely reviled third X-Men movie.

Yes I am looking right at you when I say that, Zach Snyder. DO NOT SCREW UP THE JUSTICE LEAGUE, I AM NOT 20 ANYMORE, I MIGHT NOT GET A SECOND ONE IF YOU SCREW THIS UP.

Ahem.

That said, the interconnected Marvel Universe is also a demonstrable cash cow. Not only was the Avengers a massive success, every single movie since then has enjoyed a bump. Iron Man 3, Thor: the Dark World, and Captain America: the Winter Soldier all out-grossed their predecessors (something not every superhero franchise has been able to say lately), and Guardians of the Galaxy rode the Marvel name to box office supremacy.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is working so well that everyone wants a piece of the action. Warner Bros./DC is trying to bolt right to the big money by fast tracking Justice League instead of spending the time/capital on individual franchises. Despite the demonstrable diminishing returns on their current Spider-Man plans, Sony is trying to build their own cinematic universe off Spider-Man and his various… villains? That’s the plan? Really? That is going to crash and burn so hard… Fox is rejuvenating the X-Men (and releasing a Fantastic Four movie they seem weirdly reluctant to talk about), and Universal is trying to get into the game by making a connected universe out of Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolfman, and Frankenstein. Which could work…

…or it could not.

Spoiler: he was an archangel the whole time. There was no need for that.

On the other side of the fence…

Con for DC: Everything is in a silo

Meanwhile, everything DC is doing is compartmentalized. There’s the new cinematic universe they launched with Man of Steel, and are trying to kickstart into full Marvel mode through Batman V. Superman: Cameos of Justice. Then there’s what’s known as the “Arrowverse,” the CW TV universe that started with Arrow and has expanded into the Flash. Constantine’s off on his own on NBC, and Gotham isn’t tying into anything.

Nor should it, really. I mean, they snuck in a Queen Consolidated Easter egg in the second episode, but really this show should take place at least a decade before Oliver’s fateful voyage on the Queen’s Gambit, 15 years before his return to Starling City.

So no, Stephen Amell’s Arrow and Grant Gustin’s Flash will not be joining Henry Cavill, Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot and the rest of the BvS cameos in the Justice League movie. Nor will John Constantine be swaggering into Starling or Central Cities. Which is a little sad in its own right, but there’s a bigger problem.

Have separate continuities if you want. DC is often built around the idea of a multiverse anyway. It’s the fact the characters from one continuity seemingly can’t appear in any of the others for fear of confusing the audience or whatever that’s killing us.

Smallville was banned from having Batman or Bruce Wayne appear. They brought in Green Arrow, Flash/Impulse (long story), Cyborg, Hawkman, Aquaman, Black Canary, the Legion of Superheroes, even Booster Gold… but never Batman, because they didn’t want to mess with the films. And now Batman, Superman, and their respective cities are verboten to the Arrowverse. Reportedly, the producers of Flash were told to cut a Luthorcorp Easter egg from the pilot, and it remains to be seen what sort of crackdown on Bat-verse references is going to spill out of Gotham being on the Fox network.

There is some small hope that it might be less stupid going forwards. The president of the CW network teased the possibility of Arrow crossing over with the proposed Titans series heading for TNT. And Supergirl will share a showrunner with Arrow and Flash (besides the ever-present Geoff Johns), and its network, CBS, is from a corporate perspective the CW’s older, more successful brother, both of them being owned by Warner Brothers, owners of DC Comics. So there’s some talk that Supergirl might not necessarily stand alone like Gotham or Constantine.

Except how would either of those even work? Arrow has had zero mentions of Batman, Gotham, Wayne Enterprises, anything (the leaked pilot of the Flash does, but it remains to be seen if that lasts until broadcast). How do you have a Titans show, starring Batman’s ex-sidekick Nightwing, cross over to a show where Batman doesn’t exist? Moreover, there are no aliens in the Arrowverse. They just introduced superpowers on the Flash, but neither series is currently touching aliens. So how do you have Starfire? And if there’s no Superman in the Arrowverse, does it even make sense to have Supergirl?

And it doesn’t even have to be like this. When Superman Returns came out, Smallville was still on the air. Whatever prevented Superman Returns from being the franchise launcher they hoped, people being confused by the multiple Clark Kents wasn’t it. And the producers of Gotham certainly aren’t planning to pack up and call it a day when Batman V. Superman opens partway through what they hope to be their second season. And their animation division keeps cranking out product regardless of what the characters are doing in live action.

Marvel can’t have Spider-Man or the X-Men turn up in the Avengers because they sold the film rights in order to keep the doors open after the comic crash in the 90s. Warner Bros. doesn’t have that excuse, yet they act like that anyway. And it’s maddening sometimes.

However.

Con for Marvel: Everything’s connected, but nobody’s talking

The Marvel cinematic universe has introduced film and TV audiences to a nitpick comic fans have known and traded for years: “Why wouldn’t [x-character] call [y-character] for help?”

Happens all the time. “Superman could have stopped the riot in Arkham Asylum in five seconds. Why not call him?” Or, one I asked recently, “Captain America is the head of SHIELD, why is he letting a crooked weapons developer and the general in her pocket push Iron Man around like this?”

And while answers exist (Batman is able to protect Gotham because the criminals are afraid of him, not because they’re afraid that he’ll tell on them to Superman if they’re too mean), the single greatest argument against this nitpick is “He was busy, read his book.” Of course Captain America couldn’t bail out Iron Man, he’s been going through hell with the Red Skull. Of course Wonder Woman couldn’t come to Gotham, she’s been dealing with civil war on Olympus for months. Of course Green Lantern hasn’t been around to help the Justice League, shit is falling apart out in space.

The movies don’t have that. Avengers movies aside, we check in with Tony Stark or Captain America once every two years. Less than that for the Hulk. So we don’t have any idea what they’re doing between movies. So here’s a quick list of questions that arise when everyone’s movie is connected but nobody appears in each other’s movies because Robert Downey Jr. isn’t free. (Some spoilers for The Winter Solider and Iron Man 3)

  • Tony Stark’s house gets blown up by terrorists, after which said terrorists kidnap The President of the United States off of Air Force One, and nobody thinks that maybe SHIELD should get involved? Captain America has nothing to say about any of this?
  • Captain America has to bring down three heavily armed helicarriers in the Winter Solider, and for backup he brings Black Widow and some guy he met while jogging? This doesn’t seem like something that Tony Stark, the guy who helped design the helicarriers, or Bruce Banner, the unstoppable rage monster, might be useful for?
  • Actually forget them. Where the hell is Hawkeye? Black Widow finds out SHIELD is compromised and Clint Barton wasn’t her first phone call? They were partners! She joined the Avengers to help out Hawkeye for gods’ sake, and when their mutual employer turns on her, she doesn’t even try to get word to him? He even has experience bringing down helicarriers! Managed it with two fucking arrows!
  • And where the bloody hell is Thor since his last movie? He left Asgard at the end of the Dark World to hang out with Jane, and since then… what? Just bumming around Europe? “Pagan anarchists” (oy…) got their hands on an Asgardian weapon, an Asgardian criminal was on a rampage in the southern US, and Captain America was being hunted for treason, and Thor just doesn’t give a shit.
  • Everyone knows Coulson’s alive again, right? I mean, that’s got to be clear by now. He wasn’t exactly keeping his head down in the first season of Agents of SHIELD, and now he’s being publicly hunted by the US government. I have to believe Tony Stark would have noticed he’s not dead by now.

Swear to god, if they open the second Avengers movie with the team hanging out together and the implication that they’re in regular contact, fans would be within their rights to riot.

But that aside, there’s another problem with the Cinematic Universe’s approach.

Pro to DC: no one is beholden to anyone

The greatest flaw of Agents of SHIELD’s first season is that they didn’t have an interesting plot or an engaging villain for 15 episodes. Their money storyline involved the Hydra revelation from Winter Soldier, so they couldn’t really kick that off until after Winter Soldier had opened: eight months and sixteen episodes into the season. As a result, and I’ve said this before but it bears repeating, they hemorrhaged viewers and good will and only barely squeaked out a renewal thanks to corporate synergy making low ratings acceptable. The fact that they did nothing but spin their wheels up until that point is a whole other conversation, but the fact is their first season’s stories were beholden to the Winter Soldier’s release date. It remains to be seen what impact Age of Ultron will have, but for their sake, I hope it’s “none,” or at least “none until the third season” (if there is one, given that their second episode this season tied their series low point).

The Arrowverse doesn’t have that problem.

The Arrowverse can do whatever the hell it wants to do. We’re not going to connect to the Justice League movie? Fine, we’ll build our own Justice League with the Atom and Firestorm. Can’t use Batman? Fine, but we’ll borrow whichever of his villains you aren’t using. Ra’s Al Ghul’s available now, right?

In a strictly narrative context, they don’t have to hold anything back until the next movie opens. They’re not beholden to Zach Snyder’s plans. They can crossover as much or as little as they like, and when finale season rolls around, I imagine both Flash and the Arrow will be a little too busy with their own problems to come bail each other out.

Likewise, Gotham is free to play around. They won’t have to stick to someone else’s vision of Batman or the Penguin’s journeys. I doubt they’ll get too experimental, but they have some breathing room.

So while not being connected to the movies or several of the other series can be frustrating, it’s also the reason Arrow is thriving while Agents of SHIELD fizzled.

Also, nobody ever has to ask where Superman was during the Starling City earthquake.

Wrapping up

So the two strategies have their strengths and weaknesses. Linking all the movies works like gangbusters (a few narrative holes aside), but letting TV shows do their own thing seems to be working out better than chaining them to a movie release schedule.

Do I want to see Titans and Supergirl cross over with Arrow and Flash? Damn right I do. Am I afraid that the Flash won’t be in the Justice League? Damn skippy I am. But am I glad that they’re getting to tell their own stories on their own terms? You’d better believe it.