Avengers Analyzed: Thor

Posted by natechen on

It’s time to finish up our look at the superhumans of Marvel’s The Avengers with a look at Thor. While Bruce Banner was our starting point mostly because I found him to be the least understood character, and Tony Stark and Steve Rogers followed him because their stories felt related, but Thor is the logical place to wrap up our superhero overview because he’s the final superhero in the film to show up.

Thor presents us with an interesting one because, while he’s probably the most powerful of the Avengers in absolute terms, he’s actually the most normal of them emotionally and relationally.

Yes, Thor doesn’t age, wields a weapon that easily puts out four times the power of Tony’s arc reactor and takes hits from The Hulk without appreciable harm, but he’s also got affectionate parents, friends who share his life and goals and a brother.

That last bit is the sticky part.

Point is, if you ignore the scale of his life, Thor is actually the most well adjusted, emotionally grounded and mentally stable of the four superheroes on the team. He has no suppressed anger, overactive ego or severe trauma. His greatest personal problem is a lack of familiarity with Earth culture. This both lets the audience see Loki from another angle and sets up his personal conflict.

Thor’s Background

Basically, Loki got jealous of his adoptive brother and arranged for him to be exiled to Earth, where Thor learned to be less of a Jerk. The material point is that Thor had to stop Loki’s scheming to take the throne of Asgard but in the process discovered his brother was adopted and full of discontent. Although Thor ended the matter by foiling Loki and accidentally sending him into the unknown depths of space he regrets the way they parted and clearly wants to make things right.

The Conflict 

Thor’s personal conflict is character vs. characters. Yes, as in multiple characters. For the majority of his time in the film Thor is not personally in conflict with Loki per se, rather he’s in conflict with the rest of the Avengers over what should be done about Loki. Thor still sees his brother as someone to be reformed and brought back into the fold. The rest of the Avengers see him as a threat to be dealt with via any means necessary. Thor wants to reconcile with his brother. The Avengers want Loki gone any way they can get it.

These goals aren’t necessarily contradictory but they will keep Thor and the Avengers working at crosspurposes even as Loki approaches his endgame.

We Meet Thor 

“What’s the matter, scared of a little lightning?” – Captain Steve Rogers 

For all his self-satisfied preening and condescension towards the other Avengers, when Thor arrives Loki gets nervous. We never see him show any trepidation towards anything else, he never flinches from his brother in person, but Thor beat Loki once and he doesn’t seem to have been in Loki’s calculations this time around – their dialog on first meeting suggests Loki expected his father to keep Thor at home. Thor is a weakness in Loki’s plans and a figure with enough personal power to shake Loki’s seemingly boundless self-confidence.

And then he steals Loki out from the noses of the Black Widow, Iron Man and Captain America.

Points for intimidation factor. Points for style. Nothing more to see here. Move along.

Loki – First Confrontation

“I’m not overly fond of what follows…” – Loki 

As Loki’s brother, Thor is given the unique privilege of confronting Loki multiple times through the film. Each of these confrontations marks a distinct point in Thor’s character progression and so the very first thing Thor has to do is drag Loki out for a little chat.

This initial conversation is not very long, courtesy of Tony Stark, but it clearly shows Thor’s priorities. Yes, Earth is under Thor’s protection and yes, he’s very concerned about what’s happening to it. But he’s really hurting because his brother has turned into something he doesn’t recognize and Thor can’t grasp why. Now this is in no small part because Thor is not particularly bright, he mostly gets by on being very earnest and normally this is one of his strengths. But the same forthrightness that makes Thor trustworthy and keeps his life simple also keeps him from ever fully grasping Loki’s ambition and need for validation.

When Loki mentions how much energy it must have taken Odin to send Thor to Earth we have to understand that Loki is seeing an expression of how much Odin is willing to do to keep him from happiness. All Thor sees is how much his father loves Loki and wants him to come home.

This scene is a perfect illustration of how Thor’s perspective is different from everyone else’s. The fact that it ends with Iron Man tackling him and throwing him into a pitched melee with two of the other Avengers only serves to show the logical outcome of Thor’s skewed perspective – it leaves him at odds with everyone else in the group.

A Battle of Worldviews

“This is beyond you, metal man. Loki will face Asgardian justice.” – Thor

Just about everything that happens with Thor from the end of his first brief conversation with Loki until Loki’s bid for freedom on the Helicarrier serves to illustrate the tension between him and the rest of the Avengers over what Loki is and what he’s there for. Most telling is when Thor tells Fury Loki isn’t out for power but vengeance. And not just any revenge, revenge against Thor specifically. Thor is still thinking of this as a personal problem between himself and his brother and he winds up fighting all three other superheroes in the Avengers before he starts coming to terms with things.

That’s right, as the most forthright of the Avengers Thor winds up physically fighting with Iron Man, Captain America and even the Hulk as an outward expression of his inward resistance to seeing Loki as they do. He just can’t accept Loki as an enemy to be defeated. He still wants Loki to be the brother he can save.

Loki – Second Confrontation 

“Are you never not going to fall for that?” – Loki

The moment Loki locks Thor into the Hulk cage is short, sweet and revealing… for Thor. Loki has never directly played his hand against his adoptive brother, mainly because the trickster knows he can’t overpower thunder. But the prison that used to hold him gives Loki a new card to play against Thor and for the first time there’s no masks between the two. Loki doesn’t just try and keep Thor out of the fight, he tries to kill him. It’s the same as burning the bridges between them.

While Thor escapes the death trap he’s also reached a turning point. After crash-landing in a field somewhere on the East Coast Thor brushes himself off and turns to reach for the hammer. This is an interesting moment. Although no dialog is said the image is reminiscent of the moment in Thor’s first stand-alone film, when he reached for Mjolnir and was found unworthy.

Now Thor finds he’s misjudged his brother, seen only a personal problem when Loki was all too willing to ignore Thor to pursue his bigger plans. Maybe he’s wondering if that lapse of judgment makes him unworthy to wield the hammer again. More likely he realizes the moment he takes up that hammer again he’ll have to turn it against his brother. But he takes it anyways, and it marks the turning point of his character.

Loki – Third Confrontation and Character Resolution

“Loki, turn off the tesseract or I will destroy it!” – Thor

Thor is too much of an earnest guy not to give Loki a chance at formal surrender before pounding him but this time around he’s not pleading with Loki, he’s offering an ultimatum. When Loki turns him down Thor stops playing nice and fights for real. While Thor doesn’t have the insight of Banner, capable of seeing through Loki’s illusions and immune to his semantics, once Thor turns his hand against his brother Loki’s no match for him.

People have said that Thor’s sudden reconciliation with the rest of the team is very abrupt but really, when you realize that his conflict with them was rooted in the different ways they saw Loki, it begins to make a great deal more sense. As soon as that difference of opinion is gone there’s nothing more to fight about.

There’s not as much of an arc to Thor’s character as the other three characters we’ve examined so far and perhaps that’s not surprising. After all, he is the best adjusted of them already and maybe his character didn’t need as much growth as some of the others. And to be fair, Thor is the first character to score a clean win over Loki, sending him running into the arms of the Chitauri after their confrontation at Stark Tower. That’s no small feat considering the only other character with a clear win over Loki is the Hulk – the other characters in the film never do more than stall Loki and frequently play into his hands.

Sadly, no one does that more than the core human members of the cast – so we’ll examine them next. Coming up in March, we look at Agents Romanoff and Barton. See you then!

Single Friends: A User’s Guide

Posted by natechen on

It’s February and that can only mean that love is in the air! You know, between bouts of snow, at least for those of us who live in the colder regions. And when I realized that Valentine’s Day was fast approaching I thought, why not take the month to look at stories that I like which tackle romantic love? So that’s what we’re doing.

Except for this week. This week there is a public service announcement.

Let’s start our romp through romance by addressing the elephant in the room. Let’s talk about the single people. Everybody knows at least one, probably more, whether they’ve just never had a significant other or whether they’re getting over yet another break-up, we know them and, at this time of year especially, we can find them feeling more than a little down. A good friend will probably feel the urge to try and help them cheer up and will sit down with them and offer a few words of advice or encouragement. To these helpful friends I offer this thought:

Don’t.

I’m not trying to be cavalier or anything here. I’m seriously saying, the things you’re thinking of saying are probably not going to help. I’ve been a single man for a little over thirty years, trust me, I’ve heard all the stock phrases offered to single people. Let’s take a look at a few of them, shall we?

  • When are you going to go out and get a boyfriend/girlfriend? Most people who say this think their friends just need a little push in the right direction to find someone. Usually it’s said to someone who’s been single for a longer than average period of time. And when single people hear it? Odds are they’re going to think, “Wow. This person has no idea what my priorities are.” You see, most people who are single for a long period of time are single for one of two reasons – either they haven’t found a person who they think matches what they need from a relationship or they are busy with activities that preclude the usual methods of building a relationship and will require something out of the ordinary for romance to blossom. Either way, when you ask this question of a single person, you don’t help them or prod them. You make them feel like their friends don’t understand them.
  • I’m sure you’ll find a nice person out there somewhere/eventually. No, you’re not. You’re not omniscient. You’re not sure. Maybe you think that, and I’m not dumping on optimism because I think it’s a bad character trait. Far from it. But when you say this you’re offering an empty promise. You know it. The person you say it to knows it. When you offer this kind of empty platitude you don’t help. You make someone feel like they’re not worth the effort. In the end, the only one who feels better about the situation will be you.
  • You’re not the only one – there are lots of lonely people out there. I’m not sure how to say this but, “You’re not alone, there are other lonely people” is kinda contradictory. Again, single people are usually single because they cannot do all the things they feel called to do in life – engage their community, use their talents, stay in touch with family, enjoy time with friends and find a fulfilling romantic relationship. Many things go into a complete life and a romantic relationship is just one of them. People who wind up single are probably single because they’ve found ways to fulfill their other needs but not balance them against their need for romance. That’s hard to deal with on a day to day basis, trust me. The fact that so many other people struggle to with it as well won’t really make us feel any better.
  • If they don’t appreciate you then they aren’t worth your time. Why do you think insulting the people your friends care about is helpful? Seriously, this is another case of something that makes you feel better but doesn’t really do anything to help your friend.

There’s more, but these are some of the most common platitudes handed out to single people. These, along with many of the other things singles tend to hear, ignore the basic problem most single people face: A need to balance their desire to not be single with the rest of their life. Friends of a single person need to acknowledge not only that their friend is single, and so probably not living an ideal life (a fact we single people are aware of) but also that singleness is a difficulty that isn’t solved. It is endured.

Think of a single person like a person who’s lost a kidney. It’s not exactly healthy for them, but the rest of the body can compensate for it by working a little harder to keep things clean. Being single is much like that – it’s not exactly healthy but if everything else performs well it’s not going to slow them down either. There’s also only one fix you can offer the situation, so unless you’re planning to ask your single friend out this Valentine’s Day, settle for doing the best you can as a friend and leave the single part alone.

Here is what the situation boils down to. When your single friend is having a rough time of it and you hand them a platitude, you’re showing them you desire to have the situation dealt with so you can stop feeling bad about it. That may be fine for you but it does nothing to help them. It probably makes them feel worse.

Single people are rough to deal with. We can be cranky, dissatisfied and frankly unpleasant. What we need from you is simple. We need you to be our friend in spite of that.

Take your single friends out to dinner. Go to a ball game or a movie with them. Have them over and play board games. Do whatever it is you usually do, except make sure they know you appreciate all they do to make your life better. That’s how you be a friend to a single person – just like you’re a friend to anyone else. Simple right? Not always easy, but simple.

Thunder Clap: The Icarus Run

Posted by natechen on

(Sorry for the late post. I forgot to schedule things out ahead of time last week… January was a rough month.)

Helix

According to Elizabeth Sykes, Waltham Towers was supposed to have three layers of defenses. The first were the EMP weapons we’d already encountered throughout the city in building after building Keller Realty had worked on in the past five years. Elizabeth called these empion stations and there were literally hundreds of them scattered through  the city. Massif and later Samson had spent a good chunk of the early morning clearing a path to Waltham Towers through the empion stations so that was taken care of.

Beyond that, there were roadblocks set up around the building itself. These mainly consisted of large water barrels stacked one on top of the other, blocking the road and doubling as a kind of emergency water supply for those in the tower. When Circuit had planned the scenario he’d also intended them to be a crowd control option for his viscosity manipulating henchman Heavy Water, who could drain the barrels to lay down a half-inch deep layer of gluelike water and neutralize most of what Project Sumter had to throw at him, save people like Samson or myself. Elizabeth thought it most likely that this was the layer of defense most likely to be left out of the scenario, both because he’d had no part in designing it and, since Heavy Water had gone into retirement at the same time Circuit did, there probably wasn’t anyone to work the carpet of adhesion angle of the roadblock. As it turned out, she was right on that count.

The third layer of defenses was the real problem. “It’s a deathtrap. A deathtrap with your name written all over it.”

This was also the third time I’d heard this basic line of thought. “I know, I know.” I leaned back against the side of the van that brought me and my team out from the office. l’d met Darry out there, where I’d explained the strategy we’d worked out. “I heard this from Jack and Teresa when we were back at the office and Sanders was all to happy to repeat it on the ride over. Can we assume that I’ve already met every objection you can think of and skip to the part where you agree and give Coldsnap and Frostburn the go ahead?”

“No.” Darryl glared at me from over the top of his cane, I’d found him seated on a bench on the sidewalk, watching the Sumter tactical teams as the rolled in and started setting up two blocks out from the Towers. He’d been happy to see me when I got there but it hadn’t lasted long. “When I left the building you were getting ready to question Elizabeth Sykes like the sane, if impulsive, agent I worked with years ago. In a little less than three hours you seem to have gone crazy. You don’t actually believe Circuit’s working against implementing a plan he spent ten years of his life building, do you?”

“He’s a control freak, so yeah, if he felt it was being implemented in a way he didn’t like I could definitely see Circuit doing just that.” I folded my arms over my chest and stared at him for a moment, hoping he’d cave and agree but Darryl’s always been more patient than me. “I’m going up the tower, Darryl.”

He scooped up the pile of blueprints I’d given him to look over and waved them at me. “Did you look this over at all? The entire inside of that tower is rigged with Circuit’s lighting funnel gizmos, he could fry you just about anywhere on the top twenty floors. Even if we cut the power from the building he’s got generators to keep it going.”

“But only on the inside.” I tapped my foot on the pavement. “The concrete in the building is nonconductive and he didn’t mount funnels to hit the outside walls of the building, he wasn’t planning on our taking this approach.”

“Oh, you mean he wasn’t planning on you committing suicide?” Darryl snorted. “Color me surprised. Samson should do this. He’s best equipped, best trained, and his daughter being in that building somewhere gives him more in the game.”

“Best trained? Darryl, he hasn’t done serious, full-time field work in years.”

He stamped his cane in frustration. “You know what I mean. Taxmen are trained to do a lot of solo work, you’ve always worked with a team. Now you want to try a plan that requires you to ditch them?”

“Not ditch them, just get a little bit ahead.” I held up my hand because we both knew that was pure semantics. Sixty to seventy floors up was effectively the same as working alone. “Samson can’t jump that kind of distance without a specially constructed surface to jump from. If he tried to do it here the ground would give under him and he’d completely miss the jump. At least I can break my own fall, he can’t. It has to be me, Darryl.”

“Because you’re the best choice or because you want your own piece of Circuit?” Darryl pushed to his feet and limped over, crowding me like a man who expected to have his say even if he had to beat it into me with his own two fists. “I know you, Helix. This guy has been a thorn in your flesh practically since day one and you’ve never been one to let go of things like that. But that kind of attitude gets people hurt. That’s why you lobbied to have me pulled out of the hunt for Circuit, remember?”

Getting angry is my thing, not Darryl’s. Even after Mona died he’d only really lost his temper once, Darryl was more the type to slowly burry his feelings and now was no exception. I’d known him to long not to notice the edge of unease under his hostility. He wasn’t mad at me – well, maybe a little – but getting mad was a good way of hiding what he was really feeling. “What do you want me to do, Darryl? There’s two agents missing, one of them has a father who is able and willing to tear that whole building apart brick by brick to find her, and going in is the best way to make sure they’re safe. If we wait for the man who started this mess, whether it’s Circuit or his engineer, to come out and show themselves odds are they’re going to make some kind of messy getaway attempt or at least have caused more problems for the city. And we’re talking about a guy who orchestrated a hacking attack that shut down five major cities across the nation. We need to go in now.”

“You’re being reckless, Helix. Reckless is how people get killed!”

How his wife got killed. “Darryl…”

“Do not patronize me,” he snapped. “You think I’m being irrational? Name one other person who’s contributed as much as you have to the future of talented people.”

“Corporal Sumter,” I answered without hesitation. “And Sergeant Wake. Chief Stillwater and Saint Elmo, for that matter. Even Rodriguez has been doing just as much as me, the last few years. Don’t pretend like I’m irreplaceable.”

Darry snorted and stalked off a few steps, stewing. That wouldn’t really help his mood any and I really needed his help. Maybe it was time to change the subject. “Did I ever tell you why I joined Project Sumter?”

“Because it was the family business?”

“Sort of.” I tipped my head back and stared up at the clear morning sky. It was midmorning and the buildings were catching the sun. “Mostly, I wanted to be a part of something as big as what those guys were.”

He laughed quietly. I couldn’t tell if it was meant as bitter, ironic or just tired. “You wanted to be a hero.”

“No.” I pushed away from the van and stepped over beside him, resting a hand on his shoulder. “One thing I learned from my grandfather’s stories. A hero is judged by what he gives, not what he has or what he does. I never signed up to die, and I don’t think I’m going to today. But if that’s what it takes, then that’s what I’ll do. I’m afraid of dying, sure. But what I do is worth more than fear.”

When Darryl didn’t say anything in response I gave his shoulder a squeeze and said, “And I think it’s more important than pain, too.”

Finally he sighed and pulled out his phone. “Get going, Helix. I’ll make the call.”

——–

Heat rises. That’s physics and, more importantly, not the part of physics that a heat sink messes with. I’m a heat sink and that means heat is my bread and butter, my modus operandi, the one thing I know better than a third grade kid arguing Superman versus Batman. I’m good with it is what I’m saying.

The Plan, my great method for getting into the building without having to run the gauntlet of inside defenses, boils down to this: Superheat a lot of air, creating an updraft. The hotter the air, the faster it would move and the bigger the updraft. Spread out a heat sink far enough, make it hot enough, and the updraft would push me up the side of the building. I figured I’d have to run along the side of the building, since even I’m not that strong of a heat sink, but sixty or seventy floors with a tail wind couldn’t be that hard.

The catch was, on my own, I couldn’t even create enough of an updraft to coast upward on. I’d actually done exercises to test that. I could use one to break a fall, and had in the past, but go up a building? Not likely.

If Frostburn and Coldsnap helped me it was a different matter. The two were identical twin cold spikes, people who dumped heat out of the environment just like I sunk it in – long story short, them helping me was the difference between one man holding a bucket to catch rainwater and that same man catching rain in his bucket while two other people are emptying their own buckets into his. It’s not quite the same as tripling the heat at my disposal, but it’s close.

With the two of them posted at either end of the block, Waltham Towers was at the center of one of the most unnatural weather phenomena the city had ever seen. The street began to ice over at either end as the two ladies spiked as hard as they could. The heat that was frantically fleeing the touch of their power poured around them and into my hands until the air just in front and above me was shimmering like it was over the world’s biggest black top parking lot. After twenty seconds or so, it started to glow.

The windows in the building were shaking under the unnatural onslaught of wind and, since I weighed all of a hundred and thirty pounds, I was nearly taken off my feet. That meant it was time to get a running start and dash up the side of the building.

As it turned out I wound up more skipping than running. Sticking to the side of the building was tricky but the vortex swirled in a clockwise pattern and I stayed near the building for the most part. Not that I really wanted to be there all the time. One thing I hadn’t anticipated was the windows of the building, well below the freezing point of water thanks to the twins efforts, swelling in their frames until they burst. I wound up ascending the building in a cloud of plasma and half melted glass, looking for all the world like I was chasing the sun on some kind of mad flight, except I’d forgotten my wax wings.

Or that’s what Sanders said when he showed me the video he took with his phone afterwards.

Thankfully the trip up took less than a minute, although I’d have sworn it was much longer at the time, and as I passed the large conference room window I’d been told to aim for I kicked my feet towards the side of the building, getting decent purchase and convulsing my whole body, heat sink and all, into the side of the tower. One quick, messy trip through molten glass and softening concrete later and I was inside Waltham Towers. I took a few deep breaths to slow my heartbeat and promised myself whoever was behind this had better be ready for me because at the moment I was not a happy customer…

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Genrely Speaking: Satire

Posted by natechen on

Satire is the last of the three metagenres to get tackled here on Genrely Speaking, the previous two being deconstruction and parody. Satire stands apart from these two metagenres in that it is generally intended in a noncomplementary way. Deconstructions and parodies tend to come from a deep love for a genre and a desire to share it with other people – in the first case, a desire to share it with new audiences in the second a desire to share it more deeply with those who love and enjoy it already. Satire does not come from a love of its source material.

Satire is a metagenre that tries to make an idea, person or genre look ridiculous. Generally it does this by adopting the stance of its target and pushing the ideas until they become absurd.

The hallmarks of satire tend to be as follows:

  1. A very strong tendency to extremes. There’s no middle of the road here, by the very nature of satire it has to be as loud and unreserved. A great example of this comes from the book Animal Farm, where pretty much all of the pigs qualify as ridiculously extreme examples of the kind of propaganda Orwell is satirizing. The horse Boxer is a satire of those who follow such propagandists. Voices in satire tend to be loud because quiet voices tend to sound more reasonable than shouting ones and the point of satire is not to appear reasonable. With one notable exception.
  2. The voice of reason. The point of satire is to push things to such an extreme that the audience is repulsed by it but, at the same time, it’s important to make it clear that the author is not actively endorsing it. So there tends to be this one sane person that tries to bring reason to this totally insane situation and inevitably fails. It’s important to keep readers from getting the wrong impression. Clover is an example of this from Animal Farm.
  3. No sense of actual reality. The point is to push an idea to utter absurdity and discourage people from thinking that way. So the work almost never tries to keep any semblance of reality. Oddly enough, many satirical works wind up seeming realistic despite themselves – Animal Farm in particular turned out to be eerily prescient, describing the cult of personality surrounding Stalin to a T. But that’s not necessarily the goal.

What are the weaknesses of a satire? The biggest weakness of satire is that it’s not really a very nice approach to looking at bad ideas. People who hold them already are going to be offended by the treatment and people who are undecided on the issue may be put off by the tone most satires take. That’s not to say a satire can’t be done well but it’s a difficult balance to strike and even when you find it the unreality of the approach is probably going to put off as many people as it attracts.

Also, there’s always a small minority of people who just aren’t going to get that a satire is mocking the thing it portrays and interpret it as an endorsement for something terrible. Or worse an endorsement for something positive. A more clear cut repudiation of a philosophy would probably serve better.

What are the strengths of a satire? They can be a vehicle for a very prescient engagement with an idea when handled very well. George Orwell wrote two very cutting satires (Animal Farm and 1984) that have stood the test of time, in no small part because he effectively showed how bleak the ideas he was attacking were.

In the end, satire is a very two-edged sword. It can leave a very, very memorable impression but it is going to put a lot of people off, particularly if you don’t use it well. Some people have chosen to put elements of satire into works that, on the whole, are not at all satirical. The character of Gideon Gleeful, from Gravity Falls, is a very modern example of this, satirizing TV psychics and faith healers while still serving to advance the general mystery driven plot of the show.

Ultimately, the use of satire is a personal choice, usually driven by how strong a person’s feelings on a subject is and how they want to address them. How much a person likes satire is the same – some people will like it and some will hate it. You won’t have to read much of one to know which one you are and, if you don’t like what you see, there’s nothing wrong with abandoning it.

Ship of Ghosts

Posted by natechen on

I recently watched the movie Unbroken, about down Army Air Force pilot Louis Zamperini and it reminded me of a book I’ve been meaning to mention for a while. Ship of Ghosts is by James D. Hornfischer and it chronicles the ordeal of the USS Houston (CA-30). The Houston was one of the few ships of the US Asiatic Fleet that had the unenviable task of trying to hold back the Imperial Japanese Navy during the early days of the Second World War. Like so many ships in that fleet, the Houston was eventually sunk by the Japanese.

Most of the crew that survived fell into the hands of the Japanese.

For those unfamiliar with what that entailed, the Japanese had not signed the Geneva Conventions. Their military culture at the time also strongly believed that death for the country was one of the highest honors. The Japanese war machine simply had no allowance for soldiers who failed to fight to the death. On either side of a conflict.

The result was that those men captured by the Japanese would suffer some of the hardest years of their lives, enduring torture, forced labor, starvation, disease and death.

If the title was not enough to warn you, Ship of Ghosts is not a story of uplifting triumph. Some of the men do survive, in fact we only have the survivor’s voices to tell the tales. But what they endured is fascinating only in how horrible it was and in that anyone could survive it.

Like all good histories, Ship of Ghosts lets us meet the characters we’re about to learn about before things go wrong. We follow them out to the under supplied, aging Asiatic Fleet where almost nothing happens but where everyone expects something to go wrong soon enough. We watch the Houston run before the raging storm of the ascendant Japanese Navy. It fights and eventually dies, and the good ship’s labors are done. But the men have three long years to survive.

What they endure is not fun reading. But it is the kind of thing everyone should read. People did endure these things, they did survive them. Kind of puts our lives into perspective. And they did these things for us. And that, perhaps, is why we don’t want to hear about them. Because if we accept that these events are real, and they have real motivations, what are the consequences for our lives? Have we been grateful for what they gave? And do they deserve something beyond gratitude?

Frankly, until you’ve read a book like Ship of Ghosts, those are questions you can’t even begin to appreciate, much less answer. And even if appreciating the question is all you can do, you’ll be better for it.

Thunder Clap: Jacob’s Ladder

Posted by natechen on

Izzy

I crashed down on the fortieth floor, the elevator door twisted around me in a shape halfway between a cocoon and a surf board. Prying myself out took a few seconds but I’d had a little practice over the last twenty floors. Sykes, or Circuit or whatever you wanted to call him, floated in the elevator shaft behind me, a concerned look on his face. “Are you alright? I know you’re tough, at least if you’re anything like your father, but that kind of hit over and over again can’t be good for you.”

I gave my T-shirt a quick tug to straighten it and said, “Smashing into stuff is easy. We can push out against impact for a couple of seconds to absorb the blow, kind of like flexing a muscle against a hit. But you can’t hold that forever so it’s less useful when you have a lot of stuff smashing into you.”

“So that’s why you don’t just walk through bullets like that Aluchinskii guy. Too hard to bounce bullets for a long time, better not to try it at all.” For a moment Sykes looked interested in that line of thought but concern quickly took back over. “You’re sure you’re okay? I’ve met your father and I have a hard time believing he just let you smash into walls at high speed so you’d grow up tough.”

A tilt of the head let me work the last kinks out of my neck, I did my best to do it in a way that wouldn’t let him realize how tired I actually was. He was partly right, I hadn’t had a whole lot of practice shrugging off heavy hits but I had done it some as part of my field training. Unfortunately I hadn’t slept much in the last forty eight hours and that was starting to get to me. Fine control, never my strong suit, wasn’t much of a loss but stamina was another one of those things that was slipping away from me and I was getting tired. Tired enough that I was starting to feel the hits, even when I was braced for them.

But Circuit was still a public menace, even if Sykes might seem like an okay guy, and I wasn’t about to let him know how wiped out I was. “I’m touched by your concern but it’s a little weird coming from the guy who created the plan to leave the city with no power in the middle of the summer. Or did the thousands of deaths by heat and starvation not bother you?”

His expression flipped to offended superiority almost instantly. “There were contingencies in place for that. I had resources in place to deal with those issues. Keep casualties to a minimum.”

“Don’t see a whole lot of that right now.”

Sykes sighed. “Davis wasn’t privy to the full details of my plan, his primary area of responsibility was the tower. And quite frankly, I think that was the only part he cared about. It was just a chance to build newer, better systems and see what they did. It’s what he loves to do and that makes him good at his job. It would be nice if he cared about what the consequences of his actions were, too.”

I gave him a skeptical look. “And this makes the two of you different how?”

He opened his mouth to answer, stopped, shook his head and rapped his knuckles against the arm of his floating chair, sending it upward. “Forget it. We’ve still only halfway to the top. If you can keep going then keep up. If not I’ll go by myself. I want to be there when Helix arrives.”

His wheelchair was almost entirely out of sight by the time he was done speaking. There wasn’t much else I could do except jump back into the elevator shaft behind him.

We were moving in five floor chunks, it took Circuit about ten seconds to ascend that floor and I let him check for traps then get clear before jumping up into the shaft, off of the far wall and back through another elevator door five stories up. The process was uncomfortable but pretty boring, all things considered. We made it up another twenty floors in silence, aside from Circuit occasionally muttering under his breath as he scouted out the shaft. I was waiting for Circuit to clear the jump to the sixty-fifth floor when he let out a triumphant, “Aha!”

“What?” I asked, craning my neck so I could see up the shaft.

“Traps, right on schedule. Looks like no one thought to add extra traps to the setup but at least someone thought of changing them from the kind of thing I could easily disarm with my talents.” The sound of latches being undone echoed down the shaft. “Which is not the same as saying it’s not easy to disarm.”

Circuit’s chair tilted at a weird angle so he could lean over and work in an access panel. The chair was surprisingly stable all things considered. “This may sound like a weird question but is that magic chair of yours gonna have enough juice to last for the duration? You’ve been using it an awful lot. Shoving your impersonator’s guys around by their maglev harnesses, levitating through elevator shafts and who knows what else. I mean, the thing’s only got so much juice to run on, right?”

“Smart question. Yes, it’s got a finite charge but I built it to run independently for a long time.” He paused what he was doing long enough to slap the side of the chair, rattling something in the side of the frame. “It can be charged off a wall socket but that takes time. I want to get to the top before Helix does.”

I snorted. “You’re pretty confident he’s gonna be here.”

“He may be your boss but I’ve known him for a long time, my dear. Almost half your life.” He slammed the panel he was working in closed. “I have a very high opinion of him, odd as that may sound.”

“So I’ve heard. You two are something of a legend around the offices.” Circuit moved to the other side of the shaft and opened another panel there. “Can I ask you something, since we have a breather?”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Why the chair?” He stopped what he was doing long enough to give me a look that suggested his opinion of my intelligence was dropping. “I mean, you could walk just fine in every encounter you had with Helix up to and including that showdown at the hydroelectric plant you built. Why does the chair exist at all?”

“I designed it back when I was still in the business, plotting to rule the world and all that. Faking a weakness is a fundamental rule of evil overlording and the plane crash when I was younger gave me a perfect excuse to feign being lame.” He paused to shove a screwdriver into his mouth and proceeded to mumble around it. “I didn’t actually build it until I retired.”

“So you waited?” My neck was getting a crick in it so I stopped trying to watch him and settled on staring at the wall on the far side of the shaft. In the dim light of the elevator shaft Circuit and his chair cast weird shadows, like the deformed shadow puppet of a king. “Why bother if you were getting out of the business?”

I jumped a bit when Circuit suddenly dropped back into view, his expression grim. “I’ll tell you a secret, Agent Rodriguez. I’m not a good person.”

“When do we hear the secret part?”

He smiled just a bit. “The secret is, I always planned on rolling over and dying when the time came to pay for my sins. Your father was a priest, you would understand that, wouldn’t you?”

There wasn’t a sign of malice or mockery in his face that I could make out. “If that’s true, then what changed?”

He shrugged. “I’m still not a good person, Rodriguez. But no one else should have to pay for my mistakes. My reckoning day is coming but now I’ve got people to look out for. Just because I got out of the game doesn’t mean I’m naïve. I’ve always known Sumter would catch up to me one of these days. And I never imagined that the people I worked with were playing straight with me either. Insurance is my way of life, now as much as when I played the villain, and the chair was a kind of insurance. A way to influence events if it ever came to that.”

I studied his face for signs that he was playing some sort of angle but couldn’t find any. “So we’re at their perimeter, right? What’s our next move?”

“The perimeter presents several-”

A quick chop of the hand cut him off. “Listen, I’ve heard that a million times from Al and Helix. Whenever they say there’s several things that can happen they always have one that they’re planning on happening or one that they’ve settled on doing already. So just tell me what the most likely thing is and we’ll all save some time.”

Circuit stared at me in surprise for a moment, then laughed. “You know, they do that because they haven’t actually worked out what they’re expecting for themselves, right? It’s just a way to buy time.”

“You mean you don’t know what you’re planning on doing?”

“One can’t always know what to expect until you’re on the scene.” He shrugged. “I think we’ll continue with the direct approach for now. We need to get to the seventy-fifth floor.”

He shot back up through the shaft and I got ready to wreck another elevator door.

Fiction Index

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Conflict: A Taxonomy

Posted by natechen on

Conflict is an essential part of storytelling. Every story needs a conflict to drive it, even if that conflict is as simple as getting to the office on time. I’ve talked about conflict before from time to time but today it’s time to sit down and really dissect it. In literary terms there are four to eight types of conflict but in the writing tradition I learned from there are exactly seven and this is the system that I continue to use to this day. Without further ado, the seven kinds of conflict as I learned them are:

Character vs. Character 

In this conflict you have two people who cannot agree on something. Each character tries to get their own way and hijinks ensue. While this seems like a simple type of conflict it is really very deep, these conflicts tend to spread out of control as they exist almost any time two characters interact with each other. The vast majority of stories today have character vs. character as a major conflict, if not the major conflict. Luke’s story arc in the classic Star Wars trilogy is a great example of this kind of conflict, as is any Superman story with Lex Luthor in it.

Character vs. Self 

This conflict arises when a character is dissatisfied with some aspect of themselves and attempts to correct it. If you’ve ever tried to get in shape or break a bad habit you know how hard this can be. Stories focusing on this kind of conflict usually make a big deal of how the thing being changed effects the central character and the world around them, and how the attempts to change cause ripples in the character’s life. Groundhog’s Day or (oddly enough) Scott Pilgrim VS The World are great examples of this.

Character vs. Nature 

A struggle with nature arises any time impersonal laws of existence, like gravity or time, or forces of nature, like storms or earthquakes, or just wild animals threaten a character or prevent them from getting what they want. These kinds of struggles usually focus on the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of ingenuity in the face of mindless obstacles. The Old Man and the Sea is the quintessential example of this. The Perfect Storm is another good case study.

Character vs. The World (or Society) 

When a character desires something that just isn’t the way things are done, or social mores and strictures put entire groups of people against one person or one person just tries to march to his own rhythm and is discouraged by the ways he doesn’t fit in you have a character vs. the world. It’s much like character vs. character except it’s as much about the nature of the system the character is caught in than the wants and needs of the individual characters who oppose him. Romeo and Juliet does this on a small scale, 1984 on a large one.

Character vs. Fate 

This is much like character vs. self except all the character’s attempts to change are thwarted by circumstances beyond their control. It can also pertain to stories where characters attempt to thwart some prediction only to make it come true – usually because of some quirk of their own characters. Regardless, it hinges on how a character’s nature makes their actions ineffectual. And sometimes (rarely, to tell the truth) how they overcome those natures. Oedipus Rex is an example of this conflict.

Character vs. Machine 

This conflict is actually kind of new, but not at the same time. It’s a well known fact that changes in technology force people to adapt and the struggle to adapt to changing places in the world, or hold on to your place in the face of new tools or techniques, is a timeless one. But only in the modern era has it started to look like machines can actually replace people entirely and how people deal with that possibility is the center of this conflict. The Caves of Steel is a perfect example.

Character vs. gods/God 

Any time a character struggles against another character who is utterly beyond their abilities to comprehend that conflict is character vs. gods/God. What sets this apart is that the conflict is almost always one-sided. The human character does all the work, invests all the emotion and purpose and almost always fails to provoke any kind of reaction at all from the other party. These stories run a spectrum from The Call of Cthulu on one end to Till We Have Faces on the other.

So what function do these classifications serve?

Mostly, I find they help you think about your characters in a new light. Trying to classify your character’s central conflict can focus your narrative wonderfully, helping you fixate on and eliminate needless distractions and really hit the story where it lives.

For those of you following my Avengers Analyzed series, I employed this technique to help me narrow down the elements of each character’s own character growth and ignore their actions which were intended to advance the development of others. Which brings me to another important issue. Most every character in your cast should probably have a conflict of their own that they are dealing with. Working out what those conflicts are will help your characters’ actions and dialog to have purpose and make them more believable and sympathetic.

Conflict. It needs to be at the heart of your story so make it as clear as possible.

Cool Things: Shazam!

Posted by natechen on

I have issues with American comics/graphic novels for a number of reasons. They tend to address a very narrow range of topics – mostly people in colorful suits battling crime and/or evil and/or each other. There’s nothing wrong with superhero comics, as a genre, but like many genres with entrenched fanbases and a fairly continuous, unbroken history stagnation is a real problem, with many of the tropes and stereotypes reinforcing one another until everything starts to look the same.

On top of that, most of the comics I’ve read seem to have forgotten that they are visual media, and attempt to tell most, if not all, of their story through captions, narration or dialog. While a certain amount of this is necessary, comics are a visual medium and must be told visually or they kind of loose the point. These two factors combine in some form or another to comprise most to all of my problems with the American comics industry.

Fortunately, there is the occasional title that comes out with enough fresh perspective, engaging characters and well used imagery to stand out from the crowd. One such title is Shazam!, a collection of shorts that ran in the Justice League comics for a time. I recently read the collection and highly recommend it to anyone who wants to see a good reinterpretation of a classic superhero origin in modern times.

This book does a lot right but I’ll just touch on a few things.

First, the art is great and does a lot to tell the story all on it’s own. People are expressive, poses are dynamic and there’s no jump from panel to panel that you simply cannot follow because of bad composition or poor blocking. It’s amazing how many comics, even those drawn by artists with perfectly fine technical skills, fail in the area of composition and loose readers simply because you’re not sure what’s happening from one panel to the next. That’s never a problem for this book.

Second, Shazam! chooses it’s tropes wisely. The two it ignores, which most stories of this flavor would try and include, are the trope of the overly tough hero and the trope of the heavily guarded secret identity. Both of these are avoided to the story’s great benefit.

A quick overview – Billy Batson is taken in by a foster family. He expects to be kicked right back out, just like he eventually was at  all the other foster homes he’s been in, but the family works hard to make him feel at home and they make small inroads. Things take a turn for the weird when a wizard named Shazam takes Billy from off of a subway train and tests him for a good heart. He doesn’t find one – he hasn’t found one in the dozens of people he’s tested, but Billy points out that it’s pointless to look for a good heart among human beings and maybe Shazam should consider looking for the potential for a good heart instead.

The wizard takes Billy’s advice and finds such potential in Billy. Thus, Billy is entrusted with the Power of Shazam and the Living Lightning and winds up forced to battle his corrupt predecessor. With the help of the others in his forster family Billy defeats Black Adam and takes his rightful position as the Guardian of Magic in the DC universe.

Also, there are magical tigers. Trust me, it’s cool.

At it’s core, Shazam! is the story of how a damaged foster kid finds himself once more placed in a foster home which he has no expectations about. Billy’s a realistic kid – he’s been in the system a long time and he doesn’t expect much. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t want a family, under all the layers of cynicism and disappointment, he just doesn’t expect one. At it’s heart, Billy’s struggle to find his place is well written human drama and neither takes over the story nor comes off as a cheap sugarcoating.

It also gives the story one of it’s greatest strengths.

At no point in the story does he try and hide the fact that he’s received the power of Shazam from his fellow foster kids. In fact, a lot of time is spent with Billy and his friend Freddy Freeman, exploring what Billy can do as Shazam and what they can do with those powers. Eventually the whole set of foster kids knows about them – the parents are left out only because the growing mess Billy’s new role as Shazam has created has separated them from their kids for a while. This dynamic, with Shazam having a bunch of people who know he’s got superpowers, lets the story explore a lot of ideas that normally never get any attention in comics.

For starters, there is the natural reaction and surprise at seeing Billy’s powers. But that’s gotten over fairly quickly, mostly because Billy is just as surprised at them as everyone else. Then there’s the phase where everyone is trying to figure out what it is Bill can do. Finally, everyone tries to pool resources to solve problems quickly and efficiently while keeping everyone in touch with each other and safe. It’s this last part that I feel most comics really fail at. We never see superheroes collaborating with normal people and sharing responsibilities. Even those who pay lip service to trying such a thing usually end up with the superhero doing everything on their own. But, perhaps in part because Billy is still young, a positive team dynamic rapidly coalesces and the story is both more engaging and more endearing for it.

The comradery among the characters, although not easy to come by, does help the book achieve it’s second major trope aversion. While his life in foster care has made him a hard case, Billy is by no means lacking emotional depth. We see his disappointment at previous failed foster situations, his extreme skepticism at his current foster family and simultaneously his nagging desire to be a part of this family create a meaningful personal conflict for Billy and it’s through that conflict, and the carefully balanced use of the rest of the cast, that we get a chance to see that depth.

Freddy, in particular, is a great foil to Billy’s attitude. Both have practical and self serving streaks that should make it hard for them to appreciate one another but, at the same time, they are the ones who show the most wonder and excitement when Billy is suddenly given superpowers and manage to form a solid bond. The moment they realize Billy can fly as Shazam is one of the best in the book.

Finally, I love the fact that Billy ultimately defeats Black Adam (Spoiler! Hero wins in superhero comic book!) because he is clever and courageous, not because he’s simply more powerful. Many superhero books let their protagonists win because they were more powerful or more determined or more cunning than their enemies. Billy ultimately gambles on courage and good character and I like the fact that he wins.

All in all, Shazam! is a superhero tale that has the trim and trappings of the modern day, that reflects our modern ills and attitudes, but still manages to be a superhero tale at heart. It’s worth at least one read.

Hiatus Act Two

Posted by natechen on

Just a quick reminder that Thunder Clap will continue next week. The recharge is going well and I’m starting to get caught up. Come back on Wednesday for some thoughts on the state of American Comics!

Nate

Midseason Recap: Agents of SHIELD

Posted by natechen on

Hi guys, final midseason recap time. We’ve talked about the writing in Scorpion and Gotham so it’s time to turn our attention to Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD.

I have so many mixed feelings about this show. SHIELD is different from previous shows in a couple of ways. First, it’s not in its first season and second it’s a tie in to a much bigger media franchise. These things are not necessarily in the show’s favor.

Series Premise and First Season Recap 

The premise of SHIELD is pretty simple. It’s about a shadow agency, the titular SHIELD, that reacts to paranormal and metahuman situations around the globe and keeps them from hurting people. It’s like The X-Files meets Men In Black, except there’s more than aliens running around and we have Clark Gregg instead of David Duchovny (not exactly a bad trade in my book). All of this ties in to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) as expressed in movies like the Iron Man franchise and The Avengers. Except now that premise has been put through the wringer for a full season and it’s morphed into something different.

So, a brief recap of Season One. We meet our team, then discover various metahuman and extraterrestrial doohickies and keep bumping into people working to perfect a new supersoldier serum and start cranking out Captain Americas – although probably with less of the moral center. In the middle of the season Captain America: The Winter Soldier comes out and HYDRA infiltrators take over SHIELD and the whole premise takes a serious hit. (Spoilers, by the way.) The SHIELD we’ve started to get a feel for is suddenly ripped out from under us and we have to relearn all the rules of the world and the show. The season ends with Agent Phil Coulson promoted to Director of SHIELD and working to rebuild the organization.

The real problem with Season One is it lacks any kind of focus or cohesion. Several episodes were spent on tie-ins rather than progressing the show’s central plot. Which, by the way, revolves around a character named Skye and her mysterious parentage and history with SHIELD. Skye and the team are ignorant of what happened to her family and Phil decides to do what he can to help her figure that out. We start to see connections between Skye and the people running the supersoldier program… but the tie-ins wreck the pacing of her story and then the sudden HYDRA revolt totally sidelines that mystery for most of the last third of the season.

I’m not saying the HYDRA thing wasn’t good but it really feels like it’s happening at the wrong time in the series. SHIELD probably would have been a stronger TV show if it had either waited for the second season to pull a total revamping of the show’s format or if it had waited half a season and simply begun with Coulson picking up the pieces after HYDRA wrecked most of SHIELD. Status quo must be established before it can be changed up and the show failed to do that before it’s big Season One shake-up. That doesn’t mean the show wasn’t entertaining, it just wasn’t as good as it could have been.

Otherwise the show did a good job with characterization and no single episode was particularly boring. A lot of interesting storylines were set up – although some things that I’d hoped to see, like an episode inside the supervillain prison center or more events inside SHIELD Academy, are obviously not coming to pass now.

All things considered the first season of SHIELD started good and drifted toward high end mediocrity. I approached the second season with trepidation. In fact, I didn’t start watching it until several episodes into the season. I’ve definitely had the most trouble convincing myself I wanted to watch it on a weekly basis out of the shows I’m following this season. That said, there is some good stuff in it. Let’s take a look.

Favorite Character (Honorable Mention) – Phil Coulson 

The answer will probably always be Phil. It’s a combination of many factors, I think, and the excellent performance of Clark Gregg is definitely one of them. I’d like to say there’s great writing behind his character but the fact is Phil is just written as solid, likeable, fatherly and sensible. He’s hard not to like and something about Gregg’s charisma makes it work all the better. But in terms of the show’s writing… Phil isn’t actually written that well. He’s not written badly at all but there’s nothing outstanding there either. So, while I love the character and the way he’s presented, I’m removing him from the running for favorite character because he wins… but more because of the actor and personal preference than actual writing.

Favorite Character – Leo Fitz 

He’s kind of geeky and adorkable which I can sympathize with. But the growth of his character since the rift between him and Jemma Simmons formed combined with his slow recovery from near suffocation makes for some really interesting moments. The most interesting aspect is the way a person who has only really needed one friend has to adapt when his primary relationship is radically and probably irrevocably altered.

While the arc itself is not particularly groundbreaking, each interaction with each character along the way is so well written and so believable that it plays like a dream. Major kudos for handling this whole thing so well.

Least Favorite Character – Daniel Whitehall 

Whedon is great at doing good characters so it’s impossible to pick one that I hate. But there is a character which I don’t like as much as the others and that’s Whitehall. He’s a lackluster villain, feeling much like a generic Dr. Insano kind of a mad scientist. While perpetrating wholesale organ transplants in order to gain renewed youth and vigor certainly establishes him as both vicious and cold we never really get an appreciation for what drives him or what sets him apart from all the other characters matching his archetype, or even his mentor Red Skull.

Whitehall suffers from a distinct lack of development and, particularly with Skye’s father and Grant Ward running around, the series has a lot of better villains casting a shadow over him. That’s a particular weakness given that he’s probably meant as the primary villain of the first half of Season Two. More time should have been spent developing him or, given his current status in the show, less time should have been wasted on him. It’s not a strong dislike but it’s enough that he rates as my least favorite character this season.

Favorite Character Dynamic – Grant/Skye 

The transformation of these two from tentative romance to bitter betrayal and creepy stalker/stalkee relationship is… engaging. It’s not really fun but it does ramp up the suspense and keep you coming back for more. Grant is a very, very warped individual and it’s unclear what caused him to latch on to Skye like he did, or what he might do should he ever find the approval he wants from her.

Skye is a confused person who doesn’t really understand who she is or what she’s capable of, but she’s not going to be manipulated by Grant and it will take more than his attempts to express affection for her to draw her from the side of the angels. The battle of wills between them is tense and hopefully will lead to even better storytelling down the road.

Least Favorite Character Dynamic – Billy and Sam Koening 

Okay, so I’ve played around with the look-alikes with weird relationships a bit in my stories but this one… it just feels a little out of place and weird in this show. Again, not a big gripe, but Whedon does so well with his characters and their interactions that it’s hard not to like them. These two just feel out of place in the larger cast which puts them near the bottom. Hopefully they’ll be more than just quirky background but in the mean time I guess I’ll settle for being mildly exasperated whenever they steal screen time from people I’m more interested in.

Least Favorite Episode – The Things We Bury (S02E08) 

While I like Grant Ward when he’s keeping the pressure on Skye, forcing her to grapple with her own feelings and the realities of the life she’s chosen, on his own he’s kind of a weak character. I’m not sure if it’s because his psychotic fixation makes him predictable or just because he’s not a nice person but he gets old fast. This episode mostly features him and I managed to deduce the outcome, point by point, almost from the beginning and that didn’t sit well with me. I’m inclined to credit that to poor writing, since I think all of this could have been done in a way that made it interesting and effective while still conveying the same events, but I’m not a TV writer and I’m not in a position to judge. It wasn’t a horrible episode but it wasn’t very interesting either.

Favorite Episode – The Writing on the Wall (S02E07) 

This episode was good. The culmination of the TAHITI arc, Coulson regaining sanity and the flashbacks to his efforts to understand fellow TAHITI patients all makes for great character stuff. The episode moves tightly, has good suspense and the reveal shot at the end, when Coulson and the other TAHITI patient who have been searching look down and finally see what they’ve been looking for… that’s a great moment. Yes, the Winter Finale had a powerful climax as well but Coulson’s character resolution for this half of the season resonated more.

Other Stuff 

I’m still on the fence about this show. The incorporation of the inhumans to the MCU before their actual movie is a nice touch and feels much more organic than most of the forced tie-ins from the first season. The reveal that Skye is actually an established DC character (albeit a minor one) is great and, while Bobbi Morse did this first, it’s satisfying to know one of the people who we’ve come all this way with is an established Marvel player.

This will most likely make the character Skye in the Marvel comic SHIELD, which features many of the same characters as the show, substantially different from her MCU counterpart, but we can live with that.

My two biggest problems with the show are as follows. First, the heavy studio hand visible in the first season which resulted in wonky story pacing and poor placement of a major plot twist really hampered the progress of the show. But it seems to be recovering from that.

Second, the beautiful people habit. I mentioned how much I liked Scorpion avoiding that and, to an extent, Gotham has as well. Not as much, but many of the people in Gotham are socialites and others with public images to think of so it’s at least kind of realistic. SHIELD is full of spies and professional hard cases, people who should blend in or be a little on the rough edge of things. But the cast almost universally looks like they’re ready to step onto a photo shoot most of the time. They’re overstylized and it’s a little grating. Only Clark Gregg manages to avoid looking like he’s been spit polished before he stepped onto the set and I suspect that’s more due to his natural charisma than a conscious decision on the part of makeup.

On the other hand, the actors are very good. Clark Gregg I’ve already said I like. Brett Dalton is eerily good at the placid psychotic Grant Ward. But Kyle MacLachlan takes the cake as Skye’s deranged father, teetering wildly between an injured and hurting man and a homicidal wreck bent on vengeance. His jump from one to the other is always believable and, oddly enough, more pitiable than chilling, making his character all the harder to get a handle on. Good work, sir. Good work.

I’m still divided on this show, but my biggest gripe with it was the clear fingerprints of studio interference in the first season. Over time those signs have diminished. Hopefully we won’t have cause to see them again – not that studio direction is bad. But when it stands out too much it can kill a series. Perhaps, if we’re lucky, the good ship SHIELD will not suffer such a fate.