Four-Colour Commentary

It's the Most Shoppingest Time of the Year

My grandmother just sent out a message in her characteristic way of thinking about The Big Picture. She was at a church recital and she got to thinking about Jews and the early Christian movement.

I went to hear the Lessons and Carols this afternoon, and I have been singing to myself ever since, “Sing to all Jer- ooo- salem, Christ is born in Bethlehem”. So the message is to the Jewish people,. But they never accepted it. Why? Imagine if they had agreed to sing along – there would be no Israel festering in the Middle East. Maybe Islam wouldn’t have taken root and grown, if its few beginners had been faced with one cohesive religion all around them. No Crusades, no Holocaust, no Merchant of Venice. Gosh.

I love that my grandmother thinks of things like this, but I suspect the Jews didn't take to early Christianity because as far as they were concerned it was pure heresy for a living man to claim to be the messiah, even in his supposedly reserved way. Also, splitting the Jewish communities of Rome into olde timey Jews and new-fangled 'Christians' put all of them at an inferior position, politically. The Jewish community was treated with a little respect by Rome; this new upstart cult could throw all of that out the window. I have no trouble at all understanding Jewish resistance to Christianity.

As for Islam, there is certainly a causal-historical point of view: if not for Christianity, no Islam; if not for Judaism, no Christianity. However, there's also the idea that the Arab people were, politically and socially, ready for a new faith, perhaps even in need of one, and they happened to grab up what was at hand, the Judeo-Christian tradition, and then altered it and fit it to their own context. And all of that happens over hundreds of years, of course, so it has time to be molded and shaped and squished to satisfy the various desires of those who are in the position of privilege to be able to alter the text; the exact same things are true of the Torah and the New Testament, of course.

The perniciousness of Jehovah, it seems to me, is logically going to be the result of setting up any one godhead. There is an inherent statement in monotheism that not only can my god beat up your god, but your god doesn't actually exist. You've merely fallen prey to some character that we made up to stand in for everyone else's beliefs (Satan), or petty, random spirits who are out to screw with you (demons or Arab djinns, for example). If we're going to point to any one religious mistake, it's monotheism. At least with the polytheists, there's always room for one more, as long as that one doesn't claim to be the only one. Within polytheism, there is an implicit welcoming of many stories, many voices, and many points of view. That's not to claim that polytheists don't wage wars and commit colonial genocide and persecute women and all of those things.

In the end, which religion you follow is meaningless compared to how well you treat your fellow human being, and no faith can claim to be the 'religion of peace' without a heavy dose of hypocrisy; they've all done all of the things that they claim only the pagans do, or the heretics, or the infidels, or the barbarians, or whomever. Nobody's hands are clean. Not Jesus, Abraham, and Mohamed. Not Krishna, the Buddha, and the Master Kung. Everyone kills to demonstrate that they're the best at maintaining peace. This is one of the many, many, many reasons why I stopped believing that humans are inherently logical creatures.

Merry Christmas.

The Simpsons

Dear Fox,

Please stop making episodes of The Simpsons. Watching this show, after it's years of brilliant satire and absurdist humour, is like watching your favourite uncle slowly die of Alzheimer's. It's utter shit and I can't take it any more. Please, please, please let this once great comedy die with the tiny bit of dignity that you haven't yet beaten out of it.

Sincerely,
-Orion Ussner Kidder

Torchwood, follow-up

I've just watched episode ten, "Random Shoes," and it was wonderful. A lot like "Love & Monsters," from Who, but with the suck turned down: very much about geek fans and every day life. The fantasy element is a great vehicle to tell Eugene's little story, and the ending is both sweet and tragic. I would haven't been extremely annoyed if Eugene had lived, but I really wanted him to, anyway, so I think by that measure, it worked. The hit/miss ratio is very low with these Cardiff/RTD shows, but when they do it right, it's impressive. So far, "Father's Day," "Girl in the Fireplace," and now "Random Shoes" have been fine episodes.

Torchwood

Out of 8 episodes so far, two or three have been mildly interesting. The faeries were fun, but only because I have a soft spot for bad-ass faeries. The 20th-century construction of them as all sweetness and light bugs the crap out of me. The resurrection glove, or 'risen mitten,' episode was fairly good in its general level of darkness, and the little bits of angst from Captain Jack about his immortality/undeadness have been interesting, but far too sparse.

And then there's the sex... I love that Jack is omnisexual. As an ultra-sleazy, intergalactic time adventurer, it makes perfect sense. It's hard to quibble about gender if you're doing aliens with four tentacles and feathers. What bugs me, though, is that the sexuality of the characters, at least three of whom are queer, is mostly used for throw-away gags, instead of having some narrative meat (so to speak).

Owen's bisexual disco-boy persona seems to fit him, and his emotional POV of the rape/murder really hit him hard. I have no complaints about Owen as a character, though he is rather fucking annoying as a person. But Gwen's alienchick snog didn't even rate a "wow, why did I do that?", and Tosh's queer/alien affair was really mishandled. Not only do we get the oh-so-very-tired predatory lesbian villain, but the fact that it's the first time Toshiko has been with a woman is barely touched on.

If you want to do a show about the queer end of sexuality and use science fiction as a metaphor, great! Buffy basically did that. I'm not objecting to the sex or the sexuality, but handle it with some sensitivity and some sophistication. The Cybergirl episode is a great example of mishandling. Why, exactly, was she in a titanium bikini? Why would the cybermen, even if they were short on supplies, make her a bra? You'd think that primary and secondary-sex organs would be the first things to get lopped off. Wieners, cooters, and boobs (oh my!) are not exactly useful to that whole 'galactic domination' thing that the Cybermen are all about.

I appreciate the idea of mature science fiction that takes on sexuality, but like a lot of the new Who, it's just not all there in the execution.

Buffy, Season 8 (wtf?)

Nothing intellectual to say, just had to show these off:

How friggin' cool is this?

Bad Reviews Are Easy

Check out this review of recent episodes of Battlestar Galactica. G'head. I'll wait.

This review is a product of the all-too-common Arrogant 'Net Nerd's Disease (or ANND), which is very closely related to Arrogant Cultural Critic's Disease (ACCD). In both case, victims often think that by virtue of their own vast, personal insights alone, they can critique popular entertainment, in this case a television show, and pay little to no attention to the actual content. The assumption that underlies the symptoms of these two diseases is that the reviewer is, by definition, smarter than that which he or she reviews.

The reviewer lists ten reasons why the show might be doomed. Here we go...

10. Show co-creators Ron Moore and David Eick are both developing multiple other projects. Moore is working on BSG prequel show Caprica, and Eick is working on both Bionic Woman and Them.

Red herring. Spin-offs don't spell doom for the main show. Buff and Angel both rocked.

9. Crucial subplots, such as the fate of Sharon and Helo's hybrid baby, are left dangling for more than three episodes.

I suppose this could be a problem if you have no attention span, but this show has always demanded more of its viewers than the average drama. Deal with it or flip channels. I hear Andromeda is still in re-runs.

8. Rather than developing characters via personal transformation, character development is charted via hair length, presence/absence of beards, and weight gain/loss.

Those are visual signifers of character development. Kara's hair and Adama's moustache were both symbols of them leaving the soft/civilian life behind. It's a motif, ya twit.

7. The only way the writers imagine they can showcase Edward James Olmos' considerable acting talents is via long-winded speeches.

He's been doing that since the first episode. I fail to see how it's suddenly bad now

6. Cylon threesomes.

In character, for both Baltar and what little we know of Cylon culture, and really, really funny!

5. Too much intimacy with the mysterious Cylon enemy in their SM dungeon ship makes them seem campy rather than scary.

I'll give her a half-point for this one. The Base Ships could have been handled better, but they are making the best of a bad situation, which is not having enough budget to really wow us with the Cylon environment.

However, there was no S&M dungeon that I noticed. There's been some screwin' (see #6, above), and there's been some torturin', but they've been separate. The whole point of Baltar's orgasmic experience during the torture was that it was Head Six's way of taking him away from the torture. That's sort of the opposite of an S&M/rough sex situation, as far as I know...?

4. Entire episodes are clumsily devoted to single-word social issues like "torture" and "genocide."

Topical references, like Adama's speechification, have been with the show since day one. You got a problem with that, then that's on you.

3. Eick promises next season will bring more flashback-heavy episodes that focus on romantic entanglements and/or childhood trauma.

As opposed to what? Big-ass battle sequences? Adama beating Cylons to death with Ol' Flashy? Does this reviewer realise that it's not actually an action show?

2. A retcon turns Adama into the cause of the Cylons' attack on the twelve colonies, thus making him both improbably important and too much of a bastard.

There are two scenes that make very clear that Adama's sense of guilt is misplaced. That it's actually the product of a desire for a simple explanation for the horrendous thing that happened, and that that answer doesn't exist. I can't think how you could miss that, unless you're just not paying attention.

1. Boxing is used as a thin excuse for an episode that could have been written (better) by shippers.

The boxing episode was a wonderful example of parallel editing and a great use of revealed history. It was the payoff of years of Kara and Lee dancing around each other, and the Adama/Tyrol match was the perfect parallel. While Adama carries on about how none of us are friends, and that acting like friends is leaving them all at risk, Kara and Lee demonstrate that without their emotional bonds, these people can't live, are barely even 'people' at all. That's been a major theme of the show since the miniseries, a conundrum with no solution, and presenting problems without clear-cut solutions has always been what this show does best.

Plus, Adama and Laura smokin' fatties and snuggling in the sand. You cannot overstate the sheer volume of awesome in those scenes.

Ion #8 (of 12) from DC Comics

As I read through this week's GL and GL-related books, I couldn't help but think, not for the first time, what a fascistic, authoritarian little myth it actually is. The idea of a cosmic police force is pretty good, heroic even. A super-powered group that protects everyone. How could that be bad? But then you start thinking to yourself, who, exactly, runs this little operation? What oversight is there? Which laws do they enforce? Most of the time, they talk in terms of a very abstract concept of 'justice,' which doesn't exactly fill me with confidence when it happens in the real world. Basically, for the whole 'Green Lantern' thing to not be horrifying, you have to have total faith in the judgement and righteousness of the Guardians. Okay, I says to myself, that's fine. Then I see this:

And then I says to myself, well that blows that theory out of the water.

I posted this message to a discussion forum (as always!) and it generated some interesting responses. You can check the forum here, but one of the possible objections to my objection is that the character in question, Nero, is an insane, cosmic-level villain who's responsible for the death's of entire worlds, so perhaps he deserves it, or at the least, it's no great injustice to torture someone who's that evil. Here's what I had to say about that:

Actually, I won't [agree] and I don't have to. Insanity is a great reason to not torture people since, by definition, they're not in control of their actions. That reason is, of course, in addition to all the other reasons why torture's an incredibly stupid way to extract information from people; chief among them is that a person will say anything to get the torture to stop. In this case, it's implicit that the torture is also some kind of psionic probing, which possibly makes lying a side issue, but also acts to obviate that very basic objection to torture itself, if even merely for practical reasons.

But that's all pretty obvious, really. The reasons to not torture are pretty solid, even setting ethics aside. There was another reading, which I encourage you to look at on the forum itself, that happened to invoke some rhetoric that I find particularly interesting (the emphasis is mine):

Rip van Mason: I think the Guardians are far less about justice, and far more about the continuation of galactic civilisation and sapience. Justice is just the most useful trait to have in the hired muscle if that is your goal. It acts as a check to prevent another multiverse creating event [i.e., a world-ending event, in the language of DC Comics' recent Infinite Crisis storyline], and generally earns your group the legitimacy needed to do what must be done. [...]

These statements are out of the context of a larger discussion, which is an interesting one, but I do want to focus on the rhetoric of "what must be done." We see it a lot, especially in action/adventure narratives, but also in politics. The phrase is a bit of a tautology. It can be applied to practically any situation in order to justify almost anything because it presupposes that what's "being done" is "necessary," thus greatly reducing the possibility of questioning the real issue at hand: does that act, in this case torture, actually 'need to be done' at all?

I'd also point out that the passive construction, "what must be done," effaces the identity of whomever is performing the act; it pushes the subject of the sentence aside, and can even remove the subject from a sentence entirely, though Rip hasn't quite done that, here. Thus, as well as presupposing that the act is necessary, it reduces, and could even removes, one's sense of responsibility for the act that "must be done," which again is torture. I don't mean any of that to be a personal attack on Rip, of course, and it should in no way be read as an accusation of anything. I think he echoes a rhetorical strategy that is very powerful and ought to be interrogated.