sholio | More TV (well, mostly Sanctuary, big surprise)

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More TV (well, mostly Sanctuary, big surprise)

I have certainly been getting my money's worth out of Netflix this month. Watched the first season of Slings & Arrows on a friend's recommendation (I loved it; it's completely adorable) and finished marathoning Sanctuary -- yes, I have now seen it all, except for a couple of episodes in season one that I've only seen parts of (Folding Man and Warrior, specifically).

I believe I may have severely underrated Sanctuary's addictiveness. *g* I think I have a small crush on Henry now, to go with my crush on Tesla. And I'm very much looking forward to new episodes in April!

Because most of my flist seems to have hated it (with reason, I think) the final episode I watched was Hero II, which, since I just watched it, I have Thoughts about:

Okay, I liked Hero quite a bit, actually. There were things I didn't like about it, particularly the fact that the main characters have no leg to stand on when it comes to criticizing other people for running about doing the vigilante thing; it made so much more sense to figure out a way to work with Walter and maybe help train him to do his thing without accidentally hurting people, rather than being all "We must stop him!" from the beginning (even before his general ineptitude becomes apparent). And the episode was also guilty of the "point and laugh at the geek" subtext that so many shows do; I find Henry's comic geekiness utterly adorable, but I do hate that, even within the show, it's this nerd thing that the other, "cooler", archetypically non-nerdy characters raise their eyebrows at. (If nothing else, I will love SGA forever for having both of its main male leads geek out on comics and sci-fi, including the cool action-hero one.)

But aside from that, it was cute and fun, and one thing I loved about Hero was that Walter was given all this power and what he did with it was try to make the world a better place.

Which made the subtext in Hero II all the uglier, really. Walter gets the suit and immediately tries to be a hero, even though he's not good at it. Kate gets the suit and ... takes revenge on her enemies and beats up her friends. There was some half-assed attempt to explain it with Helen's comment that the suit is affecting Kate's brain, but it doesn't have that effect on Walter, so WTF. I'm totally down with an episode about one character being adversely affected by something-or-other and attacking their friends -- I love that trope, actually! -- but if it's been shown not to have that effect on other people, we're left with the inescapable fact that what we're seeing here is how Kate reacts to being given a lot of power. And it's ugly.

And the final insult is that in the end, the whole thing -- Kate getting the suit and running all over town being supervillainy -- is setup for Walter's hero arc: he gets to do the whole heroic sacrifice thing and then work together with Helen to take down the bad guy, while Kate is totally sidelined.

That's just ... I mean, way to commit utter character assassination on Kate and take away her agency all at the same time!

What's frustrating about it is that I like Walter and I really wanted to enjoy his little zero-to-hero arc, but I couldn't let go of the way that the whole thing was at Kate's expense.

The cute little "home" conversation with Kate and Helen at the end, while nice, doesn't make up for the other unpleasant subtext in the episode.

But that's a depressing note to end my Sanctuary viewing on; perhaps I should go back and rewatch some episodes featuring Tesla or Henry to perk myself up. Or "Breach", which is probably my favorite Helen episode to date.

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I think it wasn't the suit itself that had that effect on her, but the ~~torture~~ zappy treatment to try to remove the suit. They literally made her brain-damaged. Which, yeah.

Their treatment of Walter all around was just weird: They adore mocking the geek, and they load him down with ten thousand attributes of the showrunners themselves, but it doesn't come across as self-mockery at all. I mean, Heroes II punishes Walter for going commercial (and I think there was an SG-1 plot or three with the same general idea), only to resolve that by returning him to the same point — just more assertive, because his real sin was bowing to executive pressure and not remaining true ot his vision. So the answer is that he needs to sack up and make the suits listen to him. The writer. Sure.

"Breach" — I liked Helen's agency here, but that hit at the tail end of "Caprica" and "Girl Genius" both going to the "let's watch two girls kick the shit out each other, yayz!" place, in terms of my media consumption timing, so all the brutal battery left a bad taste in my mouth. And the weight they gave the revelation of Adam was weird, to me; they acted as if we should know the guy at all.

But you like Henry now, too? Yay! I really like him and Tesla together.

See, what I loved about Breach was that I didn't see Helen being treated any differently from a male action hero under those circumstances. The violence against her wasn't sexualized (at least IMHO; I know that mileage may vary), she and Adam were both pulling no punches, and a lot of the episode was her coming up with clever ways to improvise weapons and level the unequal advantage that his dimension-hopping technique gave him. It would have been the exact same story and played out in just the same way if it had been, say, Bruce Willis in that abandoned building, and I loved that (as well as just being a sucker for survival stories and characters MacGyvering solutions to their problems).

Although, yeah, the way that Adam's revelation played out was weird, and repeating the cliff flashback in its entirety in this and the next episode was sort of gratuitous. I think I might've reacted to this differently if I'd seen the episodes in order; I saw King & Country first, which, on the one hand, stripped out some suspense from Breach, but on the other hand, I knew who Adam was all along, so it wasn't a total "WTF, why do we care?" moment when they pulled his mask off.

There have been several episodes, actually, that I think could have really benefited from some foreshadowing in previous episodes, and that is definitely one of them -- it would have had so much more resonance if we'd gotten the cliff flashback, even glimpses of it, a season or so earlier. Some of the other episodes that have made me feel that way have been the ones like the Kali eps where ~~Carson Beckett~~ Paul McGillion's pivotal character and his coup totally comes out of nowhere; come on, it's not like they don't do long arcs sometimes, and they have recurring characters like Declan -- there is no reason at all why they can't drop a character like that into an earlier episode and then have his big moment come later. But then, I had that problem with Stargate too ... (Though, I never thought I'd say this because I don't often give plot kudoes to the Stargate writers, but I think this show is actually worse with those "... and here's my best friend that we've never heard of before in the entire series!" moments than Stargate was ...)

But you like Henry now, too? Yay! I really like him and Tesla together.

Henry is awesome. Henry slays me -- Ryan Robbins' delivery of his lines is adorable. There are some scenes that make me crack up not because of what he's saying, but just the way he says it and his body language. But he also has some really neat little hero moments, and he's such an utterly nice person without a mean bone in his body.

Re: Walter -- yeah, I agree. One of the things that I find really bizarre about Hollywood's treatment of geek characters is that the writers almost certainly putting their own geek-traits onto the characters, and then proceed to mock them mercilessly; it's like they're taking out the bullying that nerds get in high school not by mocking the jocks or the whole mock-the-geeks mindset, but by creating geek characters so that they can mock them in effigy, thus perpetuating the "geeks are uncool and cool kids mock them" cycle. It's weird.

- Oh, no, I totally respect that Helen was bad-ass, with her sex not an issue, and with her smarts and planning at least as important as her ability to wield chains and pipes. The punch-in-the-face elements just came at a really bad time for me, and since so much of the episode was fighting, it was a problem of tainted associations. (Her one big non-fighting moment, catching on as he jumped through the portal, then turned out to be His Evil Plan All Along Mwa-ha-ha, so she doesn't get as much credit for that.) If I'd seen it several months earlier, I'd probably be a lot more fond of it. I do really like that it shows, in miniature, how Helen has survived all her many exploits without having to rely on the more-mortal folks around her.

- Yeah, their use of foreshadowing is weird. I think it was actually a little better in S3; the Big Guy's priest friend came from nowhere, yeah, but that thread was then used in a few episodes before suddenly being rushed back out the door. At least Will's blast-from-the-past colleague made sense as a blast from his past (though I think they fumbled the execution on that a bit).

- Ryan Robbins was in Caprica, too, and that was weird. It's odd to switch from seeing him as the conniving Ladon Radim, and then sweet li'l Henry, and then a terrorist training camp operator! Tip of my cap to the actor, because he sells them all. (And I was so tickled that I recognized Chris Heyerdahl as another terrorist on Caprica. It was hard! He had hair! LOL)

Oh, and I hadn't thought about the torture/zappy-thing being responsible for Kate's weirdness ... but no one else seemed to think so, though; Helen actually said to her at one point that the suit was affecting her, and she seemed to be thinking perfectly clearly, just power-drunk.

Though I am looking for good writing and consistent characterization from Sanctuary, so, really, I am probably doomed to disappointment. *g*

I'm pretty sure they stated explicitly early on that Kate's something-centers had been overwhelmed by the surge, so her executive functions were compromised and she would act purely on impulse rather than on reason. I'd certainly believe that they then blurred that, though.

Ahhhh, I might have totally missed that part, since I found the torture scenes hard to watch and was doing other things during them. (Actually, I was half tuned out during a lot of the episode, so there's no telling how much of the plot -- such as it was -- sailed right over my head.)

*Adds a qualified nod of affirmation to this*

It's qualified only because I'm not the best at remembering details like this, but that is certainly my impression. Nevertheless, I'm still a little peeved about the way Kate's agency was stripped away--the plot could easily have worked for me if just a couple of things had been different.

Yeah, that sounds ... well, not reasonable, exactly, but makes more sense in terms of the plot. *g* Apparently, not listening to half the dialogue causes one to miss important plot points! WHO KNEW.

And yeah, it's really frustrating, because they would've only had to change a few things to make it fun goofy escapist entertainment (like the first Hero was for me) rather than a big ball of DO NOT WANT.

I might have more to say later, but for now, *GRINS*

Hee! I'm definitely fanning on the show, though in a weird way, because it keeps frustrating me to bits (worse than Stargate in a lot of ways) and yet, it's delivering on the fannish parts too. Augh! And thanks for the earlier advice on which episodes to watch, too. :D

The mockery of geeks and nerds in shows has become a major pet peeve of mine, especially in sci-fi shows. Way to support your main audience, people :P

It's getting to be one of mine, too; it's depressingly predictable and frustrating. It's nearly always played for laughs rather than just being something that this character does in their free time, and they never seem to pass up a chance to have the "normals" raise their eyebrows and look disapproving. I don't think it would bother me if you occasionally saw counter-examples, but Sheppard is, seriously, the ONLY character I can think of off the top of my head who's canonically shown reading comics or talking about sci-fi without being a total nerd type. (Not that I have a problem with nerd-type people -- I am a nerd-type person -- but it's just ... come on, think outside the box a little bit, people!)

And it's just like you say -- this is their audience; these are the people who support their show that they're making fun of!

I share your frustration with Sanctuary - there are times when it gets things very, very right - like Helen being tough and resourceful, but flawed and I like the little snippets we see with her and Druitt (the couple scenes in 'King and Country' when she finds him), but the things it gets wrong are either bad or very silly.

Tesla is just fun - take a bad guy and make him likeable.

I do wonder how much of the script is written and how much is ad-libbed.

I keep wanting to not like Tesla as much as I do, because he is a bad guy and he's got some pretty awful character traits ... but I love him. I do. :D

I do wonder how much of the script is written and how much is ad-libbed.

It doesn't really have an ad-libbed kind of feeling to me? Especially with the need to mesh the characters' actions with the green-screen effects, I expect there's not a lot of ad-libbing going on. But I don't know.

Slings and Arrows? You are the only other person I've heard of that watched it (except for the person who rec'd it to me). I was working with a community theater company at the time, so found some of the situations hysterically accurate. It was also so very Canadian in its style. I have a couple of season three left to see.

There were so many hilarious moments and so many amazingly dramatic moments. I was really expecting Jack's performance of Hamlet to be a washout, but I was awestruck by the scene where Geoffrey gave the kid (okay, I am dating myself - young man) a couple of choices about his performance and he did the "to be or not to be" scene. I, too had wondered how he would perform that scene with a history of so many actors to live up to, but his delivery blew me out of the water. I loved the emotions behind the scene when Geoffrey explained Ophelia's mindset to Claire. My daughter and I have a running joke about the "setting it aside" moment when Geoffrey tries to explain to the undertakers why he needs them to remove Oliver's head. Delightfully different with some truly fine performances.

It's so much fun, very well written and acted, just generally a wonderful show all around. I haven't done community theater, but a lot of the same ideas and personality types map over pretty well from the amateur end of the fine art world; I definitely recognized a lot of it. :D

And, oh, Geoffrey; I'm sort of torn between wanting to pat him and wanting to shake him (which, I gather, is how a lot of the other characters feel about him too -- the ones that don't outright hate him, that is!). The moment where I fell in love with Geoffrey, though, was the scene where he's being forced to give the class in "leadership" to the marketing people, and turns it into a theater improv group, and inspires the one accounting guy to take up acting. That was such a neat scene, and just, the look on Geoffrey's face when he's listening to the accounting guy give his recital, when Geoffrey is so in the moment and so obviously delighted -- it really nailed for me how appealing it is to see people who are so in love with their work and able to inspire that love in others.

Haha, the scene with the head -- one interesting thing about Geoffrey is how different he is from Benton Fraser on Due South ... I usually don't see one character in the other, but that scene, something about the straightforward and earnest way he was explaining a concept that was totally bonkers -- it really was a very Fraser scene. :D

Yes, I could see that the dynamics could be played out in other artistic venues.

Ah, the leadership class - that moment is on list of favorite scenes from the show. Seeing someone coached and inspired towards an outstanding performance and Geoffrey's passion for it was as you said, it was another of those moments that they really nailed.

You're right about that undertaker scene, too. Makes me want to see a bit more of Due South. The contrast between his earnestness and the ludicrous plan cracked me up.

The subtle humor was great, too. It wasn't until I had seen a flashback moment that I noticed the play on words on the pig-carrying truck that killed Oliver - "Canada's Finest Hams."

I got the pig truck pun (and LOL'd), but I didn't realize 'til talking about the "leadership" scene in the above comment (or, rather, reading your reply) that demonstrating leadership was exactly what Geoffrey was doing in that scene. How cool!

And yeah, I like how you have to really pay attention to this show, and remember incidents and characters from several episodes back in order to get what's going on. My husband wasn't interested in it, and after I realized how good it was, I wanted to start watching it with him -- but you can't easily jump in on episode 4 or 5. You'd be lost.

Ugh that does sound disappointing.

(Excuse me for geeking out for a minute: I am so pleased to see someone in fandom who knows the difference between affect and effect /snobbery)

Edited 2011-01-18 05:55 (UTC)

LOL! I am such a word nerd; that one always drives me crazy when I see it used "wrong". (Heh, "wrong" in quotes here because my inner grammar pedant is forever in conflict with my inner linguistics nerd, which keeps insisting that there is no "right" and "wrong" to language. BUT SOME THINGS ARE JUST WRONG, DAMMIT. *g*)

One is a noun and the other is a verb! These things are not interchangeable!

/rant

I know what you mean about the inner linguistics nerd. Mine keeps reminding me that as long as the person manages to communicate what they were trying to say it still "counts". But I grit my teeth at the wrongness anyway ;-)

One is a noun and the other is a verb! These things are not interchangeable!

And in the very deepest part of the night, I whisper to myself that there are times when the usual noun is properly a verb, and the usual verb is properly a noun ... for we must preserve these truths and keep them sacred, discussing them only amongst our fellow true Grammar Pedants, knowing that the common fan is yet unenlightened and would only be led astray by such arcane mysteries.

/OT geekery

And on a less silly and yet equally OT note: Props to

friendshipper for wielding both words so accurately that I didn't even notice them! (That is meant quite sincerely.)

Props to [info]friendshipper for wielding both words so accurately that I didn't even notice them!

I know! It's so refreshing!

ETA: Your whole first sentence is a thing of beauty and infinite truth *makes the secret sign of the Grammar Pedant*

Edited 2011-01-18 07:37 (UTC)

And on a less silly and yet equally OT note: Props to friendshipper for wielding both words so accurately that I didn't even notice them!

Heh, thanks! I actually had to go back and check where in my post I'd used them, since I didn't remember using them at all ...

One is a noun and the other is a verb! These things are not interchangeable!

Wait... Is that the difference?!? Why was this never explained to me!! I sweat bullets over affect (noun?) and effect (verb?) and oh God will I use the right one and God damn it, this dictionary is not helping me and... verb vs. noun seems a so much simpler way to figure it out! (You may have just become my vocab/spelling-hero, fyi.)

/thread-jump

Effect is the noun and affect is the verb, generally speaking. It's not a hard-and-fast, fool proof 'rule' because nothing is ever that easy in English, but yeah.

Hee glad to help!

I'm glad I used question marks! :D But yes, this will definitely be a big help. (I'm ridiculously slow on this sort of stuff. I literally guessed at the differences between "than" and "then" until college when my roommate explained it to me. *g*)

Yay! TV talk! :D

Extra special bonus: I've actually seen "Hero II". (The last Sanctuary I managed to catch, unfortunately. Unfortunate because of the missed eps, and also because that's not the best one to end on.)

I didn't like it either, but mainly because I think it was meant to be funny and it really, really wasn't. The jokes all fell a little flat, which is not typical for either that show or that actor (the guy who played Walter). I strongly suspect it was stuffed so full of inside jokes that the production crew were too busy giggling at the insider jokes and missed the fact that if you're not on the inside it ain't that funny.

I wasn't too upset about Kate's role, but I think that's because, like

michelel72, my understanding was that Kate's brain had been scrambled by her torture so she was operating on auto-pilot/instinct. Or something like that. I didn't love her storyline, I found it fairly boring to be honest, but it didn't squick me or ruin her character or anything.

I thought they were trying to underline that she's a lot more noble than she gives herself credit for (her deepest desire not being to kill the guy who'd tried to kill her but instead just wanting an apology), but I felt like we'd already seen that before and in better episodes. (Not that I can remember those episodes, of course. *g* But that Kate is an honest to goodness good-guy has been well established, was my thought.)

The one new thing (and I did like this) was seeing the depth of her trust in Helen. That Helen was the only person she'd listen too while in whatever state she was in was pretty cool. But that info wasn't enough to lift the entire episode.

Over all, it was the kind of episode you could easily skip and not miss anything. And it wasn't funny.

Yeah, I think people are probably right about the torture messing up Kate; I skimmed the torture scenes because I was having trouble watching them (torture in general is so not my thing in fiction) so apparently I missed PLOT. *g* But I do wish they'd explained it better, or had her act more messed up -- Kate running around scared and not really knowing who or anyone else is? I would totally have gone for that! Supervillain Kate without a compelling explanation for it ... not so much.

I certainly wouldn't say that it ruined the character for me or anything -- SGA gave me plenty of experience at ignoring inconvenient canon *g* -- but it was definitely 100% skippable. Mostly I just watched it because I'd run out of other episodes and I needed Kate clips for a vid I was working on.

I did like her trust in Helen, and the sweet little scene with them at the end.

But I do wish they'd explained it better, or had her act more messed up -- Kate running around scared and not really knowing who or anyone else is?

So much agreement to that. Even knowing Kate was messed up, I was bored with her story because it didn't really do anything. Didn't flesh her out more, etc. I like Kate, but it wasn't really about Kate, you know? It honestly felt like a pasted on plot device to explain why Kate didn't use her sudden superpowers to... capture the bad guys and go home. Something to keep the "Walter comes to a realization" story going. Amnesia would have been a lot more entertaining and compelling.

I think I missed part one of the Hero two parter and it's not something I'm in hurry to revisit. Breach, on the other hand, I may have watched more than is strictly healthy (though still a few times less than "The Five", because I have A PROBLEM).

I really do love Kate Freelander. I just...have a really hard time bonding with characters who have my name. Does that even make sense?

I love Breach! I think the thing I loved most about it (well, this is something that I love about Helen in general) is that it would have played out just the same if she'd been a male protagonist -- there was nothing at all in either the plot or the way it was staged that was objectifying, sexual or anything less than two people pitting their strength and skills against each other in a fast-paced display of badassery. :D

I really do love Kate Freelander. I just...have a really hard time bonding with characters who have my name. Does that even make sense?

Oh, it makes perfect sense! I have a rare enough name that it doesn't come up all that much for me, but I react weirdly to it -- in my case I find that it's tempting to over-identify and take what happens to them personally, which I realize is irrational and silly, but I can't seem to help it.

I didn't post a review of the episode (yet) because I had pretty much powered through two and a half seasons in a week, and was trying not to completely alienate my f-list. ;) But my favourite part of Breach was when I realized why she was drawing the map on the wall, and fell more in love with her than I thought was possible. ;)

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