Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Seven

Things got a little bit crazy about then.

No, not crazy. The other thing. Crazier.

Because when the blue-skinned girl did something that I think you'd have to be a telepath to understand, it wasn't just Captain Light that got back up. It was everyone. She undid whatever Mister Meme did to their minds, and she healed their physical injuries, and she even untied them telekinetically. And suddenly it wasn't a handful of desperate superheroes against a horde of supervillains, it was our team against their team. And we have a big team.

You do not know "crazy" until you've been in a really big full-scale super-on-super melee. You're switching off opponents every few seconds because one of their guys comes at you from behind while you're fighting another one of their guys and just when you're starting to have trouble fighting two enemies at a time, then one of your teammates breaks free of their fight and knocks one of your opponent halfway across the room, where they promptly get up and just start whaling on whoever happens to be closest. And then you put your guy down and look around for someone to fight just in time to see some guy that you thought your best friend knocked out getting up for more.

And everyone's going nuts with their powers. I'm just fast and agile, but Stormcrow was literally the eye of a hurricane. An actual hurricane in the middle of our conference room. And while our conference room is big, a hurricane makes it seem a lot smaller. Freezing rain was pouring onto every flat surface, people were slipping and sliding, lightning bolts were zapping out all over the place--it was a lot more comfortable for us than for the bad guys, because Stormcrow has really good control of her powers, but I was still soaked to the skin for the second time today.

And vines were tangling around supervillains and smacking them into walls, and Neutrino Man had caused some sort of a minor runaway nuclear reaction in the corner that was flash-boiling the freezing rain into radioactive steam that was choking a bunch of bad guys (he swears blind that it's quick-dissipating and has no long-term side effects. This. Worries. Me.) And laser blasts flew through the air and projectile darts launched at people and got swept up in the hurricane and wound up hitting entirely other people and anyone who wasn't otherwise occupied was kicking or punching or stabbing or hovering in the middle of the room thinking really hard...

And in the center of it all, Regent and Captain Light were duking it out. Regent launched a punch that would have knocked my head clean off its shoulders and halfway down the hall, and Captain Light didn't even flinch. The impact sounded like another thunderclap in the din, but Captain Light just smiled.

Then he punched back. The whole room lit up with a blinding flash as Captain Light's energy field interacted with Regent's force field in a way that neither one of them expected. Regent went backwards into the wall hard enough to embed itself in it, and Captain Light...didn't move. But his whole costume was covered in soot and it smoldered in places until the rain put it out.

"Enough of this," Regent said. He pried himself out of the wall and touched his left wrist with his right. A door opened in the air. "You have forced my hand further, Captain. When next we meet, I will have to take stronger measures to carve this cancerous notion out of the world I am destined to rule."

Captain Light started towards him, but Silver Rage blocked his path. The statue's grip prevented him from flying further. "Destiny is just what we make it," he said, fighting to free himself in time to stop Regent's escape. "You might be powerful, but that doesn't make you better than anybody else."

Regent chuckled. It was a soft sound, but it somehow carried over the wall of noise. "You don't know anything, do you? I am Regent, one of the Lost Monarchs of the Shadow Histories, and I will reclaim what is mine. And next time, I will not be so merciful." And with that, he stepped through the door and vanished.

After that, it was just a matter of mop-up. A lot of mop-up, but mop-up nonetheless. We beat the bad guys that didn't make a run for it when they saw their leader vanish, we dumped them in the hands of local law enforcement, I had something like a gallon of Purplesaurus Rex Kool-Aid (ever since I got my powers, I have been absolutely addicted to sugary drinks. At least they're cheap.) And then I realized just how tired I was, and I practically collapsed onto my bed to sleep.

And I dreamed about how it all started...

TO BE CONTINUED...

Review: Soulless

I'm a little late to extol the virtues of "Soulless", by Gail Carriger, given that she's already got something like three sequels published and is almost finished with a five-volume cycle of novels about protagonist Alexia Tarabotti (called "The Parasol Protectorate")...but it's just so damn refreshing these days to read a sci-fi fantasy novel that doesn't make me want to break out the red pen and edit the book into something readable that I feel like I have to tell people about it. "Soulless" is genuinely fun, a charming and light-hearted read that will leave you wanting to read passages out loud to random passers-by, and it's also an inventive spin on the oh-look-it's-werewolves-and-vampires-again genre, this time with a steampunk twist. (Everyone always does werewolves and vampires. Someday, I will write my novel about the ancient and epic rivalry between mummies and Frankenstein's monsters.)

The novel focuses, unsurprisingly for something that bills itself as "An Alexia Tarabotti novel", on Alexia Tarabotti, an outspoken Victorian woman who was born without a soul. This doesn't seem to inconvenience her ethics, emotions, or principles, but it does mean that she involuntarily renders any vampire or werewolf that touches her back into mortal form for as long as she holds onto them. This makes her a "person of interest" to the werewolves and vampires of London, who are entirely too civilized to eliminate her as a threat to their very existences, but definitely sensible enough to want to keep an eye on her. As such, she finds herself embroiled in intrigue, as well as in a romance with the Alpha of the London werewolf pack.

This romance is actually one of the best parts of the novel. It's charming in that "Jane Austen's 'Emma'" sort of way, but Gail Carriger is the kind of writer who very proudly and openly acknowledges that romance generally leads to sex. The characters in this novel are grown-ups, they have naughty bits, and they enjoy using them. I am a big fan of sex-positive attitudes in literature, I always feel like there are far too many writers who disdain talking about what their characters do in the bedroom (because who could possibly be interested in that?) and so a writer who not only writes sex scenes, but does them extremely well, is a rarity to be treasured.

Apart from that, though, the novel has plenty of humor, an interesting plot that draws you on, a lead character who is sensible and funny and independent, a guest appearance by Queen Victoria, and almost enough dirigibles. (According to the interview with the author at the end, the regrettable lack of actual dirigible travel will be rectified in the sequels.) I'd say more, but the horrid thing about good reviews is that you don't want to reveal too much. With a bad review, you want to explain every grim detail to warn the reader away, but a book like "Soulless" begs to be experienced rather than explained. So go read it. You'll enjoy it immensely.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Six

The blue girl looked around. The room was filled with madmen, monsters, killer robots, living statues...an entire team of supervillains, assembled by the arch-nemesis we didn't even know we had, Regent. Us heroes? Most of us were down on the ground, tied up and unconscious to prevent them from killing themselves. The survivors were bruised, bloody, and about as beaten as we could get without being actually beaten. But for a moment, all of it paused as we waited in stunned silence for her to explain her sudden appearance.

"Wait, don't tell me," she said. "I have a test on this next week..."

Yeah. That didn't exactly break the stunned silence.

"Okay," she continued, "the guy in purple and gold is Regent, that's obvious. The girl on one knee next to him is, um...Hummingbird, and the robot in the corner...is that the Doomsday Clock? Shoot, I can't remember now. I think the girl with the knives is Stabbily Ever After, but I don't know for sure because duh, you can't draw her picture, and they're fighting, um...Feeral? No, wait, Saavij."

She continued pointing at us, one by one. "And that's Captain Light on the floor and Gunmetal Grey standing over him and Silver Rage with the axe next to him and, and, um...no, wait, don't tell me...oh, it's right on the tip of my tongue...Bloodcalled! Wow. I've never seen a real vampire, not since they all went to the Black Nebula in 2754. I thought she'd be paler. And--"

Regent interrupted. "A time traveler," he said. "Interesting." He gestured towards the fox-woman fighting John Q. Public. "Vulpine, subdue her. Not too much damage, please. She has valuable intelligence for us." The beast pulled away from John, her teeth scraping grooves into his baseball bat as she lunged backwards, then she turned and leapt for the blue girl...

And gently glided to a halt in mid-air. "Oh, come on," the blue girl said, as Vulpine flailed helplessly in a vain attempt to gain momentum. "I'm flunking history, not telekinetics. I thought you were supposed to be some kind of master strategist or something?"

Regent nodded his head graciously. "Part of a master strategy involves gaining intelligence through the effective use of feints and gambits. For example, I know that you are overconfident, not easily vulnerable to physical force...and thus I change my tactics. Meme?" He gestured to the teleporter. "Share your understanding with her."

I raced across the room, hoping to knock Mister Meme out before he could work his crazy death-wish mojo on our only chance for surviving all this (slim as it was...) But the cyborg woman dashed away from John Q. Public just as fast, dropping into a fighting stance right in front of me. "I want you to be aware that I'm not happy about this," she said, her words spilling out too fast for anyone but me to follow. "I view the state as nothing more than a tool of oppression against the masses, and Regent is really just another dictator. But he's a dictator who planted a small bomb next to my aorta, and there's really only so much you can do to bring about a new age of enlightenment and a freedom from the tyranny of government when you have a smoldering crater where your heart should be."

I launched a feint at her midsection in Serpent Style kung fu, then shifted stances and styles at the same time to aim a kick at her face in a Tae Kwon Do style. (I make up for my lack of depth in any one style by knowing a lot of them. It's kind of what happens when you have five minutes to kill, a stack of books on martial arts, and a reading speed that gets measured in pages per second.) I was gratified to see her head snap back with a sharp grunt of pain, but she wasn't down for the count. And I knew I probably had less than a second of real time before Meme did his thing.

The cyborg slashed at me with her knuckle claws, and I barely managed to avoid them. I'd never seen anyone as fast as her except me, and it was a close second. She launched a flurry of darts from a wrist-launcher, and I had to fling myself to the floor as they passed overhead to embed themselves harmlessly (I hoped) into Zombie Samurai. I got back up, but I could tell it was already too late. Meme's eyes had locked with the blue girl's...

And she laughed. "Oh, puh-lease!" she said. "Amateur hour is officially freaking over, pal. I'm already taking college credits in telepathy; did you really think a vat-grown one-trick pony like this was going to do anything?" She held up a finger, and Mister Meme slumped to the ground, unconscious. "He's all thud and blunder, no subtlety. Doesn't even know how to stop a simple Circadian reset."

She turned, glaring at Regent. "Honestly, if I hadn't also aced my 'Ethical Uses of Unusual Abilities' course, I'd peel you out of that armor and give you a good spanking. As it is, I'll settle for earning extra credit towards my major." She closed her eyes, and waves of invisible energy poured off of her like a heat haze.

Regent reached down and ripped a hunk out of the floor, hefting it with both hands. His earlier sang froid was clearly gone. "I don't know what you think you're doing," he said, "but I have no further patience for it. I'll--"

"You'll put that thing down," Captain Light said, slowly rising to his feet. His fists crackled with unearthly energies. "I know it's a cliche, but why don't you pick on someone your own size?"

TO BE CONTINUED...

How To Make Twilight Awesome

I watched the Rifftrax of 'Twilight' last night, and while I could review the film itself, I think I know my reading audience well enough to be reasonably sure that you've all formed your opinions of the film/book/franchise already, and they're not good. (The only thing I think is directly worth mentioning is the lighting in the film. They chose a tonal palette of muted, wintery blue and green lighting that made the whole thing even more of an ordeal than it would have been already. I felt like I was watching the world's first movie shot entirely underwater.) But it did occur to me that the movie could actually have been very intense and intelligent if they'd made one small change...

It would have been actually pretty decent if Bella hadn't loved Edward.

I mean, I'm not telling anyone anything they don't already know when I say that Edward comes off as a creepy, domineering, borderline abusive stalker. He threatens her, he breaks into her room, he veers between wildly overprotective and actually endangering, he constantly talks about how he loves her so much that he wants to kill her...it's a non-stop Disturbing Behavior Festival, and you spend the whole movie wishing Bella would come to her senses and get a restraining order.

But what if that's exactly what she did? What if she really did recognize that Edward was downright dangerous, that his obsessive attraction to her was a threat to her life and safety, and that he really was a bloodthirsty monster whose tenuous self-control was the only thing that stood between her and a brutal death with an eternal unlife hungering for the blood of the living if she was "lucky"? What if, on realizing it, she then realized that there wasn't a whole hell of a lot she could do because getting someone involved was just signing their death warrant, and her only hope involved establishing an emotional connection with the Cullen family so they saw her as more than just a meal? You've already got the tension of "abusive boyfriend and girl who knows that nobody can help her", might as well make deliberate use of it instead of fighting it for your entire franchise.

A four-book series about a teenage girl trying desperately to stay on the good side of a group of barely-sane vampires, knowing that there's no hope for her if they take a mind to kill her, but needing to use them to keep her away from the even crazier vampires because apparently her super-power is being yummy? That might be readable.

If, y'know, someone else wrote it.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Five

"It was Captain Light that forced my hand," Regent said, swatting John Q. Public halfway across the room with a casually dismissive gesture. He got back up--John had a knack for rolling with punches, and an absolute refusal to give up--but he was wobbly. A bipedal vulpine creature with red fur loped across the room in a single vicious lunge to take advantage of his momentary weakness.

"Before Captain Light, the heroes were merely...firefighters," he continued. "You ran around, you stopped villains where they arose and made threats of themselves, and you never thought that there might be someone who planned instead of simply rampaging." I raced in and aimed a rapid-fire punch at his mid-section, but my fist skidded off of an invisible energy field and slid off to the side, its momentum harmlessly dissipated.

In my peripheral vision, I saw Saavij backed into a corner by a humanoid robot wielding twin khopeshes. (I played lots of D&D, okay? I can tell you the names of lots of different medieval weapons.) Her long swords clashed in a blur against its wickedly-hooked ones, but reinforcements were already coming to the robot's aid. "But Captain Light...he had a vision. An idea. Under Captain Light, you became a movement. And movements are dangerous things."

"A movement, an idea...these spread from person to person. They unite them under a banner. Inevitably, you would learn of my existence, and you would oppose me. And this I could not bear." Goth Grrl's shadow had already enveloped her, transforming her body into a monstrous creature of living shadow, but she was duking it out with a raven-haired woman with glowing red eyes who was flinging around shadow bolts of her own. And an androgynous woman in a tuxedo who was flinging multi-colored blasts of burning smoke, and an armored man wielding a sword of pure flame...yeah, we were outnumbered pretty badly. At least two to one, now that most of our team was unconscious and suicidal.

"It has been said, of course, that you cannot kill an idea." As he spoke, Regent was punching back at me. I dodged--I was still a lot faster than him--but his misses shattered concrete where they landed. He only had to get lucky once. "The people who say that lack ambition and planning, though. The trick in killing an idea is catching it before it has time to breed."

Shining Dragon Fist's hands glowed bright with her inner qi, but the woman she fought had fists that seemed to absorb that light. The eyes that woman had...I couldn't let myself get distracted, but I'd seen eyes like that before. They were like Zombie Samurai's eyes. Dead eyes. "And so I planned," Regent said, drawing my attention back to the fight. "I knew that I was dealing with heroes, and heroes have weaknesses. Loyalty, integrity, decency...these are levers, for a man who knows how to move them."

Zombie Samurai was advancing on a ten-year old girl, his sword drawn. This would have bothered me a lot more if the little girl hadn't been holding a sophisticated rifle, taking chunks out of his dead flesh with each shot. One of them ricocheted off his steel-reinforced skull with a loud 'clang', and he staggered...but kept going. That was, until a squat, toad-like humanoid of indeterminate gender tackled him into the wall.

"And so I created a threat." Regent's fist whizzed past me, so hard I felt the breeze of its passage. "One that you would have to battle, because it was evil. One that attacked your friends, so that you would have to help them. One that stirred the anger and hatred you try so hard to resist, causing you to react without thinking. 'Mister Meme' was my Trojan Horse, softening you up for the kill."

Gunmetal Grey's steel fists clashed against an axe blade as he dueled a silver statue whose eyes blazed with an inhuman fury. His perpetually-morphing metal skin healed each nick and cut, but I could tell that it happened slower each time. "And now we move into endgame. You were already defeated before I even entered the field of battle, and your every action merely postpones the inevitable. Should you yield and swear fealty, even at this late hour, you will find me merciful...but I cannot allow you to oppose me."

I tried to focus on my own battle, as I kicked and thrust and swung punch after useless, ineffectual punch against the force field, but I couldn't ignore the others. Saavij was now matching her two swords against four enemy blades, desperately whirling them to block the twin daggers of another little girl. This one had a cold, terrifying smile and the gleam of madness in her eyes. John Q. Public had his bat shoved into the jaws of the fox-woman, which left him open to punch after spike-knuckled punch from a cyborg woman with a mohawk. Her fists were coming away bloody now, but he refused to cry out. All around me, everyone was fighting their hardest...and they were losing. We were losing--I caught a glancing blow to my shoulder that spun me around so hard I tumbled to the ground.

"Yield or die," Regent said. He'd never even raised his voice. "You are fighting a general who has won a thousand battles before your grandfathers were born. This moment was destined to happen. I have planned for every eventuality. Your only choice is whether to suffer in futility, or bow to a superior...force...?"

His voice trailed off as he heard the growing hum from the center of the room. The battles slowed, then stopped as we all looked up towards the wind that came from nowhere and went to nowhere. We all watched as the light grew from a glimmer so faint it was almost imaginary to an almost blinding radiance.

And then it faded, leaving a woman floating in the center of the room. Her skin was a rich, royal blue, contrasting vividly with her blonde hair. She wore a dress made out of some kind of slick plastic, and there was some kind of strange device on her wrist. She looked at us with a faintly confused smile on her face.

"Hi," she said. "I'm here to watch the first battle between Captain Light and Regent." She looked around at the semi-conscious heroes, the desperate grimaces of pain, the horde of villains. "Um...am I late?"

TO BE CONTINUED...

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Four

It's not easy, carrying a body.

It's even harder when the other person, the one who's holding them under the arms, is taller than you are by a good foot. My arms were aching from the effort of keeping the feet properly elevated. I was determined not to show the strain, though. We were two people on a mission. (Well, peopleish. I've got bird DNA, and Zombie Samurai's dead and still walking, but I think we technically qualify. Nobody knows the rules anymore. Not when we've got electric cat-women on our team.) Our team was depending on us. I just hoped I hadn't screwed everything up too bad.

I should probably clarify, the body we were carrying out wasn't dead. It was Mister Meme--I know, you probably guessed that one--and he was "just" unconscious. But I was still worried, because one of the things I've learned about being a superhero is that it's a lot harder to knock a person out than it looks on television. I've punched bad guys nine, ten times, as hard as I can, and all I've got for my troubles is a really pissed-off bad guy who's spitting teeth. And I'm not proud of it, but I've sent some guys to the hospital when I was just trying to subdue them. Mister Meme was unconscious. That could mean concussion, skull fractures, maybe never waking up. We couldn't afford that.

That was what was going through my head. On the surface, I was trying to remain calm and collected. I had to. I'd told Zombie Samurai that all this was part of my plan. "We need to get him back to our headquarters," I'd said, "and we can't afford to risk moving him through the city with his powers. Every human being is a potential hostage. We get him back to base fully neutralized, we take stock of the situation, and we do whatever we have to in order to make him fix our friends."

That was what I told him. But he looked at me with those eyes...dead eyes. Killer's eyes. And I knew he knew. Just as sure as I knew, looking at him, that he'd used that sword when he was a living man to end someone's life, I could tell that he knew that when I came into that room, when I hit a helpless man over and over and over, each blow rocking him back faster than he could possibly recoil...I wasn't trying to knock him out so we could carry him back to base. For a few seconds, before I got control of my anger, I was just lashing out at the person who hurt my friends. For a few seconds--and a few seconds, to me, feels like a few minutes--all I wanted to do was kill someone.

And I could tell that Zombie Samurai understood. He didn't say anything, though. Maybe things like that, you don't have to talk about.

We got him to our transport flyer and made it back to base in record time. (I don't know whether I inherited some sort of intuitive flying skills from the bird DNA, or if the flyers were just designed to be really user-friendly so that henchmen could pilot them, but I was great with those things.) My stomach was clenched up in knots; we didn't know just what to expect when we got there, but we knew it would be bad.

The bad news was, only five of them were upright. The good news was, the rest of them were trussed up and semi-conscious. I have never felt more grateful to see my friends beaten up and bound with electrical cord than at that moment. "What happened while we were gone?" I asked Goth Grrl. "How come you're not like...the rest of them?"

Goth Grrl looked down at me. She looks creepy when she's staring at you; it's the black eyes. Black-on-black-on-black, no pupils or irises. They stand out even more against the ultra-pale skin. "I share my head with a ghost and a primal darkness spirit. It gives you a different perspective on death."

I nodded. "And the others?"

Gunmetal Grey cocked 'his' head. I could hear the servos whirring under the synthetic skin. "It appears I have no analogue for 'death' in my database. The concepts Gaian Champion was talking about did not translate."

John Q. Public had heavy bags under his eyes, like he was wearing the weight of the world on his shoulders, but he gripped his baseball bat tightly. "Just too stubborn to die, I guess. Same as the Fist, over there."

Shu bowed deep and low. "It is a question of being centered within the universe," she said. "The wheel of karma turns, and it will continue to turn after this body is passed on to its next life. I tried to explain it to the others, but..." she shrugged. "It took me my entire life to achieve the humble understanding I now possess."

I looked over at Saavij. She had found a hunk of meat somewhere in the stores and was gnawing on it. "Kra pochitila mar ka sangiri!" she shouted, pulling into a defensive crouch to protect her prize. "Fo-od! Go-od!"

"Right. Got it." We'd been working with Saavij, but she still had a vocabulary of about fifty words of English. Metaphysical concepts probably didn't get through to her. "Okay, let's start waking this guy up and explaining why it's in his best interests to undo his messes." If we can, I added mentally. His head was lolling in a way I didn't like.

It was a few very tense minutes before Mister Meme opened his eyes. In that time, we tried cold water, light slaps to the face, shouting...but it wasn't until John reached over and pinched the guy's earlobe as hard as he could that Meme's eyelids shot open and he yelped loudly. "Wha-huh-wazza?" he mumbled.

I'd never seen anyone but me move as fast as Zombie Samurai drew his sword and darted in to put its edge right at Mister Meme's throat. "I will make this very simple, animal. This is an amazing world that I have been returned to, filled with wonders to stagger the imagination. I have no doubt that if I slit your throat, we will find someone else in this fantastic new universe to restore our teammates. So while I am willing to spare your life if you undo what you have done, do not mistake this for a bargaining chip. Not for a moment."

Meme's eyes narrowed. "What makes you think I can fix it?" he asked.

"Because you are not dead. If the idea kills anyone who understands it, you would not be able to pass it on. There must be a piece of information, something you withhold from your victims that prevents them from seeing the true solution."

Meme grinned again. God, I hated that grin. "You're pretty smart, dude, you know that? A lot smarter than me. Me, I'm dumb, I'm shallow, I'm amoral..."

I couldn't help it. I snarked, "And those are your good qualities?"

He looked over at me. A thin line of red appeared at his throat before Zombie Samurai could pull the sword back. "No...and that's just what I was made to be. I was grown two weeks ago, built out of flesh to become what I am. Obnoxious, stupid, dangerous, the kind of threat that you'd have to bring into your base to deal with...and a large-scale teleporter." His mouth opened, wider than any human mouth possibly could, and light burst forth from it. It flooded across the room in a stream, manifesting into over a dozen human forms. The one in the middle wore a suit of sleek golden armor, with a dark purple cloak draped over his shoulders.

"I am Regent," he said. "I understand that it will take you some time to understand how thoroughly you have been outmaneuvered, but you would be wise to kneel and show fealty now. The alternative is pain."

TO BE CONTINUED...

Breaking Political News!

Entire Republican Party Dies In Series Of Horrific Automobile Accidents

Deaths Occur Mere Hours After Obama's Traffic Safety Speech

Disassociated Press--A wave of tragedy struck the Republican Party today, as virtually all elected Republicans in Washington D.C. were struck by moving vehicles and died. The tragedy comes mere hours after a speech by President Barack Obama, in which he came out in favor of pedestrian safety. Said one horrified bystander, "It was the most bizarre thing I've ever seen; they were just hurling themselves in front of cars!"

Ironically, just hours before the hundreds of Congressmen perished, Barack Obama delivered an address to the nation in which he came out strongly against just such behavior. "I think that all Americans agree that the worst thing you can possibly do, for your own safety and that of motorists, is to go play in traffic. Flinging yourself in front of a motor vehicle with a carefree 'Wheeeee!' on your lips is dangerous, perhaps even suicidal, and I am strongly against it."

One driver said of the carnage, "I was just driving along, and I saw Eric Cantor, but I never expected him to just fling himself in front of my car! He even shouted 'Wheeeee!' while he did it!" The driver, like those of the other vehicles, will not be charged with vehicular homicide until the unusual occurrence can be fully investigated.

For now, the nation mourns, and prepares to hold special elections to replace the deceased Republicans. It is uncertain who will stand for those elections, however, as President Obama has just come out in favor of the two-party system.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Three

It had been fifteen minutes since we disconnected the IV, and his eyes were just now beginning to open. The police told us they hadn't taken him off the sedatives since we brought him in eight hours ago, since he was classified as "Dangerous - Potential for Non-Physical Threat." The cops are still learning how to handle supervillains, but they're learning fast.

I wasn't in the room with him; I got to stare at him through a two-way mirror, pacing back and forth fast enough to create a heavy breeze in the room. Neither was Josh; he was back at base, making sure that Susan's condition was stable and sending people out to deal with other little crises that popped up. The world doesn't stop just because one of your best friends gets sick. These days, it doesn't feel like it stops for anything.

Finally, the guy sat up and looked around. He tried to get out of bed, but the restraints stopped him cold. They were the kind we designed to handle bad guys with super-strength, since we weren't sure if he had any kind of telekinetic powers, but from the way he reacted, he wasn't any stronger than a normal person. He looked around wildly, saw my new partner, and glared at him.

"You might have some difficulties convincing me to commit suicide," Zombie Samurai said, staring back at him with milk-white eyes. "After all, I am already dead." I am supposed to be a hardened superhero, with almost nine months of experience under my belt, but I gotta tell you, that creeped me the heck out. I can only imagine what it did to the guy in the room with him.

Sure enough, he jerked around wildly in the restraints a little more, like a fox caught in a trap. Finally, he subsided and looked over at Zombie Samurai. "What do you want?" he asked.

"You know already," Zombie Samurai said. (Yeah, he's got a name. Don't care, he's a samurai who's also a zombie. I am calling them like I see them, here!) "You are an animal, with an animal's cunning. I can see it on your face; you intend to bargain your freedom for the life of your victim."

The guy smiled. I really wanted to punch that smile. "Yeah, pretty much," he said. "So are you the one who can make that decision, or do I need to talk to the chickie behind the glass?" He looked over at me. Not just at the mirror, or in my general direction, right at me. "You might as well come on out, little girl. I know you're in there."

I didn't come out. Because I'm not stupid. Instead, I pushed a button to talk to him through the intercom. "I think I'll stay in here," I said. "I'm not dead just yet, and I don't think I'd like it." I pressed the button again. "Um, no offense."

The guy pursed his lips like he'd just eaten a lemon. "I can't get into your head," he said reluctantly. "I can see it, but it's like a tape recorder moving at the wrong speed. Your leader picked the right freaks to talk to me, you and your freak buddy here."

"Then I guess you're out of luck," I responded. I realized I hadn't hit the button yet. "Then I guess you're out of luck," I repeated. "You can't do anything mental, you can't do anything physical, and your buddies are all in jail right with you. You want to make a deal, Mister...?"

"Meme," he said. "Mister Meme." He attempted a sort of vague half-bow, but the restraints kept him from doing too much. I seriously don't know how police deal with people like this every day without smacking them around. "And yes, I do. I want out. Out of the restraints, out of the crappy prison, and maybe a ticket to someplace nice with no extradition treaties. Haven't done my homework on those, though. Does Rio work? I think I'd like Rio."

"Cute." Great. Just what we needed. We were facing off against the Fighting LOLcat, and he was acting smug. "You want to make a deal, we'll bring Susan in and have you fix whatever it was you did to her and then we'll talk to the cops about maybe reducing your sentence for attempted murder."

He laughed. He actually laughed. Zombie Samurai hadn't even moved, just kept staring at him with those freaky dead eyes, but the guy was actually laughing. "You think this is still about 'Susan'?" I mentally winced--I hadn't meant to use her real name. He was a telepath, though; he probably knew already. "You're going to have to let me out soon, chickadee, I guarantee you that. You won't be able to fit them all in here for me to fix."

"What?" I asked. I knew what he meant already, but my mouth hadn't caught up with my mind.

"Memes are ideas that reproduce." He kept staring at me, that ugly little smile still on his face. "Susie girl has an idea in her head, a puzzle with 'Kill Yourself' as the only answer. And just like any good brainteaser, she's going to pass it on. You and your freak buddy are immune, but..." He chuckled. "In fact, now that I think about it? Let's extend that free pass to all my friends. Or otherwise you're going to go back home to a stack of corpses."

Zombie Samurai looked over at me. I was really glad for the two-way mirror, because I didn't have a clue what to do and it was written all over my face.

TO BE CONTINUED...

The Other Problem With "A Good Man Goes To War"

I watched "A Good Man Goes To War" again last week, and it still didn't sit as well with me as some of the other Moffat Who episodes have in the past. I'm aware that some of it is due to the episode's status as a "mid-season cliffhanger"--after all, it literally has to end with the Doctor at least somewhat outmaneuvered by his enemies, and with the bad guys having gained some form of triumph. I'm also aware that some of it is due to the fact that the conflict with said bad guys has to, by its very nature, see-saw wildly over the course of the episode. They must first be built up as a formidable threat so that we legitimately doubt the Doctor can defeat them; then they must be utterly defeated by the Doctor so that he can "rise higher than ever before"; then they have to pull some form of triumph from the jaws of defeat so that he can fall "so much further". (Neither of which is true, but given that it's River describing events there, I'll excuse her as having a certain degree of understandable bias.)

But what bugged me on rewatching it was River's speech to the Doctor at the end. You know, the one about "All this is to some extent your fault because you're so terrifying to those who would oppose you that they've gone to insane lengths to defeat you." Which is not too dissimilar to Davros' "You claim to be a non-violent explorer who doesn't like weapons, but you do seem to have a habit of getting other people to do your dirty work," but I could at least excuse that one away because it was freaking Davros talking, and Davros is such a vicious and amoral little twerp that hearing him chastise the Doctor's ethics was a little like getting a lecture on veganism from Adolf Hitler.

But River is supposed to be a viewpoint character. She's supposed to know more than the Doctor, for Pete's sake, due to the peculiarities of their temporal relationship to each other, and she's laying the blame for Melody's kidnapping at the Doctor's feet. Why? Because apparently he's become so good at fighting evil that bad guys are getting ruthless and desperate and over-the-top in their efforts to stop him. Because he actually frightens the wicked and the cruel the way they frighten everybody else.

Hey, you know what might be an option for them? NOT BEING SO F***ING EVIL. The Doctor doesn't just swoop down on random people off the street and mess up their lives. He went after these people because they were kidnappers who experimented on children, because they were murderers who mutilated their own troops and turned them into horrific mindless killing machines, because they were allied with a race of yes-I-will-say-it monsters whose goal is to destroy the universe and who actually succeeded once. River says these guys are scared of the Doctor? I wanted the Doctor to respond with, "Not scared enough. Because they haven't stopped."

But instead the Doctor changes the subject to realizing that he actually knows who River is (and he's excited by it, not squicked out, which is another thing wrong about the episode) and we're left with a vague sort of impression that maybe River's right. And she's not. The only people who are afraid of the Doctor are the bad guys. And honestly, if you hear that wheezing, groaning sound and worry that this time, he's come for you...then you must have done something pretty bad. People like that deserve a little fear, if only as punishment for all they inflict.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Two

(Apologies for the delay in posting--I literally didn't realize it was Thursday until I got up today. This week has been rocketing past! This one's also a little shorter than the last one. The last one was actually longer than I intended it to be, this is more in line with the "normal" length. Anyhow, less talk, more superheroes.)

I probably created a pretty major scene when I came into the room. I mean, soaking wet straight through my costume, mask off, little bits of half-digested tranquilizer in my hair...it's no wonder everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at me. "Hummingbird!" Josh cried out as he launched himself out of his chair. His eyes were wide with surprise. (Josh is the only one who calls everyone by their code names, all the time. I'm pretty good about it in public, everyone else is hit or miss. Except Adam, who's miss or miss.)

I waved back in the direction of the dorms. "SusanImeanGaianChampionshe'sinthebathroomshe tookawholebunchofpillsIthinktheguyshewasfightingdidsomethingtoherbrainshepukedmostofthem upallovermebutshe'sstilllookingprettywoozyandshe'stooheavyformetocarryweneedtogetherdown herefastsothatsomeonecangethersomemedicalattention!"

Everyone just kept staring at me for a second or two, until I realized I'd forgotten to talk at a normal speed. "Susan. Upstairs. Sick. Took some pills, lots of pills. I don't think she's dying, but she needs help." I forced each word out at a deliberate pace, putting what felt like an eternity between each word. Even then, I think it probably came out at a machine-gun pace.

But it was slow enough. Josh sprang into flight, cruising through the archway at about fifty miles an hour and already accelerating. (This is why we have no doors at the Academy.) While he was gone, the rest of us made a place for him to set her. Darcshield went to the supply room to get medicine (thankfully one of his four PhDs is in medicine), while I made a mental note that we needed to get our act together and turn some of the space around here into an infirmary. Assuming there wasn't one around here already--that was the problem with appropriating your headquarters from a criminal mastermind instead of building it yourself, nobody knew where the heck anything was.

Josh got back with Susan before Darcshield got back with meds, and he put her down on the floor and did his best to make her comfortable. It was scary seeing her like that--she looked so pale. Normally her skin was a dark green, a kind of a forest green color. But now she was only a shade darker than I was. (Yes, I do have skin the color of mint chocolate chip ice cream. That's just the way the ball bounces when your dad cures your congenital degenerative metabolic condition with an infusion of hummingbird DNA. I guess I'm lucky I didn't grow feathers.) Susan's eyes were open...ish, and she was kind of mumbling, but she was too weak to make any of it out.

It felt like forever before Darcshield got back, and I'm pretty sure that even went for the people who experienced time at normal speed. But he forced some gunk down her throat, and then he sat her up while she puked her guts out again all over the floor (sorry, I'm describing a lot of puking and not much in the way of exciting escapades of superheroism. We do those, too, I promise!) Then he poured some other gunk down her throat that she didn't puke up. "Activated charcoal," he said, in response to people's stares. "It'll bind up the drug, keep anything that's still in her stomach from being absorbed into the bloodstream. There's also a cathartic in there to get her to, um...expel it quicker."

"But when she wakes up," I said. "Will she try again?"

He paused for a long moment. "I don't know," he said at last. "This is physical medicine. We don't have any telepaths on the team, nobody who can tell what he did to her mind. The only person who knows what he did to her, and how to fix it if it needs fixing, is..."

"Him." Josh finished the thought. "The guy who did this to her." He frowned. "Looks like we need to go see a man in a cell."

TO BE CONTINUED...

Utterly Shameless Plug, 2011 Edition

Naturally, it goes almost without saying that in addition to my general pop-culture savviness, I also happen to be an erudite scholar of the first order. As such, it should surprise virtually nobody that I am featured in an academic publication of the highest order, from the textbook publishers at University of Ottawa Press.

Called "Braaaiiinnnsss! From Academics to Zombies", and edited by Robert Smith? (the mathematician who made a media splash a while back by modeling the spread of a zombie virus mathematically), this textbook features a variety of academic essays on the truest and most vital topic of the age: the zombie apocalypse. Mine is but one of a veritable cornucopia of scholarly discussions on the zombie problem that faces the world today, a humble contribution on the epidemiology of the zombie plague.

The book is available at a variety of outlets, such as:

http://www.press.uottawa.ca/book/braaaiiinnnsss

(or, for those of you who would prefer to read the essays in French, at: http://www.presses.uottawa.ca/livre/braaaiiinnnsss)

and of course, Amazon has it at:

http://www.amazon.com/Braaaiiinnnsss-Academics-Zombies-Robert-Smith/dp/0776607707

So remember, it's three a's, three i's, three n's, and three s's. "Braaaiiinnnsss"! Be very careful about asking for it by name.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part One

The shower stall would probably have felt cramped even if I hadn't been sharing it with Susan. With both of us in there, I barely even had room to wriggle.

Okay. I should probably mention that we were both fully clothed. And the water was on. And it was really, really cold. And Susan was only about an eighth of the way awake, and getting less so every minute. Which was, natch, why she was under icy cold water with Yours Truly holding her upright and giving her a good slap every few seconds.

At least, that was the plan. It had a few flaws.

The first flaw was that, as I mentioned, there was not much room. If Susan tipped about six inches one way, she was leaning against the wall. If she tipped six inches the other, she was slumped onto me. That leads me naturally to mentioning the second flaw, which is that she's a good head and a half taller than me. And, um, she's kind of...I'll say "full-bodied", because you might get the wrong idea if I called her "stacked", seeing as how I'm already describing the two of us showering together. Suffice to say that I could barely see the face I was supposedly slapping because there was a massive wall of breast practically smothering me at about mouth level.

You could probably say that this wasn't turning out to be my favorite day ever.

It hadn't started that bad. Word was really starting to get out about the Academy, and we had three new recruits show up that day. I didn't get to see one of them, but Adam did; he said she was calling herself Skreem Queen, and he talked about her like he couldn't think about anything else. But that's Adam. I think he falls in love once a day and twice on Sundays. He'll move on to the next girl soon enough. (Or at least, he'll move on to hitting on the next girl soon enough. Guy's been shot down more often than Snoopy.)

The other one called himself Blue-Collar, and he seemed nice; he was an older guy, maybe in his forties, but he didn't act all overconfident and try to pretend he knew more than everybody just because he was older than most of us. He was polite, listened a lot, and he even told us his real name. There are people who have been here longer than I have that haven't given a real name yet.

The last one kind of...okay, not kind of. There's no real way you can "kind of" creep someone out when you're a walking corpse with a metal plate that covers half your face and a giant freaking katana you carry around with you everywhere. He gave his real name, but everyone started calling him "Zombie Samurai" within about thirty seconds. It's probably going to stick way better than his real name.

But yeah, three new people. Recruits, teammates, roommates, whatever you want to call them. That put us up to twenty-five. I started to feel like maybe we were hitting a critical mass of some sort, like maybe Josh's big plan was starting to work. (He just calls it The Plan. I swear, you can hear the capital letters.)

But then the Destructors hit Los Angeles. The first time we fought them, there was about four of them. This time, there was nine...and we were already split into three teams because the Grand Finale was laying waste to Seattle and we needed about seven people just for him, and the Shadow Confederacy had just broken through into our dimension right on top of the Mall of America. Twenty-five people didn't feel like nearly enough some days.

We did alright, though. A couple of the new Destructors were just wannabes, guys who heard about the "super-villain" craze and thought they could use their training or skills or whatever to hang with the gang and commit mayhem. One of them wasn't even wearing a cup. I have official news for you. When you're fighting someone who can hit you three hundred seventy-two times in the instant that you blink, you definitely want to be wearing a cup.

I thought it went well. Admittedly, I thought that the guy fighting Susan seemed to have a strange attitude and one of those creepy, weird auras that screamed, "I have mental powers!" But I also thought Susan wrapped him up in tangle vines and cut off his oxygen before he could do anything. (One of the weird things about actually having real-life superheroes is that you find out that all the powers that sounded really lame in the comics, like plant control, turn out to be terrifyingly bad-ass. "Weather control"? Nobody ever picked it in my gaming group, but Stormcrow has made grown men piss themselves. And she's younger than I am.)

But when we got back to the dorms, Susan started acting...funny. Just staring off into space, with this sad look on her face. Which wouldn't have seemed out of place on Stormcrow or Goth Grrl, but Susan was always cheerful. I started to worry about her, then. When she went into the bathroom and didn't come back out, I decided to go with my gut. (Rule Number Thirty-Two of the Academy, as contributed by John Q. Public: Always go with your gut.) I kicked open the door and went inside.

I found Susan slumped down on the floor with a bottle of sleeping pills next to her. Most of them were gone. It did not take a nuclear scientist to figure out where they went. (We actually have a nuclear scientist on the team. But I was not about to go ask him right then, obviously.) Whatever that guy was, he must have had some sort of...I dunno, psychic sting or something, some sort of delayed-effect blast that hit her hard and made her suicidal. Which meant that in the long term, we needed to figure out if it would wear off, or at least find someone who could reverse it. In the short term, though, I needed to keep Susan awake and alive.

It wasn't going well. I had managed to manhandle--okay, womanhandle--her under the shower head, and the cold water was going full blast. But I had no idea how to get her to puke up the pills, which was kind of important if she was going to live through this. Everyone else had gone downstairs to talk (Josh says it's a "debriefing". We all just say we're talking about how we can do better. Josh is awesome, but he takes himself a little too seriously sometimes.) The long and short of it was, I was soaked to the skin in icy water, my best friend on the team was barely conscious, and my original plan--shout myself hoarse and pray someone had super-senses they hadn't mentioned yet--was not working.

So I did the only thing I could think of. I punched her in the stomach.

Not hard, or anything. I mean, I'm only sixteen, even if I do hit a little harder than your average sixteen year old girl. When it comes to brutality, I'm a "quantity over quality" kind of kid. But it turned out that with a belly full of pills that Susan's body was already trying to get rid of, that was enough. She let fly with a big mouthful of ick, all over the top of my head.

It added a lot of extra suck to an already sucky day. But at least I was already in the shower.

TO BE CONTINUED...

What the Hey

I've been reading 'Chicks Dig Time Lords' and 'Whedonistas' lately, both from Mad Norwegian Press (what can I say, Mad Norwegian had an excellent presence at CONvergence last week)...and one of the things that it reminded me of is just how much fun it was to write fan-fiction. That sense of writing on the fly, with no grand plan, purely to see if people liked what you wrote...I realize I kind of missed that.

There's just one problem. I don't want to write other people's characters.

So starting on Monday, until I get sick of it or people beg me to stop, I'm going to try writing a fanfiction that doesn't use any established characters, set in my own universe. (Yes, I'm aware that this would just be "writing fiction". Hush. My brain seems to think there's a distinction, and if I can fool it into writing more, I'm going with it.) I'll write, and see what comes out. I know where I'm starting, at least...and you'll find out on Monday.

Review: My Sucky Teen Romance

Hey, everybody! I just got back from CONvergence, a local sci-fi con that we've made it a habit of going to the last few years. It was a nice experience--among other things, I bumped into an old friend I haven't seen for over a decade--and one of the coolest things was getting a chance to see Emily Hagins' new film, 'My Sucky Teen Romance'.

You might not have heard of Emily Hagins--I hadn't--but she's a film-maker from Austin, Texas who has made a couple of feature films prior to MSTR, 'Pathogen' and 'The Retelling'. This film, her third, focuses on a group of teens going to a local sci-fi con (clearly inspired by and shot at CONvergence) who run afoul of a vampire...one who's exploiting his resemblance to Robert Pattinson and the current 'Twilight' craze to get his fill of teenage blood. It's got quite a few sharp, clever lines, makes use of the con setting well to make it look like they spent a lot more money on it than they did, and is generally fun and witty.

Oh, and by the way, Emily Hagins is just now turning eighteen. Just in case you weren't impressed yet.

All eighteenage aside, this is a very good film. It's low-budget and that does sometimes show (but not as often as you might think), and the use of authentic teenagers as actors means there's some stiffness now and again (but in a film that's very much about teen awkwardness and romance between shy and introverted people, that's not always a drawback) and it does briefly get a little talky towards the end of the second act...but frankly, this is not a film you need to grade on a curve to say nice things about. There are a lot of people who are making movies on much bigger budgets with much more polished actors who have turned out a much less watchable product than 'My Sucky Teen Romance'. Put this in a room with 'Transformers: Dark of the Moon', and you'd be muting Optimus Prime after about five minutes.

I don't know where this film will go from here, theatrically or on DVD, but I'm definitely going to find out. There are a few fourteen year olds I know who would love to see it.

Vader: Master Of Espionage

I was thinking last night about 'Star Wars' (an always popular topic in my brain) when something interesting clicked in my brain about the movie. We're told, of course, that Vader in the original film was nothing more than a jumped-up thug, a blunt instrument with Tarkin "holding his leash". But what if the opposite was true? What if it was not Tarkin commanding Vader, but Vader playing a deadly and subtle game that involved letting Tarkin think he was in command?

Think about it. The Emperor is planning to dissolve the Imperial Senate and rule directly through his planetary governors. In order to keep the planetary governors from breaking away and forming their own hegemonies, he has the Death Star present as a weapon of last resort. No planetary governor is going to risk retribution on that scale. But then, logically, I asked myself, what's to stop Tarkin from deciding he's just going to cruise this puppy on down to Coruscant and turn the Imperial throneworld into bacon bits? The Emperor might have Force powers, but I don't think they make lightsabers big enough to deflect that laser. No, the Emperor would have to live in constant worry that Tarkin would betray him, unless he had someone on the station keeping him in line...

And that's when it hit me. Vader. He might be doing Tarkin's bidding--in fact, he probably wants to appear as nothing more than Tarkin's obedient dog, to lull any suspicions Tarkin might have--but deep down, he's a Sith apprentice. I'd be willing to bet that if Tarkin did try to foment mutiny and usurp the throne, he would have gotten a cauterized wound through his heart faster than you can say, "I think you underestimate their chances."

And then, of course, at the end of the film, the Emperor's ultimate terror weapon that he plans to use to keep his generals in line...blows up. Very publicly blows up. Perhaps that's why we see Vader, in the next movie, tooling around the galaxy in a Super Star Destroyer throwing his weight around among all the Admirals. He's not just crushing the Rebellion, he's making a statement to anyone who might be thinking about taking advantage of the Empire's weakness.

R I P Gene Colan

I'm glad that I took the time to send him fanmail while it still had the chance of meaning something to him; Gene Colan was one of the legends of Marvel comics, a genuine artist with a distinctive and dreamlike style unlike anyone else in the field, then or now. His art on Doctor Strange and Daredevil was iconic, and his work on Tomb of Dracula remains an unsurpassed milestone of moody horror. He was gracious and generous, and his response to my fanmail was just one of many examples of that.

"Gentleman" Gene Colan, one of the great ones. Rest in peace.

Review: Bloodstone, by Nate Kenyon

I found this book on my bookshelf one day a while back. It was in with the unread books (I sort books into two groups, read and unread) but I couldn't remember when I bought it. In fact, not only could I not remember when I bought it, I also couldn't remember where or why. I don't think I bought it based on the back cover blurb; I suspect that I must have read a slightly more detailed synopsis, saw the word "zombies", and decided to pick it up and only just now got back to it.

Having finished it, I don't feel too bad about not getting to it right away. It's not a bad book by any stretch; I've read far worse novels by far more experienced authors. (This is Nate Kenyon's first book.) But it is what it is, a first novel by someone who hasn't yet stepped out of the shadow of his idols Stephen King and Peter Straub to find his own voice as a writer. While I suspect that Kenyon might have some good books ahead of him, maybe even some genuinely great ones, this is the work of a fledgling writer who's still sorting things out.

One of the big things that he needs to sort out is who he is. Right now, this feels like a painter trying to forge the work of an Old Master; the touches are all King, but the inspiration that guides the work is clearly that of someone of lesser skill. A clarifying disclaimer: I'm obviously not saying that Kenyon is plagarizing King, merely that he uses many of King's stylistic touches. There's a Christine-like social outcast who falls under the domineering influence of a possessing ghost, a Shining-esque sequence where a character is tempted to drink by ghosts in a bar that inexplicably appears the way it did where it was new, and one of the death scenes of a minor character feels like it fell out of Salem's Lot and the vampires turned to zombies when it hit the ground. Even the opening sequence, which is attention-grabbing and clever, has more than a little similarity to the opening of Peter Straub's Ghost Story.

And the similarities make the weaknesses of the story compared to King or Straub's work that much more apparent. It's an "ancient evil comes back to haunt small town in Maine" tale (it's not Kenyon's fault that he lives in the same part of the country as King, but it is unfortunate...) But Kenyon hasn't yet learned how to write on the kind of grand tapestry this sort of story requires, where the small New England town becomes a world in microcosm and the intensity builds as the novel moves towards a climax. There's plenty of atmosphere, but nothing actually happens until about page 280 of a 33o-page novel. It's as if Stephen King had to cut IT down to fit the publisher's requirements, and so he took out all the monster attacks and all of the town history sequences.

Despite all this, as I say, the novel is not without promise. The prose flows well, and is not marred by any of the clumsy cliches that plague the horror genre. The zombies and supernatural elements, while underused, aren't bad (although again, too reminiscent of King.) The characters are sympathetic and well-drawn, and there are some interesting choices in their backstory and the dynamic between them. This is a novel that you could maybe look back on and see the potential in...but I don't know if it's worth reading for its own sake.

Half-Hearted Perfunctory DC Complaint

So let's get this straight. DC is making a fresh, young, accessible DC Universe...where Batman has already gone through four Robins, Superboy has already been cloned from Superman, and the entire War of Light has already happened because God forbid Geoff Johns has to erase even a single one of his stories from continuity. Oh, and Hal, Guy, John and Kyle are all Green Lanterns already in this new, more accessible DC. And "The Killing Joke" is in continuity, but Batgirl isn't Oracle.

This isn't even worth making fun of...except for the blurb for Justice League Dark, which is the perfect parody of a crazed talentless manchild fanboy's idea of what the Justice League "should be like" that somehow got made into an actual comic. This isn't like "Crisis on Infinite Earths", where they genuinely tried to start the DC universe over as a single coherent construct and got hamstrung by some lingering pre-reboot continuity. This isn't even like "Infinite Crisis", where they tried to undo "Crisis on Infinite Earths" and go back to the convoluted continuity because they liked it better. This is just plain inept. Seriously, all the analogies I can think of for this reboot, I can't say, because I think that jokes about the mentally challenged are mean-spirited and tasteless.

The only good thing I can say is coming out of this is that they're finally folding the Wildstorm universe into the DC Universe the way they should have six years ago. (And I haven't heard anything about the Authority, which is also good. The Authority are a good stand-alone team, but they've always fit awkwardly at best into a shared fictional universe, and that would only get worse if they had to rub shoulders with Superman and Batman.) But really, once you've decided to bring back Batman, Inc. in a year rather than piss off Grant Morrison, why even bother calling it a reboot? Why not just say, "Fuck continuity, we're changing the backstory whenever we feel like it and you can just fucking cope!"

Oh, right. Because the only reason fans stick around for the bad stories is to find out what effect they'll have on the vast, overcomplicated metastory. My bad.

Body Fascism Is Deeply Disturbing

Last night my wife, who is a frequent and unrepentant knitter, decided to test a theory she had heard about unisex hat patterns. Supposedly, unisex hats are all really made for women and called unisex, and guys just wind up needing to buy a larger size to accommodate their heads. (No, this is not the body fascism of the title. Making men feel as though they have grotesque melon-y heads is not actually body fascism.)

My head came out to be 24 inches in circumference. And I was like "Oh, hey, that's interesting," until someone made a joke about how we just needed to find two people with heads 36 inches around. And then I thought about it. Seriously? That's what's supposed to be attractive in a woman? Having a waist that is literally about the size of my head? That doesn't seem sexy, that seems freakish and disturbing. And oh yeah, deeply deeply unhealthy. I can't imagine what it would take to make your waist that thin (actually, having read some stuff about Vampira, yes I can and oh that poor woman...) But honestly, I can't say I'd even find it attractive.

Please, women of the world. On behalf of my gender, I say...we're really not worth it. Go ahead and have dessert with that.

How 'The Lion King' Should Have Gone

Scar: The future is littered with prizes
And though I'm the main addressee
The point that I must emphasize is
You won't get a sniff without--holy crap, is that lava? Oh my god, this whole place is going up! Run! Run, my hyena minions! Oh, God, no! Sweet merciful mother Earth, we're all going to dieeeeEEEEEEAAAGGHHH!!! (screams drowned out in an unholy explosion of superheated sulfuric gases, pyroclastic ash, and molten rock)

Then the rest would have just been Rafiki hitting people.

Things I Just Got Around To Reading: Burning Chrome

Not just 'Burning Chrome', actually, but William Gibson in general. Not just William Gibson in general, actually, but pretty much cyberpunk as a genre; aside from 'Headcrash' and the stellar cyberpunk pastiche Doctor Who novel 'Transit', I've just missed the genre completely. I was born just a little too young to hit it square on as it happened, and since I knew it would be there whenever I got around to it, I never felt any great hurry to get back to it. But then a very close friend was encouraging me to read it, and I popped it in my luggage for a trip, and then when I got back from the trip after reading "Johnny Mnemonic" I popped it in my book bag to take to work, and now I've finally read it. And what do I think?

Well, there's a lot to admire. Gibson is an unquestionably talented writer; his short stories have amazing prose that is almost like Beat poetry (this is not, of course, a coincidence) and he's a master of storytelling economy. He manages to fill in entire worlds in the gaps between sentences, where lesser writers might have had to insert monologues to explain them. (Actually, in general short stories are a far more challenging art than novels; Stephen King, for example, is a good novelist but a masterful short story writer. It is much harder to say something well in 8,000 words than it is to say it in 800 pages.)

But I will admit that I admired Gibson's stories more than enjoyed them. There was a sense of coldness to them, as though they were saying to me, "Look but don't touch." I spent a lot of the collection trying to figure out where that sensation came from, and I finally came to the conclusion that a lot of it came from his treatment of women.

I'm not going to say that William Gibson is a misogynist. I think that's a very strong word that gets thrown around a lot and tends to shut down discussion a lot more than it starts it. But I do feel like it seemed like Gibson was having some issues with women that came out in his work of the period. Virtually all of his female characters in the collection are manipulative, loveless, ambitious and duplicitous. I realize that some of this came out of the deliberate attempt to pastiche the film noir genre in a different medium and setting, which in turn replicated those writers' very real misogyny (anyone who wants to try to argue that Mickey Spillane wasn't misogynist, good luck to ya...) But when it's a repeated theme, that the lead characters are betrayed by the women in their lives (or in the case of "Dogfight", betray them in a sequence that's uncomfortably close to rape...) it's hard to feel good about what you're reading. It's hard to enjoy it. So I admire but don't enjoy.

But I do admire a whole lot.

River Song: A Confession

I know this is going to be a bit of a shocker, particularly to fellow Doctor Who fans, but...to me, River Song gets less interesting every time she shows up in the series.

I obviously don't want to give anything away for "A Good Man Goes To War", which hasn't officially aired in North America, but suffice to say that Big Revelations about River are in the offing. And like all the other Big Revelations about River Song, it seems to me to diminish her in my imagination just a little bit more. When we first saw River Song, she was a larger-than-life human able to hang with the Doctor on his own level, a woman who may or may not have been his lover (or even his wife) who has her own tremendous, exciting adventures that only occasionally intersect with those of the Doctor...and those not necessarily in consecutive order at that.

Now? She's that woman who lives in Stormgate Prison and breaks out every once in a while when the Doctor needs her. She's someone who lives life backwards to the Doctor, not sideways and upside-down and at crazy non-Euclidean angles. She's someone who, not to spoil "A Good Man Goes To War", has a specific and finite character arc that we have already seen, in a sense, the beginning and end of. It's hard to see her as an equal to the Doctor in that light. After all, he's a man with an unlimited past and a wide-open future. River is anything but.

I miss the River who wasn't anything but. I miss the River whose story couldn't be told on television because you can't hire an actress to time travel fifteen years into the future to pretend to be her own younger self. I miss the River who might only have lived into her forties (assuming she wasn't from an era where someone could live to be two hundred and still look like they were in their forties...) yet spent those years full of life and adventure, crossing paths with twenty-seven incarnations of the Doctor in her career as archaeologist, smuggler, burglar, professional jailbird, and dozens of other professions in a rich life filled with incident. Like the Star Wars prequels, River fails for me not because of any failings of Steven Moffat, but because the River Song in my head was mine and nobody else's is ever going to be as good.

I know that a lot of people aren't going to agree with this. They like Moffat's River Song, and I don't blame them. But I think if you could meet mine, you'd like her better too.

Hulk Relates the Classics: His Girl Friday

"Hello. Today Hulk tell you about classic screwball comded...commud...funny movie by Howard Hawks, called His Girl Friday. Hulk think Howard Hawks is Bird-Nose, Hulk's old friend, but Hulk not sure. Hulk will ask Bird-Nose next time he sees him what it like in Tinseltown.

"His Girl Friday starts with pretty girl and boring puny man going to say hello to shouty man. Boring puny man thinks shouty man is scary, but shouty man not scary. Hulk could crush shouty man! Shouty man never win Oscar anyway, except for honorary award in 1970! Honorary award sop to actor more famous than good! Hulk hate puny character actors! RRRRRAAAAARGH!

"Where was Hulk? Oh. Right. Shouty man and pretty girl talk too fast about stupid things. Shouty man says he loves pretty girl, but pretty girl is bored with him talking too fast and wants him to go away forever. Shouty man says he will do it if pretty girl goes to talk to puny puny man in jail, but he is lying! Hulk hate lying shouty man! Hulk think 'Arsenic and Old Lace' overrated translation of stage play anyway! Hulk prefer 'High Society' better than 'Philadelphia Story'! GRRRRRRRR!

"Hulk sorry. Hulk better now. So then pretty girl goes to jail to talk to puny puny man, and...puny puny man remind Hulk of Banner! Hulk hate Banner! Hulk hate puny puny man! But Hulk nonetheless finds moral ambiguity of situation fascinating. Puny puny man's insanity defense not genuinely warranted, but pretty girl support it anyway because stupid Mayor want puny puny man put to death. Stupid Mayor deserve to resign in disgrace, but puny puny man merely pawn in vaster game of politics. Hulk love flawed heroes!

"Then puny puny man escapes. Shouty man and pretty girl help him. Boring man not seen for most of movie. This not fair to boring man! Boring man not bad, just boring, and pretty girl dump him for shouty man just because shouty man has big chin! Hulk hate movie where romance presented as superior to long-term stability and emotional compatibility! Hulk hate unrealistic expectations placed on couples based on Hollywood "fiery romances"! Romance easier when couple only stays together until end credits! REARRRRRRGH!

"But before contrived and unrealistic romance plays out, stupid Mayor and stupid policeman try to arrest pretty girl and shouty man and puny puny man. But governor commutes sentence. Stupid Mayor looks stupid in front of everybody! Stupid policeman looks stupid in front of everybody! Contrived and unrealistic romance seems natural because actors have good chemistry. Everyone talks very very fast and boring man goes away. THE END."

There Is No Hyperbole Great Enough

DC Comics made an announcement today that should absolutely, positively, unequivocally stun everyone in the entire comics-reading world today. Seriously. There has never been news this big in my entire lifetime in the industry, not ever.

No, not the "We're relaunching everything at #1!" crap. That'll be retconned away within five years, max. (Geoff Johns and Grant Morrison have a collective Silver Age crush that makes Mark Waid look like Alan Moore. Their "reboots" are never going to last, because they're coming from the guys who undid 'Crisis' and invented a whole cosmology-shattering mini-series so that they could bring back the 70s Legion. Geoff Johns is psychologically incapable of true innovation.) No, I'm talking about the news of same-day digital distribution.

Or, as I call it, "Hey, comic book stores! F*** you sideways!"

Sure, DC is trying to downplay this. They're trying to say that they will have special incentives designed to get people into stores. (This is roughly akin to stabbing someone with a broadsword, hooking the open wound up to a turbine-powered exsanguinating vacuum pump, and then announcing that you plan to put some band-aids on the counter.) They're no doubt going to say that collectors will always want the print edition. (But in the kinds of numbers that can support an independent retailer?) They will no doubt point to their back-catalog of trade paperbacks. But honestly, that's all like spritzing the Hindenburg with one of those little plant misters.

Because this...this is in all likelihood the beginning of the end for print comics. Same-day digital means that anyone who wants to can go download their comics directly. No trips to the comics store, no waiting, your very own copy of a comic right there on the hard drive. And let's face it, the iPad has been regarded from the beginning as a perfect platform for digital comics. This is going to drain away a big chunk of the market from print.

And the profit margins for comics stores aren't great. Losing a big chunk of your DC sales is probably going to result in some retailers going out of business, especially for those stores that are going to have to try to guess how much their demand is going to drop and will be stuck with unsold copies if they over-order. (Personally, if I was a comic book store owner? Tomorrow, I'd have a sign outside saying, "DC Comics will only be available at this retail outlet if you pre-order them.")

And if stores start going out of business, Marvel is going to have to either jump on the digital bandwagon or lose money as they lose outlets for their product. And if Marvel goes digital, the death spiral continues...there's not a retailer running that can survive on solely its indie books. They need Marvel and DC to pay the bills, and they might not be there much longer.

Some might suggest that this is hyperbole. They might say that comics is such a tradition-oriented industry that this initiative will fail and leave comics back where it started, a niche market catering to nostalgia. (It's certainly the argument that I'm using regarding the "Every issue is a new #1!" BS.) Time will tell if I'm right or wrong.

But on the other hand...if MGM announced that it was making a new James Bond movie, and also announced that all their movies would be available on Netflix the same day as they came out in theaters...wouldn't you be talking less about who Bond is going to be and more about how hard this is going to make life for movie theater owners?

Line Item: Hired Goons

Sorry about the slight delay in posting; I started a new job last week (yay!) and they've thrown me right in at the deep end on a big project, which necessitated lots of overtime this week. (I'm being slightly vague about the details because if there's one thing I've learned from being on the Internet, it's that no matter how innocuous your blog posts about your job are, you still don't want any identifying details about the job.) The big project involves collecting some information from all of our outside contractors in order to update the database.

Anyhow, I got corrected (I'm still a little too new to actually "get in trouble") because, when one of the contractors refused to provide the information, I passed word of that refusal along to the regional manager for that area. I did so mainly because the refusal sounded like it was "with prejudice", as it were, and I wanted them to know that they might have some angry contractors to soothe. As it turned out, though, people like me don't talk directly to people like him. There are channels to go through for that.

I apologized, like you do, and explained that I went directly to the regional manager because I'd been told in the email that "it is your responsibility to make sure the information is collected for every name on this list." As far as I was concerned, that meant I should do whatever I had to in order to get that update done.

I didn't say so at the time, but I did picture using comic hyperbole to make my point. "If I have to email the regional manager, I will. If I have to call the CEO and ask him to make a personal visit, I will. If I have to hire some goons to go out and rough these people up until they update their profile in our system, well, then, that's what I have to do." Pause. "Of course, I'd expect to be reimbursed for that. Do I have to submit an invoice, or...?"

Of course, I'd have to note it in the "Comments" section of their profile. "Goons hired, will contact when vendor roughed up sufficiently."

The Paul Ryan Medicare Plan In a Nutshell

"Now, I think we're all aware that we have a serious spending problem in this household. I make ten thousand dollars a month, but with the three thousand dollars a month that we pay for Grandma's heart medication and the three thousand dollars a month I spend on sweet, delicious candy, that barely leaves enough to make ends meet. Therefore, I propose that we cut down to spending only one thousand dollars a month on Grandma's heart medication--and because I'm fiscally responsible and willing to make hard choices, I'll only use half of the two thousand dollars we're saving to buy more candy. That's right--I'm such a serious, responsible person that I'm willing to take a full thousand dollars a month that could be used to buy chewy, chocolatey goodness and put it towards saving for our future.

"It's a tough decision, but that's just the kind of guy I am."

Exciting Pixar News!

Of course, we've all heard the announcement of Monsters University, the next movie after Cars 2 and Brave and the first Pixar prequel. But what you may not have heard is that this is just the first of an entire new slate of films exploring the beginnings of Pixar's beloved characters! Brad Bird and John Lasseter are already thrilled about the idea of getting at the roots of what made Pixar's protagonists tick. Some of the slated films include:

Losing Coral: A shocking and gruesome tale of terror and revenge, Losing Coral focuses on the night when clownfish Coral runs afoul of a brutal, sadistic barracuda named "Heartless" (voiced by Christopher Walken.) The taut, suspenseful thriller follows the deadly game of cat-and-mouse Heartless plays with Coral, a game that ends in tragedy when Heartless murders her and devours her eggs. The film then follows Marlin as, pushed over the edge by the death of his mate, he hunts down and kills Heartless by luring him into a nematocyst. About to commit suicide, Marlin discovers that one egg has survived...an egg he decides to call Nemo.

Cars 0: Carmageddon: When the first machines develop sentience, humanity is initially thrilled by the development of a machine culture. After all, we built them--surely they'll be grateful to their creators? But instead, the human race finds itself locked in a deadly battle with the vehicles they designed, and only one race can survive. In the end, the machines exterminate the people, leaving nothing but the trace remnants of our culture to survive in the entertainments the new mechanical race devises for itself.

The All-Too Credibles: Thrill as Bob puts on a few extra pounds and loses job after job! Gasp as Helen slowly gives up on her own ambitions to become a stay-at-home mom! And be astounded by Violet's unhappy school years as she slowly learns to keep her head down and not make waves because girls don't get called on anyway! It's an exciting descent into vague dissatisfaction for the whole family!

WALL-Lander: As it becomes apparent that humanity will not return, and the trash removal robots slowly begin to break down, each one realizes that the only path to survival is to cannibalize its brethren for parts. A vicious war begins, as each robot seeks to disable its fellows so that it can keep itself alive that much longer. In the end, there can be only one...

...this isn't doing anything to disprove my belief that I'm never going to be working for Pixar, is it?

Why They Will Never Let Me Work At Pixar

2025: Overpopulation and pollution conspire to breed a new "super-virus", created by chemical-induced mutation of an existing bug and incubated in the vast shantytowns of the underclass. The virus causes vast mutations to the human brain, turning key sections to become anaerobic tissue and allowing other sections to die off. This creates mindless, vicious assailants that continue to attack long after their circulatory and renal systems have shut down. These infected, quickly nicknamed "zombies" due to their difficulty to kill and hunger for living human flesh, spread like wildfire through the overcrowded Earth.

2030: Overpopulation is now the least of humanity's problems, as the zombie plague has now covered 95% of the areas inhabited by humankind. With the last few strongholds of humanity about to fall, the decision is made to evacuate Earth completely. The resources of the remaining population are devoted to creating ships that can hold the survivors for as long as it takes for the zombies to die off. Robotic killing machines are sent out into the wastelands to humanely exterminate the infected, as humanity leaves the world of its birth forever.

2546: A robotic probe is sent back to Earth to determine whether the planet is fit for humanity once more. What it discovers is a terrifying dystopia where the zombie virus has mutated yet again; the zombie survivors have retained their intelligence, and now rule the Earth. Humanity is kept in "breeding pits", enslaved for life and used either for food, or transformed into consumers of human flesh. The robots have all been overwhelmed, save for one. One last hope for the enslaved and exiled humanity, one last hero for the human race...

WALL-E, Zombie Hunter.

...oh, come on. You'd pay to see it.

Why Smallville Is Not Doctor Who

It's been a while since I've watched an episode of Smallville; I haven't actually checked, because I don't care that much about the show, but I think the last episode I watched in its entirety was the third or fourth episode of Season One. But when I heard that the last episode would be airing on Friday night, I felt that there'd be a certain poetic symmetry in watching only the first(-ish) and the last episodes. Plus, given the reputation that the series has gotten over the last ten years, I figured that I'd be onto something good by skipping the ten seasons of hinting, teasing and stalling and getting straight to his transformation into Superman.

You may now laugh.

As it turned out, even the grand, huge, epic "finale" to Smallville was an exercise in drawing out the thin gruel of a story it had been subsisting on for the last decade. Everything was about not changing, about not surprising, about giving its viewers as close to the same experience as they could get without violating the show's mandate of demonstrating how Clark Kent became Superman. There were reset buttons a-plenty, retcons and reappearances, and massive dodges (I someday want to explain to television writers that legally, you're married when you sign the marriage certificate. Failure to say, "I do" means diddly-squat in the eyes of the law.) And in the end, we never really even got to see Superman; there were a few CGI sequences with the character shown from a distance, but in the end, they were driven by the need to keep things the way they'd always been. "No tights, no flights," the unbreakable rule of the series.

And then, the next night, I watched "The Doctor's Wife". And while I won't spoil anything, because the episode is very wonderful, very surprising, and many people probably haven't seen it yet, I will say that it is the epitome of everything that Doctor Who is and everything that Smallville isn't. Instead of being an "epic game-changer" that really doesn't change anything, not even really the things it's obligated to change...this was a normal, everyday, stand-alone non-arc episode that just happened to transform everything you thought you knew about forty-eight years of the series. And it did it almost casually.

Doctor Who is, and always has been like that. It's never been afraid to reinvent itself, not even after forty-eight years. It's a bold, inventive show that has no boundaries, no self-imposed rules, and no orthodoxies to uphold. That's why it attracted a writer of the caliber of Neil Gaiman, whereas Smallville has had to content itself with Geoff Johns and Jeph Loeb. That's why it's still going and why I don't think it'll ever stop. Because it's a show that can do anything...and one that will do anything.

Amazing Race Round-Up, Finale

Technically, it's the last two episodes crammed together in a not-at-all-blatantly obvious fashion, no siree! Much like Riding With Death and the Master Ninja series, CBS has seamlessly blended these two episodes into a two-hour extravaganza so brilliantly that you can't even see the join! (I suspect it was somewhere around the Pit Stop at the halfway point, but that could just be crazy talk.)

In any event, at the start of the first epis...er, first half of the episode, the four remaining teams (Flight Time/Big Easy, Zev/Justin, Gary/Mallory, Jen/Kisha) are still in Switzerland. They all head to the airport to get their flights to Rio de Janeiro, and the Globetrotters luck into a flight that seems like it will give them (and Zev/Justin, who were tagging along with them) a seven hour head start over the other two teams. This good fortune lasts until Mallory asks Flight Time, "Did you find anything better?", at which point his eyes widen like he's just seen an oncoming train, his mouth hangs open for a long moment, and he finally says, "Um, no! We were looking to see what y'all got!" Unsurprisingly, his devastating poker face fails to fool Mallory's razor-keen intellect, and soon all four teams are booked on the same flight.

Once they get to Rio, a little taxi roulette and a trolley schedule give the other three teams a half-hour lead over the Globetrotters, which is pretty much entirely eaten up for Zev and Justin when they choose Zev to do a dancing challenge. I'm not going to say he has the worst rhythm of anyone ever on the Race, because I know better, but his lack of dancing skills combined with his social disorder lead him to a) get through the challenge very slowly, and b) slap one of his instructors on the ass, which made me wish she'd have returned the favor on the back of his head. Mallory and Jen cruise through the challenge looking like they had a lot of fun, though.

Then everyone gets fifteen minutes of body waxing. For some, this meant they came out perfectly smooth. For Zev and Justin, it just meant that the waxers managed to get the first couple of layers of fur off. (The timer elapsed before they could get the machetes and flamethrowers to really slash and burn.) After that, three of the teams did the drink-mixing half of the Detour, while Zev and Justin basically said, "Nah, we don't want to be in the Final Three anyway!" and went to go sell bikinis on a beach. Because nothing works like having two white guys, one of whom has a social disorder, wander up and say to random bikini-wearing women, "Hi! Take that off and pay us money to model one of ours!" Needless to say, the first half ends with Zev and Justin getting eliminated. Honestly, they only had one or two genuinely bad legs this time around, but when they were the 10th and 11th, that was all that mattered.

The second epis...er, half...begins with the teams heading back to Miami for the final leg of the Race. There's a lot of chatting, recapping (pffh...recapping...like anyone could make that interesting...) and general catching-up to get people excited for the final trek to the Finish Line...and then Gary and Mallory get a genuinely incompetent taxi driver and don't even see another racer until the last challenge. So this is pretty much a two-team race, here. (For the record, I agree with everybody else who said, "Gary and Mallory should have realized how bad their driver was very early on and ditched him for another instead of sticking with him until it was too late to make up the time." But hindsight is 20/20.)

The other two teams face two Road Blocks in a row (one of those little "gotchas" I appreciate, because it means that teams who strategize all the way through the Race to make sure that their strongest Racer gets the last Road Block wind up having to put their weaker half in for the very last one) and a challenge that was annoying due to wind and weather and the need to be super-attentive to detail. No Detour, though. Come to think of it, there wasn't one last season, either. Maybe they just want to make sure everyone has to do the exact same challenges for the final leg. (That also seems to be the motivation for the obvious bunching for the final leg.)

Then finally, in one of the nastiest final tasks I can remember, they have a seven-mile bike ride to the Finish Line. It's close--the Globetrotters actually have Jen and Kisha in sight as they trek across Seven-Mile Bridge--but in the end, Jen and Kisha become the second all-female team to win the Amazing Race. (Which should, by the way, shut everyone up who claimed that Nat and Kat won by beating a "weak field of Racers"; Jen and Kisha beat several teams that finished in the Final Three on previous Races, and were one of only two all-female teams this time out. And frankly, I think if this Final Three had been put on Nat and Kat's race along with them, they would still have beaten out all five of the other teams. But that's unprovable.)

And that's it for another season of the Amazing Race! As always, I'm looking forward to the next one.

Why Syndrome Makes the Perfect Nemesis

I've been watching The Incredibles a lot lately; this has something to do with the fact that my daughter comes home from preschool with the words, "Can I watch The Incredibles?" practically bursting from her lips. It's actually displaced Toy Story 2 from the top of her "never sick of watching" list, which I didn't think was ever going to happen. So I've seen it on a near-daily basis, something that's afforded me a few opportunities to think about what Brad Bird was saying with the movie.

One of the things that's interested me is the way that Syndrome, Mr. Incredible, and Dash all seem to have different surface motivations, but the same basic underlying drive. Mr. Incredible, of course, insists that he's being genuinely altruistic; he feels bitter about the public reaction to superheroes (which is actually a matter for another post, because the idea of "superheroes getting sued into retirement" is kind of a handwave, to be honest, but I'm digressing here) and wants nothing more than to go back to the way things were.

Syndrome, on the other hand, is bitter and resentful about the lack of emotional support from Mr. Incredible when he was younger. He wants to show Mr. Incredible that he's a better hero, and that if he'd been allowed to be Incrediboy, he would have been a huge asset to the cause of good--to prove that Mr. Incredible was wrong to dismiss his gifts.

And Dash? He just wants to show off. He wants the world to acknowledge his specialness, and to receive the adulation he feels he deserves for his amazing abilities. Which is a little childish, but then again, he's ten. When he grows up...

...he'll wind up either like Mr. Incredible or Syndrome. Because underneath their surface motivations, that's exactly what they want too. Bob Parr doesn't want to save people anonymously, just because they need saving; he does do that over the course of the movie, but only because he can't go out as Mr. Incredible anymore. He only really comes to life when he's wearing his super-suit, performing amazing feats for an admiring audience (even if that audience is just Mirage and her mysterious benefactor.) Deep down, he really wants things to be the way they were when the world looked upon him with quiet awe and adulation.

Syndrome, of course, makes a second career out of self-justification in the movie. Looking at his actions, he's a pathetic, needy child who needs everyone to praise him for his gifts. As Mr. Incredible points out, he's killing real heroes in order to create a fake villain that people will praise him for stopping. While he claims that he's doing it all for Mr. Incredible, there's never been anything to stop him from using or selling his inventions to make the world a better place; it's just that doing so won't give him the emotional rush that comes from crowds cheering his name. Deep down, he and Mr. Incredible are two sides of the same coin, which is why he makes such a perfect nemesis. (And thus I make good on the implicit promise in the title...)

The real hero of the film, of course, is Elastigirl. She's the only one who can put aside her costume easily, because she wasn't ever in it for the glory; she was a superhero when the world needed one, and only when the world needed one. She's tried to pass along to her kids the belief that it's what the world wants ("the world wants us to fit in") and not selfish personal needs that are important; nonetheless, when her family needs Elastigirl, she proves to be easily the most competent of all of them.

Amazing Race Round-Up, 18-10

Famous director Akira Kurosawa once directed a film called "Rashomon", based on a short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa about the death of a samurai. The film makes an important point about the ambiguity of memory; even the most seemingly clear-cut situations can never be truly known, and all our attempts to bring order out of chaos by assembling events into a narrative are doomed from the beginning.

This will be important later. But for now, we start off in Switzerland, with our five teams setting out to a helipad for some good old-fashioned "hours of operation" bunching. Once that's out of the way, we start off with a Detour that involves trekking out into the trackless wastes of the Swiss Alps to rescue stranded tourists. (Or, more accurately, involves tourists trekking out to rescue actors/mannequins.) One option, Search, involves finding a buried mannequin and digging them up, while the other one, Rescue, involves one Racer lowering the other into a crevasse to "rescue" a probably very bored Swiss person.

Three teams (Kent/Vyxsin, Jen/Kisha, Flight Time/Big Easy) do Rescue. It's fairly easy, despite the editors' valiant attempts to recut Kent's whining into some sort of an actual crisis. It should be noted here that this is pretty much the point where killer fatigue and the arduous nature of the Race combine to boost Kent's natural whininess to intolerable levels. He's been getting gradually worse all season long, but this is the episode where it all goes off the rails and he hits "Perfect Storm" levels of general obnoxious whinging. He can't even put on his own hood when it gets windy.

The other two teams (Zev/Justin, Gary/Mallory) do Search...which proves to be longer and more difficult, to the point where I started to wonder if Zev and Justin weren't going to need to be rescued while they searched. Both teams managed to save their mannequin, though...if you don't count the tiny, insignificant fact that they broke him in half while "saving" him. This puts them at a major disadvantage when they get to the Road Block.

Which is another Travelocity-themed challenge (we usually get about one per season.) This time, they have to make a giant painted chocolate Roaming Gnome, using two molds that each team has one of their Racers paint, freeze, fill with chocolate, freeze again by putting in a snowbank, then split open to reveal the creepy misshapen parody of a human being within. Once they've done all that, they get a clue and a non-chocolate gnome, which they then take on foot to the Pit Stop.

This is where the Rashomon stuff comes in. Because the molds aren't labeled, the shelves in the freezers aren't labeled, and everyone is working at a frantic pace to get their gnomes painted. And one of the Racers, Flight Time, looks up at one point to find that what he thought was his gnome-half is actually Vyxsin's. Or, from his point of view, what Vyxsin thinks is her half is actually his. There ensues what could be the most confusing sequence in Race history; even the audience isn't clear on what happened to which gnome, at least judging by the Television Without Pity forum. All we know is that neither Flight Time nor Vyxsin got a penalty, so whatever happened, neither one took work that didn't belong to them. It seems pretty clear that Vyxsin put her work on the bottom shelf precisely so that she would know which one was hers, too. Beyond that, the universe simply does not allow us to know what happened. Narrative fractures and decoheres, and all we can be sure of is that both Big Easy and Kent were being whiny dicks to each other in accusing each other's teammates of theft.

We can also be clear that Kent and Vyxsin didn't read their clue carefully enough, because they took a taxi to the Pit Stop. (Still managing to arrive in third, impressively. Apparently some of the other teams are good runners.) Despite the fact that he was holding the clue when they got into the taxi, and that Vyxsin said repeatedly that something wasn't right about the situation when they passed other teams that were on foot, Kent insists for the entire half-hour that this is all Vyxsin's fault for not reading the clue carefully enough and that she's dragging him down with her negative attitude. That's right--the man who literally had to be carried through a Detour like a six-month-old is telling the woman who dragged his ass along that she's holding him back. This marks the official point where everyone in the world started rooting for their elimination simply so that Vyxsin could tell him to fuck off and never see him again.

And everyone got their wish. The half-hour penalty elapses, giving Gary and Mallory and Zev and Justin time to get to the Pit Stop while Kent is still explaining that he's being positive by blaming everything on his teammate. They're eliminated, and next week it looks like the last four teams go off to Brazil, then the last three teams go to the Florida Keys in a double-sized season finale!

Which will, of course, be broken up into two normal-sized episodes for subsequent syndication. But c'est la vie!