It came to me that I should run away from home taking nothing but myself and so I thought I would and so I did. I’d not gone ten turns of the spiral before a small leathery suitcase began to tag along in my invisible wake. “Take me! Use me! Fill me!” it said. “Please, please fill me; I need to be filled.”
Blue Dragon Plus, published by Ignition Entertainment, is a role-playing game which was released back in February for the Nintendo DS. A sequel to Blue Dragon, in this adventure the main hero Shu meets up with his old friends in order to battle a mysterious new threat. Without totally delving into Spoiler-Land, fans of the original title might be in for a surprise when they see few certain familiar faces
As you may have surmised from my last post, I am not a huge fan of Dollhouse. I find the concept sketchy and the execution even sketchier. I keep watching because, well, I’m paid to (sort of). That being said I found more to like than to hate in last night’s episode and it’s apparently all down to Andrew Chambliss, the writer. Proof that even the worst concepts can work when the right writer steps into the driver’s seat.
The theme of “A Spy In The House Of Love” is revelations: Topher discovers a foreign chip in the equipment that reveals the presence of a spy; the audience discovers that Miss DeWitt is the true Miss Lonely Hearts who keeps requesting Victor for romantic escapades; Paul Ballard finally learns that Mellie is a sleeper doll; the Dollhouse staff finds out that Mr. Dominic is the spy (and also that DeWitt is so hard and freaking British that she can take a bullet and still continue on with revelatory dialogue).
All of this is handled extremely well and teased out through a familiar, though hard to pull off, structure of overlapping time- and plotlines. Perhaps if we’d had more of this in the beginning I could have been on board with this show. Or maybe not.
Because there’s still all that damn rape. Because the show continues not to show any remorse for all the damn rape. And last week, when it was supposed to be all about closure and such, I did very much notice that Sierra’s closure in no way involved actually getting to do anything about the man who had her kidnapped and forcibly made into a doll. Sure, Victor punched him a few times, but why did he not die? The show hasn’t shied away from death before. And I have to say that the dude who put Sierra in the Dollhouse has to be as punishable or even more so than the handler who raped her. (And again, show, if you play that scene one more time, I will come for you.)
I suppose it comes down to this: “A Spy In The House Of Love” made all the episodes that came before it look even worse because we now see the show is capable of so much more.
Last night’s episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles may well be the last in the entire series, sadly. Though the episode mostly worked when seen that way, I found myself angry at the show’s creators for leaving us with so many unanswered questions and trailing plotlines. You can’t count on being renewed for another season, and, as other shows proved long ago, you can construct a season with a definable, questions-fully-answered ending and still continue if you’re picked up once more. Now fans of the series are left with a lot of questions and must turn to writing fanfiction to answer them. Thanks SCC creators, sheesh!
I also found myself angry because too many episodes of this season were spent spinning wheels instead of moving the plot forward in a satisfactory manner. If we’d had the kind of movement throughout the season as we had in the last 4 episodes they could have gotten to the same or similar ending while also having resolved all the mysteries the show threw at us. Instead we had too much of John Connor whining and too much of Sarah Connor chasing down leads that really should have led somewhere faster.
The thing that makes me the most mad is that, despite all of this, I loved the show so much. I wanted it to continue. I want the answers to the questions and a satisfying ending. I am so pissed that I don’t get one.
Let’s raise a glass and mourn for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. It was not the perfect show, but it was often awesome, occasionally frustrating, and deserved better than to be killed by Friday night.
What are the dangerous but alluring professions you’ve seen in fantasy literature – dragon tamer? witch hunter? ghostbuster? What are your thoughts on such matters as hazard pay or vacations? If you could write your own fantasy job description, what would it involve?
I write because I know that everything around us is woven out of stories. When I notice a story that cries out, “tell me! Tell me!” I can’t help telling it. I don’t make up stories; I usually see them in all the details.
This collection of seven stories is subtitled “Return to the India of 2047,” but what it really is is a return to the India of McDonald’s 2004 novel River of Gods. The novel won the British Science Fiction Association Award, as did one of the stories, and it would not surprise me to see this collection nominated as well. McDonald displays the assurance of a mature talent immersed in his fictional world — yes — but also the deep, multi-layered understanding of an intelligent and compassionate man immersed in the 21st Century.
First, the world. Cyberabad Days is essentially cyberpunk, keeping company with William Gibson’s Idoru and Neil Stephenson’s Diamond Age. Nanotech has blurred the line between hardware, software, and wetware; AI is here and scaring the pants off a lot of people; programming is the new oil; information is the new gold. Unlike many of Gibson’s heroes, however, McDonald’s protagonists are not the web-jockeys and hackers, the people getting dirty on the pipelines or in the mines. McDonald is mostly writing about the people affected by the new economy a few steps away from production, the people who have to live in the world others are building, and tearing down, all around them. He is writing about the inheritors, and inheritance is one of the themes running through these stories.
He is also writing about India one century after the nation achieved independence from the British Empire, and, in his fictional future, just a few years after the nation fragments into half a dozen nation-states — another inheritance, of a kind. A bold move, you might even say a risky move, for a white guy living in Northern Ireland to be writing about India. He isn’t coy about it; with one exception, his characters are all Indian, Hindu and Muslim. He is an outsider writing with an insider’s perspective, and that turns out to be one of the great strengths of these stories. Because what he is showing us is a society so complex, so fractured and yet so bound into interdependence, that everyone is both an insider and an outsider in their own country.
Why do taboos stay with us? They are the dark underbellies. Incest, rape, torture — we can’t ignore them. As distasteful and decrepit as taboos are, we keep them around like crusted scabs on our collective skin. Taboos dare us to pick, but as enticing as they can be, taboos can also be barriers. The difference between hook and barrier depends upon thematic sincerity. Tropes, however, are a different matter.
The man interlaced his fingers as if he were going to pray. “Can you describe your voices?” I asked him. “Are they malicious or aggressive?” There was a slight abnormality in the man’s look, in his words, gestures, a touch of affectation seen through his otherwise gentle and open manner. It wasn’t mental disorder yet, [...]
This week’s reprint, Miss Cubbidge and the Dragon of Romance, got me thinking about fantasy companions…
