Sherlock: "His Last Vow" (Part 1)

Previously: "The Sign of Three"

My mind is blown. WHAT WAS GOING ON HERE. WHAT.

My initial reaction to this episode was to vomit ectoplasm at the ceiling, but since I am A Lady, I forced myself to look at the situation in a calm and rational manner. First of all, would I still think this episode was a hilarious seafood gumbo of nonsense if it had been written by someone other than Steven Moffat? Am I biased, as a result of his track record as a renowned misogynist and writer of nonsense television? Would His Last Vow survive a blind taste test? So, looking back on it, I asked myself: would this episode still be a warped tangle of plot-noodles if I thought it had been written by Mark Gatiss, Steve Thompson, or J.K. Rowling?

Well, yes. Yes it would.
This season's big finale hinged on one of the show's most embarrassingly overused concepts, the Mind Palace. The sonic screwdriver of BBC Sherlock. One Mind Palace aficionado was enough, but two stretches credulity to the limit. Plus, having Magnusson admit that his records are all stored in his head is just plain bad writing. Not only is it kind of implausible (seriously, not even Sherlock has that level of detail in his Mind Palace), but it's also tantamount to inviting someone to shoot you in the head. If not Sherlock, then certainly John, who Magnusson would surely know is a gun owner. Unless Moffat was deliberately going for a Bond villainesque "I've brought you here so I may as well tell you my evil plan!" scene. In which case... that pretty much negates Sherlock Holmes' power as a hero who relies on deductive reasoning to defeat his enemies. The denouement was the villain literally explaining his Achilles Heel, and then Sherlock murdering him to get rid of the problem. Not very impressive, when you think about it.

I wish I could say I was surprised that this episode received generally positive reviews (the Guardian called it "perfect," and the Telegraph thought it was the best episode so far) but for some reason, British TV reviewers always seem fall over themselves to applaud Steven Moffat's writing. This is highly frustrating because it makes it seem as if his best writing (Blink; The Girl in the Fireplace) is only slightly better than his worst (ie, the last year or so of Doctor Who), which completely devalues the quality his better work. It's just plain ridiculous to claim that His Last Vow was better than every other episode of Sherlock to date, when in fact, it was really just more dramatic. This kind of blindly devoted attitude reminds me of Aaron Sorkin fans who manage to persuade themselves that The Newsroom is incredible, just because they liked The West Wing.

Last night I had a conversation with one of my friends who thought this episode was even worse than I did -- in fact, that was one of the worst episodes of big-budget TV she'd ever seen. I pointed out that while His Last Vow was nonsensical and often straight-up bad, I did still find it entertaining. I still enjoy Sherlock's flashy excitement, and its ridiculousness, and the sheer high-octane pleasure of seeing Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman play off each other. Also, I'm not enormously invested in the show's future, so it doesn't really bother me that the characterisation was kind of inconsistent this season, or that the finale was a hot mess of OTT plot twists and frustrating sexist undertones.
What does bother me is the idea that this episode might be hailed as an example of good TV writing, when it mostly relied on flashiness and sudden, implausible revelations to dazzle its audience rather than engaging them with a coherent, well-developed plot. Mary's an assassin! There's a third Holmes brother! Moriarty's alive! Magnusson's files are all in his MIND PALACE! Sherlock just drugged everyone! Sherlock's going to jail! No he isn't! He's got a girlfriend! No he doesn't! -- On and on until you're caught between laughter and shock, your critical faculties obliterated by Sherlock running around his mind palace with a puppy, and everyone's "pressure points" being helpfully displayed onscreen. The only aspect of the episode that remained consistent throughout was Lars Mikkelsen as Charles Augustus Magnusson: a gorgeously repulsive performance.

Continued in Part 2: Female Characters

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Sherlock: "The Sign of Three"

Previously: "The Empty Hearse"

I feel like I need to preface this review by saying that I didn't think this episode was necessarily... "bad"...? But it was definitely weird as hell. It was a pile of butts. It was a hysterical LOLfest. It was a Richard Curtis movie written by sadists. Was it "good television"? Well, I personally found it quite entertaining (in between my agonised shrieking at the supreme awkwardness of Sherlock's speech), but I suspect that more serious Sherlock fans will have a bone to pick with the extremely uneven characterisation. If I was a more serious critic, I would also point out its odd story structure, its bizarre lunges between slapstick comedy and sentimentality, and its apparent abandonment of the show's core purpose as a crime drama. It's really no surprise that this episode was so divisive between fandom viewers and the show's more mainstream audience.

The reason why I'm hesitant to label this episode a "bad" is because I've seen Bad Sherlock, and its name is the Blind Banker. That episode was a common-or-garden example of shitty television, with a side order of blatant racism. But The Sign of Three? Was just plain weird. I think what we've learned here is that if they do indeed end up making a fourth season, Steve Thompson's episode will be the wild card. Just think about it: he went from worst ever episode (Blind Banker) to the heartwrenching thriller that is Reichenbach, to this. Meanwhile, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss remain reasonably predictable in that Moffat is excellent at writing individual scenes and snappy dialogue, but will pepper his episodes with offensive garbage and OTT grandstanding... and Gatiss is a horror nerd fanboy who takes the show way less seriously and is entirely happy to take the piss.

I still do not understand the basic logistics of the murders, though. So, Dean Thomas and Watson's old commanding officer were both stabbed in a way that wouldn't show until they removed their belt, which was acting as a tourniquet. But as soon as they did so, they exsanguinated, fast enough that they couldn't so much as call for help. IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE? I mean, wouldn't you NOTICE getting stabbed? Wouldn't they feel it, even when wearing a very tight belt? Particularly if it was a wound that was serious enough to very quickly kill you once you removed the pressure? And NO blood leaked out beforehand, at all? Sherlock Holmes stories have always relied upon a certain element of ridiculousness to make their central crime plots more interesting, but this is definitely the most nonsensical murder we've seen in Sherlock so far.
Aside from the barefaced ludicrousness of a crime plot that requires the victim not to notice that they've been fatally stabbed, my main quibble with the plausibility of this episode was the absence of people filming during Sherlock's mid-wedding meltdown.

At any wedding, there is usually SOMEONE filming, but even if John and Mary had elected to not have any kind of footage of the speeches at the reception, EVERYONE WOULD HAVE STARTED FILMING ON THEIR CAMERAPHONES AS SOON SHERLOCK GOT GOING. I mean, the kids and teenagers at least, if the adults were too English and middle-class to get caught using their iPhone during an embarrassing moment at their friend's wedding. Sherlock is a public figure, and he was performing one of the most bizarre and mesmerisingly awful Best Man speeches in human history. I refuse to accept that it wouldn't be on YouTube, Upworthy and UK Buzzfeed within 24 hours. One of this show's gimmicks is Sherlock's regular usage of smartphones when solving crimes, so there's really no excuse for this bizarre lack of cameraphone footage when it's less convenient to Sherlock's personal storyline.
The crackfic tone of The Sign of Three meant that a lot of non-fandom viewers were probably disappointed, especially since the episode's central story (such as it was) was only vaguely adjacent to the crime TV genre. However, one thing that may have been easier for non-fandom audiences to palate was the characterisation. Your average "serious" Sherlockian has probably rewatched the first two seasons multiple times and spent hundreds of hours writing meta posts on Tumblr, discussing the show, and reading fanfic. They have analysed John and Sherlock's personalities until they know them inside out. So to anyone with this level of familiarity with the characters, this episode is likely to have been pretty fucking baffling.
I haven't actually rewatched the last season of Sherlock since it aired on TV, but there were still a bunch of things in this episode that I quickly realised were utterly out of character. The most glaring example was the Maid of Honour. When she was first introduced, I was like, "Man, wouldn't it be awesome if they just spent the rest of the episode with Sherlock acting as her matchmaking service?" but realistically, I assumed that he'd end up offending her and/or deducing that she was a criminal or something. But no. This was a crackfic. A crackfic in which Sherlock did indeed act as a matchmaking service for a woman he'd never met before, despite his utter distaste for romance, people, and quite possibly women in general. Why was he so friendly towards her when he couldn't even force himself to treat Watson with simple human compassion during the bomb scene in last week's episode? Is this meant to be evidence of a character evolution that took place over the intervening months between episodes one and two? Or, more likely, was it just another throwaway joke to add to a comedy episode that was already swimming in "random" humorous asides?

The middle episode of a season of Sherlock has traditionally been the zany/ridiculous one, but I think The Sign of Three indicates that the writers now have the power to do basically whatever they want. The show's ratings are incredible, and it's the reviews of the first and third episodes that really matter. God only knows what they'll do with season four. I'm hoping for a more coherent story arc, though. When it was announced that Lars Mikkelsen had been hired to play Charles Augustus Magnussen, I was psyched because he's a great actor and Charles Augustus Milverton is one of the most interesting villains in the original Holmes stories. The TV crime genre is already littered with terrorists and mass murderers, but a talented blackmailer could be a far more interesting and insidious threat. I can only hope he survives tomorrow's episode so we can get to see a more fleshed-out Milverton/Magnusson storyline in season four, rather than just bringing him in for one episode.

Miscellaneous

• Re: my earlier points about Steve Thompson being the wildcard writer in this show -- I am aware that this episode was credited to all three writers, but Thompson was announced as the original writer. I think Gatiss and Moffat stepped in to rewrite the episode, for whatever reason. Goodness knows what it was like before. More disjointed, or less?? Either way, Gatiss and Moffat are probably collaborating to a certain extent on their own credited episodes, anyway. So Gattiss's first ep would've had some input from Moffat, and vice versa for Moffat's final ep tomorrow night.
• John and Sherlock's drunk scenes: HILARIOUS. Probably my favourite part of the episode. 
• The entire mini-story about the murdered (or attempted-murdered) soldier was utter nonsense, wasn't it?
• Not wild about seeing Naked Irene Adler again. Unnecessary, in more ways than one.
• I WAS happy to see Mycroft hanging around Sherlock's ~mind palace~, though. Mycroft has had a very interesting role this season, possibly the best interpretation of Mycroft I've seen in any adaptation. (Possibly because Gatiss is writing dialogue and character development for himself, LOL.)
• I already wrote about this in the article I linked at the beginning of this post, but this episode was mindblowingly fanfiction-y. Months of John/Sherlock relationship stuff compressed into half an hour of clip show storylines, plus crackfic garbage like Sherlock becoming obsessed with wedding planning. Which is awesome if you like that sort of thing, and if you don't, well... sorry, bro. Maybe there'll be some crime next week, or something.
• Several of my friends are convinced that Mary is EVIL EVIL EVIL. I'm more inclined to suspect that she's doomed to die, although that's not a solid prediction. It's more based on a combination of my distrust for Steven Moffat, and the fact that she dies in the Holmes stories (possibly in childbirth). The main argument against this is that John's already taken enough punishment, and killing off his wife would just be OTT. My favourite future-Mary theory so far came from my friend Grace, who thinks that Mary will survive and have her baby, because having to take care of a child is the least objectionable way of effectively getting rid of her so John and Sherlock can continue with their adventures in future seasons, while Mary continues to be awesome in a more background role.

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Sherlock: "The Empty Hearse"

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR "THE EMPTY HEARSE"

I saw this episode at a preview screening a couple of weeks ago, which undoubtedly coloured my feelings somewhat. Basically, watching anything it for the first time in a cinema of hyped-up fans makes everything seem Very Very Exciting. It's the difference between watching a Marvel movie at home on DVD, and showing up to a midnight screening full of people who applaud and scream in the middle of the big fight scenes.

My own feelings on Sherlock are somewhat ambivalent because I love ~Sherlock Holmes~ in general, but I tend to feel that the whole Sherlock phenomenon is a little overrated. In the plus column, the casting is fantastic, the dialogue is frequently excellent, and the writers get to play around with a 90-minute thriller format rather than a typical 40-minute episodic crime TV structure. On the more negative side, two of the six current episodes are kinda bad (or straight-up offensive), and the rest of the good episodes are sprinkled with moments of Steven Moffat's trademarked sexism, which I find offputing. Two years of watching Steven Moffat's increasingly awful Doctor Who had made me somewhat trepidatious about the new Sherlock, so I was happy to discover that The Empty Hearse is, in fact, brilliant.

The best thing about this episode was its lack of predictability. Obviously there's always going to be a certain amount of Chekhov's Gun with Sherlock, but as ever, most of the the crime storyline was ridiculous enough to be unguessable -- which has always been the strength of Sherlock Holmes mysteries, really. Also, the story deviated A LOT from its supposed inspiration The Empty House, particularly when it came to the way the main characters and relationships developed in Sherlock's absence.

Anderson is the biggest surprise, switching over from being an avowed Sherlock hater to being his biggest fan. But in terms of sheer performance, Martin Freeman was my favourite because of JOHN WATSON: RAGE MACHINE. The whole basis for the John-Sherlock relationship in this adaptation is that John is attracted to Sherlock's bizarre personality and lifestyle, and Sherlock recognises that John is nowhere near as normal as he appears to be. This means that John is always at his most interesting when he's acting outside of his "normal guy" persona, ie being stupidly brave or incandescently angry, or just abandoning societal convention altogether. John Watson being exasperated at Sherlock's ~antics is entertaining enough in small doses, but it's not anything we haven't seen before in a million other odd-couple buddy cop TV shows. As in any Holmes adaptation, the more Watson is allowed to shine, the better the story is as a whole.
Criticisms

I'll be interested to see what the fan response is to this episode. Watching it in such an isolated environment was weird because all of my opinions were formed in a vacuum, rather than being influenced by the reactions of other fans. It's entirely possible that I'll rewatch the episode when it airs tonight, and realise that this review is 100% wrong. But from my experience at the preview screening, I LOVED IT... with a few inevitable caveats. First of all, I think a lot of fans are going to be annoyed by the Molly's character arc. The Empty Hearse avoided many of the weirdly misogynist quirks of some previous episodes, and Molly's personal journey seemed awesome -- right up until the last moment, when she turned back into a punchline, unknowingly dating some Sherlock lookalike because she's in denial about still being in love with him. Personally, I didn't find this very annoying because I thought Molly was otherwise given a great role in the episode, but I can foresee other people being pissed about it.

Another thing that will look bad when framed against the flaws of previous seasons is just how white this episode is. There is no racial diversity in the main cast, to the extent that the only central character of colour from earlier episodes (Sally Donovan) is completely absent, while her white male counterpart (Anderson) was given a far more significant role. This episode was free of the racist undertones of The Blind Banker, but that may have been because they just sort of... whitewashed the whole thing, removing that "problem" entirely. I found this particularly noticeable because I've been watching Elementary recently, a Sherlock Holmes adaptation that features a realistically diverse cast for a show set in a major city like London or New York


Fandom

I wrote a non-spoilery article about Sherlock's relationship with fandom a couple of weeks ago, but IMO there are thousands more words to write about the way this show interacts with fan culture within the narrative itself. The big thing is the in-universe fanclub, including the obligatory slash fangirl -- who was, thank god, not the mocking portrayal she might have been. You guys may disagree, but I thought her little cameo was pretty entertaining, and didn't really deride slash fangirls in the way Supernatural has done in the past. Anderson was the one who ended up at the butt of the jokes, and while I don't have any real investment in his character, I think the decision for him to turn into this guilt-fuelled Sherlock fanboy was an interesting and entertaining character choice. 

Although I don't think Anderson's new character arc is "bad" or in any way detrimental to the story, I personally find Sally to be a far more interesting character. Hopefully she'll return in later episodes. Anderson's progression makes sense for his character, but it's essentially just another example of an ~unappealing and abrasive man being given more screentime and eventually "proven right," which is something we've already seen with Sherlock, Mycroft and Moriarty in this show. Anderson is the flip side of this, a pathetic loser who we're not really meant to find likeable on a personal level, but I still found his new role to be needlessly indulgent.

Because we're on Sherlock's side, Anderson and Donovan seem like antagonists in the first two seasons. But their role is actually far more neutral in the sense that they are the "good guys" but view Sherlock's antics from a more realistic standpoint, ie that he's always barging onto crime scenes and causing chaos while they're trying to do their jobs. Also, the reasons for Donovan's dislike of Sherlock were always far more sympathetic than Anderson's. Sherlock purposefully antagonises both of them, but Anderson came across as a jealous, bitter idiot, while Sally Donovan was characterised as a good detective who just happens to dislike Sherlock... which was understandable, considering the fact that he treated her like shit, undermined her authority at work, and is kind of a misogynist.

Don't get me wrong, I really DID find Anderson's character journey to be truthful and entertaining in this episode, but it just felt like he was being rewarded for bad behaviour or something. In the first two seasons, Anderson and Sally are the voices of doubt and realism, countering Sherlock's over-confident bravado and egotism. It would've been equally easy to use Sally in Anderson's role instead, with a few tweaks to the way she reacted to the revelation that she'd been wrong about Sherlock. They couldn't have given her precisely the same role as Anderson, but maybe something a little more Hermione Grangerish -- using her detective skills to try and track Sherlock across Europe in person, for example. Or spearheading the campaign to clear his name with the newspapers who slandered him in the first place. 

Sherlock fandom exists within the show, both in that Sherlock himself has fans and followers, and in the more meta sense that in one or two scenes, real-life fans snuck into the background of certain shots while they were hanging around the set. At the cast and crew Q&A after the screening, the episode's director said that the scenes filmed in the Underground were the worst, because you can only bring a skeleton crew into the Underground, and it's impossible to shut off a big enough area to film without catching some passers-by in the background. So it was impossible to avoid filming a few background Sherlock fans by accident.
I find it pretty funny that despite all of the noisy protestations to avoid spoilers for how Sherlock managed to fake his death, it's actually very difficult to spoil. The writers may have included a bunch of different ~clues in The Reichenbach Fall, but they had two years after that to read the multitude of fan theories, and Gatiss made it very clear that he was influenced by fandom when he was writing The Empty Hearse. Which you can kind of tell just by watching it, TBH. The fake flashback scenes are a nod to how much the audience has been thinking about this for the past two years, and it's no coincidence that they were mostly told from the perspective of Anderson/a fan. My favourite was the first one though, because a friend had "spoiled" me for the whole hypnotism thing. I had such low expectations that I could almost believe that Moffat and Gatiss would explain Sherlock's return using a bungee cord, a fake Cumberbatch mask, a grab-and-kiss makeout scene between Sherlock and Molly (Steven Moffat thinks these are HILARIOUS and has included like five in the last season of Doctor Who alone), and Derren Brown. Luckily this was not the case, but I was probably the ideal audience for that opening scene because I totally bought it.

(There's also the fact that the final, "real" explanation for Sherlock's survival is not remotely reliable, so we may never know the true answer. Some people will probably think this is a cop out, but I don't really mind. He's alive; we always knew he'd be alive; who gives a shit.)

Mary

In the original Holmes stories, Mary is little more than an afterthought. I didn't have huge amounts of optimism for her role in Sherlock, partly because of Moffat's bizarre interpretation of Irene Adler last season. In fact, I'm kind of surprised they even bothered to include Mary in the first place. Luckily, Amanda Abbington was pretty charming in the role, and her relationship with Sherlock is slap in the face to every idiot who thinks that female love-interests automatically ruin the beauty of a male/male buddy-cop dynamic. Given the bare bones of Mary's role in this episode, she could very easily have been annoying and OTT, but I think Amanda Abbington sold it because she's just so good at those catty sideways glances. Also, she looks like a normal human middle-aged woman, which: thank god.

Miscellaneous

• The montage of Watson's shitty GP's surgery patients: hilarious.
• All the moustache jokes: also hilarious.
• COSTUMES. Loved all of Mary's vintage fashion. Ditto Molly's knitwear, even though I have a sneaking suspicion they were trying to ~dress her like a cat lady~ or something.
• I actually could not watch while Sherlock was doing that whole routine with the false moustache in the restaurant. NOOOO.
• Mycroft: obviously as splendid as ever, but this new development of him having actual emotional vulnerability and insecurity was icing on the cake. Mycroft fanfic people are gonna go bananas.
• WALLPAPER, LOL. Back when this blog was only a couple of months old, I wrote about the wallpaper in season 2. AND IT'S BACK, AND BETTER THAN EVER BEFORE. The set designers always bring A++ wallpaper game to this show. Very impressive.
• The budget was clearly higher, and it showed. But unlike plenty of TV shows that get popular and end up rolling in money, the expense actually seemed worth it. It was showy, but not pointlessly showy. They're using the money in the right places.
• Lestrade: still a silver fox. Obviously.
• Some of the sped-up visuals and codes scrolling across the screen were kind of ridiculous-looking. Reminiscent of a 1990s TV documentary or something. But whatevs. Not really important, since the vast majority of the episode looked beautiful.
• Sherlock himself had basically zero character development, but OH BOY, WAS HE MESMERISING. The last thing I saw Cumberbatch do was the godawful Fifth Estate, so this was a real relief.

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Big Bang Press: Only a few hours left to pre-order books on Kickstarter!!

Sorry I've been kind of absent for the past few weeks -- I've been busy running the Kickstarter for Big Bang Press, a crowdfunding campaign to publish three awesome original novels by fanfic authors. We're mostly doing this through pre-sales, so basically backers just pre-order a book, and that pays for us to do all the publishing and publicity stuff! You can learn more about BBP on our Kickstarter page or website, but here's the lowdown on the three books themselves. Click on the titles for more info, and to read excerpts from each book.

Savage Creatures by Natalie Wilkinson (febricant), is a dark, twisted urban fantasy story taking place in a version of Europe not too far from our own. Shapeshifter Francis Harding is forced to hire a decidedly disreputable investigator to help track down his missing sister. Described by the author as “a book about terrible people being terrible to each other,” Savage Creatures is a grippingly weird psychological thriller.

Juniper Lane by Kady Morrison (gyzym), is a lyrical and clever literary fiction romance about two young women navigating life in suburban hell. In the words of our Editor-in-Chief, Morgan Leigh Davies, “Basically, this book is Jonathan Franzen if Jonathan Franzen were a queer woman with a heart and a sense of humor that hadn’t been corroded by decades of profound misery and bitterness about the world.”

A Hero at the End of the World by Erin Claiborne (eleveninches), is a hilarious satire on “chosen one” narratives in Young Adult fantasy fiction. You know the drill: a teen boy is prophecied to defeat the Dark Lord and save the world. The only problem is: he doesn’t. After a lifetime of being told he’s the Chosen One, Ewan Mao chickens out at the last minute, and his best friend Oliver ends up killing the Dark Lord instead. Five years later, Oliver is a celebrity while Ewan works in a coffee shop and still lives with his parents. That is, until a magical cult tracks Ewan down and offers him an intriguing way to earn back his hero status.

All three novels are by talented fanfic authors who want to make the leap into original fiction publishing, without abandoning their fandom roots. The cover art will be drawn by three fanartists: hydrae (A Hero at the End of the World), quaedam (Juniper Lane) and longerrpigs (Savage Creatures), along with extra interior illustrations as per our $45,000 stretch goal, which we've already reached! If we manage to hit $50,000 before the Kickstarter closes, we'll include signed bookplates in every physical book, as an exclusive upgrade for everyone who supported us on Kickstarter. :D

Why you should back Big Bang Press on Kickstarter
With just a few hours left before the end of our KS campaign, we’ve raised enough money from pre-orders to get all three books published and pay for extra interior illustrations. However! Pledging on Kickstarter isn’t just about funding these books. Every single reward level, from $1 to our top reward at $1000+, offers exclusive content that will NEVER be available to ordinary readers who buy the books in stores later on. Our most popular rewards include:

• Behind-the-scenes commentary packs with exclusive story content from the authors, character sheets for each book, sketches from the illustrators, and letters from the publishing team.
• Personalised postcard updates from the authors.
• Up to 10,000 words of extra writing (ie, a short story) from each of the authors.
• Art prints.
• A MYSTERY BOX containing personal gifts from every individual at BBP.

And that’s just a handful of the rewards we’re offering! To learn more, check out our Kickstarter page. Over 1000 people have backed BBP so far, with the most popular reward being $25: all three ebooks, plus exclusive backer updates. We’ve seen a lot of support from the fandom community so far (our books have already inspired fanart!), along with some pretty flattering media attention from blogs and news sites like io9, HelloGiggles and Book Business magazine.

The Kickstarter campaign ends at 1.43am EST, Sunday Dec. 22. That means there’s still time to become a backer! And even if you can’t afford anything right now, you can still support these books by sharing links on social media and reblogging this post on Tumblr to spread the word.

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Agents of SHIELD: It's actually good now!?

Previously on Agents of SHIELD.

Since there's no episode of Agents of SHIELD this week, I thought now would be to catch up with my reviews. Sorry I haven't posted in a while! I've been busy launching a publishing press that prints and publicises original novels by talented fanfic authors. You should check us out! There are book excerpts on our website (young adult satire! queer romance lit! urban fantasy noir!), alongside cover art and info about why a project like this is such a good idea for people in fandom.

If you don't watch AoS, or if you (understandably) lost interest after a few episodes, then you really need to reevaluate your decision because this show has improved A LOT. I have no idea what happened between episodes 5 and 6, but if you read any of my earlier reviews, you'll know that I was very critical of the first half of the season. Now I'm wondering just what the hell was going on, because a switch flipped during episode 6 and the show has been steadily improving ever since. Here's my rundown of the season so far:

• Episode 1: Entertaining, for a pilot episode (and I usually hate pilots).
• Episodes 2-5: Increasingly frustrating, both in terms of general quality (dialogue, characterisation, episodic storylines, etc) and as a sci-fi/genre show. Almost no worldbuilding, character development, or emotionally compelling scenes. There is no way I would've kept watching, if not for Clark Gregg + the Marvel connection.
• Episode 6: Suddenly?? Actual emotions are happening?? Agent Ward almost does something interesting enough for me to stop hoping he'll drop dead, and FitzSimmons are brilliant.
• Episode 7: Super fun. Simmons and Skye get to be hilarious together. SHIELD Agent Victoria Hand is introduced, and I greatly enjoy the fact that she is much taller than Coulson. We FINALLY get two of the main things I was hoping for: a real look at SHIELD's unethical behaviour as a quasi-governmental organisation, and some details of the inner workings of SHIELD HQ.
• Episode 8: Directed by Jonathan Frakes (!?) AKA Commander Riker from Star Trek: TNG, and director of two Star Trek movies. Real, solid links to the Marvel movie universe, played out in an interesting and reasonably unpredictable way. Ward and May hook up, to my utter astonishment. More on that later.

Which brings us to the most recent episode, "Repairs," a ghost story that finally makes good on the expectations I had for Agents of SHIELD in the first place. I'm actually quite stunned by how quickly this show transformed from being almost unwatchable (unless you're a seriously involved Marvel fan or a small child) to being smart and entertaining. And that's down to a sudden change in not just one, but multiple aspects of the show.

Team Building
Even though Joss Whedon is only distantly attached to AoS, it was definitely marketed as a Whedonverse show. As a result, people had certain expectations. Whedonverse shows have snappy dialogue and a smart balance between geeky humour and depth of emotion, but most importantly, they always focus on groups of misfits coming together to form an extraordinary team or family. On a superficial level, the first episode of Agents of SHIELD really did look like it was heading in this direction. Coulson brought together the team like Ocean's Eleven, there was an interesting mix of personality types, and everyone was just as photogenic as your average Whedon show.

However, for the next four episodes they stalled out. Either the team relationships didn't develop at all, or the characters were put in scenarios where they acted like they'd known each other for months, even when we'd seen little to no believable bonding onscreen. They were stuck in limbo between "too close" and "too distant," with few human touches no social middle-ground. With the exception of May and Coulson, most of the team interactions for the first five episodes felt oddly false, so I was surprised by the number of people I saw posting on the Tumblr tag about how much they loved the relationships in AoS. That is, until I realised that most of those fans were either a) very young, or b) not really talking about canon.

We all love found-family stories, and we're so used to reading fanfic or watching TV shows about snarkily affectionate teams that sometimes, we end up extrapolating that dynamic onto relationships that haven't yet been formed in canon. Two recent examples are Teen Wolf and The Avengers. A lot of Teen Wolf fanfic has the main cast of characters acting like a wolf pack full of affectionate, familial relationships, whereas the canonical characters are all split into antagonistic factions who only grudgingly trust each other for short periods of time. The Avengers is slightly different because in many of the comic books, they are really close as a team. But at the time of the 2012 movie, the team are all essentially strangers to each other, and are yet to move in together at Stark Tower. As a result, there was always a pretty big gap between the Avengers team I wanted, and the one that actually existed in "reality".
Obviously I have zero problem with this happening in fanfic because, you know, that's the whole point of fanfic. I just find it kind of baffling to see people reinterpreting canon to fit in with those ideas, but IDK, each to their own. The result with AoS was that until the last handful of episodes, there was a significant divide between the "real" character relationships, and the alternate versions that existed e inside many people's minds. (An imaginary show that I personally would've preferred to be watching, because it sounded way better than the one onscreen.) Luckily, after nine episodes we've finally reached that point in canon. The team now have a believably casual rapport, and they've been through enough perilous situations together that they've had a chance to bond in a realistic way.

Unpredictability

I never had high expectations of AoS being a world-class thriller or boasting the same quality of dramatic writing as, say, Battlestar Galactica or The Good Wife. Still, the first five episodes were so predictable as to be actively frustrating, and that's despite the fact that I personally enjoy this sort of combination between sci-fi and heist caper story elements. The most frustrating episode was "The Girl in the Flower Dress," which focused on a storyline so ancient and stupidly sexist that it seemed like the kind of thing most Whedonverse shows are parodying in the first place. A 30-year-old "girl" acting as a honey trap to seduce an innocent everyman into a life of crime, only for him to be shot down by the Good Guys while she escapes to be sexy and evil another day. In a general sense I'm actually quite interested to see how the Project Centipede story arc pans out, but this was not a good way to introduce it. ("The Girl in the Flower Dress" was one of the only two episodes that was both written and directed exclusively by men, BTW.)
"F.Z.Z.T." (1x06) won me over because it convinced me that they might actually kill off Simmons. Because Fitz and Simmons are the only characters with a pre-existing relationship, they were the ideal choice for the first majorly dangerous scenario of the season. When this episode aired, I remember a friend and I basically being like, "Holy shit, I can't believe this crappy show actually made me tear up." The alien virus was a Chekov's Gun that had to endanger someone by the end of the episode, but the way the story unfolded was satisfyingly unpredictable and emotionally engaging.
My favourite recent development is the May/Ward fuckbuddy relationship, which pleases me on many, many different levels. First of all there's the fact that it makes sense. Neither of them has the time (or the inclination, I suspect) for a serious romantic relationship at the moment, which was one of the reasons why I was dreading the possibility of a Skye/Ward romance. Luckily, the May/Ward thing seriously limits the likelihood of Skye/Ward EVER happening, which frees up Skye to take on a role I've been hoping for from the start: the "kid" of the team, with Coulson as her surrogate dad. I really enjoyed the scene where Skye says that May needs to get laid, and Ward is just like, "..." Sometimes, Skye can be SUCH a tween.

AoS has a surprisingly great attitude toward casual sex, particularly when you remember that the first half of the season felt like a kids' show. May and Ward have an unspoken bond because they're a pair of trained killers in a team of relatively naiive young "civilian" agents, and because they went through the same experience with the Asgardian staff in episode 8. But it's not a romantic bond, and their interactions are never filmed in a ~sexy way, unlike with Skye and her hacker boyfriend, where it made more sense. Finally, it's nice to see such a mature and in-character depiction of a older woman/younger man dynamic. Good luck finding a TV relationship like this where it isn't either played for laughs and/or cougar-related drama, or accompanied by a ton of gratuitous sex scenes.

It took me a long time to warm to Ward because TV is already riddled with good-looking, angsty white male heroes. He's just so unbearably generic. The revelation that he'd had a ~bad childhood~ was the nail in the coffin for me, because it's Hollywood's go-to excuse for the shitty behaviour of every angsty white male action hero of the past bazillion years. It got to the point where I was actively annoyed whenever he came onscreen, because it felt like he was taking up a space that could've been given to a far more interesting type of character. He seemed like a typical example of that thing where family-friendly shows create a flippant, "safe" depiction of a character who, in reality, should be complex and horrifying and not particularly likeable. Ward is a trained killer who works for a morally ambiguous organisation, outside the civilian legal system. The show was treating him like he was a repressed-but-charming jock.

Links to Marvel movie canon

Marvel movieverse stuff in AoS was always going to be an optional extra, rather than a major component of the show. I understand that it's tricky to include many details without messing with canon that's being written by someone else, not to mention the legal issues involved with including anything from the comics. Still, I was hoping that AoS would at least give us a taste of how everyday people are reacting to the superheroic and/or alien additions to their world. Too bad there was probably more of that in the actual Avengers movie than in episodes 2-5 of this show.
I doubt you'll be surprised to learn that I loved the Thor: The Dark World episode. The Asgardian cult were relatively believable (given, you know, the ridiculous subject-matter), and the actual Asgardian guy was hilarious. Not only was he the polar opposite of warrior characters like Thor and Sif, but they added this brilliant detail of him just being this... gross old sex-pest professor who creepily hits on younger women all the time. I really hope he comes back at some point. And I'll be interested to see if Ward's anger issues end up being a recurring thing, because they're definitely the most interesting thing that's happened with him so far. The scene where shirtless Ward freaked out at Skye and FitzSimmons was especially good, because you could really feel the combination of masculine rage-panic (Ward) and fear (everyone else) in the enclosed space of the lab.

In future episodes, I'm hoping to see more of the outside world, and the way normal civilians are experiencing the supernatural (or at least, pseudo-scientifically supernatural) events of the Avengers franchise. I could do with more ~superhero fans~ for example, although the villagers-with-pitchforks scenario of episode 9 was great as well.

Miscellaneous

• This didn't really fit into any of my categories, but I SUPER LOVE Melinda May now. LOVE HER. Also, her interactions with Coulson are hilarious. He just... talks and talks. And talks. While she stands there and twitches like 0.5 of her facial muscles in long-suffering bemusement. They have such great chemistry.
• I got WAY too into the "Did I fall asleep?"/"For a little while," exchange in Coulson's dream sequence last week. Realistically I know ths was just a bit of fan-pandering rather than a hint of a serious link to Dollhouse, but I loved it anyway. Whenever someone on TV asks, "Did I fall asleep?" I always expect the answer to be "For a little while," so it was gratifying to see it actually happen, for once.
• Not to be a raving misandrist or anything, but I note that episodes 7-9, the best so far, were all written or co-written by women, and the upcoming 10th episode is written and directed by women. Good. Very good.
• Actually, I'd recommend taking a look at the Wikipedia list of writers and directors on this show, it's a really interesting selection. Obviously most of them have worked on vaguely similar shows (Torchwood, X-Files, Whedonverse, etc.) but did you know episode 4 was directed by B'Elanna Torres from Star Trek: Voyager??
• I can't tell if Skye's dobule-agent hacker status has been resolved yet. I guess maybe they're saving something for the finale?
• Did I mention how much I loved "Repairs"? Some of the scenes in that episode were seriously creepy. I wonder if Tobias the Stalker Ghost was ending up in Svartalfheim, or what?
• I think I already said this in one of my reviews, but I'd really appreciate a scene where we see one of the female characters fixing their hair and makeup. May and Skye both wear at least two shades of eyeshadow at all times, and Skye's hair looks incredibly high-maintenance. It would be refreshing to see a show like this acknowledge the work that goes into looking that good, instead of tacitly implying that women find it incredibly easy to look perpetually gorgeous while hacking into the Pentagon or flying a spy plane or whatever.
• Next week's episode involves Mike Peterson (J. August Richards' character in the pilot episode) in some kind of black leather superhero jumpsuit. You're welcome.

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Thor: The Dark World, Part 2: Female characters & representation.

Previously: Part 1, Heroes & Villains.

I was extremely careful not to read any spoilers before I saw this movie, which is just as well because it's VERY spoilery. The one thing I did see beforehand was part of a review that said Jane's role was mostly to "faint on cue", which made me rather apprehensive. There's probably going to be a lot of debate over this among fans, but I personally thought the depiction of women in Thor: TDW was very good. If Jane had been the only female character, I wouldn't have been pleased by the fact that she fainted a lot, but there are four women in this movie (one more than in The Avengers, which had a far larger ensemble cast), and each of them has an important role in their own right. On the simplest level, this is how representation works: the more women you have in your movie, the more leeway you have to let one of them be "weak" -- whatever that means.
Jane's characterisation is very solid thanks to the first movie, and I appreciate the number of publicity interviews Natalie Portman has done where she talks about strength of character vs. the concept of "strong female characters". Sif is a warrior. Frigga is an witch and a diplomat and a mother, who can fight if she has to. Jane is brave and curious and smart, but she's not a fighter. Darcy is independent and fun and "normal". All four of those characters are "emotional", but not in a way that's coded to make them seem hysterical/weepy/stupid, which is often how some people interpret "emotional" female characters. A female character who faints a lot sets off alarm bells because we associate it with swooning damsels in distress, but a female character who has no weaknesses is a more insidious problem. I suppose they probably could've done better than Jane being Maguffinised for half the movie, but I think it worked in the context of her being the mortal girlfriend of a near-indestructable alien, which I can only assume will be the primary conflict in the Thor/Jane romance storyline in any potential sequels.

Regarding Frigga, I am SO GLAD she got a more significant role, a role that really solidifies Asgard as a patriarchal society. A patriarchal society where leadership is determined by genetics, hence Odin's desire for Thor to start looking for a ~suitable~ wife rather than the sub-standard "goat", Jane. (Thank god there wasn't a real Jane/Thor/Sif love triangle, by the way. I LOVE SIF, and a love triangle would've been a complete fiasco.) I could've done with more Frigga/Loki scenes, but overall I thought she was a really satisfying depiction of a classic "woman behind the throne" character: someone who gains power within traditional femininity, whereas Sif is the warrior who fights to be part of the boys' club. Also, Frigga's death was a rare example of a mother/wife character being killed off, but not "fridged".
We were discussing this in the most recent episode of the Fandomspotting radio show/podcast, and everyone agreed that while we don't actually want Frigga to be dead, her death scene (and subsequent funeral) was satisfying, and definitely not an example of the "fridged female character" trope. Her funeral was one of the most beautiful scenes in the movie, and Thor and Loki's reactions to her death were engaging and complex. The difference between your average "MY WIFE IS DEAD!!" action movie and Thor: TDW is that with Thor and Loki, their reactions take into account their own personalities and relationship with Frigga, and her death wasn't immediately sidelined: it was brought into the foreground with this epic, Lord of the Rings-esque funeral. It was similar to Coulson's role in The Avengers, where a character's death is used as a catalyst to bring the heroes together against a common goal, but that dead character is developed beforehand rather than being two-dimensional or exploitative.
It's not a huge shock for a Marvel movie to be overwhelmingly white, even though Thor took a couple of baby-steps forward by casting Idris Elba as Heimdall. Still, I felt that this movie was actually a lot whiter than the first one, which is something that I don't even always pick up on unless it's pretty obvious. The thing that put me on edge in the first place was the absence of Hogun. He's introduced early on, but aside from his scene on Vanaheim he's basically benched for the rest of the movie. I originally assumed this was due to one of two reasons: either the actor was only available to film limited scenes (ie, only on the Vanaheim set), or he filmed more Vaneheim scenes that were cut from the final edit. Unfortunately, the director has recently stated that Hogun was written out for basically no good reason, which I find very disappointing.
The plan was apparently give each of the Warriors Three some "individual" moments, and for one to travel to his home world to thematically mirror Thor's decision to move to Earth at the end of the movie. But I guess they chose the Japanese guy to be an outsider who comes from a world that looks like a Mongolain grassland, because... of reasons...? This just does not come across as a good choice at all. I'm not sure if he actually gets much less screentime than, for example, Fandral. But Hogun's role in this movie functionally removes him from the central action, and characterises him as an outsider while Fandral and Volstagg hang out with Thor and Sif in Asgard. I can sort of understand wanting to bench one of the Warriors Three on another planet because there are too many characters in the story, or because they wanted to introduce one of the other Nine Realms. But since both Volstagg and Fandral are comic relief characters, and Hogun is one of the few non-white people in the movie, it was a bad decision to leave Hogun behind.

The eventual result is that of the three significant people of colour in Thor: TDW, Idris Elba gets an awesome role while Hogun vanishes offscreen and Christopher Ecclestone's elf husband puts on a mask on and turns into a giant beast-monster for the last two thirds of the movie. Collectively, this doesn't look great -- particularly when coupled with the addition of two extra white dude characters in the form of Richard (Jane's date, who I really enjoyed), and Ian the Intern. I don't have anything against Ian as a character, but his main purpose was to provide Darcy with someone to talk to, making him a perfect example of when casting just defaults to a generic-looking white man for no good reason. This kind of thing is particularly frustrating because in an ensemble movie like this, it shouldn't be hard to cast a more diverse range of side-characters, even when you're carrying over a predominantly white cast from the first movie. It came across as lazy writing and casting, and soured my opinion of a movie that I otherwise loved and found very entertaining.
Out of all the Marvel movies, Thor and Thor: TWD are the best at illustrating complex emotional themes and depicting interesting, human characters outside of the central superhero/love-interest duo. So it's all the more noticeable when they fail at racial diversity. Right now, my goal for Thor 3 is for it to be an Asgard/Nine Realms buddy movie, where Jane and Darcy get to come to Asgard. Thor, Hogun, Sif and Fandral go on adventures, while Volstagg stays home to cook and take care of the kids. Loki is partially redeemed, culminating in a Thor/Loki hug where at least one of them cries, and there's a subtle undercurrent of Sif/Loki romantic subtext throughout the movie. Also, someone makes an STD joke about Fandral, preferably Hogun. Ian disappears without trace. Perfect.

To be continued in Part 3...

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Thor: The Dark World, Part 1: Heroes and Villains.

SPOILER WARNING: There are spoilers for Thor: The Dark World throughout this post!

I recommend watching this movie back-to-back with Thor, as it really emphasises the way the two stories shift from personal character journey to sweeping epic. I watch A LOT of superhero movies, but this was probably the best graduation from origin story to sequel that I've seen so far. Thor is purposefully the reverse of your typical superhero character arc because instead of struggling with superpowers and learning how to become a hero, he's learning how to be a fallible human and not have superpowers. Even the obligatory daddy issues are far more interesting than usual, because Odin is an actual character rather than a long-dead ghost or an avatar of lofty paternal expectations.
Thor's unusually well-drawn characterisation means that there's a solid base on which to make The Dark World a sci-fi/fantasy epic with an ensemble cast, instead of just another superhero movie where the central character hits Bad Guys until they give up. I was also pleasantly surprised by how complex it was -- not that I'm suggesting it's a particularly deep and meaningful cinematic work, but more that it was one of the most unpredictable (and rewatchable) superhero movies I've seen so far. If you look at the Thor-Loki arc over the course of their three movies together, Thor is about Loki running rings around everyone because they're all straight-shooting warrior types. The Avengers is about Loki finally meeting his match, in the form of Black Widow (intellectually) and the Avengers themselves (because Friendship and Teamwork triumph over Evil, obviously). Finally we reach Thor: TDW, in which Thor has learned from his mistakes and manages to fool Loki himself.
I don't need to tell you what a gift Loki is as a character, but he's also a solid argument against the concept of disposable villains. The only comparable relationship is Charles Xavier and Magneto, but you don't really see them change to accommodate one another (partly thanks to the current chronology of the X-Men series), whereas you really see Thor getting smarter and more canny over the course of his three appearances so far. Not that he's smart enough, of course. Loki's triple bluff is a thing of beauty. But I loved the way the movie briefly turned into a heist story halfway through, with Thor and the Warriors Three orchestrating their elaborate escape plan.

Unless you've got Lex Luthor in your movie, villains are always the weak spot of the superhero genre. Villains, and the inevitable final battle sequence. (I'm looking at you, Iron Man, Captain America, every Spider-Man movie, and the final 14 hours of Man of Steel.) Luckily, this series has Loki, one of the most satisfying antagonists in recent blockbuster history. Any additional villains are basically window dressing by comparison, which is just as well because the clunkiest aspect of TDW was definitely Malekith, the Aether, and their attendant exposition scenes. Poor Christopher Eccleston. I don't have any particular problem with MacGuffins in general (after all, the entirety of Lord of the Rings is founded on a MacGuffin), but I suspect this movie may have suffered from cutting out some excess Malekith scenes along the way. He just wasn't very engaging. But even though Malekith was little more than a force for mindless destruction, that whole problem was obliterated by the presence of Loki and Odin.
In Thor, Odin was a pretty terrible father, but in a way that wasn't explicitly pointed out to the audience. Fans on Tumblr are definitely aware that Odin is a dick ("One day... one of you will be King, my sons." The Hunger Games of parenting!) but I'm reasonably sure that most average viewers just wrote him off as Anthony-Hopkins-as-Zeus. So I'm very happy that this time round, it was obvious that he's not a good guy at all, and not necessarily even a good king. Thor has matured beyond him, and thus Odin has become a kind of benevolent antagonist. In this context, having Malekith as a kind of ticking time-bomb in the background actually simplified the film and brought the interesting stuff (ie, Loki) into the foreground.

I'm quite surprised by this film's mixed reviews, because I felt that Malekith and the Aether was really its only major weakness. Looking at Rotten Tomatoes, a lot of the negative reviews seem to be thanks to superhero fatigue, which is fair enough because your average professional film critic is not as excited about Marvel movies as I am. However, not only did this movie mostly abandon the typical superhero formula, but it included something that's usually deemed far too complicated for the genre: multiple characters with conflicting yet believable motivations. Usually the most you can hope for is an ~ambiguous villain~ like Magneto, or Batman struggling with the moral dilemmas of vigilante justice. I find it baffling that last year's mediocre Spider-Man reboot received more positive reviews, when it followed the superhero formula to the letter, and was riddled with plot holes.
Another reason why rewatching Thor beforehand was so rewarding is that you get to see Loki's transformation in full. Thor's character development is, obviously, excellent, helped along by Chris Hemsworth being unfeasibly likeable in the role. But with Loki, the changes are beautifully drastic. In Thor, Tom Hiddleston is playful, childish, and overly emotional. He's an angry emo teenager who tries to burn down the school because nobody understands him. But since The Avengers, Loki has transformed into an exhausted, crazy-eyed murderer with papery skin. He's gone from being a doe-eyed sylph to a frazzle-haired angstbucket with a penchant for stabbing. It's beautiful. And, of course, he's an absolute scene-stealer. Ambiguous villainhood is all well and good, but Loki is endlessly entertaining because he's so goddamn hard to predict. You really do get the feeling that he's living from moment to moment, rather than following a carefully itemised Evil Overlord plan like most supervillains. I just wanna high-five Tom Hiddleston and the writers all the way through, both for creating such a fun character, and for developing such an interesting interpretation of Norse mythology.
By the end of the movie, it's equally easy to believe that as king, Loki could lead Asgard to ruin or restore it to its greatest triumphs. If they go the mythological route then the only way this can end is with Loki's destruction. But from a personal perspective, I think most of us want to see him if not actually redeemed, then at least appearing in Marvel movies ad infinitum.

Continued in Part 2:  Female characters and representation.

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