Testament: 1-10

Testament is a comic that is tailor made for me. Grant Morrison is quoted on the cover, and the book itself, a tale of cyber-revolutionaries battling the man against a backdrop of gods and magic is just like The Invisibles, and countless projects that I’ve done myself. These are the themes I find fascinating, the motifs that obsess me for whatever reason, and they’re all gathered under one roof in this book. The book itself is not a total success, Rushkoff lacks Morrison’s ability to create fully realized characters and singular emotional moments, but there’s so much good stuff here, I can highly recommend the book, and am sad to see that it’ll soon be cancelled.

People, both in and out of the comics world, frequently crack on the medium and its obsession with telling the same superhero stories over and over again. But, I think there’s as wide a wealth of quality material as in films or TV. Look at Vertigo alone, over the past ten years, they’ve produced as many classic series as HBO. The Invisibles, Preacher or Sandman all stand with the best of film or television. Recently, Vertigo has had a crisis of identity similar to HBO’s, doing a lot of great series that haven’t broken out in the way that their 90s works did.

I think a lot of that is due to a change in the market. Particularly with these complex, longform works, people are inclined to wait until they’re out in trade, or even until the series finishes to buy it. I know with Y: The Last Man, I’m a few trades behind, and I’ll just wait until the last trade comes out, then read the whole thing. The same is true for 100 Bullets, which is so complex, I doubt anyone could fully get it in monthly format. So, even though they might lose money on the singles of these books, they’ll be selling Y TPBs for years, and making a lot of money there.

Anyway, back to the book itself. Testament takes a Philip K. Dick “the empire never ended” style approach to storytelling, claiming that the same conflicts chronicled in the bible are happening today. To do this, he uses the cast of present day characters in various biblical roles, and crosscuts between the two different time periods, which usually line up, but occasionally split from each other. It’s an interesting concept, and works to expand the scope of the stories he’s telling. I think Rushkoff’s central point is that the narrative of the bible itself is what has engaged people, that these stories themselves, not the historical events they refer to, are what has engaged people. That’s what he has the God stand in say in the book, that it’s the word itself that will make people believe, the word that gives him power.

If the bible is the text at the center of Western civilization, the source of our moral codes and worldview, then it would make sense that the narratives it contains would recur. In the world in which we live, George Bush casts himself as a holy warrior battling the Islamic menace, he wants to connect with that biblical impulse, make us believe we are living in important times, and that America is God’s chosen land.

However, one of Rushkoff’s central points is that the bible has been co-opted by the forces of darkness and oppression. The characters in the bible weren’t like Bush, they weren’t powerful, they were revolutionaries, stirring up trouble and battling the existing order. Bush would be the pharaoh in the bible, the man oppressing the freedom fighters. Reading the book made me think about the awful way the religious right has co-opted the story of Jesus and warped it. The real person, or biblical character, was out there with prostitutes, the sick and diseased, helping them and fighting the entrenched religious power. How have we reached the point where people can use Jesus’s message to spread hate, hatred of gays, hatred of those who are different than us?

Why is it that those who claim to believe the most are the ones who don’t want to help the poor, and who want to give tax cuts to the rich? It’s all about control of the narrative, Jesus would have supported gay rights, he would have been there with the oppressed peoples, fighting for them. He would not invade Iraq to impose his own order with violence, he would have done it with love. This is relevant whether you’re a Christian or not, the message of the man was a positive one, but the religious establishment frequently corrupts it.

So, that’s the backdrop against which the book was born. It’s hugely relevant for our times, but there is some clumsiness in the execution. The core characters are Jake and his cell of revolutionary dissidents. The problem with the book is that we don’t really get to know these characters. Jake is sketched out to some extent, but there’s no one I deeply care about in the cell. Most of them are just there, spouting the usual system-shaking rhetoric.

The character who stands out the most is Dinah, and I’m torn on her. On the one hand, she’s the most powerful and connected character in the gang, equated with the goddess Astarte, she is able to see things in a way no one else can. I absolutely love the scenes where she goes into the tank and is able to see outside of time in a trippy, Promethea like panel array. At the end of each major storyline, she goes on a journey that gives her a view of the larger stakes, and it feels like she is going to be a major player as the book goes on.

The downside of the character is that she’s also presented as a fucktoy for these all male revolutionary band. She’s always sexualized, wearing little to no clothes, and looking a bit ridiculous for it. While everyone else is wearing a shirt and jeans, she’s wearing a bra and panties. I can understand the desire to equate her to Astarte, and make her sexuality a factor, but it comes off more as pandering, and a relic of the sexism inherent in 60s countercultural activity. She doesn’t get her own agency, she’s a tool to move Jake’s storyline forward. I can see Rushkoff’s intention, but there’s a thin line between thematic point and an artist who likes to draw big tits. Ragged Robin was a similarly sexualized character in Invis Volume II, but she always seemed in control of her presentation, Dinah seems more subject to male order.

The first few issues make the biblical parallels very clear and direct, but as it goes on, we witness more revisions to the stories, individual action subverting the pre-ordained direction that God has chosen for the characters. This comes to the fore in the Joseph and the Dreamcoat story that closes out the second volume. There, the Joseph story sets up our expectations, which are subverted in the end. Alec is not able to trick Fallow, but Jake’s crew injects a chaos element into the situation, and disrupts everything, only to find that no one cares.

The whole Manna thing raised some questions for me. I was able to follow most of the book pretty easily, but I wasn’t sure the point he was making with the Manna. The basic idea seemed to be that money controls us so much, and is so powerful that it is inevitable it takes on a life of its own. The Manna will be a living currency that can literally control us from the inside. It’s a bit heavy handed, but it generally works. The place that Rushkoff lets me down is the ads for the Manna. The clichéd teen pitch should be a bit more sophisticated for a post MySpace generation. Do kids respond to TV ads as much anymore, wouldn’t it have been cooler to create Manna profiles on MySpace, literally have the Manna come alive and promote itself?

I’m also not sure what his great fear about the world currency is. Would that control us any more than our individual ones? I suppose it’s part of the biblical parallels, but a world currency isn’t too high on my list of fears. I guess the point is, the more unified the world becomes, the easier it is for one person to control.

The thing I really love about the book is the way the worldview meshes all kinds of human religious history together. Gods watch over everything that happens, influencing the happenings, and occasionally intervening. It reminds me a bit Neil Gaiman’s worldview, the way old gods struggle to maintain their influence, and appear in new ways. The difference between this work and Neil’s is that Neil’s stuff always remains fictional, you don’ get the sense he believes in the reality of what’s happening in the way that Rushkoff does. Like Morrison’s work, this is sci-fi, but based very much in philosophical reality. It’s a treatise within a story, like Promethea or The Invisibles.

And, generally, the book works best on an idea level. Each issue left me thinking about a lot of things, and the stories do have a lot of relevance to the world we live in today. This is the kind of work people should be reading and considering in the world we live in. I love the meshing of concepts and reality into a kind of indeterminate mytho-reality where everything’s true.

But, the book is definitely held back by the lack of emotional engagement with a lot of the cast. The characters frequently seem manipulated by the need to conform to the biblical storylines, they don’t have their own agency. Again, this is part of the thematic point, but it winds up hemming them in. The cell in particular is just a collection of clichés. However, not every writer is about emotion, and Rushkoff is doing his thing, and doing it well. I’m going to pick up the third trade this week, I’m eager to see how things develop.

Farscape: 1x03 - 1x06

After watching a few more episodes of Farscape, I’m really impressed with the show. I’ve seen a lot of sci-fi shows, so I’ve seen most of the concepts behind these episodes before, but the show has such engaging and likable characters that the old material feels fresh. I would like to see some more ongoing storylines, but the show has a sense of history that makes you at least feel like they didn’t just forget what happened last week. It’s like Buffy in that respect, the characters change, and that’s what the show is centered around.

The thing I like most about the show is definitely the characters. Crichton started out as a kind of blank slate generic hero, but over these episodes we’ve got to see some of his flaws and personality quirks. The thing that makes him interesting is that everyone thinks he’s dumb, so the role we’d expect him to play, that of strong male leader, is undercut. He can’t lead, and when he tries to, he frequently is unable to deal with the specifics of the universe he’s found himself in.

His primary counterpart is Aeryn, whose intensity and business only attitude makes Crichton play the traditional female role in their relationship. I think that’s what makes the dynamic between the two of them so effective, the subversion of expectations. She’s the one who’s prone to violence in defense of her honor, while Crichton has a more grounded attitude. Crichton is an ordinary guy who finds himself transported from our reality to a sci-fi genre universe. He is aware of the conceits of the genre, but recognizes that people don’t need to use violence to solve their problems. So, his solutions to the problems usually run counter to our genre expectations.

Aeryn is always a joy to watch, though I’m unsure how they’ll keep her mix of heavy intensity and slight vulnerability as the series goes on. The further you go, the more humanized a character becomes, and that will change the dynamic. This may be a good thing though, if she’s outside the peacekeeper world, she should change. She’s had this culture of war instilled in her over the years, how easy will it be for her to change? It’s a bit head on, but the end of ‘Thank God It’s Friday Again’ addresses this, with her pride at solving a problem with science, not violence.

That episode is a good example of what I like about the show. Rather than just use the standalone stories as something to fill the time, most of them have some kind of interesting philosophical underpinnings. The question behind this story is what is happiness? Is a false happiness better than real sadness? They are suspicious of what happened to D’Argo, but when you see him and Zhaan out in the fields, they seem more at peace than they are on the ship. There’s a pull between wanting them to stay there and enjoy life, and the inevitable conclusion in which the false happiness is debunked.

For once, I’d like to see a sci-fi story about a utopia that isn’t built on a lie. Where would the tension come from? Perhaps it could be from our inherent resistance to anything that appears too good to be true. At the end of this story, we find out that the characters were making weapons for the peacekeepers, drugged into submission, but wasn’t that submission on some level great? Is it better to be happy and a slave, or free and unhappy? At the end, D’Argo wonders this, and there’s no easy answer. It’s a sign that the show is working that there’s great moral ambiguity in my feelings about the planet and the world they build over the course of the episode. When Crichton asks to get the worm out, is it about regaining his freedom, or is it about his desire to feel like D’Argo and Zhaan do about the world.

The revelation that the peacekeepers are behind the colony ties the episode into the overall plot nicely, and also puts what we’ve seen in perspective. It’s easier to enslave a contented populace than a troubled one? The drugs in the food are the same as the societal distractions we have that prevent us from looking deeper into the problems in our society. Aren’t all of us complicit in the production of weapons like those being built here? Every day we continue our illegal invasion of Iraq, we’re like the people on the planet here. But, it’s hard to do anything about it, perhaps our best prerogative is just to be happy.

“Throne For a Loss” features a similarly interesting philosophical subplot with Zhaan and the soldier. I didn’t particularly like the soldier’s performance, which was all bluster, but the points made were interesting, the way Zhaan is able to fight with love, not hate. It’s very Invisibles, this idea that exposing your humanity is going to do more to deter the enemy than hurling hate at them. By injecting that seed of doubt about their mission, you can change the nature of the war. The soldier may go back to fighting at the end, using the glove to try to eradicate the ambiguities he felt on board the Moya. But, you can tell that what Zhaan said made an impact on him.

Another thing that really impresses me about the show is the Muppet work on Rygel. He’s a fully realized character, and as key to the ensemble as any of the four human actors. I love the craft that goes into him, he’s a great testament to the power of old school technology over CG. He’s more ‘real’ than even a great CG character like Gollum, there’s a tangibility that CG can’t match, and that helps you accept him more as just another character, not an effect.

“Back and Back and Back to the Future” was another really strong episode. There was a lot of trippiness with Crichton’s views of the various futures, and underlying it all was this weird sexual dynamic. The episode made you think more about the Moya as a living thing, and all these emotional beings going around in it. Going into this episode, I was thinking that D’Argo was a bad character, but we got a lot more humanity out of him here.

Crichton’s uncertain feelings about Matala were interesting as well. Too many sci-fi shows avoid sex entirely, and it’s nice to see one delving into the possibilities of interspecies coupling. It’s weird territory, but worth checking out. Even Aeryn got in on things, all of a sudden wearing a cut off shirt. It’s not particularly true to the character, as I see her at least, but she wears it well, so I’ll forgive them. Her and Crichton seem to be the central relationship on the show, and I’m sure there was a ton of shipping for them back when the show was on. They’re great together, and I’m frequently wondering why they don’t just fuck already.

So, I’m really enjoying the show. It’s not as outright great as something like The Wire or The Sopranos, but it’s hitting that Buffy spot of great character based storytelling, throw in a sprinkling of interesting philosophy and it’s looking good for the future. And, notably, most of the episodes have gotten better as they go along, I’m eager to check out the next batch.

The Wire: 'React Quotes' (5x05)

After the huge events last week, ‘React Quotes’ is another move the pieces into place episode, the kind of episode that just flies by when you’re watching on DVD, but is a little bit frustrating watching week to week. There’s a lot of good stuff here, but it’s hard to wait a week to get to the rest of the story. Plus, the story primarily focuses on comic and satirical bits, there’s not as much deep emotion here as there was last week.

The best part of the episode is the shootout at the end. People are knocking the scene a bit for its lack of realism, but it’s so much more exciting than the rest of the episode, I’ll let it slide. As I’ve said before, Omar is the incarnation of chaos, so I’ll let the rules of reality slide when it comes to the character. The scene works because we’re emotionally invested in every character in there. I don’t want Omar to die, but at the same time, it would be devastating to lose Michael. It’s strange to see Omar, who has always been the best warrior on the show, totally overmatched for once. Maybe one on one, he could take Snoop or Chris, but as a team, they’re too much for him.

The question we’re left with now is what happens next. I hope we see Omar next week, and find out exactly how he got off the balcony to survive. That bit was a little contrived, but the way the scene was constructed, there was really no choice. They should have made the window a little lower, like a second floor, to make the scene more realistic. What does Omar do now? He can’t beat Snoop and Chris on his own, does he get more allies, or does he try a different tact? The only evidence I’ve got for what happens is the car bomb we see in the opening credits, so it does look like Omar is back on his feet and taking the fight to Marlo.

Along with this, we get the loss of another old timer. That entire generation is dying out, which doesn’t bode well for the co-op next week. But what about Cutty? He’s back this week, working with Dukie. The scene where they talk about how to get off the streets gets to the core of what season four was about, the impossible odds these kids face. With direct mentoring from an adult, they can stay afloat, but left alone, they’re going to slide into drugs. That’s what happened to Dukie, when he got taken away from Prez, he had no real incentive to stay off the street.

But, it’s pretty clear Dukie isn’t meant for the street. No one respects him, and he’s not going to be able to carry a gun. He’s at a crossroads here, he can either totally commit to the streets, work to make himself tougher, or he can go off in a different direction. But, he doesn’t know how to get there. You’d think Cutty would actually have some good advice to offer, as someone who got out of the game and is doing well for himself, but I guess it’s hard for him to realize that. I think Michael should make use of Dukie’s smarts and give him some kind of administrative role within Marlo’s organization. But, I’m still holding out hope that he’ll run into Prez and get set on the right path somehow. Or, maybe him and Michael will see Namond again, and find out how much his life has changed. I’d really like to see Namond and Colvin again, hopefully they’ll turn up in the next couple of episodes.

This episode also brings us a lot of progress with the serial killer plotline. I understand what they’re trying to do with this storyline, and it does tie the police and newspaper storylines together nicely, but it doesn’t really do anything emotionally for me. It’s played mainly for laughs, and while it is funny, Scott is so consistently a devious character, there’s not much conflict. If they had him try to do good occasionally, it’d be one thing, but he just keeps making stuff up, in such an obvious manner, you’d think someone would catch up with him. Lester told McNulty to treat the fake serial killer like a real case, Scott isn’t treating anything like it’s real.

Now, maybe this is setting us up for the fall down the line, but right now, the story is kind of a one joke thing. It’s a funny joke, but it doesn’t have that much thematic depth. The point is, the press doesn’t focus on the real issues, it prefers sensationalism. I think we got that, and the story doesn’t have much more to offer. I think it actually works best as a rebuke to films like Zodiac, which show a detective becoming obsessed with a case, and treat this same material with total seriousness. Beattie punctures that entire worldview when she tells Bunk it’s not the case that’s destroying McNulty, that’s just an excuse. This is probably a more realistic look at what it’s like to pursue a serial killer, people don’t become obsessed with the case so much as they use it to fill a void in their personal lives.

Along those lines, the strongest scenes in the episode are about McNulty’s deteriorating personal life. The scenes with his wife and sons are jarring because those kids have grown up all of a sudden, and you get the sense that McNulty is just as shocked as the viewer to see them like that. His conversation with his wife conveys just how unhinged he’s become, and the scene with Beattie and Bunk drives it home. Bunk doesn’t tell her what’s going on, but he’s clearly tempted. McNulty’s been on a downward spiral the whole season, and that’s what’s really compelling, not the serial killer stuff. I feel like he invented the killer as much to justify his own drunkenness and screwing around as to help the police. He wants to get back to that place he was a few years back, going after Avon and drinking all the time, but this time, it’s hard to watch because we’ve seen who he can be, and how quickly any chance of returning to that place is slipping away.

Elsewhere, Clay Davis mounts a defense campaign so convincing, even I’m starting to believe him. He’s a master of his own version of ‘the game,’ and I’m still not sure that even with all this evidence, the States’ Attorney can take him down. I feel like Bond is going to gamble on a lesser charge to ensure he’s the one to take Davis down, and wind up letting him off the hook. But, we’ve seen a lot of old timers on the way out, Davis may have to take the hit as well. Nerese is looking more and more like the new Clay Davis, making a lot of backroom deals that’ll gain her power and leverage, as well as cutting some deals with criminals that would make Clay proud.

Increasingly, it looks like every character from the first season is being replaced by a younger counterpart. Avon replaced by Marlo, Burrell by Daniels, Colvin by Carver, and I’m guessing McNulty’s going to become the new Freamon. After this serial killer debacle, he could very well find himself defeated and in the pawn shop unit for a long time.

Well, this week moved some pieces into place, and it looks like next week’s going to be when stuff starts really going down. I won’t spoil it for people who didn’t watch the preview, but things are starting to converge.

Doctor Who: 1x01 - 1x05

This is indisputably the Golden Age of television, the medium’s never been better, and I’ve been catching up on the great shows of the era over the past few years. I’ve knocked off most of them, but one recent one I’ve heard talked about a lot, but haven’t seen is the new Doctor Who. I was vaguely familiar with the premise of the show when I started, but I figured any show with this much fan acclaim is worth a look. Without much foreknowledge, I dove into the show, and after five episodes, I’m pretty impressed.

Right now, the show reminds me a lot early period Buffy. There’s some mild personal drama mixed in with a slightly goofy monster of the week plot. The monsters of the week are a bit more ambitious than some of those early Buffy characters, but that’s not saying much, some of those early Buffy episodes were really awful. Right now, I don’t see the show growing into as emotionally ambitious a show as Buffy was, but it’s still early and there’s a lot of potential. What is now is a fun, energetic show that’s consistently a joy to watch.

The first episode introduces the Doctor. As a new viewer, his introduction worked. There’s some teasing over the course of the first few episodes, until we finally find out that he’s a time traveling alien with an origin that hasn’t been entirely revealed. Maybe older viewers know exactly what’s up with him, but I’m still a bit in the dark, and that actually works well. The character at present exists mainly as the catalyst for events, the energy spike that expands our perception of the ordinary world.

In light of that, the series’ center is actually Rose. I really like the character, and the way she differs from the archetypal sci-fi hero. Joss always made a big deal about how he wanted Buffy to be an ordinary girl, who liked ordinary girlish things, and also happened to be a vampire slayer. The attempts to make Buffy into a cheerleader or shopaholic never quite worked with the character who actually showed up on screen. She already had the weight of being a slayer, and her history at her previous school by the time we met her, so she couldn’t ever be the happy go lucky girl that Rose is at the start of the series.

A lot of fiction, including Buffy, centers on chosen one heroes, people who have to carry the burden of doing the right thing. Think “With great power comes great responsibility.” Be it Peter Parker, Harry Potter or Buffy Summers, I have issues emotionally responding to these kind of heroes. As someone who has neither great power, nor great responsibility, the thought of being part of some larger cosmic adventure is exciting, not a burden. It’s harder to relate to a hero who just wants to live a normal life, because to me, normal life is not that exciting. It’s a case of the grass is always greener, but it’s refreshing to see Rose genuinely love getting to go on these adventures and experience the universe. As she tells her mom at the end of “World War Three,” if you see what’s out there, you won’t be able to come back and sit in your flat.

Rose has more of a call to adventure arc. She meets up with a mystic character, The Doctor, and is called away from ‘the farm’ to go out and have adventures. It’s the same as Star Wars, it’s a classic archetype, and it works well here. The core of the series, at least so far, is about Rose exploring the new world that’s open to her, a world without the limitations of space time.

All these thematic discussion might blow the show up a bit. The episodes themselves are really entertaining, but not particularly deep. After all, the show did a two parter about aliens who are constantly farting. That kind of humor didn’t really work, but some of the goofiness is successful, keeping things fun and making the show’s sometimes limited production values work.

What gives me hope about the show’s future is the moments of real emotion sprinkled throughout. I love in “The End of the World” when Rose watches the Earth being destroyed, and reflects on just how far she’s come. The scenes with her and her mother work really well too. Jackie starts out as a comic character, but in the alien two parter, we understand what Rose’s adventures do to her. The scene at the end when Rose and the Doctor leave is particularly effective. I like how the Doctor doesn’t understand what humans need, he wants to go off on his adventure, not wait an hour and have the Shepherd’s Pie to make Jackie happy. He makes the choice that much more binding, Rose has to leave now, or not at all.

My favorite episode so far was “The End of the World,” which featured a lot of wonder and high concept wackiness throughout. That was our first trip off world, and it did a great job of putting the viewer in a totally different mindset, such that when we finally return to Earth at the end, the present day feels totally alien. The weakest was the Charles Dickens episode. That felt clichéd, notably the fact that they ran into a famous person, which seems to happen to every time traveler to the past. It didn’t do much to add to the characters or world.

On the whole, I’m really liking the show. It’s a bit goofy, but it’s fun in a Ghostbusters way. I’m curious to see how it grows, but I’m enjoying the journey, and am glad to have another series to look at.

Teen Titans: The Lost Annual

You’ll read a lot of people talking about the Silver Age, how those comics had something missing today, and everything would be great if comics were just like they were. This is a book written in 2003, but done in the style of the Silver Age, and it absolutely owns. Like the best of Grant Morrison’s work, it manages to mix Silver Age craziness with some real emotion towards the end for a thoroughly joyous read.

I have a problem with people who do a one line pitch, like zombies vs. astronauts, and wind up selling a huge amount of books from people who say that must be awesome. That said, John F. Kennedy fighting in an alien space war is a pretty killer high concept, and the great thing is, the book more than lives up to the concept. It starts with that and then goes forward for a whole bunch of other interesting stuff.

The pacing of the book is very Silver Age, barreling through a huge amount of story in a short amount of time. In a matter of panels, Robin and the gang hop through billions of miles to the alien dimension, and the huge war happens in a hyper compressed way. I think this kind of compressed storytelling works in the same way that the missing reel of Planet Terror does, cutting out the parts of the story that are usually placed in, but don’t really have a purpose. There’s no logical way for them to get to the alien dimension, so the easiest way is to just send them there quickly and move on. The people who will enjoy this story just accept the logic of it. To quote Grant Morrison, a lot of our society is schizophrenic and unable to press metaphor. These kind of people will get hung up on the weirdness of the content, and not enjoy the story.

It’s disturbing to me that so many people use ‘weird’ as a negative when describing a work of fiction. I want fiction to be like a drug, to open a window into another world, and make perceive things differently. A work like this has an entirely different logic system than the world we live in. Is it plausible in reality? Not at all, but it runs on its own internal logic, and once you engage with the world, it’s a joy to read, an experience that takes you out of the everyday to a world of wonder where anything can happen.

Now, one could take that as an excuse for forgiving sloppy, illogical storytelling. I read the first few issues of Joe Casey’s Godland recently, a comic that’s going for this Silver Age insanity, but doesn’t quite get there. It feels a bit too self consciously wacky. With that comic, you feel like Casey is doing a Silver Age pastiche. He’s emulating Kirby’s wacky ideas, where Kirby didn’t have that layer of self-conscious, he was just hurling the ideas on to the page. Reading Casey’s book makes you appreciate what Grant Morrison is able to do, Morrison’s work is in that same area, but manages to do Silver Age stuff without that layer of self-consciousness.

Back to the Annual, it’s the vibe of this book that makes it works so well. The compressed storytelling maximizes the enjoyment, Robin’s able to go to the White House, and it happens so fast, you don’t even look back to think about whether it makes any sense. Once things get going, we get the inherently enjoyable spectacle of ‘Leader Kennedy’ on the alien world, leading this group of mod aliens against the hippy aliens. There’s definitely a 60s subculture war vibe going on there, and it fits with the whole youth culture theme of the book.

The book is interesting for me as an interesting companion piece to Manhattan Guardian #4, Grant Morrison’s wonderful take on the secret history of a kid gang, not unlike this one. Here, Kid Flash and Speedy are uncomfortable with Wonder Girl’s relationship with the Violator. The three boys don’t want Wonder Girl to break up the platonic gang they’ve got, but her sexual desire is going to soon destroy what they had. It’s one thing to have a crush on President Kennedy, to actually be in a relationship with the Violator, a guy who looks decidedly older than our boyish heroes, disturbs them.

In Manhattan Guardian, we saw the way Chop Suzi’s pregnancy led to the destruction of the group. As a kid gang, they were unprepared to deal with growing up. Ed couldn’t see her pregnancy being anything but the product of rape, he didn’t want to deal with real maturity. What Morrison did with that comic is bring the subtext of all these teen gangs to the surface and explore it in a way writers of the 60s just couldn’t. That’s the thing that makes Morrison’s work so special, he manages to combine the crazy pop joy of books like this with very real emotion and deep thematic substance.

That’s not to say there’s not emotion here. The final pages present a startling alternate history of the Kennedy assassination. It’s really weird, and unexpected after the adventure of the previous pages. Reality comes crashing in to the fantasy world. What’s interesting here is the deep affection you can tell Haney has for Kennedy. Kennedy was famous for incarnating ideals and hope, it wasn’t so much what he did as president, but the idea of Camelot that made him so beloved.

The ending of the work sends Kennedy back to Ulustra to battle with the aliens and fight the good fight in space. It’s a crazy ending, and really touching. I love that someone came up with a whole alternate scenario to save a leader they loved from untimely death. Even though Kennedy’s dead, his spirit lives on, that’s what the ending says, and it does so in a dynamic, pop way.

And, I’ve got to give big props to the art. It’s very pop, but still emotional. The art places you in that 60s pop place, and also does a great job of conveying character emotion. It’s not an easy thing to make a comic like this work, Alan Moore’s greatest failures usually come when trying to emulate Silver Age stuff. You need a total commitment to what you’re doing, to come from a mindset where weird ideas come naturally, you can’t think about it, you’ve just got to do it. In that respect, it’s the same thing that separates David Lynch from the myriad Lynch knockoff films out there. Lynch’s stuff is so weird because he’s not trying to be weird, he’s just doing what comes naturally.

This book has me wanting to check out more Haney Titans. If it’s even half as good as this, the Showcase volume should be well worth it.

The Wire: 'Transitions' (5x04)

Marlo must die. That’s what I was thinking after seeing this episode, the bodies in the vacants, the attack on Butchie, all that didn’t turn me on the character, but after seeing him kill Joe, there’s no alternative for me. Marlo, Snoop, Chris, they’ve all got to go. Will this happen? I don’t know, but I feel like he’s done too much bad stuff to go unpunished. Within the social systems of The Wire, someone like Marlo could survive, but out on the street, people who fly too high usually burn out, and after killing Joe, Marlo’s isolated himself, made everyone else his enemy.

One of the central themes of this season is generational change. All around, we’re seeing older, more experienced people replaced by a new generation of people. This started last season with Royce’s ousting for Carcetti. There’s this sense that simply changing the person in charge of the institution will change the institution itself, but something as big as Baltimore is bigger than the man in charge of it.

The same will likely be true of the police department. Burrell echoes the “eating shit” speech Royce gave Carcetti when turning over control of things to Rawls. Daniels may be ‘good police,’ but when he’s got virtually no budget, he can’t invest in projects like the Major Crimes Unit. He’s just go to keep things the way they are, and eventually, the public will sour on him as well. There’s always someone higher up the ladder, no matter what chair you’re in. I’d like to see Daniels succeed as commissioner, and I think he’ll try, but over the course of show, we’ve constantly seen how the system corrupts those who gain power.

But, back to the focus of the episode, the Joe/Marlo storyline. Over the course of the season, we’ve seen Joe grooming Marlo, teaching him what he needs to be a legitimate businessman. However, that doesn’t really interest Marlo. He’s only working with Joe to get in contact with the Greeks. Marlo has no vision beyond the street, I don’t think he really cares about the account in the Caymans or what Levy can do with his money, he just wants total control of the drug game. He humors Joe when Joe tries to ‘civilize’ him, but it’s all about getting to the Greeks. From the moment he met Vondas in season four, he saw something Joe had that he didn’t, and wouldn’t stop until he got it. Marlo needs total control, he can’t have anyone speaking ill of him on the streets, and he needs to control drugs from supplier to corner.

There were a lot of really great moments in the episode, one of my favorite is that lengthy plan out shot in the diner that finally reveals The Greek. So much of the press for the show focuses on the sociological side of things, how it’s a political treatise, but this episode shows that it’s just as strong, if not stronger, as a straight up pulp gangster story. There’s a lot of thematic layers there, but part of me was just like “Oh shit, The Greek!” I thought The Greek was gone and that plot was over after season two, and I’m really happy to see it come back. This year does have the sense of everything coming full circle, and all the plots congealing together for a finale.

The Greek is the perfect ally for Marlo because he’s similarly inhuman. Vondas has affection for Joe in the same way he took Nick Sobotka under his wing. He’s a cruel guy, but he has loyalty. The Greek, much like Marlo, is only out to make money and advance his empire. Both are representations of capitalism at its most destructive, razing everything and everyone in their path if it means making money. It’s chilling to watch them come together because they’re the same thing, but from different worlds.

I complained about The Greek’s monolithic evilness when talking about season two, and I think the major reason for that is that he’s so secure in his position. I can’t see anyone taking him out, and he’s so far beyond the law that you knew McNulty and crew were going to fail. Marlo is still in his formative years, he may be just as single minded as The Greek, but he’s got to work to gain what The Greek already has. It’s those uneasy alliances that make him a fascinating character, watching Marlo humbled before Joe to get what he wants. Plus, Marlo is so bound to Baltimore, it is possible that he’ll get caught by the police. The Greek could just walk away and go somewhere else, but Marlo can’t live anywhere else. He needs to be on the streets.

I feel like Marlo is a more evolved version of Avon. Avon had that soldier mentality, but he was a bit too showy. He was capable of violence, but I get the sense he wanted to be liked more than he wanted to kill people. In that sense, it’s very much The Godfather conflict in action, between the community minded older generation and the fiercer, violent younger generation. I could never imagine Marlo at a community dinner the way we saw Avon back in season one. Avon talks a lot about West Side pride, I think Marlo only has pride in his own organization. Marlo is more precise than Avon, he doesn’t make mistakes, or put himself at risk in the way that Avon did, and he doesn’t split his focus between legit business and the streets. When Avon tries to confront Marlo at the end of season three, Avon seems to be playing gangster while Marlo is just being himself.

Joe is very much of the older generation, a generation that’s quickly being wiped away. We saw Butchie taken out last week, Hungry Man dies here, a present to Cheese for giving Marlo Butchie. I love the fact that Method Man has become such a central piece of the closing season. I think he’s a great screen presence, and the notion that this one inept guy is going to take down Joe is so sad. Joe watches out for him because he’s family, but it turns out blood doesn’t matter so much anymore. Cheese is pretty dumb, the only reason Marlo’s dealing with him is to get to Joe, but he doesn’t know that. He only knows Joe scolded him for going into Hungry Man’s territory, and this, coming on top of his refusal to deal with Omar, means Joe’s going to fall.

In his final scene, Joe says Marlo was like a son to him, and throughout his time on the show, it’s been easy to see him as the father to this whole messed up gang of drug dealers. He’s kept the co-op alive after Stringer’s death, and provided the voice of reason when people like Marlo start to go too far. As a parent, his kids aren’t necessarily going to like him, but he’s got their best interest at heart. However, when your kids have guns, a parental role isn’t enough to guarantee survival.

Marlo’s really pushed it over these last couple of episodes. It’s notable that Chris and Snoop, the more likable presences, fade into the background here. It’s Marlo who gives Cheese Hungry Man, and Marlo who’s there to personally oversee Joe’s death. I’ve heard some people say that the death felt telegraphed, and in retrospect, it’s clear that anyone who starts getting introspective is going to die soon, at the time, I didn’t see it coming. I thought Joe was going to get out of the game for a while, but it wasn’t until he tells Marlo “You didn’t come to see me off” that I realized what was going to happen.

One of the things I love about both this show and The Sopranos is they don’t try to shock you with the plot developments. Joe’s death has been telegraphed throughout the season, I’ve been speculating about it in every review I’ve written, but I didn’t expect it to come this quickly. And, watching Marlo and him, I was hoping that there’d be some way for him to survive. However, the crushing inevitability built with every moment until he was finally killed. That’s more effective than a shocking death because it makes it more emotional. The death itself is a release, but those moments of buildup are awful. You’re thinking “they can’t do this,” all the while knowing that it will happen. It’s the same as D’Angelo’s strangling in season two. Because you know the rules and credibility of the world, there’s not going to be some last minute reversal. After he’s choking for a while, you realize, he’s going to die, and it’s the same with Joe.

Joe was an amazing character, one of the best presences on the show. After Avon and Stringer were taken out the game, he was the only larger than life personality left. Now, we’re left with only Marlo. I’m thinking that Marlo will dissolve the co-op, likely killing most of the members, and plan to take over their territory. He has the supply, so they are beholden to him.

But, all is not lost. As Marlo gets worse and worse, Omar moves in in the background. I love the fact that he’s got the old timers working with him. Those two old guys are his last allies, and some of the last survivors of the old era. They can get revenge for Butchie and the others who have died. I’m thinking more and more that Omar will survive this, that he will take out Marlo, just because Marlo has made so many enemies, he can’t survive. There is rarely order in the institutions, but on the streets, characters eventually get what’s coming to them. Stringer tried to play Omar and Mouzone against each other, it backfired and they teamed up to kill him. I’d love to see Mouzone come back one more time, to help Omar take down Marlo.

On some level it would be ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than the over the top Wild West showdown with Stringer. And, c’mon, Omar and Brother Mouzone battling Chris and Snoop, that scene has to happen. Here, Omar demonstrates that he does have a code, he won’t kill people just because, and the death of Joe should confirm who killed Butchie in the first place. There’s such desperation in Omar at this point, he knows what it’s like outside the game, and doesn’t enjoy the killing anymore. He just wants to finish things.

It really bothers me that so much press attention focuses on the press storyline because the Marlo stuff this year has been phenomenal. I suppose there’s less to talk about there, because there’s not the controversial element to latch onto. But, from a storytelling point of view, it’s just gold, right up there with the Avon/Stringer betrayal arc from season three.

The other great storyline this episode was the stuff with Carver and Herc. First, there’s the phenomenal scene where Marlo taunts Herc about the camera. It’s a great callback, and demonstrates how even though Herc is moving up in the world, he’s still controlled by the criminals. He now makes his money helping the people he used to help capture.

The character’s moral bankruptcy is pointed out by Carver when they’re sitting outside the police station. Herc rolls up in his Mercedes in a suit, Carver’s still wearing the police uniform. Carver plans to break the blue wall of silence and turn in Colicchio. He does this because of what Herc, a similarly dangerous officer, did to Randy. So much of the show is about the unexpected consequences character actions have, how a police decision can impact a criminal’s life. Most of the time, the characters are unaware, and it’s the viewer who makes the connections. However, Carver saw the full extent of what Herc did to Randy, he knows that what they do matter, and he knows how much a bad officer can screw up someone’s life. He failed that kid because he never called Herc on his bad behavior. People who stand by and let horrible things happen are just as guilty as those who do them.

This actually fits well with the newspaper/serial killer storyline. Because the media focuses on sensationalized crimes, while letting the everyday injustices go by, we’re all complicit in what happens in America’s cities. We’re all like Herc, just going along, unaware of the damage we cause. The thing is, there’s no easy answer. The institutions are so flawed, you can’t change things on a mass level. The message of the show, if any exists, is that the individual level is where you can make the difference. Taken out Marlo and a new Marlo will come along, take down Clay Davis and corruption will continue, but intervene in one person’s life and you can save them. That’s what Cutty does, that’s what Colvin does, and it’s what Carver does here. Colicchio is a danger, and having him off the street may help save someone down the line.

There’s a lot of other noteworthy stuff in the episode. I love the scene where Kima decides to build a house for Colossus, and the juxtaposition of that with McNulty’s awful behavior towards Beattie. The two were closely paralleled in season three, and now we’re seeing Kima where McNulty was at the end of that season, thinking about what kind of life exists outside the police force. The serial killer storyline rages on, still in the construction stage, not quite at impact. And, we get a rather pointless scene with a trip to The Washington Post. But, on the whole, it’s an amazing episode, with a truly haunting finish. Prop Joe will be missed, and Robert Chew deserves huge props for creating such a memorable character, who just owned the screen whenever he was on.

X-Men: Messiah CompleX

I’ve been reading the current X-Men crossover, Messiah Complex, as it’s been along, and, one chapter from the end, I think it’s safe to say that it’s been pretty underwhelming. With only 22 pages to wrap up, I don’t think they’re going to be able to salvage this thing. I went into the book really liking Mike Carey’s X-Men and Peter David’s X-Factor, but the crossover format has sucked momentum from those books, and slowed everything to a monotonous crawl.

That’s not to say stuff doesn’t happen. There’s a ton of fight scenes, and a lot of nominal progress, but there’s no real substance here. The setup was, the X-Men try to get the mutant baby, and we haven’t really moved beyond that. That’s fine as a MacGuffin, but you’ve got to have something deeper at the heart of your story. My guess is the writers deliberately wanted to avoid the convolution of previous X-overs, to focus on one goal. That’s cool, but I think it ignores what made previous X-overs work.

The first two X-Men crossovers weren’t really crossovers per se. The Mutant Massacre took an inciting event, the slaughter of the morlocks, and used it as a jumping off point for a story about the various X-teams of the era. It’s an amazing story, one of the best of the ‘grim and gritty’ 80s superhero stories. It works fine if you read just one piece of the crossover, but reading the whole thing you get some nice bonus connections. Fall of the Mutants isn’t really a crossover, the next big event was Inferno, an unbelievably convoluted, excessive, bizarre story, but one with a purpose. Reading Inferno, you feel like they’re struggling to fit all the material into the story. It’s the culmination of 150 issues of plot development, ten years of stories, all leading up to this one story.

It’s got a lot of flaws, but it’s got an undeniable energy. It’s that energy that makes X-Tinction Agenda work, in spite of the plot flaws. No one could break those X-overs down into linear story, but reading them is an experience. You’re immersed in this reality, this mythos and even if you don’t know what’s going on, it’s still a lot of fun. That’s what missing from Messiah Complex, the crazy insanity of the X-universe, the soap opera excess that Claremont was known for. There’s no emotional stakes in the crossover, no subplots of doomed love and broken relationships, just a relentless focus on this one kid, and we don’t even know who it is. I think that reveal should have happened already, if only to make clear what the stakes are.

That’s not to say it’s all bad. There’s a lot of scenes that work on their own, but as a whole, it’s frustratingly single minded. Both this and House of M are such conservative, boring crossovers. There’s no moments that make you say “Wow,” it’s all about playing out what you’d pretty much expect to happen. DC’s Infinite Crisis may be exceedingly difficult to follow, but it’s got moments that just leave you in total awe. As a story, it fails, as an experience, it succeeds. I’d rather read a crazy work like Infinite Crisis, a work that taps into years of mythology and spectacle than something like Messiah Complex, a work that’s competent, but boring.

Imagination

Back in the 60s, there was a genre called the ‘Head Film,’ which de-emphasized traditional narrative in favor of stream of consciousness, visual based immersion in a psychological place. Imagination falls squarely in that genre, recalling strange masterpieces like Head and The Holy Mountain. It’s a film with astounding visuals and a wonderful sense of psychological immersion. You go into this film and you enter a world, one that can move seamlessly from live action to stop motion to drawings, all filled with strange and wonderful imagery.

The movie centers around two twins who are afflicted with Asperger’s and blindness respectively. Together, they form a strange bond and go on a strange odyssey over the course of the film. It’s a folly to talk about plot in traditional terms with a film like this, and that’s something I love. I’ve been going on here about how films need to move away from traditional narrative and embrace the new mission of immersing you in a world. The scenes that don’t work in the film are the ones that exist in a ‘real world’ narrative space. The doctor’s freakout when the twins are missing is the scene that jumps out for me as not working, it replaces the hazy dreamscape of the rest of the film for a moment that feels false, largely due to acting that just doesn’t quite make it. That’s a scene that needed another take.

But, most of the film doesn’t rely on dialogue to convey the story, it uses visuals to replicate the twins’ mental landscape. This is a film filled with stunning imagery, from a cool snowy forest stop motion interlude to a fun human stop motion sequence with the twins. The imagery I liked most focused on the womb, and much of the film seems to follow the twins’ journey back to the place before birth. The imagery is trippy, but resonant. It seems to touch on something deeply human and real within all of us.

At a relatively short one hour running time, the film doesn’t have to be about anything more than just taking us to this strange place, sending us on a visual journey and then getting out. I can imagine a lot of people complaining that the film is just a bunch of visual wankery with no ‘point.’ We’ve been trained to view narrative as the be all and end all of cinema, but that’s not the case. This movie throws back to a time when Jodorowsky and others could make movies that were just weird and trippy for their own purposes.

Along with that, a lot of people would probably say this is a movie you need to see high to enjoy. I think that’s an insulting attitude when considering the capabilities of the human brain. What we consider normal in film, or in life in general, is all a social construct. What makes a rap song any more normal than an avant garde record of someone screaming? Our expectations, and social structures that dictate what normal is. People have trouble engaging with movies like this, and they feel like they need to be in an altered state to ‘get’ it.

After one viewing, I couldn’t say exactly what the movie was about, but I can say that I loved what I saw, and I felt like the journey of the film was complete when it ended. You could do a deep analysis and find acres of meaning in the film’s various images, or you could just glide the surface and find meaning only in the aesthetic power of the images themselves. Either way, the movie is a great, unique experience, and I’d highly recommend it.

The Official Site

The Wire: 'Not for Attribution' (5x03)

The last season of The Wire is starting to remind me a bit of the last season of Buffy, in the sense that there’s a disparity of focus between what I’m really interested in seeing and what we’re being shown. The problem in both shows was the decision to bring in a whole new set of characters when the story is right near the end of its last act. The newspaper people on The Wire aren’t as bad as the potential slayers on Buffy, but with a few exceptions, that storyline just isn’t doing it for me in the way that the other stories on the show are. The police is as strong as it’s ever been, Marlo and gang are reaching a Barksdale crew level of riveting, Omar bursts onto the scene and instantly raises the game, but we’ve still got fifteen minutes an episode that’s back at the establishing stage.

I hate to start with the newspaper section of the show, since it’s been sucking up critical attention, and spinning discussion of the show into a vortex of self reflection, but I’ll start there anyway. I still think the newspaper storyline is at best peripheral to the season, it’s not like the port storyline, which was deliberately designed to dominate the show, it’s inserted as another piece of the puzzle, in the same way the political stuff in season three just appeared on the show and became an ongoing subplot as it went on.

My biggest issue with the newspaper stuff is that it feels off to have a storyline in the getting to know you phase when we’re in the saying goodbye to the rest of the show. This is a consequence of the storyline having to jump in halfway through the overall storyline. The other problem is that the newspaper is another system like all the systems we’ve already seen. The parallels are made abundantly clear, but we have no emotional investment in what’s happening. The reason the school story worked wasn’t because we heard people talking about how bad standardized tests were, it was seeing the disconnect between what the bureaucracy thinks should happen and the reality of what’s going on in the classroom. Without that emotional engagement, the newspaper storyline comes off emotionally flat, even if the points are thematically valid.

For all Simon’s talk about how character trumps story, it’s the characters who make his thematic points work. When we see how the police department works, or how the school works, we understand why it’s woefully inadequate. With the newspaper, I feel like there’s a lot more show, don’t tell. There’s a reason that most TV shows are about cops and doctors, those are professions where the consequence of failure is death. Here, the consequence of failure is a failure to properly serve the community. That really does matter, but it’s harder to make that point, certainly not as one small piece of the larger plot in only ten episodes.

What does work for me is Alma’s story because we’re allowed to emotionally engage with what she’s doing. She’s not talking about what it means to be a newspaper writer, she’s living it in the moment. We enter at the moment where her idealism and reality come into conflict, and it’s great to watch her enthusiasm quickly turn to sadness when she realizes how her stories are treated, even the sensationalized serial killer storyline McNulty came up with. Gus is a likable guy, but he’s already so ingratiated into the system, I feel like there’s nothing he can really do. He can either quit or go along like he is now, doing the best he can. Alma is the closest thing to our point of view character, and has the most potential for change over the course of the storyline.

But, that’s not the real meat of the episode. For his first two years on the show, Marlo and his crew were a nebulous menace, an incarnation of the ‘fiercer’ streets, but not particularly personally developed. This season, Marlo himself has taken a bigger role, following the path Stringer traveled to a more legitimate business model. It’s interesting to see just how ill equipped he is to deal with basic social systems, like banks. This is a guy who totally owns the streets, but won’t trust that his money is being kept in a bank. And, after seeing the kids’ storyline last year, we can understand why. He has learned on the corners, not in the classroom.

Marlo wants to control everything, the money isn’t enough for him, it’s about power too. This is the same kind of thing Stringer was looking for, only Stringer wanted success in the legitimate world. Marlo wants to own the streets, to remove all his competitors and lord over Baltimore. He’s not doing it for the money, he has more than he can possibly spend, it’s more that he just needs power. Simon has called the Greeks representatives of uncontrolled capitalism, and that’s just what Marlo is as well. He’s even taking advantage of corporate loopholes, like bank accounts in the Caribbean. He’s going to learn from his competition, then destroy it.

Marlo’s one great flaw is his excessive pride. We saw it last week when he killed three people to fight back against a slur on his name, and we see it this week when he decides to bring Omar back out of retirement just so he can kill him. Joe realizes this is a foolish idea, he’s older and knows when something’s working to just leave it alone. Cheese tips off Marlo about how to get at Omar, and in the process begins a process that will almost surely lead to Joe’s downfall.

Throughout season four, we saw Chris and Snoop do some awful, awful things, but throughout, they never really lost our sympathy. Snoop is such a presence on camera, you can’t help but like her, and the combination of her joy and Chris’s brooding made for the perfect team. The only moment where you see one of them snap is Chris’s assault on Bug’s dad, and that feels justified. The scene is more about seeing Chris’s inner feelings than it is about the violence. After seeing that display, you somehow feel closer to the man.

After all the murders, it’s only this week that they crossed the line for me. The assault on Butchie was nasty, and cruel in a way that none of their other murders have been. This was purposeful, to get Omar’s attention, but it made it clear just how sadistic these two are. They may take direction from Omar, but the bodies are on their head. Butchie was a great character and it was hard to watch him go out like this. But, it was necessary to get Omar back in the game, and wow, was it time for him to return.

I’m not as huge an Omar fan as some people. In a lot of ways, he’s the Spike of the show, and though I don’t like him as much as I did Spike, he’s undeniably a presence, and it wasn’t until he was gone for two episodes that I realized, we seriously need some Omar. His entrance was amazing. For all the talk about the sociological themes of the show, it’s moments like Omar strolling the streets, giving out candy to kids that put it over the top. There’s a sense of dread hanging over the scene, Omar’s done too much to just walk away, and now he’s got to go back to Baltimore and finish things…again.

If Marlo and Stringer are meant to stand for the oppressive force of capitalism, Omar is the chaos in the system. Corporations can fall when they get too greedy because there’s always going to be individuals out there fighting back. Omar is an over the top character at times, but it’s okay to go over the top when it’s so fun. The Western showdown between Brother Mousone and Omar has nothing to do with reality, but it’s brilliant all the same. The show is entertainment at its core, it’s meant to enlighten and challenge you along the way, but if it’s no fun, no one cares. And, if you read Omar as the force of chaos and individuality in the world, some of his over the top actions make more sense. It’s hard to believe one man could survive this long, but when he’s the avatar of chaos, it starts to make sense. All I can say about his return is that it’s about time.

The force of chaos hits Marlo on many levels, one of which is Michael, the young lieutenant he’s been grooming for bigger things. Turns out Michael isn’t any more thrilled with working than any other high school kid would be, so he cuts out on his corner and goes to Six Flags. I liked that scene because it brought back memories of how these kids were before they caught up in the game. The question you’re left with after that scene is can Michael and Dukie ever go back to being those kids for the long term? Hell, they never really had a chance to be kids because they had to care for their parents.

And, if Michael does continue to ditch his work, what’s going to happen to him? Chris has heard about what he did, how will he react to his protégée not being who he hoped him to be? I want to see Cutty get involved in all this again, and find out what’s going to happen to these kids. It’s easily one of the most compelling angles of the season. With Bodie gone, we lost that connection to the street level, Michael and Dukie are carrying on as best they can.

I feel like the death of Bodie really took something away from the show. He never had that much importance to the plot, but in a lot of ways he was the soul of the show, the ultimate corner kid, someone who’d been through all the major plots and survived. I love the way he went out, but it’s hard to go on without him.

Elsewhere, the McNulty serial killer plot comes to the fore…and no one cares! I liked that twist, who really would care about homeless people dying? I bet a lot of people would kind of happy to have the problem taken off their hands. In a great twist, Lester stands up to support the idea, and recognizes the need to sensationalize things for the media. It’s got to be sick and twisted, and the killer has to have a personality. I’m not really sure where McNulty and Lester will get the bodies to do this, but I’ve got faith that the story will work. The show has always made the point that institutions don’t work, and maybe only a lie will allow good work to get done.

The greatest strength of the plot is the humor surrounding it. I loved how no one paid attention when McNulty tried to get people involved in the plot. The line of the episode is definitely McNulty saying “We have to kill again.” I feel like bringing this plot through the newspaper gang will do a better job of pointing out media failure than characters we don’t know getting laid off will ever do.

On the whole, this was really strong episode. The Marlo stuff is amazing, and the McNulty side of things is great too. I’m really curious to see where things go, and I hope next week brings Carver and Herc back into action.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - 'Pilot' (1x01)

With the prospect of up to a year without new shows, I figured it’d be worth checking out Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I really enjoyed Terminator 2, but I wouldn’t say I’m a huge fan of the film series. However, good TV sci-fi is hard to come by, so I gave it a look. The first episode is consistently entertaining, even as it raises the question of how this is going to support a season’s worth of episodes, let alone a whole series.

The thing that made the show work for me was the relationships between the three central characters. From the beginning, there was an intensity to the emotions that just wasn’t there in the lackluster Terminator 3. What made Terminator 2 so fantastic was the creation of a family amidst the action. The ending works because we care about Arnold as a character, not because of the action stuff.

This show bumps the characters up a few years, so instead of getting a father figure, John is getting a girlfriend figure. After years on the run, we’ve got to assume he hasn’t had much in the way of attention from the ladies, there’s only one woman in his life, his mother. The thing that made the episode work was the bizarre love triangle at the center of things. Sarah is so fiercely protective of John, you get the sense she was only with the guy at the beginning to give John some kind of a father figure. It’s John who has qualms about walking away, not her. She has centered her whole life around him, and it’s hard for her to face the fact that he doesn’t need her to protect him anymore, he’s got Cameron.

It produces a weird dynamic between her and John, they’re very close, and it seems almost too much so at times. I think that’s something interesting to play with, the notion that Sarah’s so obsessed with John’s destiny, her feelings are going to an inappropriate place. And, at the same time, will John fall in love with the robot Cameron? What role does Sarah play in his life now, she’s been bumped out as both source of love and protector? It’s an appropriate metaphor for what it is to have a child grow up.

Unlike a lot of reviewers, Lena Headey as Sarah really owns the show for me. Summer Glau is good at what she does, but she’s right to remain as a supporting character. She doesn’t take control of the show the way Katee Sackhoff did on Bionic Woman, I think Sarah’s strength and slightly unhinged quality are what drives the show. That said, I would like to see her pushed to a crazier place, as she was in Terminator 2. It looks like there will only be three main characters on the show, and the tension between them is what’s going to fuel events. Really, it’s a clash between Sarah and Cameron, with John just sort of standing there in the middle.

So, I’ll give the show a few more episodes. It’s not great, but the production values were pretty solid, and there’s a lot of potential there. The central question is whether they’ll let the premise evolve beyond just running from terminators. There’s a lot of interesting stuff within the mythology, but it’ll take a while to see what the show can do with it. But, I’ll give it another look tomorrow, and ultimately, that’s a pilot’s biggest goal, to get you to the next episode. Perhaps the saddest thing about the show is thinking how perfect a partner it would have been for Joss Whedon's Dollhouse. Damn the strike and its continued existence!

Best of 2007: Top 15 Albums

A bit late on this, but I’ve been busy. Anyway, here’s the top 15 albums for 2007.

15. Kanye West – Graduation
People talk a lot about the sophomore slump, but I think it’s the third album that’s really problematic. Most artists do the same, but more for the second album, but then were do you go for the third? This album has some of Kanye’s best tracks, but also a couple of duds, most notably “Barry Bonds” and “Drunken Hot Girls,” which just don’t work. Still, the good stuff far outweighs the bad. While “Stronger” got a lot of attention, and is a great track, it’s “Flashing Lights” that stands out as his best dance track. “Homecoming” is also fantastic, with a killer piano line.

14. Jay-Z – American Gangster
The master beat the apprentice with a really great album that presents a time spanning journey between Jay’s past, present and imagined life as Frank Lucas. The lyrics tell a really interesting story, and the beats match it with a great 70s soul aesthetic. The opening, with voiceover courtesy of Idris “Stringer” Elba is wonderfully over the top, but it’s the back half of the album that really shines. “Ignorant Shit” and “Party Life” are the highlights.

13. Tori Amos – American Doll Posse
This album was frequently criticized for being too long. At 80 minutes, it is a bit daunting, and cut down to 45 or 50 minutes, it would be a lot easier to endorse. But, there’s no real bad tracks here, and a lot of great ones. I love the ethereal pop of “Bouncing Off Clouds” as well as the haunting closer “Dragon.” And, she thankfully ditches the adult contempo aesthetic of her past couple albums with the rocking “Big Wheel” and “Teenage Hustling.”

12. Bruce Springsteen – Magic
Springsteen’s popularity peaked during the arena rock Born in the USA era, but unlike a lot of other ultra-popular artists, he’s managed to remain artistically vital for over thirty years. This album has a lot to say about the world we live in today, and manages to sound contemporary without reaching for techno beats or something like that. Born to Run feels like it could have come out this year, so keeping that aesthetic works. The standout here is “Girls in their Summer Clothes,” but the record goes deep. Every track has something to say, and does so in an interesting way.

11. The Colour – Between Earth and Sky
They’ve broken up after only one album, which is a shame because The Colour did a great job of reviving 60s style blues rock for today. Recalling Zeppelin and The Doors, this album rocks pretty hard throughout. The songs can bleed together a bit, but “Silver Meadows” and “Save Yourself” are as good any rock songs out this year.

10. Rilo Kiley – Under the Blacklight
A hugely controversial album, I really liked the new direction. It’s 70s soft rock, crossed with dance beats and the occasional hint of Fleetwood Mac. I like bands that change their aesthetic and explore different sounds and styles. “Moneymaker” is a killer single, and even though I like what’s come before, I’m glad that they’re branching out. My guess is this album is the equivalent of Belle and Sebastian’s “Dear Catastrophe Waitress,” a total departure in style that will eventually be integrated into what the band was doing before on their next album. But, this album really stands up, and just because it’s easy to listen to, doesn’t mean it’s not great.

9. Amy Winehouse – Back to Black
I’m glad I saw Amy play back in March because it seems like she’s gone completely off the deep end, into tabloid land and away from the musician who put out this album. She manages to use retro style without sounding like pastiche, this is a really emotional album. While the two big singles are great, the highlight for me is the pop epic “Back to Black,” a flawless piece of work.

8. The National – Boxer
A fixture on best of ’07 lists for a reason, this album creates a world, drawing you in with the great opener “Fake Empires,” then lingering for mini suites of songs that make up the album. They have a very specific sound, the piano and strings bulking up the sound and making for some really unique songs. These are fantastic songs, and the album has a tangibility that few others do.

7. The Polyphonic Spree – The Fragile Army
As with Kanye, the third album presents something of a problem. I loved the massive epics on Together We’re Heavy, but this album scales things back a bit. The songs are still great, and few bands can match the scope of what they can do when all their instruments are in the mix. But, these songs are generally more closed in, avoiding the epic sweep of Heavy, and focusing on more concise arrangement. It’s still a great album, that sounds like nothing else out there, but it didn’t hook me like their previous albums did. But, considering how much I loved those albums, not quite matching up isn’t a huge problem.

6. Timbaland – Shock Value
An album that the critical establishment knocked even as it continues to produce a litany of top singles. People criticized the album for skipping from genre to genre without any sort of clear aesthetic. I don’t think that’s a criticism, I love that an artist can make an album that takes us from 50 Cent to Elton John. The songs are arranged in sections that flow together well, listened to on random, it would be disorienting. But, the sequencing takes us seamlessly from rap to pop to rock, with great songs all along the way. “Way I R” is a distillation of everything Tim can do well in the rap field, and probably the best track, but really, there’s a lot of highlights on here. “Scream” is fantastic, as is “Time.” Like Handsome Boy Modeling School’s White People, it’s a deliriously kaleidoscopic album, but you’d think skipping between genres and styles wouldn’t be a problem for the IPod generation. Listen to this album and you don’t need to shuffle anything, Tim does it for you.

5. The New Pornographers – Challengers
Even as their weakest album to date, this is still an amazing piece. Like the Spree, they tone down the over the top pop and joy of their previous work, going a bit more melancholy. That gives Neko Case some of her finest showcases, particularly “Go Places.” The epic “Unguided” is one of the most emotional songs they’ve ever done, and “Spirit of Giving” is a perfect distillation of the unique, poppy aesthetic of the band. It sounds like nothing else out there, but I wish that everything sounded like this.

4. Justice – Cross
The big dance hit of the year, Justice produced the album a lot of people wanted Daft Punk to make with Human After All, a fusion of hard rock riffs and poppy synths. “DANCE” stole the show, justly, but it’s a top notch album throughout. The beats are heavy, the hooks colossal, it’s a joy to dance to. “Stress” and “Phantom, pt. 2” are two of the album’s best.

3. Daft Punk – Alive 2007
This was a tough one to rank. My memories of the amazing live show are wrapped up in the disc, so I can’t judge it objectively. However, it’s pretty undeniably a fantastic mix. This should have been their greatest hits album, cobbling together pieces of nearly every song in their catalogue into a monster mix. There’s so many classic moments here, the fusion of “Harder Better” and “Around the World,” the mix of “Da Funk” and “Steam Machine,” and the crawling vocal from “Harder” over the base line from “Face to Face.” Throw this on as high volume as possible and just get lost in it.

2. !!! – Myth Takes - Another fantastic dance album, this album represents a huge jump for the band. “Heart of Hearts” and “Must be the Moon” were killer singles, perfect fusions of rock and dance, but the album didn’t stop there. I love “Break in Case of Anything” and the epic “Bend Over Beethoven” really tears things down. The dance rhythms give the music an energy and vibrancy must rock is lacking, their live show at Studio B in May was one of craziest I’ve ever been to, a mess of jumping and dancing. I’d love to see them live again.

1. Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
Funeral was already a great album, but this is a quantum leap from that. The scope of their orchestration is amazing, you hear things on this album you won’t hear from any other band. Think of the huge pipe organ intro on “Intervention,” or the wordless vocal breakdown on “Anti-Christ Superstar.” The album just makes me so happy, so charged. There’s a sense of deep emotion here, some regret and sadness all overwhelmed by the sheer power of the music. “No Cars Go” is the band’s opus, a climax for everything that’s come before, and “My Body is a Cage” is a haunting closer, building from nothing to an epic organ line that puts a perfect cap on the album. This isn’t just the best album of the year, it’s an all time classic. People will be listening and talking about this album thirty years from now.

The Wire: "Unconfirmed Reports" (5x02)

It’s always weird watching a show on a weekly basis after seeing all the previous seasons on DVD. The DVD experience creates a total immersion in the work, for a short time, it’s all about The Wire. With The Wire, each season is structured as a single story, so what lingers with you when it’s done is mostly stuff from the end of the season. Looking at season four, most of the big moments are in the last two episodes, the emotional payoffs for an entire season’s worth of stories.

Watching it on a weekly basis, you’re able to savor each episode more, and have more chance to speculate on what will happen. However, it can also be a bit frustrating. It’s hard to go a week without Herc or Carver, and I really want to see where things go. It’s a great testament to the show that the only complaints I have about this episode are what it’s not doing, that I want to see more of the world. Watching on DVD, it’s cool to lose characters for a week, or even most of a season, but weekly, their absence jumps out.

Still, it makes more sense to focus on what’s actually in the episode instead of what’s not, and there is a lot of great stuff here. The biggest development is the final moment, where McNulty’s frustration leads him to invent a serial killer in Baltimore. In season three, Colvin was presented as an older, wiser version of McNulty, someone who’s always tried to challenge the system, whose unconventional ideas have gotten him into trouble. Colvin used unconventional methods that would never be approved by the bosses as a way to get the right thing done. That’s essentially what McNulty is doing here, exploiting the system as a way to achieve his goals, and we’re left wondering if the ends justify the means.

McNulty’s frustration is rendered well. He had everything under control last year, and was the healthiest we’ve seen him during the series’ run. He had given up on changing the system and consigned himself to an easy, domestic life. But, the promise of a “new day in Baltimore” brought him back to Major Crimes, and into a spiral of self destructiveness. I’m not sure whether he really was happy in patrol, as he said. I’m guessing he was just waiting for an excuse to get back into homicide, telling himself that this time it would be different. He’s addicted the same as those drug addicts at NA. He can say he’s not going to drink, not going to fool around, but everything he says he won’t do is what he does. In a way, I’m glad that we skipped over the backslide because it would have been painful to watch him cause so much pain for Beattie. That said, I’m sure there’s still plenty of pain ahead for the two of them.

It’s notable that we’ve never seen McNulty and Russell together this season. If McNulty’s to remain sympathetic, we can’t connect Beattie to all his catting around. We see things from McNulty’s perspective, he’s just going along, and it’s only the other characters who talk about Beattie. I’m guessing everything will crash down around him soon, and Russell will confront him about what he’s been doing. McNulty’s back on a martyr kick, and what he’s done with this body is going to have potentially disastrous consequences for him.

The question now is what will happen if the higher ups find out. If McNulty is able to create a crisis and get more city funding for cops, they may be inclined to over look the lie. It’s like the end of Watchmen, to expose the lie will destroy the credibility of the department and city hall, and that would cripple the city.

The other advantage of this storyline is that it will involve the press directly. So far, they’ve been off in their own world, running parallel to the main stories, but not integrated. The show’s only misstep, the port storyline, didn’t work so well because it felt totally disconnected from everything else, and if the press keeps going like it does, we could run into that same problem. It’s not that the story is bad, it’s entertaining, but it’s hard to get to know all these characters five seasons into the show. Emotionally, the bond isn’t there. Last season, they built incredible characters with the four kids, but I don’t know that we’ve got the time for that this year. The fact that there’s only eight episodes left hangs heavy over everything.

The other issue with the press storyline is that it brings Simon’s pettiness to the story itself instead of the commentary track. Intentional or not, the pitch about the schools seemed like a self congratulatory boast, a fuck you to all the haters out there who said you can’t examine these kids’ lives in context. The reference to seeking prizes instead of quality seems like another one of his “I don’t care if we get an Emmy, but let me mention we’ve never won one yet again.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with going meta, but this isn’t The Invisibles, it’s a show that’s been incredibly realistic and never self reflexive, and I don’t think that kind of reflexivity fits well with the show’s aesthetic.

But, the press will fit perfectly with the serial killer storyline. Scott will likely see this as the piece to make his career, but will someone’s investigative reporting reveal the truth behind what’s going on? I’m not as opposed to the press stuff as a lot of other people, but it’s feeling more and more like the port storyline, which stayed in its own world, and never successfully integrated into the show as a whole.

That said, elements of the port storyline are back in the foreground this year, so I should probably clarify that it’s the Sobotka stuff that never integrated. I liked the story, parts of it were great, but it didn’t fit into the show as well as the politics or school stuff did. Still, it’s nice to see that it didn’t just disappear. The Greeks were the only characters nastier than Marlo, and there’s potential in a teamup between the two groups.

The interesting new layer here is the return of Avon. It’s great to see him back, even though he’s played as almost a comic character, flashing the West Side “W,” and just generally being very enthusiastic. My guess is he’s just glad to see another West Sider, and have a chance to exert some influence out on the street. He’s been on the sidelines for a while, and this is his chance to get back in the game. However, doing so from prison could be tough. Marlo isn’t much of a collaborator, and any attempts to mess with the Greeks could be disastrous. Ultimately, I see Avon getting knifed in prison and winding up in a bodybag.

Over with Marlo’s crew, we start to see some weak links in the machine. First is the guy who wants to go “all West Coast” and winds up screwing up the hit. Snoop cleans up his mess, but it’s that sort of showy wannabe gangster mentality that took down Avon’s organization. Not everyone’s going to have the discipline of a Snoop or Chris, and the bigger the organization gets, the more likely someone’s going to mess up.

Another major question mark is Michael. For the first time since the end of last season, we see him crack. The reality of what he’s doing with Chris becomes apparent, and he’s not so sure how to feel about his new mentor. Michael does have morals, and the more he becomes aware of how Marlo operates, the less he’s likely to go along with it. Chris and Snoop will kill that security guard, or the civilian woman in Andre’s without qualms, but will Michael? I don’t think so, and we’ve got to wonder now whether he’ll become like them, or rediscover his morality.

Again, I have to commend Simon and crew for the job they did with those kids. Michael and Dukie are arguably the most compelling characters on the show. Everyone else has found their place, and has to live with their choices, but Michael and Dukie are still inventing their identities. It’s not too late for Michael to get out, but he needs help. If you compare the person he is now to who he was back in the season four premiere, it’s an amazing evolution. I particularly love how he has moved from his own world with the kids and become integrated with the show as a whole.

There’s a quick glimpse of Cutty in the On Demand promo, as one of the only characters to get out of the game, he could be a potential guide for Michael. The scene where Michael lets the kid run away echoes what Cutty did for Fruit back in season three. Michael could also find a potential guide in Namond, who’s off somewhere with Colvin. I’d love to see the two of them again, and find out what happened to him. There’s so many people I’d love to see again, it’s sad to think there’s only eight episodes left. If we do see Colvin again, it will probably be for a farewell moment, he’ll not get another major storyline.

The other major storyline is Bubbles’ trouble with his new life. Without the dope, he’s got no direction in life and just drifts aimlessly along. I like how they’re not doing the obvious will he go back or won’t he drama. There’s nobody there for him most of the time, he’s just lost in his head. It’s hard to watch him so bereft of the life energy he had in the previous years.

That pretty much covers it. This is definitely a get the gears moving episode. Plots are being set up and things will likely start to spin together next week, once the news about the serial killer came out. And by next week, I actually mean Monday. But, as much as I like having the episode a week early, I really think it hurts the show to lose the zeitgeist of that single moment when everyone who watches the show sits down and sees what happens. They get their extra $5 out of me for the On Demand, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Farscape: 1x01 & 1x02

The first few scenes of Farscape’s “Premiere” did not have me optimistic. The father/son relationship between Crichton and his father felt clichéd, and the entire launch sequence reminded me of the worst episode of The X-Files: “Space.” I got no sense of these characters as real people, and the dialogue was firmly in movie world, with little connection to reality.

However, the show’s not about our world, it’s about the fantastic world Crichton finds himself transported to, and once he goes through the wormhole, the show picks up and becomes a really solid adventure. Most of the big sci-fi shows from the past few years, Battlestar Galactica and Babylon 5 most notably, are all about big political ideas and galaxy spanning conflicts. They’re shows with a cerebral edge, that only occasionally verge into pulpy adventure. They draw from the Star Trek school of sci-fi.

After watching the first two episodes, it seems like Farscape is the descendant of Star Wars. The myriad weird aliens and general focus on a serial adventure tone reminded me a lot of what those films did. There is some of that Star Trekky trouble of the week thing to the second episode, but it seems like the series’ mythology is tied back to the trilogy. Hell, Crichton even makes a reference to Yoda in the second episode, a bit odd considering we’ve got a guy who looks like Yoda’s cousin up on the ship.

Let me first cover the issues I’ve got with the series. At this point, I just don’t really care about standalone episodes. The second episode wasn’t particularly bad, but after watching countless Battlestar, Buffy, Babylon 5 and X-Files standalones, it’s hard to find new ground. I’m not particularly looking forward to going through a whole bunch of standalones on the way to the good stuff. Now, standalones can work really well, as long as they are used to explore character and not just tell the story of the week. Season five of The Sopranos, the series’ strongest, has very little arc per se, but the stories are so tight and revealing of character, it feels like everything is building to something. That’s a luxury that a late season show has, here, it’s tougher.

The second episode reminded me of an early Buffy standalone, entertaining enough in spite of the story, not because of it. I want to get to know these characters more, and the story seemed to get in the way. Not to mention, how many different planets can they encounter along the way? I liked the moment where Crichton kissed the woman, but I just didn’t care that much about these people.

And, there is a bit of goofiness to the goings on. It’s not the muppets, they’re really expressive and fun to watch. Rather, the over the top acting of D’Argo kills the scenes with him. He reminds me of Olaf the Troll from Buffy, and that lack of subtlety doesn’t work for a long term character. Aeryn, John and the blue lady are likable, but on the whole, the acting doesn’t have the immediate intensity of recent great shows. Now, maybe this will be a Buffy situation, where we get unforeseeable depth from the players. Hopefully it won’t be like Babylon 5, where the acting is serviceable, but with a few exceptions, not particularly inspiring.

So, that’s what’s bad, what’s good? I really do like the main two characters, and they’ve got great chemistry. John is a bit of a blank slate, classic pulp hero, but he’s fun to hang out with, and a good straight man for the various wacky goings on. And, in the second episode, you get a strong sense of his conflicted feelings. He’s excited to be in this new world, but also sad when he realizes he might never get home again.

Aeryn is my favorite so far. She reminds me a bit of Starbuck, though less self destructive. I can see some good potential in John helping her discover more of her humanity, and opening her up emotionally. It’s pretty clear a romance between them is getting set up, and that should be fun to watch. When the two of them are together, the show is always solid, it’s only when they get split up that things can get a bit slow.

In the first episode, I really liked the Peacekeepers, and I think they’ll be a strong villain. They definitely recall the Empire from Star Wars, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Freedom vs. oppression is an eternal conflict, and one well suited to the kind of stories they’re telling here. The space battles in that episode had a majesty, and there were moments that just hit me on a deep level. That’s what a great show does, touch something deep in the subconscious.

The other moment that did that for me was Zhaan taking the ship’s pain in episode two. I love that metaphysical stuff, and the scene had a real magical quality. The power of that moment made up for any of the other goofiness going on in the episode. As long as the standalones deliver enough good moments like that, I’ll stick with the show.

So, I’m going to seek out some more episodes, and see where things go with the show. I’m not completely sold yet, but I’m liking it so far and hopefully things will get even better. We shall see.

The Wire: 'More with Less' (5x01)

I caught The Wire’s season premiere on On Demand today. Even though I’m glad to see the episode a week early, I really don’t like having the episodes released early. While it’s increasingly becoming a thing of the past, I like having a work released at the same time everywhere, to emerge in a single cultural moment. In Before Sunrise, Jesse talks about a study which showed that people who do crossword puzzles a week after they’ve been released do better, presumably because the answers are somewhere out there in the collective subconscious. The same is true of having the episodes show up a week early, they’re just sort of floating there, and there’s no single moment when the episode emerges. I’d imagine this will be a particular issue with the finale, as The Sopranos shows, a finale can be a galvanizing cultural moment, but The Wire finale will just show up on On Demand at some point, there will never be that shared sense of watching the finale with everyone else who loves the show.

Both The Sopranos and the recent Radiohead album release show the fun of watching people struggle to catch up with something right as it emerges. But, we won’t be getting that with The Wire this season. I’ll be watching the episodes as early as possible, but I’d rather wait for everyone to see them at the same time.

Broadcasting issues aside, the episode itself is fantastic, quickly bringing us back into the world and conflicts that will guide the final season. One thing that’s significant about the season is that for the first time in Wire history, one season is directly continuing what happened in the previous one. You could easily view seasons one through three as a continuous arc, but there were significant tonal shifts between the seasons, most notably with the jarring introduction of the Frank Sobotka crew in season two. Season four set up the post Barksdale status quo, and we’re continuing that story here. The central conflicts of the season are Marlo’s feud with the co-op, and the police attempt to bust Marlo for the bodies.

Because we don’t need to spend a lot of time setting up the status quo, this season premiere feels a bit more accessible than previous year’s. Rather than being chapter one of a thirteen part story, it’s chapter fourteen of a twenty-three part one. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of new stuff going on, it’s just most of the changes are tending towards what we used to know rather than something new.

I’ll start off by talking about the new element of the season, the newspaper. With only ten episodes in the entire season, I’m a bit worried about how they’ll resolve the myriad character arcs in play, and fit in this newspaper stuff. Now, the show probably won’t give everyone a definitive conclusion. More likely, everyone will reach some kind of stasis point, and life will go on. The central plot conflicts have been in development for a while, so it shouldn’t be too tough to close them out in the ten episodes, and the newspaper will probably play a significant role in that storyline.

After the first episode, it seems like the newspaper will be used more as a pawn/catalyst in the conflict between Carcetti and the police, and the police and Marlo. Already, we’ve seen Haynes link city politicians to drug officials, and their reporting will likely dovetail with Freamon’s investigation into the Clay Davis money. Avon will be returning at some point during the season, and it would make sense that he would feature in the corruption scandal. I’m not sure what happened to Avon’s landholdings, but donated a lot of money to the Davis campaign, and could be involved should a trial happen.

I don’t think the press people will be developed as in depth as the kids were last year. We pretty much know all we need to already because we’ve seen similar people in the other institutions. As the parallel dialogue makes clear, it’s always hard to fight the good fight against the bosses. Haynes is just as disrespected as Lester or McNulty, but he’s going to keep fighting for small victories, like the one he gets in this episode.

I’m thinking that McNulty will leak the news that the police have halted the investigation into the bodies, which would put him in contact with the press characters. I’m also thinking that McNulty will have his eye on Alma, as the target of his returned wandering eye. I think The Wire is the only show on television that would send their attractive female reporter on a mission to a strip club and not even show the scene. HBO probably read that script and told Simon this is the reason you only get a ten episode renewal.

Either way, the press attention is going to be another pressure on Carcetti, who is already getting it from all sides. I’ve talked before about how Carcetti sold himself out at the end of season three, when he shut down Hamsterdam then gave a speech about how they need a new approach to stopping crime. His justification then was he could do a better job stopping crime as mayor, so the loss of Hamsterdam was worthwhile. As mayor, he’s been doing everything in service of the notion that he can make more change if he’s governor. That’s what led him to pass up federal money for the schools at the end of season four, another damning moment that has lingering consequences this season, as he finds the police force getting more and more out of control.

Even though I hate Carcetti the character, I love what Simon and co. did with his story. Carcetti started out as a somewhat annoying, but goodhearted character. You got the impression he really did care about protecting witnesses when he write Royce the letter in season three. There, his political ambition meshed with his desire to do good and all was well. However, as the series has progressed, we’ve seen the way any hopes of doing good are gradually extinguished by his immersion in the system. He’s beholden to so many special interests as mayor, it would be near impossible to really change anything. The budget crisis is similarly vexing, preventing him from any serious bureaucratic restructuring. The system is designed to maintain itself, and real change is near impossible.

But that still doesn’t excuse Carcetti’s awful behavior. He created a problem when he passed over the money, and creates another one when he passes on federal funds here. He didn’t think things through and now has a mutinous police force on his hands. Norman is the one voice of reason in his cabinet, the rest are just feeding his deluded further political ambitions. Carcetti will likely compromise the Clay Davis investigation because a major takedown there could enhance the political reputation of the states’ attorney. He is sabotaging his own people to ensure his position, and around him corruption like the drug dealer move continues to happen. As Daniels observes, the new day in Baltimore is most definitely over.

In general, the change we’ve seen over the course of the series has proven futile. At this point, we’re basically back to the season one status quo. The detail has been reassembled and is using the same surveillance techniques that got Barksdale to track Marlo. However, Marlo is a smarter, more evolved form of gangster. It’s fascinating to watch the one upmanship over the years, the move from beepers to burners to personal communication only. Marlo doesn’t take any risks, and that’s kept him and his crew out of prison. But, eventually they all slip, and the detail needs to be there when it happens.

That’s why it’s such a problem that they can’t get the overtime to track Marlo. The constant police presence will reduce violence, but once it’s gone, the bodies will start piling up again. From a dramatic point of view, I’m not sure why they brought everyone back into the detail only to tear it down an episode later. However, I’m guessing the point is to show that Carcetti’s grand ambitions were not realistic, and crumble in the face of the city’s financial troubles. Carcetti is more loyal to his party and Clay Davs than to the people of the city.

Along with the slip back to season one, we get McNulty’s return to drunkenness. He’s combined his addiction to alcohol with his addiction to the job, and in slipping back on one, he slips back on the other. It’s hard to watch the scene with Russell alone at the house, knowing that she still trusts McNulty on some level. The problem is much like the one faced by Nate on Six Feet Under. McNulty can play at being the good husband and father for a time, but in doing so, is he destroying the real him? Was everything he was in season four a lie? Maybe, or maybe that’s just how he justifies his current behavior to himself.

Either way, it’s good to see McNulty back in a prominent role. In season one, he was the spark that ignited everything that would follow. He got Freamon back to real police work, and helped to set up the whole Barksdale takedown. His role on the show diminished as time passed, and I think there’s a tendency to write him off as the white leading man put in to appease network demands. But, he’s a fascinating study, and a great presence. Dominic West always brings it, and it’ll be nice to see him leading things forward again this year.

The episode is saturated with callbacks to the past. The best is Chris going to City Hall to get information about the Greeks. It’s amazing to see that storyline coming back to the fore. After season two, I assumed it was just a standalone piece, but it’s returning to the fore here, and I love the fact that Marlo is using McNulty’s investigation to support his own. It’s a great use of continuity, a great example of how the show really is one unified long work, broken into five chapters, but all connected. In addition to that great moment, there’s some funny callbacks, like Sydnor reminding McNulty he wasn’t on the port investigation, or the talk about McNulty’s undercover mission in the brothel.

The series has always made parallels between the drug dealer organizations and the government bureaucracy, and this episode did some great work by showing Prop Joe in a similar position as Carcetti. He is facing a challenge from Marlo, and trying to sure his power base. It’s interesting that Joe actually runs a more fair operation than Carcetti, trying to help out his people who have been negatively impacted by the Hopkins expansion. While he obviously does a lot of wheeling and dealing in his interest, Joe sees the benefit of the co-op and is legitimately committed to supporting his fellow dealers.

Part of that is that they are all weaker than him, and the co-op gives him a way to keep control. Marlo threatens that because he’s the only one who offers a real challenge to power, and attempts to sow discontent by pointing out how Slim Charles was passed over for territory. Simon usually talks about the show in the context of its sociological message, but he can make a hell of a story. Over the past season, we’ve been set up for a war between Marlo, Prop Joe, the Greeks, and Omar and the Hispanic gangs, with the police on top of all that. It’s been a perfectly paced build, and if Avon gets involved, it could synthesize all the seasons together for the final climax. I felt like it would be impossible to do something as epic as the Stringer/Avon conflict at the end of season three, but things are building and building here, and this show always pays off its plot points. That meeting was full of ill portent, and it’s only a matter of time before Omar makes his move.

One of the things I love about the co-op scene is the way the police are so close to finding out about the whole co-op, but Marlo brings a girl with him and they look no further. All the acting on the show is phenomenal, but I want to give some props to Robert Chew as Prop Joe, who brings the huge charisma that Stringer and Avon used to carry. Method Man is another fantastic presence, it’s weird to talk about Method Man acting in one of the best works of art of the twenty-first century, but he nails it every time, and looking at his glare at the end of the episode, it’s clear he’s not happy with the way things are.

The thing The Wire does better than any other show is to tell a story in the most efficient way possible. In two scenes, not even three minutes total, we learn exactly where Dukie and Michael are. Michael is emulating Chris, the first adult he can trust as a father figure. He’s trying to be like him, and is apparently moving up in Marlo’s organization. Dukie has no respect on the corner, a couple of lines of dialogue and the shot of him on the stoop convey this. He’s been playing at drug dealer, but isn’t able to do it yet. The entire story of his move to the corner, and failure to succeed is told in two shots basically. The show trusts the audience to follow things, we don’t need a lot of details, just the single shot in the montage at the end of season four, and this pickup here tells the whole story. That’s a testament to the fact that the characters are so well realized, we already know what will happen if Dukie goes out on the street, and can fill in the blanks of what happened for ourselves.

Dukie’s future remains uncertain. Michael cares for him, and is willing to give him an easy life as Bug’s nanny, but Dukie doesn’t want to just take his charity. Michael recognizes the damage that Dukie’s parents did to him, and he also sees Dukie as his last tie to the life he used to have. It’s so sad to think that a year ago, these kids were starting school, that their lives are already so far gone.

Can Dukie come back from this? I hope so, I could see him getting arrested and calling Prez for help, possibly turning witness. Or, Prez might tell him not to say anything, after Randy got totally fucked over last year. But, The Wire always surprises. We know Dukie will fail in his initial venture to the corner, but over the course of the season, he might harden up and become more like Michael. Either way, that storyline is one of the most interesting on the show right now, and I’m eager to see how it develops.

Another of the show’s best strengths is the way they are able to reinvent characters to suit the needs of the story, and rather than feeling contrived, it fits perfectly with the character arc. Look at Prez last year, I think of him as a teacher more than a police, like he finally found his true calling in that last year. It’s not so much that he was turned into a teacher to suit the story, it’s that the person found what he really should be.

This year it’s Herc who gets the fantastic reinvention. I felt like they had exhausted him by the end of last year, when he screwed over everyone in his path. But, he has found a way to fuck up even worse. Probably my favorite moment of the episode is the reveal that Herc is working for Levy. It’s such a perfect twist, and knits everything closer together. He’ll now be using police resources to help out the very drug dealers they’re trying to prosecute. Watching those scenes, and the episode as a whole, made me feel like David Simon had the whole five years in mind from the very start, that he knew where all these people would wind up and expertly navigated them through the years. That Herc, seemingly a comic throwaway character, could become so significant in the overall plot is amazing. It’s a perfect development.

The only major thing I haven’t touched on is Bubbles’ struggle to recover. Again, Simon assumes we’ve seen the whole show. Bubbles went to his sister’s in season one, he’s back here without much explanation because he knows we remember what happened before. And, we get the subtle reveal that Bubbles stole her stuff last time and pawned it. This year, we get the dichotomy between ‘Reginald,’ the person he is without the drugs, and ‘Bubbles,’ the legendary street figure. We’ve never even heard him called Reginald, who is that guy? What kind of life will he have without the drugs, and can he ever get people to trust him again? It’s hard for us to watch his sister throw him out because we know he’s really trying to change, but for her, this is one of many attempts to get clean, and who knows if his resolve really means anything?

It’s jarring to see him all cleaned up, and so much more subdued. He doesn’t have that energy he used to have on the streets. Part of him is missing, and I think that is one of the major troubles people have getting clean. The drugs make you into a different person, and what if people like that guy better? Certainly the death of Sherrod changed him too, forced him to look back and see what his life had become. I really hope that Bubbles doesn’t relapse, that he makes it to at least a somewhat happy ending. After what he went through last season, it would be too hard to watch things get any worse.

No show on TV is as dense as The Wire. This post is 3,000 words, about one episode, and I feel like I only scratched the surface. The show is back and as good as ever, though I do still have some doubts about everything getting wrapped up in nine episodes. We shall see. But, they’ve never let me down before, I’m sure things will go out on a good note.