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Tuesday 24 March 2015

The Week In Stories - March 24

Well, gaming got cancelled once, and for one of the shows I regularly watch, I was busy making baklava instead of Ollie running around Starling City. (The baklava turned out extremely well, so I regret nothing!) But this might be a shorter entry than usual.

TV

The Flash - "Out of Time"

Ho-ly shit. That's all I have to say. So many things happened, and although the end of the episode seems to say it might be reversible, there were still big bold moves! A main character was killed, and it was heartbreaking! (Although my husband has a comics-based argument for why what appeared to be getting killed might actually manifest his superpowers.) Joe was kidnapped and beaten up. The police chief is in a coma and has brain damage. (And we finally got to meet his fiance, who was mentioned way back at the start of the season.) Barry came clean about his secret identity to Iris.

Now I guess we have to see how much they let of what happened stand as Barry loops himself in time. I hope they let some of it stay, although I really don't want to lose the character who got killed. But eep! This show keeps making bold moves, and not leaving any of its story on the table. I applaud that.

Agents of SHIELD - "One of Us"

Kyle MacLachlan gets another chance to do batshit crazy, and it is certainly entertaining. He's determined to show his daughter that he's the stable one who loves her, and does a really terrible job of it, what with threatening to kill an entire town in the process. Also, Blair Underwood has not aged in, it appears, decades. I hope he's a recurring character, because his psychologist was remarkably free of the crazy.

The reveal at the end was small, but pretty damn creepy. Good job.

Roleplaying

Paper Dolls

The only roleplaying game in the last couple of weeks, as two of my Shakespeare, VA games got cancelled - one due to me being sick, and one due to a player not being up to it. So everything's been focused on our weird multiple universes game, which appears to be drawing to a close, and we've finally figured out an endgame.

This is one where almost all the drama is interpersonal, but we needed some sort of threat at the end, and it occurred to me at last week that perhaps the scientists who split the three worlds apart 20 years ago might be trying to figure out how to smoosh them back together again. Which raises interesting questions about what would happen to our characters, of whom there are three versions apiece, or to all the children born in the last 20 years? We've had to think about which of our characters would fight on each side.

I have one who is just broken and full of self-loathing enough that she might want to destroy herself and the world she lives in. I think almost everyone else will fight to preserve the split, because even though it caused a great deal of emotional and physical trauma, that's not exactly a good reason to cause a second trauma. Plus, one of my characters has a baby, who she'll fight to save, and the other has a ton of nieces and nephews she adores.

We'll probably wrap it up within a session or two, but it's been an interesting experiment!

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