Tales From Parts Unknown – Page 27 – Adventures in travel, theatre and life in the future

Flash forward?

So. The Flash.

People who know me know that I’m a hardcore DC fanboy. I love Superman, am at best ambivalent about Wolverine, and own more Green Lantern paraphernalia than suit jackets. It’s not that I have anything against Marvel comics (I read many of their titles), or the Marvel movies… in fact, here’s me co-hosting a Marvel movie marathon for my theatre group.

Not pictured: Superman pint glass, with cape. Not kidding. — My co-host didn’t feel I was embracing the spirit.

So, yeah, love me some DC comics. Have been wanting a Justice League movie for years, even though they let me down every time.

And yet even I’m confused by all the love getting thrown at the Flash all of a sudden.

Why Flash?

When laying out their plans for the future at Comic-Con, (plans that move much slower than Marvel’s, as DC Entertainment is but a portion of the Warner Brothers empire rather than a separate studio like Marvel) DC Entertainment announced that their Superman/Batman movie in 2015 would be followed by a solo movie for the Flash before taking a swing at a combined Justice League.

This caused a few raised eyebrows. After all, the holy trinity of DC Comics isn’t Superman, Batman, and the guy who runs fast, it’s Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. The greatest female superhero of them all. Remember? Wouldn’t making her movie next be the logical move? I mean, other than Incredible Hulk, Marvel opened with their big trinity–okay, well, no they didn’t. As far as the Avengers go, the big three have traditionally been Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor, but in Marvel as a whole it’s Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Deadpool. Two of whom are even Avengers now, at least in the comics. But in terms of characters they still owned the rights to, it’s Cap, Tony, and Thor.

I digress.

I suppose the Wonder Woman movie they tried but failed to make with Joss Whedon (HOW DOES THAT HAPPEN–sorry, rant for another time…), the TV series they tried but failed to make with David E. Kelley, and the more Smallville-esque origin TV series they can’t get even sell to the network that deliberately ran Smallville for a goddamn decade, Warner Brothers is feeling gun shy with Wonder Woman. And they’re not eager to return to Green Lantern, given the harsh reception the last movie got. And Entourage aside, I don’t see them making an Aquaman movie before they’ve tested him in a team flick. Assuming that Justice League is a hit, and they follow it with solo movies. Neither of which are in the same time zone as “sure things” yet. So, yeah, if they’re going to do one more solo movie, I guess I can see why they’d pick the Flash.

And I love the Flash. Ever since Mark Waid’s run on the title in the 90s, it’s been one of my top books. The Flash is definitely one of DC’s top characters when handled well–any character is awful if you write him awful, so don’t throw any silver age nonsense at me–so I allowed my enthusiasm for a Flash movie to override any confusion over their “Man of Steel, Man of Steel sequel–NO WAIT ALSO BATMAN, Flash, Justice League” plan.

This this happened.

Flash of Two Worlds?

For those who didn’t click the link, in addition to a Flash movie in 2016, they’re trying to launch a Flash TV series in 2014 by introducing the character in an episode of Arrow, a move known as a “back door pilot.” And, for the record, the executive producers/showrunners of Arrow are the guys who are supposed to be writing the Flash movie as well.

Um… okay. Interesting choice. This is the part where I might have flipped out in joy. Ranted about how great it would be to set up the Flash in a TV series, a medium far, far better suited to adapting comic books than movies ever were, then do the Flash movie and link the TV universe of Flash and Arrow to the DC film universe. Like how Agents of SHIELD is linked to the Avengers movies.

If only I believed that’s what they’re doing.

Because, you see, as the second season of Arrow starts, super powers still aren’t a thing. The season two sizzle reel showed no sign that they were going to do the one thing I stubbornly hoped for, despite how unlikely it seemed: references to the events of Man of Steel. It’s the first time Arrow has ever failed to bend over backwards to please me, so I let it go… but now the Arrow universe is priming to include the Flash. Super powers are coming to Starling City.

And yet I can’t help suspect that they’re planning on keeping the movie Flash and TV Flash separate. I don’t know why they’d do that. I can’t picture the thought process in which having a movie about a character while running an unrelated TV series about the same character is a good idea. Man of Steel didn’t come out while Smallville was airing. But if you’re willing to fire Joss Whedon off a Wonder Woman movie, you’ll do any damn stupid thing.

Final thoughts

So maybe… MAYBE… this will all become the simple wonder of synergy it logically should be. Maybe the DC cinematic universe started with Man of Steel will link to the televised universe of Arrow, and Flash will be the bridge. After all, Flash was the first character to travel from Earth-1 to Earth-2 (long story). And yet I can’t shake the suspicion that they’re going to go the other way. Hire one team to write two Flashes, going to bizarre lengths to avoid a united universe.

I hope I’m wrong. But I also hope that one day I’ll learn to love things that don’t disappoint, hurt or try to kill me, but my commitment to community theatre and craving for Pizza Hut suggest otherwise.

Still, though. Flash on TV. Didn’t expect that to happen twice in my lifetime. Might yet be worthwhile.

In Which Dan Talks About Comic Con

I am a geek with opinions and I have a blog, so we’re talking about Comic Con now. That’s what’s happening.

Age of Ultron, you say?

So at the end of their panel, Marvel brought out Joss Whedon to announce that the full title of the Avengers sequel will be Avengers: Age of Ultron. For those who don’t follow comics with the same unhealthy intensity I do, Age of Ultron was a recent event comic Marvel put out in which Ultron has successfully conquered the world and the few remaining heroes need a desperate plan to stop him. It was pretty clear, from the word go, that Joss was only going to be using the title “Age of Ultron” rather than the story. The actual miniseries couldn’t work as an Avengers sequel, since A) it hinges on Ultron being a long-term established threat; B) Ultron is barely in it, and non-comic readers would likely respond poorly to announcing a villain who doesn’t actually appear; and C) it’s not even about the Avengers. It’s a Wolverine story. Even moreso than most Marvel events.

So, Ultron’s our villain for the next movie? Interesting, should work out. Still, does kind of make a liar out of that end-credit tease of Thanos, doesn’t it? “Hey! That spooky boss of Loki? It was this guy! Maybe we’ll put him in a movie some day! Just not soon!”

And this is not the first time they’ve set up a future villain and then dropped him. Iron Man set up the Ten Rings, a terrorist organization named after the signature weapon of the Mandarin, Iron Man’s biggest enemy. Iron Man 2 had Sam Rockwell’s Justin Hammer, evil corporate rival from the comics, dragged away by the police promising to return and seek revenge. And Iron Man 3 dropped all of that to take its own angle on the Mandarin and bring in a new corporate rival in Aldrich Killian and AIM. I mean, Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin was neat, and putting Guy Pearce in a movie is never the wrong choice, but still. That was a lot of build-up tossed out.

Incredible Hulk had Banner-blood leak into fellow-scientist Samuel Sterns’ head to set him up to be the Leader. But that would have required them to make another Hulk movie.

So is that Thanos tease going anywhere? Who knows. The other examples come down to changing creative teams (Iron Man 3) and lack of sequels, but in this case Joss Whedon decided to include the Thanos tease, and Joss Whedon decided to make Ultron his next villain instead. Maybe he’s planning on using Thanos for Avengers 3, but that is still five years away. I’m all about the long game but that’s really pushing it.

Superman/Batman? Go on.

Warner/DC’s big announcement? The sequel to Man of Steel coming in 2015 will be a Superman/Batman movie. This one announcement has generated enough attention that a legitimate website actually asked who won Comic Con, DC or Marvel, despite the fact that Marvel had footage from three movies (including one that had been shooting for less than two weeks) and trotted out enough stars to have a pickup soccer game in the parking lot, and DC announced one thing with at best tentative plans for two more, hasn’t cast the new Batman yet, and said more about what Batman/Superman won’t be than what it will (it won’t be an adaptation of Dark Knight Returns or a follow-up to Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy).

So, yeah, Marvel wins because their panel had Amy Pond and The Piemaker on one panel, but there’s still something important in what DC had to say. Producer Emma Thomas confirmed that this is not going to be a continuation of the Nolan/Bale Batman. It’s a new Batman, a Justice League friendly Batman.

And they’re not introducing him in an origin story.

How is that not the conversation? How are we not excited that they’re actually going to trust us to remember what Batman’s deal is rather than start over at his parents dying again? And once they’re done fighting each other, who will they be teaming up against? Come on, this is cool. This could be super cool. Plus, how about some credit for trying to expand the universe in a different way than the Marvel model? Huh? That worth something?

And, let’s be real, summer of 2015 they’re up against the sequel to the most successful superhero movie ever made. Putting Superman and Batman in the same movie puts Warner Brothers back in the running.

Final thoughts

There are two things that are truly important from this year’s Comic Con announcement. First, and most important… Summer Glau is on Arrow next season. They… they get me. They really do.

Second… DC is aiming to have the Justice League on screens by 2017. Thanos will not be in any Marvel movie before 2018, if that. Warner Bros, this is your chance to get Darkseid in a movie and not be accused of ripping off his pale imitator Thanos.

DO. NOT. FUCK. THIS. UP.

Thank you and good day.

Back on the coast

Ah, Vancouver.

I’m currently on a brief sojourn to the coast, where I’m visiting family and taking a break from some of the stresses that have been hovering over me as of late. Well, not many of the stresses, actually… I plan to fit in some serious writing time now that I’m a 12 hour drive away from my video games, and can either be on my computer or watch Netflix, but not both. Reduces the diversions.

A friend recently accused me of being in the creative peak of my life. Okay, “accused” may seem like an odd choice of word there, but he has a very judgmental tone when discussing anything I like that he does not, or vice versa. If I mention a TV show I like more than twice in a day, I’m “clearly obsessed,” and likely wasting my time watching so much TV; when I remind him I don’t like olives, he acts like it’s a personal failing.

After which he will continue to advocate poor life choices, prostitutes, and beverages that taste of black licorice. Despite the fact that liking the taste of black licorice is a warning sign of psychopathy. And he wonders why I find his advice suspect.

Writing up a storm

Wait. Where was I? Yes. Creative peak, he calls it. Hadn’t thought about it like that. I’d only been thinking of it as “I’m surely working on a lot of things.” A new play for next year in its third draft. A webseries I hope to launch this fall, assuming my cohorts and I can get it written and shot. Two projects I try to avoid mentioning lest discussing them get me too excited about what could happen if these tempting yet unlikely ships come in. And my unnecessarily verbose blog. I do seem to be in a creative storm here.

And the truth is, that’s because it’s what I need right now. I lost the latter half of my 20s. Well, in a way I did. I wasn’t in a coma or anything, I just… wasted my time. Working as a projectionist and lurking in my dingy apartment, passing the time alone in the dark, waiting for my life to start. It took until two months before my 30th birthday to fix all of that, and I won’t go back to that place. I’ve become acutely, worryingly aware that I have much less time left to waste, so I’m on the hunt for ways to make the most of it. And love and family seem off the table (for now…ladies), so instead I’m on a quest to go places, see things, and above all create. Create as much as I can, and find a way to make it last. Get it to people.

But for any of that to happen I need to actually break away from my routines and write my cold, black heart out. Maybe find a way to keep my goals for the week in mind so that some of them actually get done. And a good first step is getting away, giving my head a little space.

So… Vancouver.

And maybe some day soon I’ll have exciting news. For now, though, it’s just me and the grindstone. And my niece. Who I should probably go say hello to. Ta for now.

Danny G Writes Plays: Trigger Dandy

Alright stop. Collaborate and listen. Danny’s back with a brand new edition.

Right. No. Sorry. That was the wrong way to apologize for a lengthy absence from blogging. One writing project sort of eclipsed all others, even though everything else I’m working on has a far better chance of ever seeing the light of day. Still… write what’s in your head, you know?

On that note, time for the first entry in a series I promised back in spring, before the Europe trip, before the rivers rose and the city briefly drowned: a look back at my various plays. To begin, we travel back to the before times, the longago, a time some of you may have read about in school called “the mid-90s.”

The Amazing (and Almost Accurate) Adventures of Trigger Dandy

It began in the room that would, more than any other, shape my entire life to come: my high school drama room, the classroom/theatre where my best friend Sean and I spent most of our time, especially by grade 12. Sean was doing his math homework there over lunch, and muttered something about trig identities. Our teacher, Mr. Stromsmoe, misheard it as “Trigger Dandy,” feeling it was a great name for a character.

Time passes. Our fall production of Waiting For Godot becomes my stage debut, playing opposite drama regular Rusty Bennett. One night, Rusty cut his foot on a bottle that had broken onstage. He didn’t let it hold his performance back, despite the bleeding. In the show’s post-mortem, Mr. Stromsmoe referred to it as the “blood, glass and Rusty” incident. He then turned to Sean and said “Hey, there’s a play for that Trigger Dandy guy.”

“Yes,” I thought. “Yes it is.”

Blood, Glass and Rusty

Before long, I had enlisted Sean and our good friend Jason Garred into the creation of a short film noir detective parody to take to that year’s high school drama festival. We had fifteen minutes to tell the story of private eye Trigger Dandy, trying to solve the abduction of his sidekick, Rusty Buster, and the theft of the Macguffin Diamond. We crammed as many jokes, sight gags and one-liners as we could into it, not wanting to waste a moment of our fifteen minutes. The result? Hilarity. Audiences cracked up at our debut performance at our school and at the festival. At the festival, our cast got a second wave of applause when they came back onstage to clear our set. And it wasn’t just a hit with audiences: our adjudicator also loved us, and gave us an award for writing.

Buoyed by this, we thought the only logical response was to keep going, write a sequel. Well. It’s not like you never made questionable decisions at 17.

Potatoes in the Mist

Sean began to pull back from the process, but Jason and I plugged on and, by the end of our first year of University, wrote our Trigger Dandy sequel, Potatoes in the Mist.

Wacky titles seemed the way to go. Shut up.

An older Trigger Dandy reunites with his old sidekick, Rusty, to investigate a potato cult, planning to summon their Evil Potato Goddess with what turns out to be a piece of an alien starship engine, oddly British aliens working with Trigger’s estranged girlfriend from BGR (as its fans had come to call it).

PREMISE! (All of that made perfect sense at the time.)

We attempted to get the band back together, as it were, and stage our follow-up back at the old high school. This ultimately had less to do with rational thought and more to do with anxiety over University, and my failure to research what I might actually have to do for my preferred major. I wanted to be a big fish in a small pond again, and that meant going back to the only place I’d ever felt like a big shot: my old drama room.

Sadly, putting on a show at a school you no longer attend is trickier than it seems. I had yet to master the art of self-producing (the secret is get someone else to be the producer), and it became clear that we weren’t going to get the show up and running by the end of the school year, and attempts to pick up where we left off quickly collapsed the following September. We thought no more of good old Trigger Dandy.

For, like, a whole year.

Cube Root of Death

Jason and I eventually felt the need to be creative and theatrical again. At his suggestion, we answered an ad in Fast Forward, a local weekly newspaper, calling for people to be part of a group doing radio plays. We joined up, went to meetings, wrote a few sketches… and nothing really happened. One of the other members, also frustrated with the general lack of action in the group, suggested the three of us split off and form a sketch comedy troupe, grabbing what actors we wanted on our way out (particularly one Mr. Tebbutt, whose acquaintance was the single greatest thing we gained from the radio drama group). We had some meetings, wrote some sketches… and nothing happened. Jason and I decided enough was enough: we were setting a concrete goal. We were going to dust off and stage our Trigger Dandy plays, and by god we were going to take them to the Edmonton Fringe.

But first, we needed a third entry. Something to make it into a full trilogy. A prequel: an origin story for Trigger Dandy. A spy parody called The Cube Root of Death, in which a young Trigger Dandy gets wrapped up in an adventure with British secret agent Max Forky, out to foil the Australian mad scientist Tarkin Drubik, who is planning the rule the world with hypnotic cube puzzles.

In June of 1997, The Amazing and Almost Accurate Adventures of Trigger Dandy played for one night only. The laughs were big and frequent, but the triogy had its flaws. Potatoes in the Mist was twice as long and half as fast-paced as the other two, which is not what you look for in a concluding chapter. It would also be the first and greatest warning of my coming struggles with pop culture references: several of our “jokes” boiled down to simply quoting Star Wars while doing something silly. At the time we thought it clever. I would later see it for the hackery it was.

Years later we’d replace it with a new third chapter: Doom’s Pointy Talon, in which an aging Trigger Dandy, retired from the PI game, is drawn back into the field by FBI agent Rusty Buster. We kept the strangely British aliens we’d introduced in Potatoes, devised wacky encounters, slipped in a Matrix fight scene (still had a few pop culture issues in 2002, it seems), and made a far more satisfying trilogy.

It’s still not perfect: it’s tricky to do a three-act play when the acts are twenty minutes tops, and some of the jokes are a touch corny. Some of the others are highly corny. But for something I wrote at 17, or co-wrote in any event, it holds up okay. And it holds a definite appeal for most people who work on it. Maybe one day it’ll be back, but I’m not holding my breath.

When I next return to this series, we’ll look at how Jason and I tried to keep our Trigger Trilogy cast together.

Dan and Ian Wander Europe: In Bruges

So, you know that annoying thing people on the internet will do, where they fail to update their blog/comic/whatever, and then apologize by saying that they were working on something super cool that they can’t tell you about yet?

Welp.

The real problem is that, since we last spoke, I’ve been working on something that I’m not telling people about because the odds seem very small that it will go anywhere. It might. It might go somewhere, and if it did, it would be the single greatest thing that has ever happened to me by a significant margin. Save for “successfully being born,” I guess. But until that switches over from “dimly possible” to “actually probable” I’m trying not to get my or anyone’s hopes up by making a big deal.

And now that I’ve done that exact thing I dislike, onwards. Belgium. Let’s do this.

Bruges

I won’t lie to you. Bruges did not get on the itinerary through the noblest of methods. We weren’t in Belgium to see Flanders Field. We didn’t hit any World War memorials. We did not swing by the EU Parliament building in Brussels. No, we were in Bruges because I saw the movie In Bruges and thought it looked worth visiting.

And I was not wrong.

Since my return, people ask “What was the highlight of the trip?” And that is often a difficult question, since so much of it was great. But when I do come up with an answer, it’s usually “Other than London? Paris for the city, Rome for the weather, and Bruges for the food.”

Seriously you guys, everything in Bruges was delicious.

Show me where your noms at

My primary goal for Switzerland was cheese fondue: for Belgium, it was waffles. And the old town had plenty of waffle take-out windows to get lovely, fluffy waffles doused in chocolate, caramel, whatever you desired… I had a waffle in Calgary not so long ago. What a bland waste of time it was in comparison.

Belgium is also the birthplace of the french fry, thus giving us all the excuse we needed to gorge on street fries outside of the famous Belfry. You see, there’s a regular contest in Bruges: local fry makers compete against each other, and the two top entries get the right to set up a fry cart in front of the Belfry. This means those two carts are pretty much guaranteed to have the best fries in the whole city, and if you’re not helping yourself to an order from each one to see who comes out on top, why are you even there? Why are you even there.

I did not expect to say “Bruges had the best meatball I’ve ever had,” but there it is. It’s said. It happened. A random lunch stop brought us to a mom ‘n’ pop restaurant with a hilarious name and absolutely incredible food.

If you’re in Bruges, go there. Get a meatball. You will thank me. Do this or I will find you and hurt you.

Time for beers

I’m not a beer drinker. This is generally known about me. Just never developed a taste for it. When I finally began experimenting with alcohol, I drifted towards whiskey and cocktails, and skipped over beer completely, finding it unpleasant. But we were in Belgium. They brew over 2000 beers in Belgium, and they take it seriously. How seriously? They have designed individual glasses for each of those beers to optimize the drinking experience. And if you were to serve, say, a Hoegaarden in a Duvel glass, a Belgian drinker will send that shit back and demand you do it properly.

So while beer had never been my thing, going to Belgium and not sampling their ales would be like going to Italy and not having any pasta, or going to Greece and not having a single souvlaki, and god damn it I am not doing that again.

So, on our first night in Bruges, I eventually opted to skim the beer menu, see if I could find something palatable. What’s that, Duvel? You have a 12% alcohol content? Why, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

New friends

Also, if you’re in Bruges on a budget, by all means check out the St. Christopher’s hostel. Best room? No, not really. Best beds? Not quite. But it’s got a bar. A bar full of fellow travelers. The perfect place to hang out and have a few drinks with new friends. Ian put up another “Hey, we’re nice but shy, so come talk to us” sign, and within minutes we were invited to what became known as the “Commonwealth party:” a table of four Scots, two Australians and a Chinese woman living in Germany (for variety) that had met doing the In Bruges walking tour, something we’d been eyeing for our full day in the city, given my fondness for the movie and Ian’s fondness for looking at stuff.

The people behind the walking tour (which used our hostel as home base) also had two other gatherings: a beer tasting, in the pub connected to our hostel, and a pub crawl. I continued to succumb to local fares and signed us up for the beer tasting the following night, where I learned that Belgian ales are, in fact, not too shabby in general. Yes, I was like Christopher Columbus: boldly discovering something that millions of people already knew about.

We chose not to go on the pub crawl, despite the fact that it meant parting ways with our lovely beer tasting hostess, Caitlyn (being named Caitlyn makes you 10% more attractive to me, not sure where that comes from). Instead, we hung out with a new friend we made during the beer tasting, a ginger from America who may have moved to Florida but never lost her New York attitude. Once we’d finished the beers that came with the beer tasting experience, we set off into the damp night in search of other bars with other beers. Our primary targets, including a small tavern at the end of Bruges’ smallest street that brews a beer unavailable anywhere else in the world, were closed, but we continued undeterred, determined to find more beers. She suggested we make an adventure out of it.

We managed to only subtly imply that our reaction to being asked on a drinking adventure by a cute ginger was less “Oh, if we must” and more “Where the hell have you been the last three weeks?”

Oh, but before we left she had to check in with a guy from Scotland she’d “accidentally fallen in love with,” so don’t get excited.

I thought one full day would allow us to get the full Bruges experience. I don’t know why I thought that, but I was quite clearly mistaken. Perhaps one day I shall return… one day…

Dan Discusses his TV: Skins of Thrones

Or should it be Game of Skins? No. No, clearly it should not.

If you’ll permit me, I’m going to take a brief break from relating European adventures to talk about something I’ve noticed this week. One of the things I leaped into after I got back was an attempt to catch up on the television I’d missed during the trip. Three weeks’ absence during May sweeps leads to a dangerously full PVR. I’d planned on my priorities being Doctor Who, Game of Thrones and Arrow, but something happened: on a whim, I decided to resume watching the BBC series Skins.

Skins in the Game? No, still awful…

Skins, for those unfamiliar, is a British dramedy (supposedly a comedy but some dark shit goes down from time to time) about high school students trying to lose themselves in sex, drugs, and maybe, just maybe, some approximation of love and happiness. To keep things at that awkward and painful age, every two seasons they change the cast almost completely, referring to them as generations 1-3.

I had four Arrows to watch, five Mad Mens (and counting), and a swath of other shows less important, but I couldn’t tear myself away from Skins, despite the fact that I was pretty sure I hated 90% of what was happening. Sorry, that’s not explaining it right… it’s not that the episodes were badly written, as they were not. It’s not that they were badly acted, as the first generation cast is top notch (including Nicholas Hoult of X-Men: First Class and Warm Bodies and Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire and the Newsroom). It’s just that the actual stories, while at times funny and moving, make me want to scream at every character involved. It’s that kind of show. And after the most recent Game of Thrones episode (Rains of Castamere–no, no spoilers here), it became clear: these two shows had a very similar grip, because despite one being a fantasy series about a bunch of jerks fighting for control of Westeros and one being about British teenagers attempting to sort their sad little lives out, thematically they’re quite similar.

Allow me to explain. The differences are clear: one has kings and dragons and magic, the other has “behind on his homework” as a plot point, but there are a few distinct narrative tropes they both share.

Lovable (?) narcissists

At the center of each show are some of the most selfish, destructive people you’ll ever be dared to actually sympathize with. Game of Thrones has the Lannisters: ranging from the frequently awesome Tyrion, to the weirdly likable Jaime, to the utterly irredeemable Joffrey and Cersei. They’ve been told all their lives that Lannisters are better than other people and believe it so fiercely that they use it as justification for the terrible things they do, and as their punishment they create a monster in Joffrey and start a civil war. (That’s not a spoiler, it’s practically the premise of the series)

Skins has Tony and to a lesser extent his girlfriend Michelle. Michelle is simply pretty and popular and addicted to the attention being pretty and popular gets you, but Tony… Tony is said to have “the cheat codes to life,” as he’s good-looking and charming enough to get away with nearly anything, and self-aware enough to know he can get away with nearly anything, meaning he spends the first season seeing how far he push people in the pursuit of whatever he wants in that moment. His manipulations of his friends, girlfriend and other lovers go from simply thoughtless to selfish to borderline psychotic before… well, that would be telling.

Tony and the Lannisters’ narcissism borders on religious fervour, yet there are moments when we’re supposed to root for them, not hope that they suffer for their sins. And when they do suffer, it’s just never as satisfying as we once wanted it to be.

Good deeds are seldom, if ever, rewarded

My generation was raised on feel-good family sitcoms. Now many of us are able to see them as disposable, two-dimensional morality fables with thin jokes and catch phrases passing for humour… “You’re right, Uncle Jesse, honesty is the best policy,” audience goes “Aww…” then Jesse impersonates Elvis and everyone has a good laugh, that sort of thing. And since they were trying to impart proper values… we’ll skip the debate over what constitutes “proper values…” doing the right thing came with a reward. A kiss on the cheek from the girl, or being told you’re a hero by the cops, or improbably getting the promotion you thought you’d have to lie and cheat to get but yet you still chose the high road and the big boss is impressed.

Not so with these two shows. Doing the right thing might satisfy honour and duty but that’s about it. Honour won’t save you from Lannister scheming on Game of Thrones any more than being a good friend on Skins will save you from getting beat up by a bunch of chav teenage girls looking to hand out a kicking to the first convenient target. Game of Thrones is better at handing out shock value, while Skins often goes for the laugh at the character’s expense, but both are clear: you’d best hope that virtue is its own reward, because it’s the only reward you’re likely to get.

Mistakes are punished…

Which is not to say that doing the wrong thing does come with a reward. I mean, sometimes it does. Joffrey gets the throne and Tony gets whatever girl he wants, but sometimes a character will slip up, and that slip up will have consequences. Sometimes horrible ones. It’s hard to go into specifics without spoiling things about both shows, but the examples are out there. On Game of Thrones, if you make the wrong choice tactically, even if it was the right choice morally, you will pay for it down the road. One character on Skins makes some short-sighted decisions and it ultimately costs him everything, including the shirt off his back.

…but not as much as redemption.

The only thing that gets you beaten down harder than mistakes in these shows is redemption. If a character begins to redeem him or herself, walk a better path, try to become a better person… brace yourself. Something bad is coming. Look at what happens to Jaime Lannister right as he was becoming likable in season three. And in the case of Skins, it’s not even something they deserved. It’s not like someone starts to turn over a new leaf but his past sins come back to haunt him. There are multiple cases where a character finds redemption, finds peace and possible happiness in that redemption, and then BAM! catastrophe from nowhere. Nowhere. And the collateral damage will hit someone you like. Usually Sid. Nothing good ever seems to happen to Sid, no matter how much I–you, the hypothetical viewer, that is… might want it to.

I was going to add a section about characters you like getting kicked in the teeth for no clear reason, but that’s, like, all narrative everywhere. That’s just good storytelling. Also, this got long for something that I once believed would fit into a Facebook status update. But, hey, what else are blogs for, amirite?

Am I not right?

Look, just come back next time. Belgian adventures for reals, I promise.

Dan and Ian Wander Europe: Switzerland!

I dropped my phone onto wet ground last night. An hour or so later, the screen began to turn purple. This morning, the purple was going to black. Within the next hour the screen will no longer function at all. Within the next two business days, I’ll have a replacement of the exact same model and colour (who said warranties were a waste of money?), but I’m still melancholy at watching it slowly die. I mean, we made it through Europe together, it shouldn’t end like this. Bizarre sentimental attachment to inanimate objects: this is how my brain works. I’m just glad to have not gone full-blown hoarder yet.

Right, yes, Dan and Ian Wander Europe. Where was I.

There is still a staggering amount of world I haven’t seen. And thus each window I have to take a trip becomes a struggle over where to go: do I go somewhere entirely new, see things I’ve never seen, seek out new adventures? Or do I return to somewhere I’ve been and loved and want to see again? A day will come when I visit London for the last time but it’s a terrible thought and a moment I’m not exactly racing to meet.

So for this trip, I went for a hybrid. London, Paris, Rome and Florence were all old friends, even if I hadn’t seen them in nearly 20 years. But from Venice on, I picked out new places to go, including two new countries. The first? Switzerland, a country that had had my curiosity for some time.

Zurich: where the party at?

Our train from Italy never quite managed to get up to full speed, given the mountainous terrain it had to navigate. Switzerland swiftly reminded me of parts of British Columbia: all forests, mountains and lakes with cities crammed in between said lakes and mountains wherever possible.

Now this trip had one major difference over past vacations of mine: a lack of swimming. The vast majority of my trips over the past decade have involved at least some scuba diving, or at least some quality lake-time on a summer houseboating weekend. I haven’t been diving since Hawaii, 2011. I haven’t been to a lake since the summer of that year. Despite having spent the previous day in flooded Venice, I was feeling a distinct urge to be in a large body of water. And now here I was in lake country.

Anyway. Upon arriving in Zurich, we made our way to our hostel with aid from several passers-by. The Swiss people were already making us feel quite welcome. We discovered that the very night of our arrival there was a pub crawl sponsored by the hostel. Ian was waffling on the notion, but I thought this was the clear way to get drinks and meet people, something we (particularly Ian) had previously considered a priority. But in any event, first we set out to explore the surrounding area: Ian wanted to pop into the local supermarket (as he often did), and there was an amusingly vandalized traffic sign we wanted to grab a picture of.

We did not expect to spend two hours searching for it. Only to discover it was only five minutes’ walk from the hostel and we’d passed it without knowing.

By the time we returned we were too late to get dinner at the hostel bar and too late to make the pub crawl. Slightly dejected, we settled into the hostel’s large common room to have a few drinks and access some sweet, sweet internet. Ian did up a quick sketch in his sketchbook, announcing that we were Dan and Ian, and we liked meeting people but were terrible at introducing ourselves. Did this ploy have a hint of desperation? Maybe. Did it work regardless?

Thank god for the one other guy at the table who didn't speak German. — BOOM! New friends!

Did it ever. And so we achieved exactly what we were looking for: drinks and meeting people, at a fraction of the cost with none of that pesky “walking” stuff. And zero douchebags. Huzzah! Now… what to do with our one full day in the city…

Lucerne!

We tried asking friends for Zurich tips over Facebook. The overwhelming response was suggestions of stuff to do in Lucerne instead. Which, I felt at first, was nice and all but wasn’t really what we’d asked. However, it did turn out to be the exact right advice, as Lucerne is everything that’s great about Switzerland.

There’s old town, with it’s quaint medieval look, historic bridge and great shops and restaurants. Including one where we finally acquired my primary objective for this leg of the trip: cheese fondue. A cheese fondue with bits of bacon in the cheese. God bless Switzerland. There was the Lucerne lion, a famous carving in the wall of a mountain.

There was the vast lake. Still no swimming, but it’s for the best: we dipped our feet in the glacier-fed river coming from the lake and mother of GOD it was cold. Even for us Canadians it was bloody freezing.

Lucerne was gorgeous, and I only wish we’d had more time to enjoy it before we had to return to Zurich, find dinner near the hostel and meet up with some of our new friends again.

And find out that the hostel had a pool, a pool that I never managed to track down. Blast it all.

Next time: Belgium! Beers! Belfries! BRUGES.

D&IWE: Italia Part 3: the Italianing

So on our way out of Zurich, a key portion of my recharging apparatus decided to leave this cruel world behind, leaving me with no way to charge my iPod, and needing to split Ian’s semi-functional charger to get any power in my phone or Kindle. And since Ian’s phone is both his camera and the way he shoots, edits and uploads videos, his phone always takes priority over mine, which absent of WiFi is simply the way I check the time.

Also it’s his charger so he was probably gonna call dibs anyway.

Venice!

Time to wander

Our time in Rome and Florence was incredibly rushed compared to Paris. We perhaps could have used an extra day or two in Paris, but in Rome we barely felt we were scratching the surface. Other than the Colosseum and the Roman Forum, we saw things but never got to explore them. We saw the Vatican but didn’t go in. We saw the Vittoriano monument but didn’t go up top. We did see Tiber Island but it is seriously underwhelming.

But in Venice we had more time. Enough time to really wander the Floating City. Including one day where it wasn’t floating as much as it should have.

Things get wet

Our first two days in Venice were gorgeous. Sunny and warm as Italy had been for most of our visit. Day three it rained. Not hard, but enough to warrant buying umbrellas before bussing to Venice proper from our hotel on the mainland. We were prepared: we’d done our canal tour the previous day and planned to do indoor stuff while it rained.

By the time we reached San Marco square, home of the basilica and palazzo we intended to visit, water levels were rising. Large puddles had formed across the square. Undeterred, we found the entrance line for the basilica and went in to get us some nice, dry history.

Parts of the entrance were flooded, but they already had crude bridges constructed. Not a worry.

From the church’s balcony you could see the whole of the square. At first I thought the line to get in had gotten much bigger, given the long stream of people in front of the building. On closer examination it became clear: it wasn’t a line-up. It was traffic build-up on the one portion of the square that was still above water. But the rain had diminished. Surely the worst had passed?

Next was the palace adjacent to the church, former seat of power for Venice’s ruling body and courts. We explored the building, saw the extravagant paintings (man but renaissance Italy was not afraid of painting balls) and stores of weaponry from swords to spears to early guns. As we began to leave, Ian jumped to avoid a puddle.

“That was close,” he said. “Almost got my feet wet.” Then we rounded the corner and saw the square.

There was no dry strip. Not anymore. The square was flooded, reaching knee-deep in places.

We waded our way north, to less flooded regions, taking note of how prepared Venice was for this. Plank bridges and wading boots were everywhere. Street vendors stopped selling questionable souvenirs and started selling plastic slip-ons to keep your shoes and pants dry. Of course by the time we saw them it was already far too late for us.

But in the end we wouldn’t have traded it. Venice in the sun was beautiful, but Venice under water was an experience.

Next time: two nights in Switzerland.

Dan and Ian Wander Europe: Near-miss Bus Riot

Time for some more tales to catch you up on Italy while I’m still only one country ahead of it on the itinerary.

When tourists attack

During our time in Rome, we dealt with massive crowds at most locations, got chided by the best dressed cop I’d ever seen (the Italian police uniform is weirdly, uncomfortably formal) for drinking in public (before dark, that was apparently our mistake), and witnessed a massive anti-abortion rally that was right next to a children’s volleyball tournament, and the one time I felt actually nervous for my safety was in line for a bus.

The two busiest places in Rome appeared to be Termini Station, where we first boarded (eventually; it was a busy day in Rome) and the Vatican, where we first hopped off and attempted to hop back on. Dozens of people were attempting to board our specific bus line outside the Vatican (popular jump-off point, go figure), and the one guy left to herd us triaged the crowd into three lines: those who had yet to buy tickets were line three, lowest priority; those who had vouchers but had yet to exchange them for time-sensitive tickets were line two; and those who, like Ian and myself, had tickets and thus our 24 hours of access was counting down.

This meant that one family had been in line two for, they claimed, an hour. They were growing tired of it. Especially the father. And the man trying his best to get all of us on a bus as quickly as possible was in no mood to be yelled at. He told the mother to line up against the wall, she didn’t, he told her louder, the father yelled at him to shut up… and the yelling started in earnest. Even the calmer, college aged son got in on telling the bus employee to watch his tone. It looked for a minute like it might end in violence on this very cramped sidewalk.

Minutes later, not one but two busses pulled up. The angry family pushed to the front of the line (the front of our line, not their second-tier line) because they were done waiting and the people herder was too ready to be rid of them to put up much of a fight.

They needn’t have bothered. Every person in all three lines got on one of those two busses. But sadly patience was the only thing in short supply right then.

It probably doesn’t add anything to point out that his happened a few blocks from one of the largest religious buildings built by man. But I feel that it should.

Next time, more Italy but less Rome. Hopefully. I’m four cities behind at this point. Crap, five cities.

Dan and Ian Wander Europe: Italia

The greatest mystery on this trip, for me anyway, was this: I’m used to walking a lot on trips like these. I am not used to my body rebelling so vehemently against the notion. My feet don’t hurt as much by the end of the day as they did a week ago (they still protest when there’s a lot of standing still to be done), but right now I have a severe cramp in my right calf that makes every alternate step an ordeal (that’s new, started this evening) and blisters on both heels left over from Paris. The one on my left foot has become big enough that I’ve named it Alphonse and should probably get it tennis lessons.

The likely culprit for all of this, I’ve realised, is that I failed to break in my new sneakers before I left. This could account for many of my woes. That and the 2.7 km hike to today’s destination, which ended in a gravel road up a savagely steep hill. Blaming the cramp on that. Tomorrow’s hotel may include a bathtub, which could help; tonight’s hostel has a bathtub, but no plug, making it more of a tease.

Ian’s greatest mystery is where his alcohol tolerance went between Rome and Florence. On our last night in Rome, he drank an entire bottle of Chianti, while giving me a hard time for sticking to Coke as I wrote my last entry. He was buzzed. On our first night in Florence, we hit the bar/pub district for dinner and hijinks. We each had a bottle of wine, then hit a pub across the street where Ian had one beer and I had two highballs (what was I going to do, NOT order the drink called “Sexy Motherfucker?” That’s crazy and you’re crazy for suggesting it). I was nicely buzzed.

Ian was demolished.

I was lucky enough to get him back to our hostel before his internal switch flipped from “Everything is amazing” to “I can’t stop throwing up please kill me,” but the switch was sudden, savage and lasted into the morning. We’re still not sure why that happened.

But back to Rome for a minute

We landed late in Rome. It was past 11 at night by the time we got our bags and left the airport. Sidenote–there are no immigration checks in the EU. I am getting no stamps in my passport. Doesn’t seem fair at all, since I, like many frequent travelers, enjoy the record of places visited a well-stamped passport becomes.

I digress. I’ll try to make up some time here. It was late, we took a cab because we thought our hostel had a midnight curfew (nope), I’ve seen car chases in Bond movies that looked safer than what Italian cabbies get up to. The point is, arriving that late never gets you a sense of a place. Unless it’s some brightly lit City That Never Sleeps like New York or Tokyo: those places can bustle at 11 PM. Most others, no. It’s just a lot of dark and mostly empty roads between you and where you’re sleeping. Maybe the occasional prostitute that briefly makes you panic that your cabbie is taking you to a brothel (left over paranoia from Cambodia, is all).

We arrived to find that we had a third roommate, whose belongings suggested “female,” but who was nowhere to be found. “Well,” I thought, “Guess she’s having a good night.” And then because society is still deeply flawed, added “At least I hope so.”

While the night is dark and full of terrors, she did make it back safely at some point after Ian and I went to sleep. And she turned out to be delightful. Emily from Seattle was so thrilled to encounter fellow English-speakers that she quickly decided to spend her last morning in Rome with us. As neither Ian nor myself had anything remotely resembling a complaint, we headed out to grab breakfast and wander the Colosseum area before seeing her off on her train to Naples. She even helped us mock and slander a friend back home via video message. Our time in Rome was off to an excellent start.

That feels like it should be foreboding. Like I’m about to say “If only it stayed that way,” promising tales of doom for next time. Well, sorry, but I blew our biggest doom story when I opened this blog talking about Ian’s hangover. Rome went pretty much swimmingly. There were, however, some complications in Florence, but they’re hardly doom and gloom stuff.

Here’s a sampling of our Roman adventures to wrap things up.