(no subject)

[trinityvixen]

There are many, many things wrong with last night's episode. It began with Lois about to get it on with Oliver Queen. Not that I blame her, mind, but I still can't understand his interest. He is so the best boyfriend on this show (thinking, thinking, yep, that's true), and if he's going to be the most super awesome guy a girl could want, he can have his pick. Ideally, he'd be with Chloe, but she, like Oliver, is too good to get the person equal to her awesomity, so she gets stuck with Jimmy and Oliver is stuck with Lois (because there are no other gurrrlz on this show except for OUR GUIDING STAR, LIGHT OF OUR LIVES, LANA LANG! Oh God, I'd sooner have Lex and Clark fighting over Martha Kent--and yes, I know how weird and gross that would be). What's truly awful about Lois and Oliver starting to get physical is that she gets nakedish and he doesn't.

It only gets worse. Really, if Oliver can hear the mugging from the roof, why not just take out a six-shooter special and fire arrows into bad guys from above? Then he can still get the sex (ugh, not that I wanted that either) and not be a total jerk. Dude, no wonder Batman gets more attention than you. He manages to get his licks in without always throwing on the cowl. I suppose the mega drug excuses it, right?

That's also the most PSA-heavy bit of stupidity ever. I think we've covered "DRUGS IS BAD! DON'T DO DRUGS" enough through the not-at-all-veiled metaphor of Clark on red K (they even abbreviated it to "K"--how many more anti-drug messages do we need?). Oliver doing drugs to make himself stronger, more durable, mmm, maybe. He definitely is incensed that he has the drive and werewithal to fight crime but is still vulnerable, while Clark is the complete opposite, so I buy him doping. But I would have thought he might have been a taaaaaad more subtle. Probably not, though, 'cause how else would Clark figure it out if it weren't bleeding obvious?

One thing I will say for the episode is that Justin Hartley is fairly amazing when it comes to being contrite and guilty-looking. His showing up at the end for dinner, his real acceptance of his responsibility for his utter weakness (ugh, haaaaate that they went there just because he was better than anyone else on the show except Chloe), they're really well done. Not Battlestar-level of complexity, but not nearly as piddling as the rest of the cast. He has to get off this show and try his hand at other things. Like a Green Arrow show. I'd watch that.

Hmm, and something else happened in this episode, didn't it? Oh, that's right, LANA WAS SOOOOO IMPORTANT (not) again. I, my friends reading this, future unborn children saw that ending coming. Let's see, woman gets woozy and passes out, has headaches = PREGNANT. If she'd been throwing up, that would have been the holy trifecta of cliched reveals that a character is having a baby. It was also the least believable fainting spell ever. Two seconds covers the drop to the floor and the standing up again. She didn't even look like she was going to pass out before she did, which, I'm sorry, doesn't happen. You don't walk around la la lah fine--DROPPED. Not unless you got whacked over the head suddenly, which, granted, happens a lot on this show.

I was joking with viridian that Lana passed out because her uterus was pressing on her brain stem, she is so skinny and tiny. Really, some super-sperm just migrated up to her medulla and is slowly squeezing the life from her. I wish, but I can dream, can't I? I was hoping they might pull a last second "not suck" card and give her a fucking tumor or something, but no such luck. And Lex will find out in two seconds and horn in on that shit. Fantastic. Love it. They suck as a couple, so let's make them babies to force them together. Worked in that near-death flash thing he had, right? ::rolls eyes::

Hey, what do you know, I was right! Watching "The Rise of the Cybermen" again last night, I kept trying to figure out where I'd seen the guy playing Lumic before. He's Barty Crouch Sr from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Checked it out with the IMDB, and, yes, he surely is. He and David Tennant are fated to be forever on opposite sides of good and evil (and general attractiveness, too, wooo, I guess Barty Jr. got his looks from his poor mother...). Go me and my mad ability to recognize people in stuff. It's really distracting, though, since British stuff is terribly incestuous--I think they have a pool of about a hundred people they recycle through film and TV, and that's it. There are bit players, so maybe it's like 200, but really, this is ridiculous. I guess, with British stock, there's only so much hot to go around. Gotta keep the good-looking ones front and center (not that I'm complaining about that, mind).

I still don't like the Cybermen as villains. I dunno what it is. If the villains are going to talk (talking zombies, basically), they should have emotions. Even the Daleks have emotions (they like blowing stuff up and killing, so it's a kind of happy angry). No, that's not it either, really. I dunno, I just don't like them. Not that they're not scary in their own right, just that they're...dull. I think the second series finale does a better job of making them frightening by showing people who aren't just drones going in to be processed.

Something I do give the show credit for, though, is design. I dunno when the Cybermen were originally designed or how much these new ones deviate from that template, but they are fairly frightening to look at (there's where they best the Daleks--the Daleks are just, God help me, cute). They also have a distinctive sound, moving and speaking, that's well done, too. There's a greater range of emotion packed into the voice modulator for the Cybermen, which is amazing given the inflection-less tone of their speech. And the Cyber Controller, with part Cyberman, part scary Lumic voice is credibly terrifying. Design-wise, they're brilliant. Execution-wise, meh, I dunno.

I woke up at 7:15 this morning wide awake. I should have gotten up and packed. For some reason, I got up way early, kept waking and going back to sleep, then got blasted out of bed by my alarm. My alarm has no happy medium setting on volume. Turn the dial just slightly and it goes from quiet to startlingly loud. And now it's not automatically finding the time, which is irksome, as I've gotten quite lazy enjoying that feature. I unplugged it in the hopes that it will find the right time next time I plug it in. It would do this right before I'm going on vacation. I need that frakkin' alarm. I'll have to set the one on my phone just to be sure.

Comments

[ecmyers.livejournal.com]

On the plus side, maybe Lana will die during childbirth...

That episode sucked for so many reasons, and yet it was still better than most of season four.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

See, there we are in perfect agreement. On both counts. Yes, fully, yes.