I'm coming at this from a week hiatus again - last Monday night, I barely slept, and so was in no shape to write anything coherent Tuesday morning. I really should try to write some of this ahead of time, as I do my reviews, but as much as I keep thinking that, I've been very bad about actually fitting it into my routine.
TV
The Flash - "Rogue Time" and "Tricksters"
The follow-up to the whole Barry-goes-back-in-time was quite satisfying. The character who died didn't, thankfully, but there were new complications, and a nice reworking of some of the same dialogue in an eerily similar scene that didn't end with murder. I also liked the impact of having missed those days on Iris - Barry moved too fast, she hadn't been through them, and things are messy again. I'm not sure I love the Iris love interest - Linda was frankly, more interesting. But I do like the complications here.
Which leads us into the second episode, and had me momentarily wondering if there was some weird mind-sharing going on with Dr. Wells, something like Firestorm. But nope. Now it's even sadder, knowing what happened to Dr. Wells. Also creepier. It was also nice to see Mark Hamill, doing his best not-quite-the-Joker.
Agents of SHIELD - "Love in the Time of Hydra" and "One Door Closes"
These were both quite good episodes, although I think my enjoyment of the second was hampered by the fact that I was severely underslept and not tracking so well. We get a Ward-centric episode. Interesting. He's still creepy.
We also find out about the pseudo-SHIELD that Mockingbird is working for, and it's good enough to make us see why Bobbi has loyalties to the second SHIELD, although it's obvious she's wrong. Poor Bobbi. Also, Gemma has such a wonderful moment in it that I did not see coming. Always nice to see Charlie from Fringe, too!
Arrow - "Suicidal Tendencies" and "Public Enemy"
Interesting. Very interesting. I think Thea will be more than a little pissed off at the end of the most recent episode. I mean, did Roy even check in with her first? Actually, both episodes have been about relationships going through stress tests - Diggle and Lyla get married, and then immediately embark on a mission that has a satisfying twist to it. Ray goes after the Arrow, and has to decide whether to trust Felicity. Then Felicity has to decide whether or not she really cares about Ray.
And Oliver tries to find a way out from under Ra's Al-Ghul's thumb. This has been a good season.
Movies
Witness for the Prosecution
This came on Turner Classic Movies the other night, and Bill and I settled in to watch it, and enjoyed it most thoroughly. I did guess the main twist fairly early on, although there was a twist to the twist that I didn't see coming. Charles Laughton is amazingly good, and I enjoyed watching Marlene Dietrich. I don't think I've ever seen either of them in a movie before. Psychological courtroom thrillers - it possibly doesn't get any better than this.
Gaming
Seven Stars of Atlantis
Only one game the last two weeks, which might account for some of the grumpiness I've been experiencing. The penultimate session of our pulp game run by my husband! The whole gang is finally back together, with Su Li joining forces with Margot, Teddy, and Rex again. Margot and Su Li had a chance to talk while under enemy fire, and that relationship isn't fixed, but it certainly wasn't hurt by Su Li calling Margot magnificent. Margot's been so anxious that compliments definitely work.
Of course, Margot flaunted her engagement ring in Su Li's face as soon as possible, so she's still a spoiled rich girl.
Other than that, from my perspective? It was interesting how much being in Antarctica and finding Teddy's ancestral home worried Margot. She thought he might decide to stay, but was even more worried about how he might be sacrificed. She was entirely willing to shove an old man into the machine instead, to save Teddy's life, but didn't get the chance.
However, near the end, I was struck by an awful idea - Margot's already proved she'll do something that makes Teddy hate her, if it'll save his life. I think she'd do it again, if necessary. He's told her in no uncertain terms never to do that again. I mentioned this to Bill, and he got an evil grin on his face. Never mention things to the GM.
Poor Margot. She may be headed for a tragic ending. I'd like to see a happy one, but this time, I'm not sure. Also, I would be dramatically satisfied by a sadder ending, although it wouldn't perhaps be my first choice.
Showing posts with label agents of SHIELD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label agents of SHIELD. Show all posts
Tuesday, 7 April 2015
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!
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!
Tuesday, 17 March 2015
A Week in Stories - March 17
I was very sick all last week, so both of my extra blog posts, this one and the old SF one, fell by the wayside. I already had reviews written to get me through the week, although now I'm scrambling to catch up on writing reviews for the books I plowed through while I didn't have anything else to do. So we'll try to pack two weeks into one.
TV
Agents of SHIELD, "Shadows" and "Heavy is the Head"
I have complained quite a lot about how Trip's death at the mid-season break was not a good one, dramatically, as he didn't really matter enough to anyone on the show to make it have dramatic impact. They tried to fix that by having everyone mourn, and that was well done, but it doesn't fix the underlying problem.
Gemma's reaction to what's going on is pretty overblown and not very scientific - by the time Raina had been on the run for several hours and there weren't any cases of contagious superpower diseases, that would pretty much blow the epidemiological explanation out of the water, and she's too smart for that. I like the tack of making her more afraid and willing to do more to compensate. Just don't make her a bad scientist.
On the other hand, the Fitz stuff was wonderful, and the actor really stuck it all. Love Fitz. Love what they've been doing with him, and that they haven't backed away from trying to incorporate a character with the kind of damage he has into the show.
For the rest? I'm impressed they didn't drag out the reveal about Skye, I loved the reappearance of Lady Sif, and I'm happy with the resolution - that Skye is dangerous, but less dangerous when she's around people she cares about than she would be rotting off in some Asgardian prison somewhere. And it's poignant that it was her mother who used to help people like her learn to control her powers, and she's gone.
Movies
Five Card Stud
Not a big movie week. Just this Western, starring Dean Martin and Robert Mitchum. With, of course, lounge theme song. A man is lynched after cheating at poker. The poker players start to turn up dead. Who is behind it? (The answer will really not surprise anyone.) Meh. It was okay.
Roleplaying Games
Seven Stars of Atlantis
We're getting near the end of our pulp game - two more sittings, I think. With a brief detour for dinosaurs in Antarctica, because dinosaurs. Let's see. This was almost a week and a half ago, so what is there to say.
Oh, hey! My character Margot got engaged! Teddy finally popped the question, and she said yes pretty much before he'd finished talking. Later on, I wondered if I should have spent some time being more suspicious and asking Teddy to prove that he loved Margot, but in the moment, it didn't feel right. She wanted a perfect romantic moment, and she got it. Now, they just have to survive imminent danger before they can get married.
Right. There was one more thing I wanted to think about, and that's my process for playing scenes. I get my fun out of roleplaying by getting into character and reacting from that perspective. I think of it a lot like my acting process - I think about things a lot ahead of time, trace possibilities, but when I get into a scene, I do my best to forget all that on a conscious level and just trust myself that it's there in the subconscious. I try not to think through what I'm going to say or what I'm going to do - I just do them. For the most part, I'm successful.
Rex and Margot were trying to patch up their differences, and they made a start, but it'll be a long slow process. Getting past that kind of mistrust and anger is not going to be taken care of in one conversation (or one lesson on how to shoot, as the case may be.) I think that frustrated the other player, as he wanted to get past it more quickly than I felt worked for me, and I was a bit taken aback when he asked if I always needed to have a snappy answer for everything. Because I'm not thinking things through ahead of time, the answer is: yes, if one occurs to me, and it feels right for the character.
Bill has pointed out that I tend to play strong-willed, opinionated characters. I told him that that's unlikely to change anytime soon. Still, Margot and Rex have made baby steps towards an eventual peace, and for me, that feels exactly right.
Paper Dolls
This was the night before I got sick, but still, it was a good evening! For my three different versions of the main character, one (Trix) was largely on the sidelines, and now I think that maybe I should have made a little scene out of that - she's used to being in the thick of whatever's going on, and giving up that control and being powerless to help was difficult for her, but we didn't get to see any of that at the table.
Of the other two, the alcoholic one who stole the baby of the third character, found out she really didn't enjoy taking care of a squalling baby, and was more than happy to let one of Colin's characters rescue the child. She's the only one of my three characters I don't see a redemption for. But I have been surprised before!
My third, poor Bee, came back to the two people she'd run away from (again), and is trying very hard to face the music, and it's interesting. I'm enjoying playing through the scenes from the perspective of someone who is trying very hard to be mature and give other people space and let them decide if they can trust me again, while at the same time, wanting to push things, and be wrapped up in their arms, and hear that she's forgiven. It's an intriguing balancing act.
TV
Agents of SHIELD, "Shadows" and "Heavy is the Head"
I have complained quite a lot about how Trip's death at the mid-season break was not a good one, dramatically, as he didn't really matter enough to anyone on the show to make it have dramatic impact. They tried to fix that by having everyone mourn, and that was well done, but it doesn't fix the underlying problem.
Gemma's reaction to what's going on is pretty overblown and not very scientific - by the time Raina had been on the run for several hours and there weren't any cases of contagious superpower diseases, that would pretty much blow the epidemiological explanation out of the water, and she's too smart for that. I like the tack of making her more afraid and willing to do more to compensate. Just don't make her a bad scientist.
On the other hand, the Fitz stuff was wonderful, and the actor really stuck it all. Love Fitz. Love what they've been doing with him, and that they haven't backed away from trying to incorporate a character with the kind of damage he has into the show.
For the rest? I'm impressed they didn't drag out the reveal about Skye, I loved the reappearance of Lady Sif, and I'm happy with the resolution - that Skye is dangerous, but less dangerous when she's around people she cares about than she would be rotting off in some Asgardian prison somewhere. And it's poignant that it was her mother who used to help people like her learn to control her powers, and she's gone.
Movies
Five Card Stud
Not a big movie week. Just this Western, starring Dean Martin and Robert Mitchum. With, of course, lounge theme song. A man is lynched after cheating at poker. The poker players start to turn up dead. Who is behind it? (The answer will really not surprise anyone.) Meh. It was okay.
Roleplaying Games
Seven Stars of Atlantis
We're getting near the end of our pulp game - two more sittings, I think. With a brief detour for dinosaurs in Antarctica, because dinosaurs. Let's see. This was almost a week and a half ago, so what is there to say.
Oh, hey! My character Margot got engaged! Teddy finally popped the question, and she said yes pretty much before he'd finished talking. Later on, I wondered if I should have spent some time being more suspicious and asking Teddy to prove that he loved Margot, but in the moment, it didn't feel right. She wanted a perfect romantic moment, and she got it. Now, they just have to survive imminent danger before they can get married.
Right. There was one more thing I wanted to think about, and that's my process for playing scenes. I get my fun out of roleplaying by getting into character and reacting from that perspective. I think of it a lot like my acting process - I think about things a lot ahead of time, trace possibilities, but when I get into a scene, I do my best to forget all that on a conscious level and just trust myself that it's there in the subconscious. I try not to think through what I'm going to say or what I'm going to do - I just do them. For the most part, I'm successful.
Rex and Margot were trying to patch up their differences, and they made a start, but it'll be a long slow process. Getting past that kind of mistrust and anger is not going to be taken care of in one conversation (or one lesson on how to shoot, as the case may be.) I think that frustrated the other player, as he wanted to get past it more quickly than I felt worked for me, and I was a bit taken aback when he asked if I always needed to have a snappy answer for everything. Because I'm not thinking things through ahead of time, the answer is: yes, if one occurs to me, and it feels right for the character.
Bill has pointed out that I tend to play strong-willed, opinionated characters. I told him that that's unlikely to change anytime soon. Still, Margot and Rex have made baby steps towards an eventual peace, and for me, that feels exactly right.
Paper Dolls
This was the night before I got sick, but still, it was a good evening! For my three different versions of the main character, one (Trix) was largely on the sidelines, and now I think that maybe I should have made a little scene out of that - she's used to being in the thick of whatever's going on, and giving up that control and being powerless to help was difficult for her, but we didn't get to see any of that at the table.
Of the other two, the alcoholic one who stole the baby of the third character, found out she really didn't enjoy taking care of a squalling baby, and was more than happy to let one of Colin's characters rescue the child. She's the only one of my three characters I don't see a redemption for. But I have been surprised before!
My third, poor Bee, came back to the two people she'd run away from (again), and is trying very hard to face the music, and it's interesting. I'm enjoying playing through the scenes from the perspective of someone who is trying very hard to be mature and give other people space and let them decide if they can trust me again, while at the same time, wanting to push things, and be wrapped up in their arms, and hear that she's forgiven. It's an intriguing balancing act.
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