Limerick Review: Arrow S3E16, The Offer

So, Ra's still wants Ollie as heir
And exploits those about whom he cares.
Ollie agrees
So he'll let them go free,
And so they escape from his lair.

Ollie's misdeeds through the season
Have, oddly enough, not been pleasin'.
So, though he was missed,
Everybody's still pissed,
And mostly for very good reason.

A new crimelord's after the prize
Who's sewn shut all but his eyes.
But the police cap
Still gives Ollie the rap
For not telling of his daughter's demise.

Ollie's jealousy is a farce
That Felicity finds hard to parse.
Folks shut out the voices
Of sensible choices,
And the flashbacks are still a right arse.

Disowned, Nissa thinks on a whim
To teach Laurel how to be grim.
While Ra's does his harm
To drive Arrow to his arms
By turning the city against him.

Limerick Review: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S2E11, Aftershocks

Last time was our heroes' close shave,
Underground in an alien cave,
Where old Whitehall died,
Tripp got petrified
And Skye caught the Terrigen wave.

Now, Skye has had a good restorer,
But poor Raina's come out the poorer.
She thought she'd be divine,
But the show seeks to mine
Inhumanity for body horror.

Coulson and Co. then enlist
Their pris'ner's unwilling assist,
So that each Hydra brother
Will turn on each other,
Which is really a nice little twist.

Jemma's concern is just that
Skye's condition will be a plague rat,
But we have the acumen
To know she's Inhuman,
And for comics fans, this is old hat.

The show takes a chance to reload,
But happ'ly declines to be slowed.
It's smooth as a harp,
The dialogue's sharp,
And it's just a first-rate episode.

Limerick Review: Arrow S3E15, Nanda Parbat

Team Arrow prepares for a blow
From a massively better-trained foe,
And the rest of the run
Is just everyone
Being told things we already know.

But Ra's' League is still in play,
And they really want someone to pay
For Sarah's demise,
So to no one's surprise,
The League just takes Merlyn away.

But Ollie, perhaps 'cause he's high,
Decides he can't let Merlyn die.
But through all the surprising-
-ly weak moralizing,
He won't give a good reason why.

Ray marches to the heroic drum,
And though his suit looks kind of dumb,
When we first see him try,
He manages to fly,
And Felicity finally gets some.

So Ollie and Diggle soon dare
To break right into the League's lair.
They soon lose their cover,
But, as we discover,
Ra's really wants Ollie as heir.

The ep sure is one snappy dresser,
But Ollie's dumb choice makes it lesser.
But it takes that hit,
'Cause I'll say this for it,
It's better than its predecessor.

Limerick Review: Agent Carter S1E8, Valediction

With theatre-goers en masse

Killed off before much time can pass,

The truth will soon out,

But Sousa the scout

Gets dosed with the angry gas.

Howard shows up, fashion'bly late,

To set the record vaguely straight,

And to prove he's an ace,

He helps out with the case,

And offers himself up as bait

But he falls into the baddies' snare,

And gets hypnotized at their lair.

Things start getting grim

As they hypnotize him

Into almost gassing Times Square.

But Peggy to action is spurred,

And the evil plot is deterred.

And she beats the toughs,

Not through fisticuffs,

But simply through well-applied words.

Throughout the tale we see conclude,

It kept us consistently glued.

And that had better please,

'Cause from the ending tease,

It looks like it's getting renewed.

Limerick Review: Arrow S3E14, The Return

Fearing execution for treason,
Ollie and Thea take a season
To train for a while,
So they go to the isle,
And have to train there for some reason.

To give Oliver back his drive,
Merlyn found Slade still alive,
Let him out for a thrill
To force Ollie to kill,
Which is interesting, if contrived.

But the rain of flashbacks is torrential,
And, as ever, inconsequential,
But as onward they plow,
They still manage somehow
To be more than usually tangential.

It's not like Oliver et al
Have that many plot points to corral,
So all this past action
Is just a distraction
From Slade's little Battle Royale.

There are big reveals to mull,
But of stuff we know, so it's null,
And somehow, in spite
Of flashed-back-to fights,
It just ends up terribly dull.

Limerick Review: Agent Carter S1E7, Snafu

Now, Peggy's got reason to frown,
As her own friends take her downtown,
They press and they press
To get her to confess.
But she ends up dressing them down.

Jarvis comes, a story to tell,
And to get Carter out of her cell,
He goes off-book
To get her off the hook,
But it only lasts for a spell.

They quickly find the real mole,
And try to suss out what he stole,
But that's blown asunder
When the chief falls under
The doctor's hypnotic control.

But the enemy's very precise,
And give our heroes the slip twice,
There's happy delusion,
And widespread confusion,
And one heroic sacrifice.

The villains have one last hurrah,
That Kingsman has made a bit blah,
And their final jest
Turns out to be to test
A gas bomb in a cinema.

As we start to wrap up every thread,
And the villains turn out to be Red,
To solve all our queries,
It seems that the series
At last is coming to a head.

Limerick Review: The Flash S1E14, Fallout

Now the nuclear man has blown,
The atomic gauntlet has been thrown.
And explosive events
Get the constituents
Back to bodies of their very own.

But this event proves too beguiling
For one man with milit'ry styling.
And this great dissension
Has drawn the attention
Of the villainous General Eiling.

Meanwhile, something has Barry graveled,
As one case starts to be unraveled,
And though it seems queer,
It quickly becomes clear
That Barry's already time-traveled.

Stein soon gets caught in the snare,
Though Wells betrayed him, to be fair.
But it's all for nought,
As the Flash takes his shot,
Beats Eiling, and rescues the pair.

The emotional beats get due deference,
Though action is this ep's clear preference.
We get the side case,
And somehow there's still space
For a slightly odd Game of Thrones reference.

SPOILERS

Comic book fans will be awed
At this episode's final nod,
As Wells in long johns
Tells Eiling to come on, And basically feeds him to Grodd.

Limerick Review: Arrow S3E13, Canaries

Since Oliver's team won't enlist her,
Laurel's mind's just one big twister,
Afflicted by lows
Where she has on-the-nose
Nightmares about her dead sister.

Then, Ollie and Malcolm consult
To bring Thea into the cult.
They open her eyes,
And to my surprise,
She takes the news like an adult.

But just as I sink into bliss,
Oliver takes time to reminisce
And so they unpack
Yet another flashback.
I had hoped we were well over this.

Before she again comes apart,
Laurel goes to see someone who's smart,
And who does she see
But Felicity!
So the girls have a nice heart-to-heart.

Laurel joins the fight and wins,
But meanwhile is dosed, for her sins,
With vertigo type b,
Which is just basically
The fear toxin from Batman Begins.

So Laurel makes the police blotter,
And finally starts to tread water,
And works up the nads
To confess to her dad
Just what happened to his other daughter.

I had feared that this ep would get caught
In all of the baggage it brought,
Though it can be erratic
And melodramatic,
It actually moves up the plot.

Limerick Review: Constantine S1E12, Angels and Ministers of Grace

It seems that the cosmic Il Duce
Long ago came upon the excuse
To send down a canny
Young angel named Manny
Who's always needlessly obtuse.

John, with his distaste for the gaudy,
Thinks this divine scheme's rather shoddy,
And he's so nonplussed
That he gets Manny trussed
Up inside an earthbound mortal body.

So John and the Angel move out
For some misadventures throughout,
And there's evil to thwart,
In the form of some sort
Of heroin monster about.

Turns out, a doc wants to get at
Those who turned down second chances flat,
A new iteration
Of Saw's motivation,
And it's just as bullshit as in that.

All that, and it turns out that Zed
Has a tumor clinging to her head,
But future damage incurred
Can just be deferred,
So the show kind of loses that thread.

The episode won't disappoint,
But the season arc's thrown out of joint.
While it's fine that the louts
All get fleshing out,
I wish we'd just get to the point.

Limerick Review: Agent Carter S1E6, A Sin To Err

Carter and Jarvis get the names
Of several suspected dames
Who might have stolen the spec
To a bunch of Starktech,
So they have to find Howard's old flames.

While Carter takes her time to think,
The S.S.R. search for a link.
And none of them knows
He's right under their nose
And it's the creepy Russian shrink.

Then, after a witness confessed,
And they match a birthmark she possessed,
They think Carter's the spy,
So it all goes awry,
And they place Peggy under arrest.

While the roommate B-plot is fun,
Peg spends most of her time on the run,
But, since at end-of-day
She's captured anyway,
There's not much achieved when it's done.

And yet, let it be understood,
The ep does no less than it should.
What it's really about
Is to leave us no doubt
That Carter is just that damn good.

Limerick Review: The Flash S1E13, The Nuclear Man

While Barry and co. look around
For where Firestorm's gone to ground,
Cisco and Joe
Review what they know
About where the Reverse-Flash is bound.

Now, Barry is set to begin
Dating Linda, to Iris' chagrin.
And though by no means
Are these the best scenes,
They're not as painful as they could have been.

But romance is placed under strain
As duty pulls back on the rein.
Firestorm comes to light,
And then he and Flash fight
For reasons the show won't explain.

The team find a fix to deter
Firestorm from going nuclear.
And we'll find out next week
If that small techno-tweak
Stops more damage than it might incur.

Overall, the ep deftly eludes
Soap-operaesque tantrums or moods.
People don't hurl insults,
They just act like adults,
And we'll see how that story concludes.

Limerick Review: Arrow S3E12, Uprising

Now, wrapping up all of Brick's feats,
We cling to the edge of our seats,
As our ragtag crew
And Malcom Merlyn, too,
Mass for a battle in the streets.

In this ep, Malcom's past is a factor.
He melts down like a nuclear reactor,
Rememb'ring how mommy
Was taken from Tommy,
Portrayed by a dreadful child actor.

Now I've said that flashbacks unfurlin'
Have done little but send me hurlin'
But it's clear as we breeze
Through Malcom's memories,
That we've just traded Ollie's for Merlyn's.

We see his wife's death was the kick,
And how he became such a dick,
Eventually brought
Back to the main plot
By a hasty retcon about Brick.

Oliver, once his injuries free him,
Returns to have the baddies flee him,
And while he's still no fun,
I must say, I for one
Never thought I'd be so glad to see him.

The dialogue tries to throw winks
As it runs through all these hijinks,
But it's mostly just staid,
Frequently cliched,
And never as smart as it thinks.

But the climax is done with such style,
And the last speech brings on such a smile,
How often it halts,
And whatever its faults,
The brawl makes the whole thing worthwhile.

Limerick Review: Agent Carter S1E5, The Iron Ceiling

Though by no means was this show flopping,

It needed one more tasty topping:

For what's a spy show,

I'd like dearly to know,

Without any proper globe-hopping?

Russia thinks that its chance of winning

Is improved by kids fighting and spinning,

So they built a camp

To train each deadly scamp,

And we see the Black Widow's beginning.

Our heroes to Russia embark

To get some tech stolen from Stark.

They run into trouble,

'midst rubles and rubble,

But ultimately find their mark.

Dear earnest Sousa, meanwhile,

Has been sifting through Peggy's file,

Her work on the sly

Makes him think she's a spy,

And he starts acting strangely hostile.

But the real Russian agent's at home,

In the building from which Peggy roamed,

She invades Carter's room

While our girl's in gloom

And picks through it with a fine-toothed comb.

Reprising roles from World War II,

The Howling Commandos come through,

And those who might wanna

See Neal McDonough

With mustache again will thank you.

There are clever touches, alright,

Like some backstory given in flight,

Or that the kid slaves

Are taught how to behave

By reciting out lines from Snow White.

With little enough to regret,

This might be the best episode yet.

And each devotee

Will return next to see

How she deals with a domestic threat.

Review: Arrow S3 E11, Midnight City

After an intriguing but somewhat underwhelming episode last week, the latest episode of Arrow tells a much larger and more compelling story, marred only by one nagging flaw that I will come to later.

The best stuff first. The overarching plot with Brick as the new villain had threatened to become like the Slade Wilson mega-arc last season, in which the villain takes an unreasonably and - ultimately - self-defeatingly long time to bring any of his plans to full fruition. Happily, in line with the aggressive persona of this new villain, his take-over-the-slums scheme is refreshingly straightforward, simple, and fast. He kidnaps three city officials and holds the area to ransom, essentially declaring his own fiefdom over The Glades district of the city. Done.

And in point of fact, he wins! With Oliver still gone, the city is left with his entourage to sort everything out in his absence, and their struggle to do so feels very real, very dangerous, and very suspenseful. As it turns out, struggle is much more engaging and relatable when not constantly interrupted by huskily whispered platitudes from a joyless mentor.

But we are by no means free of Oliver in the interim, and this is the nagging problem with the episode that I so crudely hinted at above. Not only are we intermittently assailed by more interminable flashbacks, which have always been the most bloody-mindedly tedious part of the show after the previously on... segments, but we also get a handful of scenes of Oliver recuperating in the present day. These scenes serve the dual purpose of bringing the story to a grinding halt every time they appear and reminding us of similar scenes in The Dark Knight Rises, another superhero tale that took an ill-advised break from building up tension to watch the hero recover from severe injuries sustained in the line of duty.

I am, however, being far too cruel. Midnight City is a very compelling episode that moves the season arc forward but still manages to tell an engaging story of its own in the meantime, which is as succinct a definition of a good TV episode as I can be bothered to think of. There is also a small but satisfying final twist that sets up more intrigue for the future, so well done there as well. It will be interesting to see if the next episode will be able to sustain this high.

Review: Batman #38

We are now four issues into the Endgame arc, and Scott Snyder continues to do a fantastic job. This review is going to be relatively short, since there is only so much I can say about the issue without giving the kind of spoilers that would defeat the whole purpose of a positive review. As with my review of the latest The Flash episode yesterday, I will add a spoilerific section at the bottom for the benefit of anyone who has read the issue and wants to talk about that.

Suffice it to say, there is some very clever stuff going on here. Almost too clever, as is more or less de rigeur for Scott Snyder Batman stories of late. As with its immediate predecessors, the issue occasionally risks getting bogged down in complex, plot-hole-filling explanations of why exactly we are going to the next place we are going to, or why precisely this chemical will have the effect that it does. I very much appreciate the research that must have gone into these passages, but it does sometimes threaten to bring the whole enterprise to a grinding halt.

That, however, is a minor quibble, and there is much to love about this latest issue of the arc. In fact, I think it is the best issue of the arc since its first one. That first issue, if you will recall, was terrific in the way that it brought the rest of the DC Universe crashing into the insular world of Batman in the most violent way possible, but all of the issues of the arc since have brought back the insularity to enhance the claustrophobia factor. Happily, Scott Snyder finds a way to expand the scope of his story without sacrificing the closed-in feel that has made the arc so scary so far. This will be discussed in more detail below in the spoiler section.

The issue also ends with what might be the best end-of-installment cliffhanger that Snyder has yet written for Batman. Even if I had no other reason to return, that ending would have me coming back for the next issue.

Spoilers--
The idea of tying the rest of the DCU to the story by giving an in-narrative explanation of the immortality of various unkillable characters is absolutely brilliant for the reasons cited above, and the idea that the Joker is one of those infected immortals ties back to the opening narration of the Death of the Family arc, where Batman has to talk himself into remembering that the Joker is a mere man after all. And that final page...Oh, wow, that final page. It conveys how desperate Batman is, suggests several possible ways forward for the installments to follow, and leaves enough mystery to make the reader want to come back. This is a callback done right, a cliffhanger done right, and an issue of a superhero comic done right. Full marks!

Review: The Flash, S1 E11, The Sound And The Fury

As previously mentioned, the character of The Flash has one of the best-remembered rogues galleries in comics, and one of the most prominent of those villains is Pied Piper, perhaps best remembered for coming out as gay in issue #53 of The Flash in 1991. It was an ahead-of-its-time move, and one that has made the character stand out even in the crowded field of Flash rogues ever since.

And now that we finally see the first appearance of the character on The Flash TV show, that element is nicely handled, neither glossed over nor allowed to define the character on its own. Rather, this version of the character - civilian name Hartley Rathaway - is given an Asbergers-ish, even Sherlockian quality. True to that idea, he seems to know more about everyone in the room than anyone in the room, and is just as deliberately abrasive as that might imply. Additionally, of course, his smugly-withheld knowledge of various character secrets allows the writers of the show to hint at mysteries yet to be unraveled for the viewers.

Unlike last week, this episode tries to be hyper-cerebral almost to a fault, with the dense jargon about sound waves being more than likely to confuse some viewers, particularly as the climax nears. Also unlike last week, this episode moves the season arc forward considerably, as the great cipher of the series, Dr. Harrison Wells, has a great many of his secrets stripped away with even more hinted to come. Of course, the greatest secret surrounding that character - his identity - remains a very deliberate mystery. I will discuss that briefly in a spoiler section at the end of the review.

Before that, we have just enough time for a few observations. First, the episode opens with Barry foiling a robbery by the Royal Flush Gang from the comics, although the card-face motorcycle helmets they wear are really the only aspect of their outfits that really identify them as such. Second, the subplot with Iris getting a job at a major newspaper may pay off later in the season, but in this episode it feels remarkably vestigial, really only serving to make the life-and-death elements seem markedly less urgent. Third and finally, the alternating cooperation and antagonism between the folks back at Star Labs keeps things interesting throughout the episode, and gives me to hope that their on-off resentment of Dr. Wells will force him to show his hand sooner rather than later.

In summary, this is an excellent episode of The Flash, both as fun and as full of vaguely obtuse intrigue as that would imply.

Spoiler-ish final notes--
The episode actually does some very clever things with Dr. Wells. The writers know that the biggest question with the character is his true identity, and so they drop multiple - and contradictory - hints as to the answer. This is why we have Barry sliding into what is almost a Wells impression during a conversation with Iris, seemingly lending credence to the theory that Wells is actually a future timeline version of Barry himself. Then we have Wells having to replenish his connection to the Speed Force - nice little comics shout-out there, incidentally - which suggests he might be someone else entirely. Then we have him addressing his house computer as Gideon, which some have interpreted as a reference to the DC Comics New Gods. This is all deliberate wrong-footing on varying scales of cleverness, and as such gives us no real hints. But boy is it fun to fruitlessly speculate! Until next week, friends!

Small Thoughts On The Collateral Damage of Superheroism

Returning to the subject of the conflicts examined in superhero flicks, there has been a fair amount of attention given to the insane levels of collateral damage inflicted by these battles. In The Avengers, for example, there’s a shot where we see a skyscraper begin to collapse and we never see nor hear of it again. That building collapse alone must have killed hundreds; the battle as a whole may have killed millions. Compare this to, say, Spider-Man 2 or even The Dark Knight, where there are definitely casualties, but each one is given agonizing attention and are relevant to the emotional or thematic drive of the film.

I realize this is largely just due to the inevitable scaling-up of the action sequences. A big climax requires big stakes, and establishing big stakes requires one hell of a lot of destruction. Nevertheless, what all of this serves to underline is that the concept of superheroes is inherently fascistic. That is, the idea of a breed of people who have extraordinary abilities thanks to an accident of birth is fascistic. Quite possibly unavoidable, since we already have some people born smarter or better-looking than others, but then parlaying those powers into unrestrained authority over those not fortunate enough to have been born with superpowers doesn’t really help the case for superheroes.

On Superheroes

I have heard a variety of arguments to the effect that this new crop of superhero movies are all the same. Obviously there are similarities in tone between, say, Spider-man and the X-men, or between Spider-man and Iron man, or between X-men and the Avengers, or between Thor and Green Lantern. There is undeniably some truth to this, and your toleration for those common elements is going to vary depending on how much you just like the genre. But it’s also dangerous to generalize - after all, there’s very little connecting “The Dark Knight” and “The Avengers” aside from some superficial similarities between Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark.

But a closer examination of even those two characters reveal that sure, they’re both billionaires, but their relationship with their respective moonlight roles reveals that equating the two is like saying the lead characters of Lincoln and There Will Be Blood are the same because they both have prominent facial hair and are played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Iron Man doesn’t have a dual identity - he is just Tony Stark, all the suit does is make him harder to punch when he annoys you.

Batman, on the other hand, is more complicated. I’ve already written a bit about this, but Bruce Wayne really no longer exists - he is an act designed to draw attention away from his vigilante activities by night. All that’s left of him is the specter called the Batman.

As for the tone of the Marvel movies, yeah...they do get a little samey after a while, but while the combination of spectacle, snark, and strong characterization isn’t exactly original anymore, it’s a formula that works and that produces pretty entertaining movies. Certainly I prefer it to, say, the MIchael Bay formula of massive spectacle with bugger all else going for it, or the Fantastic Four movie’s approach of awkwardly trying to be a more whimsical X-men without really understanding what makes the characters special in their own right. So yes, you have Iron Man 2 desperately trying to be Iron Man 1 and failing, but then you have Iron Man 3 trying to be Lethal Weapon and mostly succeeding.

That segues awkwardly but not illogically into something else I wanted to organize my thoughts on: super-hero methods. I think the preferences in any given time period in superhero storytelling as regards this feature will tend to reflect the dominant fears of the time. During periods of high street crime, I imagine you’ll be more likely to see heroes like Spider-Man and Batman taking down muggers and convenience store robbers. In times of war, you’ll be more likely to see heroes like Iron Man and Captain America taking on conflicts that threaten the globe. In times where we fear things like terrorism, like now, we’ll be more likely to see stories about heroes taking on large, cosmic, and largely unknowable evils, favoring heroes like Green Lantern and Thor. The Avengers movie managed to combine the second two.

However, there is one somewhat encouraging trend in these stories - increasingly, it’s less about a war on crime than it is about the hero taking on his or her own demons in the form of a specific enemy. That is, it’s more about examining the character than it is about about an uncomfortably fascistic power fantasy for paranoid shut-ins.