One "woo hoo!" and one "WTF?"

[trinityvixen]

Breakdown of the X-Men Origins: Wolverine trailer. It looks like I was right: blondie is probably Diamond Emma Frost. There are only about thirty other dudes I didn't recognize, including Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool. (That took some rewatching and pausing to find, as he's in it for less time than the close-up of Wolverine's dogtags.) I feel miffed that Diamond Emma would be featured so prominently, but given how stupid looking telepaths look in the movies, I'm happy to take that. As long as she's the bitch we all know and love, Diamond Emma is fine. (I really just think the telepath thing would detour the story too much. They're already juggling SO MANY THINGS.)

*****

JESUS H. CHRIST, I HOPE THIS PERSON IS KIDDING. REMAKE FARSCAPE!?! You know this article is a TRAIN WRECK from the first paragraph when you get to this:

There are a lot of cool ways this underrated show could return to TV as something darker, less campy, and more socially relevant, just like Battlestar Galactica did. And with all the good alien ensemble dramas evaporating from TV (later days, Star Trek: Enterprise and Stargate), now is the time to strike.

Gee, when I think of Farscape the first word that comes to mind is definitely "campy." And MAKE IT DARKER!?! They didn't even get out of the first season without torturing (literally!) the hero. After they first mind-fucked him, stuck him full of parasites, had his only friends in the far universe ditch him, throw him into mortal combat with a guy who hated him, and had him be possessed by a creature that forced him to kill. Yeah, that show is totally for lightweights.

Don't get me wrong--the show veered into crack territory and never left, but I'd be hard pressed to hold the faults of seasons 3-4 against the show when seasons 1-2-3 basically involved the main character (and others) being raped every other episode. Crack is different than camp, though. Crack is...well, what Farscape was. It's not even able to be camp because it's just not. It's in a class by itself.

Everything this person suggests makes me want to vomit. Let's make Scorpius look like a normal dude! Rygel needs to be ambiguously benevolent as a ruler. (Um, wasn't he?) Crichton and Aeryn need to have suffered some mutually tragic loss to justify their being together! Seriously, this person must never have watched this show. Because this:

And by focusing on the brain chip technology, instead of the wormhole technology, we open up space for genuinely scary episodes with a texture of conspiracy (who is controlling who? are our minds our own?).

Was pretty much the point of the Nebari. ("A Clockwork Nebari" anyone?) WTF?

Comments

[habiliments.livejournal.com]

She better be a bitch. That's all I can say. (Also, in my head, Diamond Emma didn't ... have facets. But I'm only a part-time comics obsessive and my Emma is part Hellfire, part Grant Morrison, so WTF do I know...)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Emma Frost is so delightfully unapologetic about her entitlement issues. It makes me wish people who were really like that were half so entertaining.

And I have the same reaction you did to the diamond-izing: Um, corners? Why? Because people are usually so curvy, I guess I just assumed Emma would be, too.

(I, too, have a preference for White Queen Emma, but that's only because her costume post-that era has been...well. Also, I think she's f'ing Cyclops now, and that's just a sign of their mutual sickness.)

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I wouldn't call Farscape camp. Camp requires self-referential humor at the cheesiness of it all. Hercules--that's camp. (I ended up discussing Hercules with a bunch of Swedes this weekend. They were all annoyed at the portrayal of Scandinavia in the Norse episodes, to which I say no shit.)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Maybe it got there in season four? I have no idea.

Hercules should apologize for a lot of things it ruined.

[glvalentine.livejournal.com]

Darker? Farscape? Oh, how I laugh. Laugh, and then create a duplicate of myself that dies horribly, leaving everyone bereft, including the other me who now has to meet up with all the people who loved the me that died! Ah, lighthearted fun for everyone!

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I laugh! I laugh because it's funny to imagine all the ways you can fracture your soul and then see them played out on some poor schmuck for your amusement! LAUGH!

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

Good catch on Emma--I had seen your query about that in your previous post but honestly couldn't even remember seeing her in there. I do agree with those fan posts that both Emma and Gambit are misplaced, but oh well--we have no idea what they're doing with the origin story, so they're probably morphing it to accommodate those characters' presence.

I never watched Farscape so I can't comment much on that one.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I don't honestly know Weapon X well enough to know who should be there other than Wolverine, Sabretooth, Silver Fox, and Deadpool, but I sure as shit know both Gambit and Emma Frost well enough to know they shouldn't. However, from what Hugh Jackman's been saying, I assume that the other X-Men credited with appearances (I saw Cyclops listed on the IMDB wtf?!), maybe Weapon X just runs afoul of them??

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

The Nebari AND Harvey. The man spends the better part of a season at war with an entity within his own mind that wants to steal his greatest secret and then kill him.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, "are our minds our own?" MY ASS. I mean Harvey wasn't intentional, entirely, and he lasted past when he should have in Crichton's brain, but still. Towards the end of season two, Harvey was wearing Crichton like a costume. He wasn't even a puppet--he was just the window-dressing to the chip.

I only brought up the Nebari because the sort of systemic mind control that they practice is exactly what this idiot thinks needs to be invented (...again?) to make Farscape "relevant." I think the truth is that Farscape was just ahead of its time on that score.

[equustel.livejournal.com]

Oh my hell.

Keep Browder and Black together, but give them new roles and a tragic past that's made them bitter. Perhaps their son was killed by the Peacekeepers and they adopted Moya in his place.

...I have no words for this. W. TF. "Let's gut everything these characters were about and remake them in my image!"

And seriously, just because Farscape was bright and colorful doesn't mean it wasn't dark. I am bugged by this notion that things must be grayscale and tinted with somber colors to be considered "srs bizniz" and "gritty". No: that is what we would call pretentious. Which Farscape was certainly not, and refreshingly so.

Have you seen all of seasons 3-4 yet? They're my favorites actually, heh. The cracktasticness of them sort of hit a nerve in me, and a good one.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, who cares about the first human being to go out into deep space having to establish himself and make intimate bonds of friendship and love with creatures he cannot possibly understand under less than ideal, constantly stressful circumstances? You know what's relevant? The loss parents experience when kids die. That's totally new territory. ::GROANS::

Part of the horror of Farscape's genius was the shiny things that did so much damage. Look at Zhaan. She was easily the most bright, beautiful thing, and she was the only prisoner who was actually guilty of anything and she could go evil and rip your brain out. (Or bud spores and go mad.) The best part of this trend is that it recapitulates what we see in nature. There's a rule when you dive that goes "If it's really pretty or really ugly: DON'T TOUCH IT." Because nature loves to make shiny, pretty things that ZOMG KILL YOU SO DEAD. (Look at poison dart frogs!)

I have not finished 3. I need to go through all of 2, since I missed an ep here or there, then proceed onward. After I finish all eighty billion of the other shows that are in the way, naturally. Of what I've seen of 3 and heard of 4, I'm wary, but I'm sure it won't be quite as jarring if I see what actually led to the cracktacularity. Then again, I'm pretty sure one episode was entirely about D'Argo, Chiana, and John just being high, and that's hard to explain away regardless.

[avram]

There are a lot of cool ways this underrated show could return to TV as something darker, less campy, and more socially relevant, just like Battlestar Galactica did.

Someone's determined to duplicate the comics industry's big mistake of the late '80s and '90s in a new medium.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Some comics did it right, and as long as there's one case where this worked, some idiot is going to propose it as a solution to everything. And that idiot has in this article.

[avram]

The big mistake I'm referring to was not the publication of the darker, more mature and formally interesting works that started the trend (Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns), but focusing on the darkness as the feature that made those works successful, rather than the maturity and formal development.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Point.