We’re, what, four episodes into PREACHER now? Five? You may remember I had some quick, mostly ambivalent thoughts about how the show was going after the first episode aired.
Well… I haven’t missed an episode yet, and I’m probably not going to be starting anytime soon, but I’m still not exactly hooked. Two definite pluses have revealed themselves as the show has gone on, though: Jackie Earle Haley’s performance as Odin Quincannon is wonderful, and what initially appeared to be a minor lack of concern with the source material has evolved into full blown “Fuck it, we’re doing it live”-level disrespect. PREACHER doesn’t care at all about the source material beyond vague character descriptions (Tulip is nothing like she is in the books) and is just kinda gleefully throwing whatever it wants at the wall to see what sticks. It’s as if they’ve been told that they get two seasons, max, but that if they don’t work in at least one plot detail from each graphic novel of the series Garth Ennis gets to take all of their money. I thought THE WALKING DEAD was a loose adaptation of the source material. Nah, son. TWD is an amateur compared to PREACHER.
Is that a plus? Right now, I’m going with yes, because I have absolutely no idea what’s coming next, and the first half-season of an adaptation doesn’t usually do that to you. I kinda knew what was going to happen to Ned Stark at the end of Season One of GAME OF THRONES, y’know? I just hope the show has an idea what’s coming next, and I’ll admit I have some doubt. But I’m still watching. We’ll see where we are at the end of the season.
I have every issue of PREACHER’s run as a comic book, and bought each of them on the day it came out. I bought the very first issue on a lark, and I remember spending a ridiculous amount of time and mental energy during the month between issue 1 and issue 2 thinking about whether I was buying the second issue or not. I don’t recall if money was especially tight at the time or what, because comics don’t really cost that damn much, especially in 1995 or 1994 or whenever it was when the book first came out. But it took forever for me to decide I wanted that second issue, and then it must have caught me, because I never missed another one after that. I haven’t really revisited the series since it concluded, but I have all of it in trade paperback as well. My wife recently read through them, and she finished the entire run but never seemed terribly happy about it; I have my doubts as to how well it will hold up.
That said, I watched the pilot of AMC’s PREACHER series last night, and… meh. I have a lot more to say that’s bad than I do that’s good (Cassidy’s casting is spot-on physically, but he rarely wears his sunglasses and I can’t understand a damn word he says) but I’m going to give it at least another episode or two before I stop watching, just because of the example the comic book set.
Some gripes, because why not:
The direction is schizophrenic and weirdly cheesy, with an opening sequence straight out of a crappy 1950’s B-movie and occasional weird filtering on the colors. There was one well-shot sequence, with Tulip’s fight in the car, and the rest of it was not so good.
Actually, that’s not quite true: the bar fight wasn’t bad. So the action sequences are well-shot and the stuff that should be easy has me wondering what the directors are smoking.
Arseface looks fucking ridiculous. Absolutely. Fucking. Ridiculous. I know he’s supposed to be a comic character, but… god, at least try.
Speaking of faces, there is something about Dominic Cooper’s face that makes me not want to look at him very much. I don’t know that I can explain it very well. He looks… squished? Maybe? And his acting hasn’t overcome the weird squick factor every time I see him on screen. For the lead, this is a problem.
It’s evident already that they’ve made a number of changes to the storyline, which is fine, but I’m irrationally annoyed that Jesse’s eyes don’t go red when he’s using the Word. I will probably get over this.
I dunno. I guess that’s not much, but when I have complaints and nothing really positive to say… yeah. I’ll update if the series improves, and it’s probably worth pointing out that I’ve seen people who are normally hard to impress raving about the first four episodes, but right now I’m not hooked.
If we were having coffee, I’d want to talk mostly about what you’ve been reading and watching lately. I went to see Captain America: Civil War yesterday, and while I haven’t had time to review it yet the short version is “best Marvel movie yet,” which may already tell you everything you need to know. I didn’t get to it yesterday because the afternoon turned out busier than I thought, but it’s coming, believe me.
What good books have you read lately? I’ve mentioned this, but not a lot: I’m doing a project with my reading this year where I’m trying to limit my books by white men to 25% of the books I’m reading. This has meant a lot of books by new authors, which means that competition is fierce as hell already for my top 10 list at the end of the year– because it turns out that when you say “I’ve never read anything by that person. What’s their best book?” a lot, you read a hell of a lot of good books. I’ve got some reviews to write there as well, most especially for Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, which is flat-out the best short story collection I’ve ever read. I’m mostly a sci-fi/fantasy person, as I think almost all of you know, but I’ll read literally anything in English that gets a recommendation from people I like regardless of the genre. So what’s good out there?
(I started Claudia Gray’s Bloodline last night. Her Lost Stars ranks among the best Star Wars books I’ve ever read, so I’m super excited to get into this one.)
So, yeah. What’s good out there? I’m still unemployed, so I’ve got nothing but time right now. Gimme some recommendations!
Oh, Dino Squad. How much do I hate thee? I hate thee a whole damn lot. In general, I am very much pro-dinosaur and pro-dinosaur programming, but this show is edging closer and closer to the “Oh, sorry, Netflix is broken” level of I can’t watch this shit anymore right now. It’s getting the kid interested in dinosaurs, and he’s learning a few things, but it’s making me insane, and it’s all about me and we can’t have that.
We will start with the theme song:
You didn’t click that, so here are the lyrics:
I’m in I’m in I’m in in the dino squad on a beautiful beach not far away I went to visit for a day got covered with some gooey ooze that changed my DNA Now I’m trying to act normal Keep my cool While other kids play after school I turn into a prehistoric hero I’m in I’m in I’m in in the Dino Squad!
Okay.
I understand that complaining about suspension of disbelief and scientific inaccuracy in a kids’ show is a mug’s game. I’m a superhero guy. There are expensive superhero statues in the room with me and action figures on my desk. My disbelief is suspended from the firmament itself most of the time, but this show still breaks the hell out of it. So let me just lay this show out for you, and you tell me exactly when it gets to be too much. Here is what Dino Squad is about:
A bunch of kids (high school students, old enough to drive motorcycles) go to the beach and get covered in ooze. They discover it has given them the ability to turn into dinosaurs. So far, I’m OK! This is basically Daredevil’s origin, right? Spider-Man got bitten by a radioactive spider. Gooey ooze. I’m good.
They meet this old lady, whose name I can never remember, and she tells them they can turn into dinosaurs. She’s in this picture:
So, all right, still okay.
The lady tells them that she is, herself, a dinosaur. She is, in fact, a velociraptor! A velociraptor who somehow avoided dying in the Chicxulub impact and “evolved” to be able to turn into a human being. You literally see the two velociraptors diving into a cave during the meteor strike.
This is not how evolution works.
Velociraptors were the size of turkeys and had feathers. If you saw one today, you’d think “Ooh, what a weird-looking bird!”. Cassowaries are considerably scarier-looking.
Velociraptors died out ten million years before the Chicxulub impact.
This means that she was already somehow ten million years old before that explosion, and therefore the oldest living thing on Earth, exceeded possibly only by the other immortal velociraptor, and is therefore…
…currently 75 million years old.
But that’s Science Luther talking. Shut up, Science Luther! It’s a kid’s show! Okay. Like I said, eventually that line gets crossed. Maybe this is what does it:
The other velociraptor is also still around, and is therefore also 75 million years old. He calls himself… wait for it… Victor Veloci.
Victor Veloci’s evil plan is to occasionally turn rodents and fish into dinosaurs, but only a couple at a time. He’s insanely incompetent for a 75 million year old immortal dino-person. The two of them should literally rule the planet by now.
You turn Victor Veloci’s dino-rodents or whatever back into regular rodents via a two-step process: 1) shooting them with a sprayer that causes the “dino DNA” to be sweated out of their skin, and 2) then– I am not joking– sucking the dino DNA up with a vacuum cleaner. This makes them better.
Has the suspension of disbelief gotten harder yet? Still need more? Okay. Here’s the kicker, then. This is Victor Veloci’s hair:
And, lest you think “Oh, he’s just long-haired, what’s the big deal?” let me show you another picture of Victor Veloci:
No, he only has long hair on one side. And that is an honest-to-God red streak dyed into his hair. His haircut, somehow, is the most ridiculous thing about the show.
Note also his minions, who are dressed like COBRA applicants who got rejected for dressing too ridiculously.
So, yeah. The show is about how this 75-million year old supervillain is routinely outwitted by a bunch of teenagers who can turn into dinosaurs. Note that Veloci himself can regain his velociraptor form at any time. (So can the old lady, presumably, although I don’t know if I’ve seen an episode where she does.)
And those teenagers? They’re… weird. Especially this one:
Now, again, these kids are in late high school, because they’re driving, but this one particularly– he turns into a pteranodon– keeps getting storylines that imply he is nine. This particular image is from an episode where he’s having problems with bullies. The bully’s name is McFinn, which is somehow much more ridiculous than it should be; it sounds really dumb anytime anyone says “McFinn” on the show, especially when they imply that this “McFinn” person is scary or tough. He’s just not. Plus, dude, you’re a dinosaur. Drop him off a cliff. There’s one right there by that lighthouse y’all are based in for some reason.
Now, I know, high school kids do have problems with bullies, and I’m not trying to minimize that. But the way they handle it is weirdly infantilizing, especially since they really do try to treat pteranodude like he’s a lot younger than the rest of them. He also gets an episode where Victor Veloci pretends to be a pretty girl in an MMORPG (75 million years old, people) and tries to get him to “break Internet safety rules” and tell her where he is so that Veloci can… do… something. I dunno. Underpants gnomes, profit. The high school students have technology sophisticated enough to detect two mutated dinosaurs three states over and this dude is trynna catfish over Xbox Live. I don’t get it. And mohawk dude is the only one who gets these storylines.
(Oh, and remember that “play after school” line from the theme song? Is that what high school kids do after school? They play?)
Here’s the transformation video. It plays six times an episode. If your kid watches this show, expect him to spend a lot of time yelling “65 million years back!” and “going into dino mode” when you need him to put on his shoes:
One (1) point is awarded to the show because the big black kid, who would be a football player on any other program, is actually the computer nerd. Other than that, I hate this show.
I’m running guest posts while I’m in Chicago at C2E2. I’ll probably be posting anyway, but just in case– heck, as this one is posting, I’m still in town. My friend Natacha Guyot gets the first one.
To say I was looking forward to the new season of the X-Files, my all-time favorite TV show, would be an understatement. I had high hopes for it, as for the most part I enjoyed all seasons and movies, though the most recent one didn’t live up to my expectations.
I liked the first and last episodes of this tenth season most. The four in the middle, I am still wondering why they made them for the most part. I have nothing against the return of the monster of the week approach, but those “middle” episodes didn’t do it for me.
10.02 ‘Founder’s mutation’ and 10.04 ‘Home Again’ were the closest to old school monster of the week kind, but I found them slightly disappointing and visually gore for the sake of it. Now there were similar aspects in older episodes, but not to this point. When I went to see Deadpool, I felt that it was less gory than the new X-Files, which was weird.
10.03 ‘Mulder and Scully Meet the Were Monster’ was beyond disappointing and atrocious to watch. I generally don’t care for “funny” or parodic episodes, but this one tops every other episode of that kind I had to put up with. It felt like wasted time from start to finish. I didn’t find it smart or witty, but simply horrible and poor writing.
10.05 ‘Babylon’ wasn’t much better and the overall case didn’t feel X-Files-ish at all. The doppelgangers new agents seemed very forced as well (though these two eventually grew up on me in the season finale). While these agents being somewhat similar to Mulder and Scully in dynamic, the trait was too forced, and hindered their introduction and early development. As for the whole section of what I dub “Mulder goes Californication style”, I just shook my head. If I wanted to watch Californication, I’d watch it, not X-Files.
10.01 ‘My Struggle’ and 10.06 ‘My Struggle II’ were my favorite and the season finale actually reconciled me with the newest episodes, as I watched it quite reluctantly at first. They did a great job approaching the mythology of the show that has been developed since day one. It also ended with a cliffhanger that makes me hope we get another season (or movie) because I want more answers! It is sad though that they wasted so much episode time in between those episodes, as the finale would have benefited from being a two part instead of a single one.
All the returning actors did a great job (as well as some of the new additions) and I am grateful we got to see Skinner and Reyes again but more screen time for both would have been great. Duchovny and Anderson showed that they can still do an amazing job as Mulder and Scully, though I wish they had had more scenes together. While it made sense to have them do their own thing in most of the finale (as it happened before in earlier seasons), other episodes could have had them interact more, regardless of the status of their personal relationship.
I like how Mulder’s and Scully’s son was brought up in several moments of the narrative and I am curious to see what they may do about him in a next season, as he should prove pivotal. I loved seeing Scully use her medical abilities a lot again, though one element peeved me. I was surprised to see her faith be of so little importance as she loses her mother in 10.04 ‘Home Again’. I understand it is extremely hard for her, but the writers seemed to mostly “forget” about this intricate part of the character, which annoyed me.
Overall, this season has been disappointing, in terms of number of episodes I have like. Yet, I still am hoping for more X-Files and am crossing fingers that the writers get it together and go back to what makes the show fascinating to me.
***
Natacha Guyot is a French author, scholar and public speaker. She works on Science Fiction, Transmedia, Gender Studies, Children Media and Fan Studies. She is a feminist, a fangirl, a bookworm, a vidder, a gamer and a cat lover.
Her released titles include A Galaxy of Possibilities: Representation and Storytelling in Star Wars (New Revised Edition), and Clairvoyance Chronicles – Volume One.
If we were having coffee, I’d likely be humming a Bob Marley song to myself, or possibly Pon de Replay, which, okay, I recognize that Rihanna isn’t Jamaican but I can’t help what my brain does. I just finished– as in literally ten minutes ago– Man Booker Prize winner A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James, a 700-page book containing far more than seven killings.
Probably 2/3 of the book is in Jamaican patois, which means that if I get through the entire conversation without the word bumbacloth or, God forbid, pussyhole falling out of my mouth, you should consider yourself lucky. I’ve read more Jamaican profanity in the last four or five days than I will encounter in the entire rest of my life, and it’s sorta infected my brain.
Feel free to ask me if I liked it; I’ll trail off after a few seconds and change the subject. I understand why it won the Booker Prize, but I don’t think I liked reading it at all. So… three stars? Four? Fuckit, I dunno.
But, yeah, let’s talk about movies and TV and stuff. I still haven’t seen Force Awakens a second time yet, and I want to, and the trailer for Suicide Squad that just came out made me all sorts of excited about that, which surprises me. Deadpool is going to be awesome. And then there’s that maybe-sequel to Cloverfield, a movie I unapologetically love the hell out of, so I’m all excited about seeing that too.
TV? You should be watching The Expanse, although if you’re like me you’re watching it with the closed captions on because half the time people are talking through masks, half the time they have thick accents, and oh, speaking of patois, half the time they’re not speaking English. Yes, I know that’s three halves; I’ll sketch the Venn diagram out for you on a napkin if you don’t get it. Point is, the sound mixing could be a lot better. We watched the first episode of The Shannara Chronicles last night and I only got through it by mocking the hell out of everything I saw; the show appears to be unredeemably terrible unless making fun of it proves to have more legs than I thought. Flash and Supergirl both remain better than they have any right to be. One of these days I’ll get into Arrow.
What good comic books are you reading? You should be reading Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur and I enjoyed the Captain Marvel relaunch that just started. I’m working through the Jessica Jones trades. And Clean Room is insane and depraved and you should check that out too. Unfollow looks like it might have potential.
But for right now, I need to read something that’s going to drive all this r’asscloth patois out of my brain; I just don’t know what that is. You, for your part, should go read Searching for Malumba, because it’s free today and tomorrow.
We’re, what, four episodes into PREACHER now? Five? You may remember I had some quick, mostly ambivalent thoughts about how the show was going after the first episode aired.
It’s weird that I remember this story so well.
Oh, Dino Squad. How much do I hate thee? I hate thee a whole damn lot. In general, I am very much pro-dinosaur and pro-dinosaur programming, but this show is edging closer and closer to the “Oh, sorry, Netflix is broken” level of I can’t watch this shit anymore right now. It’s getting the kid interested in dinosaurs, and he’s learning a few things, but it’s making me insane, and it’s all about me and we can’t have that.
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