Games and Art

Most videogames are not art. I don't just mean "most videogames suck". I don't mean Madden or Call of Duty or other series that rehash the same principles under an annual release lack soul. I don't mean repackaged upgrades/expansions like Super Street Fighter 4: Ultimate Championship Edition are just cheap cash-in attempts. I mean legitimately good games that I love -- games like Final Fantasy VI, Ocarina of Time, or Mass Effect 2 -- aren't inherently art.

That's not to say that these games aren't, in a way, artful. There is skillful work of all manner in play in these games and others. There's writing. There's composing. There are models and environments to draw and render and animate. There's A.I. scripting and software design. Years ago, I would feverishly point out to these facets of game design and insist that games must be art. This agglomeration argument doesn't work for me anymore, though.

Many games have moments where they reach the level of art. There are scenes of catharsis and closure in adventure games and RPGs of all generations that (due to limitations of writing or presentation if nothing else) would lose their teeth if not for the connection that control gives you to the protagonist(s), and thus the world they inhabit. There are points in Mass Effect 2 and 3 where your decisions catch up with you and you're stuck having to choose between options you don't like with no idea of how things will pan out. Then you remember that, so long as you've been consistently good or bad, you'll almost certainly get a dialog option -- eventually -- that lets you satisfy all parties. But that doesn't make the game, as a whole, art.

In order for anything to be art, it must take advantage of the inherent, or at least prevalent, characteristics of its art form. For games, this means delivering messages and fostering ideas and discussions that are most effectively conveyed through the participatory nature of the medium. Few games are dedicated to this task, but it seems like examples of this are increasing, and I think that has something to do with the fact that we're finally beginning to understand this medium as multiple generations of people who grew up with it are finally working together to determine its future.

I think it's fair to take into account the technological context of a game when deciding if it's art. The original Legend of Zelda, for instance, seems to have a better claim to being art than any of its successors. Why? Because the entire game is exploratory. You begin helpless. An unfamiliar old man cautions you and gives you a sword. And you find your way and unlock the mysteries of the world around you on your own. You bomb walls and burn bushes and stab octoroks and, through cryptic clues, slowly discover the intention of the designers with as little overt instruction as possible. Lack of instruction was a common thing in older games, but generally there were people who gave obvious directions or level design that limited your options and made things pretty clear (I can't go to the left, I guess I'll go to the right). The Legend of Zelda had none of this, and that's part of what makes it so thrilling and frustrating to go back and play today.

For similar reasons, I'd call the original Metroid (and maybe even Super Metroid, if only because of Metroid's relative obscurity at the time) art. Nearly any time a game asks you to play with it and not just play it, I'd call that art. This falls apart in more sandbox-y games like Sim[fill in the blank], where developer intent is minimal, but I'd generally classify those more as toys than games -- a discussion for another day. Unfortunately, this is increasingly hard to do as genre norms and design conventions create a context in which we can figure out what a game wants from us without a whole lot of explicit instruction. It's still doable (this is what Jonathan Blow is trying to do with Witness), but it's harder.

Another example of how games approach art is by abusing, rather than obfuscating, the goal oriented nature of a "game".

As an example: At various points in the end of the classic SNES RPG Earthbound (also known as Mother 2), the developers break the fourth wall to ask you, the player, your name. Come the end of the game, it turns out that your characters, no matter how well leveled, cannot defeat Giygas. Instead, you need to use Paula's "pray" ability until, eventually, you, the player, pray for Giygas to die, causing him to take massive damage.

As a good little Christian boy, the intent of this was lost on me. "Of course praying can defeat evil," I thought. What was really going on was this: Shigasato Itoi, the creator of Earthbound, was trying to be subversive. The only reason that Giygas dies -- the only reason that these characters and this world can be saved -- is because the player wants it. The player doesn't even have to want Giygas to die for the sake of the characters, but only because he or she wants to finish the game. At the climax of the game, Itoi sucks you out of the moment by fantastically breaking the fourth wall and asks you to come to terms with the time and effort you've put into this ultimately meaningless experience.

Does it work? Not entirely. Is it admirable? Yes.

It's a technique that is accomplished infinitely better by Shadow of the Colossus, one of the best examples of games as art that I can think of. Some of what makes SotC great are the exploratory elements. The only instruction available to you is the beam of light that will appear to direct you to your next goal if you hold your sword up to the sun. The game world is large and empty and filled with small spots of quiet beauty that you can find if you're willing to just wander aimlessly.

The entire game itself consists of 13 fights with enormous creatures who you only learn how to defeat as you struggle to survive against them. You're never told explicitly why you're doing this, as I recall. It's just suggested that you're taking the only course of action you know to revive your lost love -- whose body you place on a stone slab inside a gigantic temple at the beginning of the game.

It's also suggested that what you're doing is taboo, and as your progress through the game you begin to get a sense of why. Every time you kill a Colossus, you're not only extinguishing the life of a magnificent being that, other than your intrusion, has lived in peaceful solitude for time immemorial. You're unleashing palpable darkness that both enters physically into yourself and gives rise to discomforting shades in the temple that serves as your home base.

But you have no choice. The nature of the game is such that you either have to continue doing this or put it down or simply ride your horse around the barren landscape as you try to decide between the two.

At the end, your misgivings are proved correct, and while your love is brought back, it's to life alone in this now completely empty country.

It's powerful and beautiful and perhaps one of the greatest games ever made. People have complained about the awkward controls, but they're meant to be. You're not a God of War or any other sort of ultimate bad ass. You may be a great warrior, but you're still on your own fighting against living mountains. It's not meant to be easy or fluid. It's meant to be gut wrenching and panic inducing, and the moment of triumph as a Colossus collapses to the ground and dissolves into nearly nothing is meant to be as total as the moment of conflicted-ness following it as you again see something ominous penetrating your soul.

Maybe less powerful, but likely more important, are games that ask us to think about the norms in gaming. This is what I see happening more and more, especially in small, one-shot indie games.

One of the most famous individuals in game design is Peter Molyneux. This is the man created the "god game" in Populous and took it to new levels in Black and White. He tasked players with taking on the role of the villain in Dungeon Master, and attempted to create a game world that would respond dynamically to the player's behavior in the Fable series. The thing about Molyneux is that, as much as for his games, he's famous for over-promising, and also for making promises and talking about ideas that gamers as a whole often don't care about. The use of the Dog as a surrogate HUD in Fable 2, for instance, or his talk about creating a sense of "touch" by using Kinect in Fable 3 (a feature that disappeared long before the game saw release).

Molyneux's lofty and occasionally absurd ambitions have given rise to a brilliant Twitter parody known as Peter Molydeux. This is a guy who asks questions like "What if your avatar was afraid of you and you had to gain his trust?". Kind of ridiculous, but sometimes, you just need to run with ridiculous ideas and see the result. Fortunately, game developers all around the country agreed with that sentiment, and a couple of weekends, we got the Peter Molydeux Game Jam, in which hundreds of developers/development teams spent a weekend making a game/prototype based on a Molydeux tweet.

There are half a dozen games about talking suicidal businessmen off of ledges. There are games about being a bear who needs to hug people in order to breath, but you will kill people if you hug them for too long. There are games in which a pair of lovers need to parkour their way out of a city but become distracted/incapable if they are too far apart. Most impressively, there are games like Recidivism, where you need to continually watch the death animation of every enemy you kill until they fill up the screen and/or you die.

For better or worse, videogames are violent, and rarely do they ask you to confront that notion. Again, there are instances (such as the airport scene on Modern Warfare 2 or, better yet, having to deal with the zombies of every person you killed during one of the boss fights in Metal Gear Solid 3), but these are isolated. Making games, even short, tiny ones, that ask us to think about and stare at the things that games tend to force us to do is good. It gets us to question why these activities are the only ones we engage in, and it asks us to open up our minds to new approaches.

The interactive nature of games can make for powerful storytelling in the traditional sense, but traditional design concerns make it relatively easy for player to simply escape the stories that game makers may be trying to tell. The attitudes that most people take into games simply aren't conducive to articulating the sorts of ideas that we see in books and movies. This is why the agglomeration argument doesn't work and why storytelling isn't the measure by which we consider games as art..

What games are good at is confronting us with ideas about leisure and how we spend our free time. This, then, is how games become art: by building into their structure questions about how and why we play them and what their limitations are. A game is are art when it changes the way we play and think about games as a whole.

Events like the Molydeux jam give me hope that people will take time to think about games at this level and to make statements about the state of gaming through games more regularly going forward. The importance of the ideas being expressed may not make immediate sense to people outside the culture, but that happens with all art, and it doesn't matter. Art isn't about appeal. It's about truth. And we're finally reaching a point where we're willing to pursue that.

Mass Effect 3 and the Stories We Think We Tell (Spoiler Free)

Finished Mass Effect 3. If you're an active resident of the internets, you've probably heard that a whole lot of people aren't just displeased with the ending, they actively hate it -- to the point that Bioware is caving and preparing an alternate ending (try searching around if you want to know more). I'll admit that the ending feels a little contrived at points (and the post credits scene is laughably bad), but it could be waaaay worse.

Here's the thing to know: in the minds of the game's creators, the message of this series was never simply about survival. For them, the whole of the series was about organic vs synthetic life (and the presumed deficiencies of organics). In that light, the ending makes perfect sense.

Unfortunately, this overarching "organic vs synthetic" plot line was never made nearly as explicit as the "fight for survival" that dominates the rhetoric of the characters. Yes, the synthetic nature of the Reapers makes them a unique sort of enemy, but it's their unknowable-ness (a combination of their origin, their age, and their limited appearance), not just their unnaturalness that makes them daunting.

You could just as easily have had an advanced organic race that shows up every several thousand years to check in on the modern races and assimilate or destroy them as they see fit. The Reapers didn't need to be synthetic to be effective, they just needed to be insurmountably powerful. Being synthetic is one path to that. Simple sci-fi technobabble is another.

It would be hard to do more with just the Reapers themselves to enhance the clarity of the message that the writers were trying to deliver, though. They need to be somewhat remote so they can remain effective boogeymen. Besides, Sovereign and Harbinger both bring out the whole "gaaah, you are puny organics, we are your future, cower! COWER, I SAY!" rhetoric on those rare occasions where you do get to communicate.

In order to make this story work, you need to have a world that's built around paranoia about the limitations of organics from the start. You need to have the advanced races terrified about the technological and cultural plateaus that they've been sitting at, sometimes for millennia. Humanity has only been part of the interstellar scene for about 30 years by the end of Mass Effect 3, and yet we're as advanced as any other species in the galaxy.

You need to have more incidents of failures to contain or control artificial intelligence, possibly all having gone and merged with one another to form some heterogeneous variation on the Geth. You need to have these scarier Geth floating around the edges of "civilized" space before things ever start, using their unique intelligence to devise technologies and solutions and threats that we've never conceived of. The Reapers need to not be the only threat, but the biggest and most sudden. The Reapers need to be a realization for the existing fears that are already plaguing the population.

Instead, we have a peacetime galactic government that is focused on politics as usual and just the one incidence of failed A.I.. Worse, the Geth don't seem to be improving much upon the same technologies everybody else in the galaxy is using, and once Legion shows up to provides a mouthpiece for them, they suddenly become more accessible -- making it seem like collaboration could be a legitimate option if organics are willing to set aside their (limited) fears.

Fixing these problems of setting would be an important step, but the rest of the problem is harder to address. Part of the reason the basic survival narrative seems so dominant is because it's next to impossible to provide a gameplay goal built around anything else. This stripped down story was always going to engage the player's attention because surviving is what they spend roughly half of the game doing. The only solution I can see is to make fights with synthetics lifeforms more imposing. Make sure that they are so much harder to kill than simple security robots. Make these fights feel distinct and more tense. Don't just send Shepard and friends off to kill them in droves, but let a handful of Geth be a significant challenge.

With these (not insignificant) changes, I'm sure people would have still complained about the ending because it's an ending and it's never going to satisfy everybody (and there are some contrived elements to it). But the complaints would have been for different reasons and could at least have been in line with what the writers were envisioning. As it stands, I'm glad to know what I know and I'll be glad to let that knowledge shape how I play through the game in the future. It was a fun trip, even if I'm not certain it was as strong as either of the first two games.

Thoughts from the Half-Way Point: Mass Effect 3

Unless I opt to move my 360 into my room, the NCAA tournament is going to put a massive damper on my ability to play Mass Effect 3 over the next several days. As such, I figure this is as good a time as any to sit back and reflect some on the experience so far. I'll try to avoid spoilers, but at this point, so much of the game depends on what you've done before, that there are only a few plot points that would obviously follow no matter what your Shepard has done.

That's really the first mark in the game's favor. After so many decisions in ME1 seemed to be largely without consequence beyond the cosmetic in ME2, everything you've done before suddenly takes on added significance. More important, the blatant good/bad dichotomy has lessened remarkably, as the bulk of decisions seem to be much more grey. To this end, even the Paragon/Renegade divide has been diminished, with many decisions simply serving to enhance your "reputation" -- a catchall that contributes to both scores. I finally have a compelling reason to revisit Mass Effect 1 and alter my decision making at certain junctures just to see how certain quests change and how that will affect my ability to prepare the galaxy at large.

The increased value of your decisions wouldn't matter if they didn't continue to contribute to strong storytelling, though, and I'm happy to say that they do. The overarching plot is, of course, a bit generic (help prepare an army to challenge a seemingly unstoppable enemy), but the power is in the setting and the bond that each player gets to establish with it. There are so many characters at this point and so much history that we've been exposed to that it's hard not to feel an attachment when a familiar face pops up or when you get closure from a character or event that you expected to be left by the wayside. Of course, not every character can be included in a satisfying way. Some additions are brief and seem forced in as nothing more than an excuse to let some secondary or tertiary character saunter by as a reminder of their existence and then contribute unseen to galactic readiness (this holds especially true of any character that showed up exclusively in DLC). But, we can't expect miracles from the writers, and satisfying everybody was never an option.

Honestly, I only have two real complaints about the story so far. First of all, too many characters have changed or accomplished too much since the end in Mass Effect 2. The game tells us that it's been six months since Shepard turned him/herself in for trial on Earth. How in the hell have some of these people picked up the positions they have since then? Grunt, Jack, even Garrus: I'm looking at you. Second, the game really needs to give a better glimpse into Cerberus' motivations. It sounds like that's going to play a much more serious role going forward. For those of you farther into the game than I, a certain major plot event just took place on the Citadel. I get that it's not meant to make immediate sense from the perspective of the player/our characters, but there's no coherent attitude/belief system of which the player is aware that would allow the event to make sense. People make choices for reasons other than "wouldn't it be dramatic if...", and that's the only attitude that could possibly seem to be driving the Illusive Man at this point.

With the important part out of the way, it's time to talk briefly about gameplay.

In terms of controls, we're mostly looking at a fine tuning of the systems in place in Mass Effect 2. Gunplay sometimes feels a bit loose, but that happens with most 3rd person shooters. The improved mobility is nice, and I find my infiltrator using his cloak to sprint up and beat down fools as often as to pick out a careful headshot. The changes made to armor sorts of abilities -- each carrying the option to purge the added defense in order to gain some other temporary advantage -- are fun and make them seem more active. I also like that these armor abilities (along with the infiltrator's cloak) don't incur their cooldown until they are purged or their period ends. It makes it a lot easier to use traditional powers in conjunction with these prolonged effect abilities. Combat, in general, is as fun as it's been, and that makes multiplayer a much better option than anybody would have expected.

First, though, I have a couple of complaints about things at the design level. The least important but most glaring of these is the new resource collecting system. You run around star systems using your sensors in an attempt to ping for things that could be useful in the preparations you're supporting. This isn't so bad by itself, but each time you run a scan, you make Reapers more aware of your activity in the region. Do it too often (basically, 3 times), and they're off and chasing you and you need to get your ass out of the system! Except...you don't. The game autosaves each time you enter a system. There's no good reason not to just go around firing off your scanners like crazy, determine where everything is, Reapers be damned, let them catch you, and then have that autosave reload so you can fire off your scanners in the two or three places you need to to collect everything from a system. It's a silly waste of time that tries to add a sense of high stakes and consequence where there are none.

Slightly more annoying is a shift in combat similar to some things I complained about in Dragon Age 2: namely, inexplicable waves of enemies. Reinforcements will jet pack in or jump down from balconies or come through otherwise sealed doors at every opportunity, just to inflate challenge. It makes it nearly impossible to develop any high level strategy the way that you sometimes needed to at the upper difficulties of Mass Effect 1 and that were occasionally beneficial in Mass Effect 2. It keeps the action going, and things are fun enough that I don't mind too much at the default difficulty, but I'm going to be cursing up a storm during my inevitable Insanity attempt. In the prior two games harder difficulties just started to feel natural once you adapted to what they expected of you. I don't see that happening here because the source of difficulty is different.

Finally, the designers seem to have responded in the worst possible fashion to the complaints that Mass Effect 2 lacked side quests. There are now dozens and dozens of meaningless fetch quests you can go on (largely connected to the new resource system) and lots of time consuming, fluffy interactions available at the Citadel (and possibly other hubs if there are any). The fetch quests remind me a lot of Dragon Age 2 and the various weird things you would find while you were going about your adventuring only to suddenly know that somebody would give you money/experience for them. In this case, at least you overhear conversations about the things to know that you're looking for them, but it's similarly arbitrary. The more traditional quests, while at least providing some sort of context, but they mostly involve talking to a sequence of people/terminals and then getting some sort of payoff when a tertiary character from some previous sidequest in a previous game shows up at the end.

The good news is that, other than establishing mood, all of these serve simply to increase the resources you can bring to the fight with the Reapers, meaning they can be avoided without consequence if you just sink some time into the multiplayer!

I haven't done much with the multiplayer so far. Spent an hour or so going through a few rounds with Andy before I'd really gotten into the single player. I'm looking forward to going back. For the most part, it's class-based horde mode with unlockable persistent upgrades in the form of both level gaining and new equipment. Each player gets to control a stripped down version of one of the base classes, each with three hotkeyed abilities and two weapons (or at least the Sentinel only gets two weapons, maybe the Soldier gets more?). You're dropped in hostile territory and confronted with a series of randomized enemy waves and objectives and asked to survive as many as you can, up to 10. The longer you last, the more experience you get and the more you improve the ability of the galaxy to fight off the Reapers. Good stuff, and I'm eager to do more once I buy a Gold subscription again (note to MS an EA: the 2-day pass you shipped with the game succeeded in ensuring that I'll reup for a full year in short order after letting my account lapse).

All said, I'm roughly 20 hours in, and I'm thoroughly enjoying Mass Effect 3. There are decisions that confuse me and a lot of additions that seem to exist purely to occupy your time, which is frustrating after 2 was so tight and focused. Still, I love this setting and these characters. I'm eager to see how the story of Commander Shepard wraps up in each of the four iterations I've created for it. I'll be sad to see it come to an end.

Skyrim

In the less than 3 weeks since it's launch, I've played far more of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim than is healthy or wise -- especially considering I'm technically still a graduate student with projects and research to work on. I'm level 40, deal 30x damage with daggers when I sneak attack, and can warp the mind of anybody I feel like. Obviously, this says something something about the overall quality of the game.

I like the improved design of the world, which feels sprawling and real and waiting to be explored in a way that Oblivion and even Morrowind didn't. This is especially true in the case of caves and dungeons, which feel much more intentionally designed instead of assembled piecemeal -- which, in turn, makes it a lot harder to resist heading towards every little landmark that pops up while wandering the countryside. I like the mechanical tweaks in terms of leveling, especially the perk tree borrowed and enhanced from Fallout 3. I like the new deathblow animations and heft they add to the otherwise traditionally floaty combat.

What I don't like is the strange way that this otherwise very open game suddenly foists an unreasonable amount of structure on you as soon as you begin a quest line.

By and large, Elder Scrolls games leave you free to pursue them however you like. You can join factions, become the champion of cities, or act as an unattached wanderer picking up odd jobs as you see fit. You can approach missions and jobs whatever way you like -- sneaking around, befuddling enemies, and stabbing them in the back; launching off explosions; and quaffing strength enhancing potions before crashing the gates with your broadsword are just a handful of options.

What you're not allowed to do, though, is make any sort of impact on the gameworld beyond activating the specific series of flags that the developers put in place.

For example (spoilers, obviously):

I joined the Thieves' Guild because, well, that's just something that I always do. I discovered pretty quickly that, in Skyrim, the Thieves' Guild regularly acted as pawns for Maven Blackbriar, a local noblewoman who had the connections to keep them out of trouble. I didn't like this. Not one bit. I actively messed up the first job I was sent on for her, burning down more beehives than I was supposed to, in the hopes of incurring her wrath and maybe starting to turn the guild against her. The result was me not getting paid and her husband sending some wussy assassins after me*

The next mission involved me poisoning the product of a competing mead maker. I tried to think of ways that I could subvert this task -- cleaning out the rodent infestation but keeping the poison to contaminate the Blackbriar brewing vats. No dice. No option to lie to my superiors or report the task as finished before I'd done the final step. I couldn't even kill Maven if I wanted to because, as a quest-giving NPC, she is rendered invincible by the plot.

(end spoilers)

This lack of options defines all of the long-running quest lines of the game. For single jobs and fetch quests, it doesn't seem like such a big deal. But when I'm interacting heavily with a smaller cast of characters for a prolonged period of time, it's strange that I don't really have many options for how my character can behave. Maybe I get a couple of dialog options, but they have no impact, and I'm given no macro-level control over my character's actions.

When a game is telling a story -- even with this game is telling a story, as with the main plot -- this isn't such a huge deal. I can get behind the fact that I'm just an agent driving along the actions that must happen, maybe with a couple of opportunities to change the outcome. When a game actively attempts to be open and leave you most of the control, it's more than a bit frustrating to have that control ripped from you on issues that feel important. Joining an organization, in my mind, shouldn't just be an opportunity to act out a subset of the plot and change the comments that guards make to me as I walk by. It should be a way to define who my character is and make the game world, and not just the game, my own.

I spent over 100 hours playing Oblivion without even really getting started on the main plot. Maybe I was just less sensitive to this phenomenon, but I felt like I was having a truly unique experience in that game. I'm well under that in Skyrim and I'm now to the point where I'm ready to just plow along and finish the story. This doesn't feel like my story in the same way that did, and as much as I've enjoyed playing, I'm ready for it to be over.



*The best part of this pathetic assassination attempt was that they found me when I was chilling at the Wizard's College, where I was already archmage, and my buddies there incinerated them before I knew what was going on.

The Muppets

First thing's first: I left the theater last night after having seen The Muppets feeling almost exactly like this.

I grew up with the Muppets. The Muppet Movie and The Muppets Take Manhattan were family favorites when I was little. I absorbed Muppet Babies and reruns of The Muppet Show on TV when I was in elementary school. However, I recognize that this isn't the case for everybody in my generation. I had to orchestrate a mass viewing of The Muppet Movie my senior year of undergrad after realizing -- to my dismay -- that only a couple of my friends had ever seen it. All of them knew the Muppets. They'd seen Muppet Treasure Island / Christmas Carol / In Space growing up, but they didn't share my boundless love for these timeless pieces of felt. The reason, pretty simply, was because they'd never seen the Muppets under the direction of Jim Henson.

Henson's unexpected death in 1990 necessarily resulted in a shift in all Muppet related work. Without their chief visionary around, it was nearly impossible to recreate the whimsical sincerity that made the Muppets what they are. They could pull off the tongue-in-cheek goofy self-awareness, but there was something lacking in the joy department of everything that has come in the past two decades. The Muppets is a very strong step towards rectifying that.

The basic plot of the movie suggests that something has happened to fundamentally alter the relationship that the Muppets share, driving them apart. Into this world walk Gary, Mary, and, most importantly, Walter. These are agents external to the Muppet community who recognize the impact the Muppets have had on society, and who intervene to help the Muppets move beyond whatever happened and realize that they can still accomplish a lot of good together.

This could be seen as mirroring the making of this production. The event that drove the Muppets apart could, implicitly, be understood as the loss of Henson. There have been Muppet creations in the last 20 years, but plenty of people would be happy writing them off. Into this void walked Jason Segel and his partners (including plenty of writing and directing talent from Flight of the Concords), eager to show the world that it was still possible to capture the original spirit of the Muppets. Willing to show them the respect that they deserve both as performers and characters.

No matter what Rotten Tomatoes might say, The Muppets is not as good as The Muppet Movie. Henson's passing still weighs too heavily on this franchise for that to be the case. There's something obviously different about this movie than the Henson Muppet cannon. Chiefly, the Muppets themselves (or at least the original Muppets) aren't front and center they way they would have been years ago. They play a prominent role and take up much of the screen time, but by and large, this is a movie from the perspective of outsiders. But in a world without Jim Henson...it kind of has to be. We can't replicate his magic, his boundless idealism tempered by patient realism. We can only endeavor to describe how it made (and continues to make) us feel and provide our best recreation.

On that account, The Muppets succeeds as well as any effort could. Bolstered by incredibly eager contributions from the always sincere Jason Segel and Amy Adams, there is a hopeful, joyous quality to this movie that can only be described as Muppetacular. Having seen it once, I'm fully confident that I'll see it at least once more, and possibly twice before it leaves theaters.

Community Season 3 Rebounds in a Big Way After a Slow Start

Season three of Community started immediately with a fairly ambitious goal. Right from the get go, it became clear that a major theme for the season was going to be the main ensemble -- especially Jeff -- coming to terms with who they (and one another) are. This has clouded the first handful of episodes as we have to witness the extremes of the bad behavior that these people are capable of and the tenuousness of the bond they have. Whether it's Jeff and Annie awkwardly hanging the lampshade on the defense mechanisms they've built up or it's the group treating outsiders with intense hostility as a way of reinforcing their attitude of togetherness, the proceedings have largely lacked the heart that defined the show for me (with the awesome ending to Geography of Political Conflict being a major exception).

The fourth episode, Remedial Chaos Theory, was a huge step in the right direction if the writers want to keep this difficult theme alive while letting the show be what it is at its best. The ridiculous, multiple timeline exploring structure provided a great way of showing the impact, good and bad, that each person has on this group by letting them highlight specific parings and show us what happens when individual people aren't present.

I'll freely admit that it took awhile for the episode to get going and not every joke was perfectly clear. Britta's pizza dance doesn't make sense if you don't immediately suspect that she was getting high. It also took me a second viewing to catch the crunch that tells you Troy was keeping candy in his cigarette case and not eating actual cigarettes instead of smoking them. The revisiting of the sexual tension between both Jeff and Annie also keeps feeling a little forced (the repetition didn't help this). None of that matters, though, in the face of the complete ridiculousness of the Troy-less timeline, especially when it's revisited in the bump. There was a lot to set up, from Annie's gun to Troy's fear of the Norwegian troll, but I nearly fell off my couch laughing as things kept going farther wrong.

A great episode that has me feeling good about what the show can do this season -- assuming they keep their ambition level high.

Deathly Hallows: Part 2

Fresh back from the midnight showing of the final chapter in the Harry Potter film series, so, of course, I'm going to write about that instead of taking this opportunity to go to sleep at what would only be a mildly unreasonable hour. I'll try to minimize spoilers, but they're obviously going to be here.

First of all, a reminder that I'm not the hugest fan of the Deathly Hallows book. Long story short, my general sense about the movie is about the same as with Part 1, only generally more favorable because of the portion of the story captured. With a few small exceptions, the adaptation itself is about as strong as you could want. By and large, deviations from the source made perfect sense within the characterizations given in the movies and the nature of the medium. More important, the aspects of the book that I found most frustrating -- The Hallows, wand lore, Gringotts -- were minimized to the extent possible, while full attention was paid to the most important factors -- Snape's past, King's Cross, and others. In fact, I came into the theater thinking "If they handle Snape right, that will account for all other sins." And while I mostly feel they did this and more, I can't quite give it a completely free pass.

See, there were too many moments that just seemed...manufactured. Scenes that wanted to be emotional rarely were, and the execution just had a number of moments where it just didn't feel all there. It seemed, at times, like they were including sequences because they knew that the fans would be clamoring for them and just letting it ride on that fact. In general, I'd say that the more people who were on the screen, the less honest anything seemed. The core cast continues to be largely phenomenal, but the Wizarding World somehow felt less real than ever. Heck, early on, even the small moments seemed a little bit too rushed and matter-of-fact.

I want to end on a positive note, though. Even if it will never be the first Harry Potter film I reach for on a lazy day, Deathly Hallows Pt. 2 was an enjoyable time and a worthy ending to one of the most lucrative film franchises of all time. I'd really like to watch a cut of this and part 1 blended together to eliminate the handful of redundancies and see if I still have problems with some of the early pacing or if the momentum carries. I suspect that it would, elevating both movies considerably (thank God, DVD will also let us skip over Harry and Hermione dancing in Part 1).

Brave New World

I've been meaning to read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World for ages. I picked up a cheap copy at a Borders' liquidation sale last March and just got around to reading it while I was traveling the past couple of weeks. All I can really say is: "meh". There are interesting things, but I described the book to a friend who had never read it as thus: The first two chapters, where we learn about the conditioning process that occurs from fertilization through adolescent development for all citizens is very fascinating. Chapters 17 and 18, where our would-be protagonists talk with the Controller about God, Science, Truth, and Beauty and their lack of place in a harmonious society are interesting. Everything else is whiny bitches.

Really, this is a problem with plenty of "dystopian" fiction. It's so concerned with portraying its authors personal take on why humanity is screwed that it feels it doesn't need to tell a compelling story or provide characters with realistic motivations. It's like reading a Platonic dialogue for the plot rather than the philosophy: you're just going to be irked by how much of a Mary Jane Socrates is. In Plato, though, this is tolerable because there really isn't any action beyond the discussion and the philosophy. In Brave New World and other books of its ilk, however, the plot is meant to be somehow meaningful, or at least illustrative, and it takes up a much more significant proportion of the proceedings.

So, the fact that our "savage" and Bernard and, to a lesser extent, Heimholtz are all complete idiots is consistently annoying. Beyond even that, Huxley shoots his entire thesis in the foot with the fate of Bernard and Heimholtz by telling us that failures in the conditioning process are more common than we've been led to believe and that there are effectively numerous colonies of "normal" humans continuing to advance the race on the fringes of Utopia in the form of the Islands. That we then finish the book with a long and completely pointless chapter following John's fate is pointless. We know damn well that, were he not a "savage" and a "social experiment" his grim end would be unneeded.

Furthermore, while Huxley does a good job in early chapters of seeming to take his society seriously and as the norm, the tone becomes increasingly tongue-in-cheek as he delves into the more ridiculous suppositions. The community sing culminating in the mass orgy, for instance, is just absurd. I get that real art is supposed to have disappeared, but that doesn't change the fact that the entire sequence is a chore to read through between the songs and the sudden, inexplicable sexual frenzy that sweeps through. Contrasted to the very well written early portions where Lenina is being scolded for her borderline monogamy (ridiculous, but believable), it's a sad failure. Further, the notion of "Ford" instead of god just became more and more painful as it entered into the character's vocabulary. As what I believed to be a tongue-in-cheek idea in the foreword, I could deal with it. As a foundational aspect of society, it just seemed utterly unbelievable -- though this has more to do with a problem I'll discuss at the end.

Finally, everything to do with the "reservation" is also just poorly executed. The notion that all world religions would have merged over hundreds of years just shows an unnecessary lack of respect for all of them. To be franks, an equally offensive (to a theist) and far more likely suggestion is that religious warfare would have wiped out the remaining "uncivilized" regions or left them with a handful of small factions fighting over scarce resources. Disease, poverty, and monogomy, not simple greed or other human instincts stamped out or tempered by the conditioning process, seem to be the reasons for the reservations to be in such disarray.

That said, Huxley has a lot of interesting ideas about what it would take in order for individuals to live as willing slaves of the government. Specifically, he focuses on the fairly obvious notion of control via the carrot. By keeping people content, you keep them from questioning you. The genetic selection, developmental behavioral training, and biological "surrogate" drugs provide the foundation for this contentment, which is then maintained throughout life by three societal pillars: Soma helps to manage those inevitable moments of disappointment and sadness. The elimination of the family in favor of government "hatcheries" and indoctrination centers reduces the odds of personal attachment and thus strong emotional reactions to overpower logic. Societally expected promiscuity works on both effects.

It's a fascinating approach, but one that time has shown to be absurd.

First of all, Huxley lived in a time where Freud was still taken somewhat seriously and where Psychology was synonymous with Behaviorism. This is no longer the case. We know so much more about the brain and how it operates now that it becomes trivial to question the basic premises upon which so much of the conditioning process is based. More important, though, is the fact that Huxley assumed a society that would continue in the wake of industrialization. He had no idea, even in his addenda and commentary, that the microcomputer, much less The Internet, was on the horizon. Mass, immediate access to information completely obliterates Huxley's future, and while a future where such technology is squashed away, the process to get there would be more violent -- and certainly more prolonged -- even than the war he suggests led to the founding of Utopia.

Of course, The Internet provides plenty of opportunity for a parallel road into a similar future. We have the sort of constant, superficial contact with people that Huxley predicted in the form of social networking. We can sit and anesthetize ourselves to our ills and those of the world by overloading on news to the point that we lose our capacity to care or by playing games or by watching cat videos. The important distinction, though, is that these problems are not government imposed or even sanctioned. They are self inflicted. Fortunately, we live in a society that has smart enough to recognize that Internet addiction and information overload are actual problems. Unfortunately, we also live in a society that continues to pursue ubiquitous computing and the social isolation it promotes before we've begun to solve the problems of the current generation of technology. I'm hopeful, but...we'll see.

LA Noire Frequently Gets Lost in the Filler

Let me start by saying that the core mechanics of LA Noire, the crime scene investigation and the interviewing/interrogating of witnesses, are as great as advertised. The face mapping technology is fantastic, even if I occasionally think Cole Phelps looks less like Aaron Staton and more like Ryan Gosling. It's eerie in a good way, somehow managing to largely avoid uncanny valley territory. While big, obvious tells make deciding whether to trust or doubt people is fairly straight-forward in the early going (and knowing your evidence is enough to let you know when to make accusations of lying), it gets more nuanced later in the game as the crimes get more serious. Does your PoI look nervous because she's holding out on you or just because she's a 15-year-old girl being grilled for information on the death of her mother?

I adore the use of music in the crime scene investigation portions of the game. The music itself is moody and carries with it the seriousness of the actions behind your task. The chimes that indicate an examinable object are subtle but helpful, and short fanfare that cuts off the music once all clues are found is incredibly useful. I like that there are always things to pick up that aren't useful -- even if plenty of them would be in this day and age of DNA testing. I also like that plenty of clues are only useful in helping you conduct your investigation and won't actually be strong enough to serve any purpose in your interviews and accusations.

Similarly, as has become the norm with Rockstar games, the atmosphere is impeccable. It feels like a 1940's hardboiled crime serial, even if your role as a "real cop" rather than a private detective necessitates a less pulpy approach. The music, the style, the characters all work out great. Despite what one of my roommates seems to think, all of the actors so far have provided strong performances. Between the period nature and the abundance of familiar faces, LA Noire has actually done a fair bit to satisfy my Mad Men itch while I wait to catch up on Season 4 via Netflix.

That said, roughly half-way through the game, I can't condone the various 9.0 and higher ratings that everybody seems insistent on giving the game simply because this core gameplay mechanic doesn't account for the bulk of the game.

You see, you don't just move from scene to scene and talk with witnesses. You need to drive all around an expansive LA. The city has been compressed from real life, but it's still huge. The intro talks about LA as being a new sort of city, one built around the automobile and the ability to commute from your own home on the outskirts. The game takes this seriously, as you're regularly going to be spending 5-10 minutes driving, stuck in traffic trying to get where you're going. Sure, you can speed and navigate your way around somewhat more quickly, but the cars handle so poorly, and the AI governing other drivers is so flaky, that you're likely to cause a fair bit of damage, both taking you out of the experience of being one of the few "good cops" in the LAPD and reducing your post-case rating.

Then, when you're on your way to your next scene, you're virtually guaranteed to get a call on the police scanner about some crime occurring in a completely different part of the city. You can, of course, choose not to respond to these, but they increase your detective rating, and it's just hard not to do anything when you hear "officer under fire". These street crime cases nearly always result in shoot-outs, which just aren't fulfilling -- both because the gun play isn't terribly well developed and it just feels like bad police work. If these were just an occasional diversion, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, but I once started a case only to spend 40 minutes driving around and responding to three such incidents before I ever reached the scene of the crime.

Finally, the basic character handling isn't a hole lot better than the cars. Wandering around a crime scene and getting stuck on corners because Cole moves more like a mannequin than a war hero turned star policeman is just strange. Chasing down perps isn't a whole lot smoother, especially since the camera just doesn't keep up with all of the turns you have to make. Complaints here are reminiscent of some I made about Assassin's Creed 2 last year, except more aggravating considering I'm just running through alleyways and climbing drain pipes, not attempting death-defying acrobatics high above the streets of medieval Venice.

So, as much as I'm loving LA Noire, I find that I can't play it for protracted periods of time. One case is about my limit, and I'm often ready to quit even before then if I'm moving frequently between sites. The new ideas it brings to the table are fantastic, but slapping it onto a modified version of an existing Rockstar engine and bloating things up with extra tasks just wasn't necessary. Moving to different sites around LA for crimes would give the same sense of scope without forcing you to drive it, and the street crime inserts its way into things far too insistently.

Still, I'm enjoying the cases themselves and the back-story about Cole's experiences in WWII (that this largely seems to tie into the Battle of Okinawa, an event to which I have strong personal ties, only makes it more fascinating to me), and the subplot that seems to be developing through the newspaper stories is also intriguing. I'd definitely check it out to see if you have the patience.

8/10

Dragon Age 2 and Balance in Story Telling.

So, now that the game has been patched to properly support DirectX 11 and it no longer crashes my computer at regular intervals, I've been spending more time with Dragon Age II than I probably should be this late into the semester. The direct successor to 2009's Dragon Age: Origins, itself the long-developed spiritual successor to Bioware's much beloved Baldur's Gate franchise of genre-defining PC RPGs, there was a lot expected of this game. Cursory glances around the internet would suggest that it has failed, and while the game certainly has its failings, I would happily direct most of the people who are incessantly bitching about its "simplifications" (of which there are far fewer than one would be led to believe) to a post I wrote addressing similar complaints about Mass Effect 2 last year.

The most obvious and most frequently cited failings of the game are the unfortunate bi-product of a blatantly rushed development cycle. Environment reuse stands out particularly. I clearly recall the first time I was running through a cave and my map showed an area that lay sitting behind what was so obviously an unmarked door that I spent nearly 15 minutes running around the cave trying to find some lever to open it so as to plunder the riches that must be waiting for me on the other side. I can understand reusing resources, and even building dungeons/instance areas piecemeal from stock parts. Simply re-using the exact same environments with certain areas sealed off, though, is sloppy. At the very least, keep the map from reflecting the unreachable areas.

The second trouble area is the general flow of combat. Now, for the most part, I like many of the changes made here. Full disclosure, I rarely used the top down view in Dragon Age: Origins. As far as I was concerned, it existed almost solely to target area of effect spells without getting stuck on specific enemies. As such, being stuck with the lower, more cinematic camera angle doesn't bother me. The faster animations don't bother me at all, and, contrary to what many people seem to be saying, this is the only significant difference in how combat plays out between Dragon Age 2 and DA:O. In fact, there are a wider variety of skill trees available to work through and, due to the absurd bonuses from cross-class combos, greater attention to be paid as to how your party members' skills will mesh together. Combat is just as tactical and engaging as it ever as.

The problem I have with combat is the way fights are now entirely scripted. Sure, it wasn't uncommon in DA:O to open a door and find a room full of enemies you'd have no choice but to fight, but that wasn't always the way things worked. There were plenty of fights in Origins that I only managed to win by scouting ahead with a rogue and using ranged attacks to carefully pull outlying enemies away one or two at a time before engaging the main force. This doesn't work in DA2. Enemies aren't persistent on the map. Instead, they only appear when you step into a designated area. Then, as the battle rages on, more will show up (either dropping in from the city walls or mystically appearing right out of the ground) to take advantage of the fact that your AI controlled teammates shot their wad against your will and are either stuck in cooldown or have no stamina/manna left. It's an irritation that seems designed to force you to play the game within a somewhat limited framework endorsed by Bioware. Fights are rarely tough enough that I would have liked to have the option to do things the old way, but it just doesn't feel even remotely organic.

These aren't major complaints, though. They are quirks that you adapt to as you get into the real meat of the game -- the combat itself and the story telling. Having already touched on the first topic to the extent I need to, I'll turn my attention to the second.

One of the first posts I wrote on this blog was about Chrono Trigger, a game I have played more times than I care to count. In that post, I credited its success and longevity not just to its innovative combat mechanics, wonderful score, and engaging plot, but to the overall story-telling style and the way it merged the perspectives of its creators' signature franchises (Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy). I'll recap the argument in brief here.

Historically, Dragon Quest has been a series about exploration and creating a world filled with people whose problems you get tangled up in. Caring about this world, more than about any particular vendetta of your own, is what drives you to complete the plot and defeat whatever evil is looming on the horizon. Final Fantasy, on the other hand, has long been primarily concerned with its own characters and their struggles. Nearly everything you do winds up having some particular meaning for some member of the cast, and you finish the game because you want to see their problems resolved. Chrono Trigger manages to combine these approaches by throwing you into different eras of your world's history. At each step, you have some larger goal towards finding the cause of humanity's destruction, but you also help resolve the problems of that particular era. Further, each era lends you its own voice to your party in the form of a playable character to whom you develop attachment, furthering your attachment to the game world as a whole.

Nearly all RPGs (except, perhaps, for open world games like the Elder Scrolls series) fall into some point on this world vs. character spectrum of story telling. Few nail the balance as perfectly as Chrono Trigger, but Bioware games tend to come close. I think that the problem that many people have had with both DA2 and Mass Effect 2, is that both shifted focus slightly, relatively to their predecessors, in the direction of character-focused story telling in an effort to better find that balance.

Let's look quickly at Dragon Age: Origins. Throughout everything you do, the threat of the Blight looms in the background, and your personal motive of being a Grey Warden -- not only sworn to stamp out the blight but the only individuals capable of it due to your ties to it -- drives you to continue. And yet, you need to put your concerns on hold as you run around the country side, easing political tensions and freeing up factions to pledge resources to your crusade against the Darkspawn. You become directly involved in the fate of every civilization in the nation of Ferelden (perhaps too much so, but whatever) and are made keenly aware of the tenuous balance that you're trying to keep in place. Meanwhile, your companions travel with you and have problems of their own that they would like to put behind them -- from Alistair learning to cope with his lineage to Morrigan asserting freedom from her mother to Shale learning some semblance of respect for squishy beings. These stories are engaging, and the banter between particular party members may help to dictate who you bring with you in battle, but they don't drive you directly to defeating the blight or hook you deeper into mythology of Thedas.

Similarly for Mass Effect. You move between planets, uncovering details about Saren's plot and eventually learning about the Reaper threat. You come to an understanding about how humanity's ambitions impact their relationship with the established space-faring races and how you, as an exemplar of your species, will inevitably impact that. Your companions are an entertaining diversion, but contribute nothing to the real plot beyond providing key information at certain points.

Both Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age 2 tell much smaller stories. In ME2, the entire game revolves around recruiting and building trust with a squad capable enough of determining why the Collectors are abducting human colonies. You focus on your crew because their allegiance and dedication is the only thing that will get you out alive. As much as I enjoy the game and the characters, I'll admit that this story is almost too small, and there are a couple of revelations that could have been handled better.

Dragon Age 2 is about a slowly building avalanche. It's a story about how one man and his decisions -- fueled by his relationships -- change the entire history of a city on the brink. Because Hawke is meant to be affected by his experiences with his companions, we spend a lot more time with them and their personalities are much more thoroughly established. We see them engaging one another, developing friendships and rivalries within the group instead of just with you. The nature of the game as a story within a story (one of your party members is relating the true events of your life to a less-than-friendly interrogator) places unfortunate limits on your freedom. These are events that have occurred, and there is a framework that must be followed. But by building so much around your relationship to your friends and family and the organism that is the city of Kirkwall, we can see different reasons that some of these same, unavoidable events could have come to fruition.

Compounding this is the fact that Dragon Age 2 only barely touches on the major topics of Dragon Age: Origins. Nearly the entirety of the game takes place far removed -- in time and space -- from the events of the first game. Few familiar characters show up, and none of the lingering questions are answered. Taken together with the drastic change in tone, it's a shock that people expecting another grand, nation-spanning adventure weren't ready to deal with.

For the most part, though, it's an interesting approach and, so far, an engaging time. It had some bugs out-of-the-gate, but it really doesn't deserve the hate that's been spewed its way by PC vanguards insistent that any sort of streamlining (to visuals or gameplay) is a sin meant to take advantage of the supposed naivete of console playing "babies". I'd definitely recommended it to anybody who likes games with strong writing and entertaining combat -- in that order.

Yet Another Endorsement for Community

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Amazon had the first season of Community on sale for $12. Being a fan of the show, I immediately bought a copy, and as I revisit these episodes, I can't help feeling like I made a mistake in not buying half a dozen copies or more and giving them out as Christmas gifts. Not nearly enough people are watching this show, which could well be the best comedy on tv right now, and I have to say that, if you enjoy television at all, you really should be.

This is a show that is obviously loved by everybody involved in its creation (a trait it has in common with far too many shows that have been canceled before their time, including FX's recent Terriers). There is a joy surrounding it that is simply infectious, and that joy is enhanced by the fact that this is a show with a heart. The single camera sitcom is a genre that has long been shrouded in cynicism. Shows like Arrested Development, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and even, to an extent, 30 Rock, are essentially about flawed people hurting each other. When done well, this is still a funny format, but it wears on you after awhile. While I still adore it, I'm not sure how much longer Arrested Development could have lasted in the format.

Community takes a different direction. It's a show about flawed people overcoming and/or embracing their flaws to help one another. It's a show about how we find family in this crazy, mixed up world where traditional family is no longer a guarantee.

While that's the important part, it wouldn't be worthwhile if the execution wasn't spot-on, and the unique way that Community executes really helps elevate it. This is a show made by people with an abiding love of pop culture, and it is by no means afraid to make heavy use of tropes or references. The way Dan Harmon and the other writers use the tropes, though, is not as a crutch or even a scaffolding. Except in rare, highly intentional moments, they are used in a way that is incredibly organic and that contribute to the development of the characters. They use them in a way that shows the basis of these cliches in the reality of human interaction.

It's a wonderful and unimaginably difficult thing to do, and it wouldn't work if the writers didn't take the reality of the characters incredibly seriously. For all of the ridiculous things they might do or get caught up in, there are genuine people with genuine motivations in even the most ridiculous characters present, and that shines through most clearly in Abed.

Abed is a character who all but officially has Asperger's syndrome. He relates to people most easily through media cliches, which allows him an interesting role as a commentator on the action, providing a certain amount of meta-referential humor without actively breaking the fourth wall. If this was Abed's only role, he would still be a great character because of the singular way that Danny Pudi plays him, but he's far more than that. In episodes like Introduction to Film, Physical Education, Contemporary American Poultry, and especially last week's Mixology Certification, we can see just how troubled Abed is. Media cliches aren't a way for him to understand people. He can do that just fine. They're a way to help people understand him, something he can't do on his own. He struggles with his oddity and with being left outand he's willing to use people, to an extent, to feel like he belongs. He even recognizes that his own friends occasionally see him as something lesser, but he doesn't know how to express his frustration.

That's a lot of depth, and yet all of this is handled delicately. It's a testament to the collaborative effort on display, the willingness by everybody involved to let each other bring their gifts to the table and let the best possible result unfold. It manages to be touching without being saccharine, to be funny without being alienating, and to be fundamentally true despite being admittedly contrived.

Please watch Community. You'll be glad you did.

Thoughts on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (pt. 1)

Last summer, I re-read and posted my thoughts on the seventh and final entry in the Harry Potter series. At the time, I mentioned that I had serious problems with a number of elements of the book, both in terms of content and in structure. I also noted that my love of the characters and the ultimate redemption of Snape ultimately made the experience worthwhile. It's safe to say that, by and large, the same holds of part 1 of the film adaptation.

Since I already said pretty much all I have to say on the content of the book, I'm going to take this space to focus on some issues unique to the movie.

First, as anybody familiar with both the books and the movies would expect, the creators had to do a bit of backpedaling in order to make certain elements work. Instead of simply cutting the wedding scene, we get a ridiculously half-assed introduction of Bill ("Hi, Harry, I'm Bill Weasely. I got attacked by a were-wolf and like my meat on the raw side now!" "Oh, nice to finally meet you, Bill").

More distracting, as you might expect, was the way that Dobby was forced back into things after having all of his involvement since Chamber of Secrets cut out. I know that Dobby's sacrifice is immensely moving in the books, but movie-watchers have no familiarity with Dobby's work at Hogwarts or his adventures with Winky or Hermione's creation of SPEW.

I'm not even going to try to describe all of the problems with the scene where Harry and Hermione dance in the tent.

The final problem is that the screenwriters obviously didn't put enough time into some of the dialogue. There were a few lines so clunky that the audience actually laughed. In some cases, it was simply because the characters needed to express thoughts or explain things that could not have been spoken by a human being in a way that didn't sound ridiculous. This is a relatively common problem with any fantasy setting, and in these instances, the writers did a decent job of hanging the lampshade* and creating intentional humor out of the situation. But there were other areas where they didn't seem to recognize the problems. Similarly, the way they shot Harry's interactions with "Bathilda Bagshot" evoked laughter at a number of times in what was supposed to be a tense scene.

The filmmakers did a number of things extremely right, though. For one thing, the death of Hedwig, while a bit abrupt, made far more sense in this setting. Instead of getting hit randomly by a killing curse while stuck in her cage, she swoops in and harasses a Death Eater who was trying to shoot Harry. Not only did it provide Voldemort a much more reasonable means of identifying Harry than "OMG, he used expeliarmus! It must be Potter", but it makes more sense, since there's no good reason that Harry wouldn't have let Hedwig fly freely and find him at The Barrows later.

Second, the infiltration of the Ministry was one of the most entertaining scenes in the series so far. The actors who got to play the Ministry officials into whom our heroes polymorphed must have had boatloads of fun. The physicality of their performances was just perfect. It turned what was kind of an awkward, tense scene in the books into a great tension alleviator, punctuated at points by signs of just how twisted the Ministry had become under Death Eater control.

Third, as much as a handful of critics complained about the camping scenes, I felt that they were handled quite well (with the exception of the aforementioned dance). The creators did a good job of displaying the impact of The Locket on people's temperaments and of Ron's growing insecurity with minimal time commitment. Hermione's almost run-in with the Snatchers seemed a bit purposeless beyond showing the potency of the charms they had set up, but I won't complain too much about that. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see much of how Ron's absence strained Harry and Hermione, but I won't hold that against them overmuch. Ron was only gone for 80 pages in the book (mostly spent at Godric's Hollow), and the impact of his departure is something that was almost entirely told and not shown.

Finally, the animation used for the Story of the Three Brothers was absolutely fantastic. I would buy a DVD just containing the various Tales of Beedle the Bard told in that fashion in a heartbeat.

So, not a great movie for a person who isn't particularly fond of the source material, but an enjoyable time for Harry Potter fans. I'll never be convinced that Deathly Hallows was the appropriate way to end the series, but David Yates and crew are showing that they're devoted to making the best adaptation they can.

Scott Pilgrim

Sometime in March or April of 2008, I heard that Edgar Wright, of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead fame, was writing and directing a film adaptation of a comic series called Scott Pilgrim and that it would star Michael Cera. I love Edgar Wright, I love Michael Cera (note that this was just before Michael Cera fatigue swept a good portion the nation along with the backlash against Juno), so I immediately went and checked out the series and fell in love with it. I've eagerly anticipated each new volume (up to the final one, which released in July) and this movie ever since. I just recently finished re-reading the books and tonight I finally saw the film, so I figured it was about damn time I blogged about it.

The comics and the movie are really cut from the same cloth, so most of what I can say will apply to both, and the same can be said of the most common criticism: what's really at stake? By far the most common criticism of the movie was that it was hard to care about Scott and even harder to see why he was fighting for Ramona. That's a pretty legitimate complaint, until you take a closer look and see the point: None of this is about being in love. It's entirely about growing up. This relationship is just a catalyst, as they so often are.

Scott and Ramona are, quite frankly, the two least likable characters in this story. Scott is an idiot with no attention span, job, or prospects. He doesn't particularly care about anything and moves through life on a whim, unwittingly hurting people left and right, often times without even remembering how things went down. Ramona is slightly more responsible in that she at least has a job and her own apartment, but she's similarly capricious. The only difference is that she's fully aware of the hurt she's created and simply runs away from it any time it catches up.

Scott's battles with Ramona's exes simultaneously force him to fight for something for a change and make Ramona confront her own baggage and acknowledge that there are things and people in her life worth keeping around. Whether or not she's "the one" or Scott really loves her is hardly the question. The issue at hand is that both of them are realizing that we have to live in this world as it is, not as we'd prefer it to be. We can't live by mooching off our friends and wasting our time on idle fancies or by staying ahead of the inevitable changes. More importantly, we can't live our lives thinking we're the perfect hero of our story. We need to take charge of our affairs and of our faults and face the hard fact that reality is tough and being a good person in spite of that is tougher.

The book and the movie, which entered development and writing about halfway through the series, have different ways of letting Scott come to terms with these facts. In the movie, Wright has Scott acknowledge that he's fighting for himself and "earning the power of self-respect" when he confronts Gideon for the second time. This is slightly more straightforward and certainly happier than the comic's approach. In O'Malley's version, Scott encounters nega-Scott and he finally admits to himself what he's done and how many people he's hurt more than necessary by being willfully oblivious. Being the guilt-ridden penance junkie I am, I think I like this better, but both work well. In either case, Scott comes to terms with the fact that his life is his life, and he can't continue brushing it off if he wants it to turn around, and that's the important part.

So, that's my big reason for not caring a whole lot about whether Ramona appears to be worth fighting for. The other one is simply this: who are we to judge? As a rule, I've generally given up trying to figure out what it is that draws people to each other. We all have our own criteria, and it's hardly our place to judge. Most movies and books try to establish that people are right for one another with grand arm waving and a showiness that just doesn't happen in life. I prefer it when I'm allowed to just trust that these people are making the choice that they feel is best for them in their lives.

Not much else to say on the matter. The other big component is just the referential/stylistic component, which is the upfront draw. Both O'Malley and Wright have a near perfect understanding of homage and parody, and they keep the in-jokes coming at a blinding pace while keeping the bulk of the overt material readily accessible. Especially as a member of the in-group, I can't think of anything to complain about on this end.

Short version: Check out both the movie and the comics. They're not perfect, but you'll still be glad you did.

Looking Back: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

The first time I read the Harry Potter series, I pushed through all 7 books in 17 days. That included time spent packing, moving, and waiting to be in contact with people from whom I could secure the next volume. Once I finally finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, at the end of that marathon, I was exhausted and, admittedly, a bit depressed. It was hard to feel anything about the book in particular, other than the wonderful, dreadful knowledge that it was all done. As time passed, and I reflected on the final volume in particular, I had a few nagging issues with it, but I wasn't confident enough in my recall to make any formal complaints. Last summer, I had a bit to say while re-reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. It was a good re-experiencing these books in a less hurried (or should I say harried*) way, and I've been waiting for the opportunity to do the same with The Deathly Hallows.

I'm now happy to say two things about this book. One, my complaints still stand; and two, they are still largely overshadowed by a handful of key moments.

I'll start with the complaints because, well, that's just the sort of man I am. For one, the entire arc of the book is just alien to the rest of the series. Much of that comes from the fact that Hogwarts isn't present to provide structure of classes and quiditch term breaks. Stranger, though, is that, in this volume, Harry starts out on a mission. In every other book, Harry heads to school just hoping to God for a normal year. We know that isn't going to happen, but we also get to see everything develop and come together slowly with a few peaks of action or character building thrown in. It's almost a mystery structure: Weird stuff going on...One of the professors is acting weirder than normal... OMG, Voldemort!

In Deathly Hallows it's...well, it's just OMG, Voldemort! The whole time. It's a bit overwhelming. It's also strange because it gives Harry sort of a list of mission objectives to complete.

Primary Objectives:
     1. Find horcruxes.
        1a. Find the locket
        1b. Find the cup
        1c. Find something related to Rowena Ravenclaw
        1d. Get the snake alone
     2. Figure out how to destroy horcruxes.
        2a. Recover the sword of Godric Gryffindor
        2b. Break into the Chamber of Secrets in unlikely fashion
            to retrieve Basilisk Fangs.
        2c. Learn that the dumb, fat, evil kids randomly learned
            how to cast a ridiculously potent fire spell.
Bonus Objective:
     3. Unite the Deathly Hallows.

To me, it just feels less like a narrative and more like a lot of checking off of lists. It doesn't help that Harry, Ron, and Hermione are barely escaping death everywhere they go. Leave for The Burrow, barely escape death. Go to a cafe in London, barely escape death. Go to the Ministry, barely escape death. Go to Godric's Hollow, barely escape death. Go to a random forest, barely escape death. Go visit Luna's dad, barely escape death. Get captured by Death Eaters, barely escape death. Go to Gringotts, barely escape death. Go to Hogwarts, barely escape death. That's nine times, off the top of my head, that the kids almost die! That's nine times more than in any other Harry Potter book! Obviously, this is a very dangerous trip!

As borderline awkward as all of this is, though, it's not nearly my biggest complaint. That would be reserved for the long list of material that I feel is almost entirely unnecessary. There's a lot of time spent on the life (and lies) of Albus Dumbledore in this book. Most of it is there to give a false sense that Harry might have serious doubts or turn his back on his mission. I never thought that would happen. The only other purpose it serves is to humanize Dumbledore a bit, but I really don't think that was needed. Adults will assume that his wisdom was hard-won, and kids can stand to have a blemish-less hero once in awhile. It's all interesting to a degree, but not nearly as much as it is distracting. If Rowling can go on ahead and tell us what characters' lives are like in between the main ending and the epilogue through unofficial channels, she can do the same with Dumbledore's home life.

I also fail to see the point of removing Ron for a whole 80 pages of story. I suppose it serves to slap us in the face with the continued mutuality of Hermione's feelings and of his role in the group beyond comic relief, but it just seemed cheap to have him gone for one small vignette and suddenly back.

My biggest problem, however, remains with the eponymous Deathly Hallows and the half-assed introduction of wand lore. I really don't see how the Deathly Hallows were in any way necessary. The Resurrection Stone gave us a nice scene with Harry walking to his demise, I suppose, but it did nothing for the Cloak, and the nature of the Elder Wand then gets all mired up in the BS wand lore stuff. I would have much preferred they stick to the, "Hey, I died for everybody. You can't do any harm to anybody anymore. Suck it!" approach to the ending. Instead, they conflate it with the "Your wand is now mine by way of Draco's actions" Deus Ex Machina by which Harry doesn't even have to be the one to fire the killing curse at Voldy. If that was really the whole reason for all of that wand bull -- pretending that Harry never killed anybody (he did, think of why he didn't stun Stan Shunpike, and then the fact that he did the same to others on his trail) -- then it's just, well, dumb. I'll also note that, when push came to shove, none of the "good guys" were terribly opposed to using any of the "unforgivable curses". The readiness with which Harry uttered his first "imperius" always rubbed me the wrong way.

All said and done, though; as much as the various points above irritate me, it's still a more than adequate ending. Why? Because Harry experiencing Snape's memories is the most important chapter in the entire series. Because Rowling still knows these characters. Because I never actually wanted to stop reading, either time through the book. I meant to take four or five days to cover Deathly Hallows on this outing. I couldn't last longer than two, and I really tried.


*I really ought to be shot

Thinking Critically About Firefly: Bushwhacked (Episode 4)

I've said in each of my last posts that I'm not overly fond of this episode, which is why it's taken me so long to get to it (in fact, Sepinwall beat me to the punch on this one =/). Unfortunately, now that I have time and nothing better to do, my laptop doesn't want to read the disc, so I'm doing this from memory. So, instead of walking through specific moments in the episode, I'm going to briefly explain why, this episode ranks so low on my list.

Fortunately, my problems don't have much to do with the episode itself. It's a tightly paced episode that provides a solid introduction to the mentality of the series bogeymen and what makes them so scary all the while keeping them shrouded in horrific mystery. It provides some great humor moments to ease this tension, as well (Wosh and Jayne's interrogations) and also finishes the job of re-establishing characters who didn't really get their moments in The Train Job (Kaylee's unstoppable cheerfulness; Simon's insulated naivety). Finally, as Sepinwall noted, in showing even straight-laced Alliance troops breaking from protocol, it also continues the work of establishing the show as a Space Western (I briefly touched on what this means to me in my old Cowboy Bebop post and may devote a brief entry specifically to this concept in the near future).

Honestly, in terms of raw production, Bushwhacked is a pretty great episode. Why don't I like it, then? Well, partially because I'm not a fan of gruesomeness. I dread Mal's discovery of the passengers on the ship and the survivor's breakout from the Alliance infirmary every time I watch this episode. Mostly, though, my complaints are a posteriori and result from a lack of satisfaction with the ultimate use of Reavers in Serenity, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. For now, feel free to celebrate the fact that Bushwhacked is a pretty solid episode that normal people, free of my squeamishness an pickiness, probably like quite a bit.

Coming up next, possibly even starting tonight, is disc 2. Disc 2 of Firefly is about my favorite thing ever. After realizing that three of its four episodes are probably the best of the series' more light-hearted outings, it became a defining element of the Pity Party as a proper noun*. While the remaining episode, Safe, isn't particularly strong, it contains at least two Important Revelations. Thinking about Shindig right now, I'm already pretty stoked for everything coming up.



*The Pity Party is defined as a get together with friends, all or most of whom have been having a pretty crappy time of things. Its purpose is to help people feel less like shit by bitching about their current problems, eating chili, and watching the awesomeness that is Disc 2 of Firefly. So far, five out of five Pity Parties have been remarkably effective in improving outlook.

Thinking Critically About Firefly: The Train Job (Episode 3)

Those of you who are long-time Firefly fans likely know that The Train Job was ordered as a replacement for the pilot episode, which Fox execs loved but, for some reason, didn't love enough to actually air until after they'd decided to cancel the series. As such, it does a lot to briefly and strongly re-introduce our heroes and highlight their pasts and relationships. Fortunately, Whedon and company care enough about and understand these characters well enough that they manage to pull it off fairly organically with a relatively fun adventure, but it does mean that we don't learn a whole lot knew about anybody and no real growth occurs.

The bar scene that the episode starts with is a great example. In the first five minutes or so, we get crystal clear characterizations of much of the crew, from Mal's wit to Jayne's surliness. We're reminded about Mal's history with The Independents, River's time in the "academy", Zoe and Wosh's marriage, and the less-than-legal means by which the crew makes its living. We're even reminded of the show's namesake -- the classification of the ship that is the crew's haven against meddling governments. None of this is terribly atypical for a second-episode recap-wise, but we clearly saw in Serenity that there's more to these characters, especially Mal, than this; and we need to be shown all of that again.

This is why the episode suffers, at least in comparison to the rest of the series. It has its share of other flaws, of course. The way the eponymous train job goes down is questionable at best; and I've rarely watched this episode with somebody new to the series without them commenting on the ridiculousness of Niska's accent. But the biggest problems all come from needing to reintroduce the characters and settings in a single hour without covering too much old ground. Beyond the stagnation aspect already mentioned, it results in some heavy-handed dialog, and I'd even call the melodrama of the dilemma Mal finds himself in a consequence of this fact; as it allows him to show his true colors as a good guy in an episode where we see the depths to which he's willing to go to stay floating.

But, when all is said and done, it's still Firefly, and it's still largely brilliant. From Mal distracting the man in the bar at the beginning to drugged up Jayne, it keeps the series' heart alive; and Mal kicking Crow into the engine is just as effective as his shooting of Dobson in Serenity. We even do get the teensiest bit of advancement with the introduction Hands of Blue. As such, there are far less pleasant ways to spend 45 minutes of your time.

Hopefully this was a bit easier to get through than the beast that was my coverage of Serenity. I'm thinking it's a bit too terse, but I figure virtually anybody reading this has seen the episodes, so an elaborate recap isn't really required. Besides, I want to save my energy for episodes that I really like. We've got Bushwhacked in the way first, though, which may be my least favorite episode. In any case, we'll get to that and why in the near-future (possibly yet tonight!).

And, once again, if you want to see professional commentary on the series, check out Alan Sepinwall's awesome blog on Hitfix. His thoughts on Serenity can be found here, and his post on this very episode will be up tomorrow.

Thinking Critically About Firefly: Serenity (Episode 1)

Serenity is a great pilot episode for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it's just a damn entertaining episode. More important, though, it shows us that Whedon and friends knew exactly who these characters were from day one. For better or worse, that means that there's a lot to recognize in the episode in terms of setting up of characters, style, and conflicts. As such, this is going to be a long post, possibly longer than the double that the episode length already demands. So, let's get going and start at the very beginning.

The opening sequence, the ending of the Battle of Serenity Valley, is a bit of a red herring -- its scale and its style are unlike anything else the series has to offer. I'd call this a blessing, ultimately, as the scene shows that the effects budget can in no way support this kind of high action, large scale, future combat; but it serves its primary purpose well in showing a Mal who is ultimately not the same Captain Reynolds we know and love and letting us see clearly what is responsible for the change that takes place.

The Mal we see here is an optimist. He believes that the just nature of his cause will see him through to victory if he, and his men, can remain dedicated to it. I know many people who have missed this, but he also shows himself to be a man of faith, not only in his rhetoric about angles and "The Hot Place", but also in a very important shot of him kissing the cross around his neck. The Battle of Serenity Valley is responsible for Mal's loss of faith, but not just in God, who failed him in time of need, despite all of his efforts to follow what he saw as the right path. The battle is also responsible for Mal's loss of faith in human institutions, even if he manages to maintain belief in human individuals. His superiors in the Independents abandoned him, too, even though everything seemed to be going so right. The result is a Mal who only trusts himself and his crew. The scene also establishes many of the most beloved elements of the Mal who is, though: chiefly the ability to command the loyalty of those around him.

I remember watching this episode for the first time, I was intrigued after that first scene; but the scene that follows -- the deep space salvage on the destroyed cargo ship -- was what made me fairly certain I'd love this series. There were two reasons: first, the introduction of Wosh and the universally adored dinosaurs. Second, the Crybaby. Wosh lived up to expectations, but the Crybaby has always remained a marker of what could have been. The absolute cleverness of it as a cheap, low tech, but effective tool gave me high hopes for other ways that these Desperate Men would find their way out of tricky situations. For better or worse, though, it was, at least in part, one of a kind. Certainly, we got plenty of other glimpses of how the collective creativity of the crew helped them get out of tough scrapes, but none of them excited me as much as the Crybaby did on that first viewing.

One final side-note about this scene: I really don't like the Jayne, "Let's moon 'em" shot (or line). I get that it's supposed to be his brief character establishing moment, much like Wosh's dinosaurs or Kaylee's getting stuck in the engine room; but it doesn't work for me. It may be the way in which it's inserted into the rest of the footage, but I've never been a fan.

From here we get our first brief glimpse of one of the two major types of scenes that take up most of the series: on-ship interaction between the crew. And the bits of dialog here are pitch perfect for setting up much of what's to come in this regard. We see Mal keeping the crew somewhat in the dark -- ostensibly to keep them from worrying. We see Kaylee being incurably cheerful. We see Wosh struggling with the fact that Zoe will always be as loyal to Mal as she is to him. The scene that follows, on Persephone, gives us an equally brief glimpse at the other sort of major sequence: on-the-job interactions. The conversation with Badger shows us the calm, controlled nature of Mal's interaction with those not of his crew; and it shows the good-luck bad-luck balance that defines so much of the lives of the crew of the Serenity. It also serves to establish the character of Book and to show the living conditions of the huddled masses, even on a "civilized" planet like Persephone.

Final notes on the Persephone scene: In his readiness to deal with Patience, we see the extent to which Mal is willing to risk himself to preserve the lifestyle of himself and his crew. We get some great Mal and Zoe banter back on the ship. Finally, we have our first of many instances of incredibly poorly pronounced Chinese. Look forward to those.

As we greet the new passengers, we get a nice, slightly misleading introduction to Simon, our first shots of Mal and Inara fighting and of Kaylee fawning over Simon, and a blunt portrayal of Mal's discomfort with religion (contrasted with his insistence on respect and decency). Again, lots of setting up of group dynamics happening, and all of it done well. The old relationships feel believably old and the new ones seem like they're developing naturally. All tied in we get a nice little bit of universe establishment around the dinner table so we know what the deal is with all of these colonies. Following dinner, we get a Book-Inara scene that could have been incredibly painful as we establish their mutual fascination with Mal (one borderline romantic, one purely personal). If I were just to read the script here, it would seem incredibly forced -- the epitome of telling instead of showing -- but Mal has been so firmly established as fitting their descriptions of him, and Morena Baccarin and Ron Glass have a very nice chemistry together as the two outsiders on the ship, that the scene works rather nicely and sets the stage well for the many future conversations between the two.

Leading into the end of the first half of this double episode, we finally get to the start of the series' major source of tension: Simon and River's flight from the Alliance (which adds urgency to Mal and company's own desire to stay out of the spotlight). The reveal is built into a great scene in which we see Book's willingness to punch out the law-man who shoots Kaylee (the first sign that he's been more than a Shepard at some point in his life), Zoe's willingness to pull a gun to keep Jayne in line (the first sign that he's been trouble before and will be again), the depths to which Simon is willing to sink to stay away from the feds (though we don't yet know why), and the crew's intense protectiveness of Kaylee (who represents all of their innocence to some degree or another). Finally, we get to that great would-be-end of the first episode, Mal's mighty, confused, "huh".

This is all followed in the beginning of the second half by a lot of mildly unfortunate telling about River. In her current state, and in the current confines, there's no good way for them to establish River's brilliance and athleticism, so Simon needs to tell us all about it along with how she was taken and, presumably, experimented on and the lengths he went to to save her. It's handled gently, as a loving brother speaking tenderly of the little sister he's sacrificed everything to protect. Because of this, it works better than it might have; though I'm not convinced that his speech needed to be so long. After all of this and the crew debate as to the proper course of action, we get a nice Jayne scene as he interrogates Lawrence Dobson, the Alliance law-man, and is made an offer we can't tell if he'll refuse. This is quickly followed by our first brief encounter with Reavers -- the cannibalistic bogeymen who will pop up from time to time throughout the rest of the show's run.

As we find out that Kaylee is okay, coupled with a hilarious if evil prank on Simon by Mal, the episode kicks into gear for its remainder as the deal with Patience is finalized and the job on Whitefall begins. We see Mal doing his best to be reasonable and fair, looking to avoid trouble and get paid and still going through with the job even when he knows that there's an ambush in store. Cleverness again comes into play as Mal, Zoe, and Jayne prepare for the job, not only disarming trap but turning it around (and making it look like Jayne may have taken law-man Dobson up on his offer). Speaking of Dobson, he's broken free, beating Book more than necessary in the process and abducting River. Trouble aplenty brewing now!

As the deal with Patience goes south as predicted, Mal, Zoe, and Jayne all show their skills. They kill Patience's men while leaving her alive and claiming their payment (and leaving the supplies, as originally agreed). Simon manages to briefly get the upper hand on Dobson as he desperately struggles to continue protecting his sister, and the Reavers show back up as the crew prepares to flee the planet. Mal, Zoe, and Jayne arrive back at the ship, distracting Simon and letting Dobson reclaim his prize. Now deadly serious, Mal shows his willingness to do what's necessary and defuses the Dobson situation with a single bullet as he boards. Wosh, an injured Kaylee, and Book, who once again shows he's more than he seems, work in coordination to pull off an elaborate maneuver, a Crazy Ivan, and escape the Reaver's clutches. Sweet victory!

Finally, a nice bit of falling action as Inara and Book get more chance to talk about the unique facets of life on Serenity and Mal convinces Simon that the best way to keep his sister safe is to stay on as medic and the first episode of Firefly is over. It's a damn shame that Fox didn't air this episode first, even as a two-parter, as it's the best introduction to the series I can possibly imagine. I feel like I may have delved too deeply into synopsis here, but there was a lot of setup to do, both for me and the episode. Future reviews ought to be shorter and focus more on specifics (along with a brief plot overview). Unfortunately, the next two episodes aren't quite up to snuff. I don't particularly dislike The Train Job or Bushwhacked, but I'd probably put them both in my bottom five episodes. We'll power through those, though, and get to the delightful second disk, which gives us Shindig, Jaynestown, and Our Mrs. Reynolds, over the course of the next week or two. Thanks for reading.

Summer Project: Thinking Critically About Firefly

A few months ago, I started reading Alan Sepinwall's TV blog (formerly at Blogger, now at Hitfix). It's some great critical writing with a focus not on any sort of feigned objective evaluation, but on involved discussion of shows that he genuinely cares about with honest attempts at determining what's working and what isn't. I don't always agree with him (season 3 of 30 Rock being a major point of dissent), but that's not the point of criticism. Each summer, when the amount (and quality) of new TV lapses for a few months, he revisits older series he didn't have a chance to discuss when they were on the air. I once failed to study for a biology test reading his episode-by-episode coverage of Freaks and Geeks while regretting that I would never be able to write about this brilliant series without stealing, at least in part, Alan's thoughts. As such, I had mixed feelings about what I was hoping he would write about this summer. On the one hand, I am definitely interested in seeing what Alan thinks of great shows that I like. On the other, there are series I would like to discuss here myself and know that my thoughts are my own.

Well, my worst fears came to pass, and Firefly is one of the shows Alan is covering this summer. I've been meaning to write about Firefly ever since I first started this blog, but since virtually everybody I know is already familiar with it, I didn't want to take the same basic overview approach I have with other media. So, I'm going to try and beat him to the punch. Alan's Firefly reviews won't begin until June 8, at which point he'll be doing an episode each week. So, a couple of times a week, starting this weekend, I will be writing in detail about an individual episode of this series I love so much. I admit that objectivity will be somewhat difficult, but I think we can all agree that, as great as Firefly is, it isn't perfect (Safe comes to mind immediately as a less-than-stellar episode). Just for fun, once the main series is over, I'll try and toss in the Better Days and Those Left Behind comics and Serenity to round things out.

Anyway, since I know none of you really care, this post is basically my contract with myself. Hopefully the results are interesting and I learn a little something in the process.