The Factual Opinion

Comics Of The Weak: There Are Too Many Butts In This Room!

Slam Dunk Vol. 6
By Takehiko Inoue
Published by Viz

Slam Dunk Vol. 5 ended with one minute on the clock in a four point game. Although just an exhibition match, the contest had already seen bloodshed. After dealing with the game in the best fashion possible (a loss), Volume Six turns its focus to the other thing that the Dunk drops on the regular: page upon page of purposeless violence between angry first year high school boys. Multiple teeth are lost, the human bodies of the weak are thrown and swung like weapons, girls eject fountains of tears while screaming for their champion's success, and then it's back to the court, time for some one-on-one. There are immediate personal fouls.

This cycle will continue for another twenty-five volumes.

Haunt # 1
Written by Robert Kirkman
Art by Todd McFarlane, Greg Capullo & Ryan Ottley
Published by Image Comics

This is a comic birthed out of somebody yelling at Todd McFarlane during a comic book convention, which is pretty terrifying because it means that people who yell shit at comic book convention panelists now actually can use that behavior as a precedent for "how to get a job in comics", which is even worse to think about when you realize "how to get a job in comics?" is the thing that at least 75% of convention attendees write in their dream diary the night before Fetish Creeps, Movie Trailer & Be-My-Friend Party 2010. For some reason, comics still look upon Todd McFarlane--a hacky, shit artist who used his limited time creating awful Spider-Man comics as leverage to create a toy company/Spawn-production sweat-shop--returning to comics as the sort of thing that still engorges penises, if Robert Kirkman's back matter claim of "my best-selling book ever" is to be believed. (All this after the election of a black man as President? What did we march in Selma FOR, anyway?) Here's what Haunt is: Kirkman's best attempt at copying every crap Image comic book ever, a mercenery and his chain-smoking, whore-fucking brother (who is a priest!) teamed up across the mortal river to form a semen ejecting rip-off of Venom+Spawn. In the back of the book, Robert Kirkman writes about how awesome it is that McFarlane did things like "look at the color and make sure they wuz done right" and "look at the letters and make sure they wuz done right." In other words, his job, but hey: everybody deserves a pat on the back sometimes. Legacies are a bitch to live up to.

Cable # 19
Written by Duane Swierczynski
Art by Gabriel Guzman, Mariano Taibo & Thomas Mason
Published by Marvel Comics

Cable and Bishop are a couple of old X-Men characters that saw the opportunity to escape the doldrums of whatever X-Men: We Will Never Be In A Movie offshoot comic they used to appear in, reached across the fictional world they live in and got themselves cast in a never-ending science fiction movie. While Strange Tales has pretty much answered the question "How far will Marvel let creators go" with a "Too boring, even for MOME inclusion" answer, Cable, the series, has the most potential for being THE subversive/anti-comics comic that Marvel publishes. Not right now, no--right now it's just a stupid rip-off of an Aliens rip-off, a science fiction mash-up that ignores Ridley Scott in favor of Stargate: SVU for influence. But the basic concept: a black man chases a white man through space and time while wearing lots of pouches? That kind of simplicity has got some history to it. The Krazy Kat comparisons just write themselves.

Spider-Man 1602 # 1
Written by Jeff Parker
Art by Ramon Rosanas
Published by Marvel Comics

Of course, even the separation of four-hundred years can't keep a Marvel comic's plot from being Norman Osborn: Cocksucker. Here, old Norm turns out to be the guy responsible for that whole "giving smallpox blankets to the natives" thing, and then he shoots Spidey's latest girlfriend in the neck just to drive the point home. And that's mean and all, but it does give Peter a chance to re-enact the beginning of Bambi, since dead girl is a nekkid shape-changer. Serving as another brick in the nothing-makes-sense anymore wall, this is a particularly well-illustrated piece of Spider-obscurity, made all the worse by the fact that it just looks so much fucking better than its Amazing Spider-Competitor. Look--that doesn't even make sense. Anybody who gives a shit about something as obscure and horrible as "four dollar spin-off mini-series to a shitty Neil Gaiman comic from six years ago" is really fucking unlikely to care about how the goddamn thing LOOKS, the requirement for entry is already so specific that "the art" couldn't even make the top ten. Meanwhile, the regular Amazing Spider-Man comic has panels that only make sense if you can get a Marvel editor to email you a copy of the original script. (Which is a lot easier than it should be.)

Star Wars Invasion # 4
Written by Tom Taylor
Art by Colin Wilson & Wes Dzioba
Published by Dark Horse Comics

Occasionally, there's some moment when churlish shitheads complain about the lack of true comic book journalism--sometimes this is because there's a lack of substantive technical anaylsis regarding business decisions, but most of the time it's because A) shitty comics get treated like shitty comics and B) people whine, because they suck. Every once in awhile, it's because something happened in a comic book that is maybe kind of a big nerd deal, and yet no one really acknowledged said big nerd deal. Like, for example: Chewbacca is dead? Somebody killed Chewbacca? And now Han Solo has a grizzled beard and won't talk to his kid? And Leia has an ugly haircut and an ugly hat, and she wears a football uniform with a cape? And Luke has a wife who wants to have sex with him, and they live in a Mayan ruin? What are we not paying those news sites for anyway? That's the sort of information you shouldn't have to go searching to find.

Batman and Robin # 5
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Phillip Tan, Jonathan Glapion & Alex Sinclair
Published by DC Comics

Most of the time, the best way to talk about a Grant Morrison comic book is just to say "It's the G-Mo, bitch" and then stick a fork in the speaker, Thurston Moore style. After all, the guy did write Doom Patrol AND Doom Force, and those fucking comics are basically cranked out crank, Spank Rock comics, and Spank Rock was a fucking kid when they came out. Then, Grant started rolling deep, dropping comics on such a regular basis that something kinda normal happened: they weren't all great anymore. Not that they weren't great at all, he still has hits, but now he's got misses too. It's problematic, because if you read books, watch movies, do basically anything, people do that shit all the time: like, shit. They do shit. Batman and Robin--hell, it's got some moments. The line "no backstory" is pretty clever, Damian has had the best character moments Morrison has come up with since Xorn held a finger to his missing lips, and yeah, so on. There's stuff that's likable. But the rest of it? It's horrid. Frank Quitely's art has been replaced by somebody who would be better served on a Whilce Portacio comic book. It's a missed note, it's a Hail To The Thief, a Mystery Play. And if it were movies, it would just be a "haw haw" in the parking lot, a "oh man, how about when he realized that she was his mom" conversation over coffee. That's what this one is, and that's all: bad times on the way to the next one. Good thing it's cheap.

Batman Annual # 27
Written by Fabian Nicieza
Art by J. Calafiore, Mark McKenna & Nathan Eyring
Published by DC Comics

Since there's no such thing as too much shitty Batman, here's an annual that leads into another annual, which will eventually lead to a series. The first part came out earlier this year, in a comic book that is only remarkable for wasting the time/talents of Frazer Irving. The story continues here, remains terrible, now has a different artist, he can't fix it, and there will be more coming later, in the form of a monthly comic book about a character who dresses like an early 90's rapper.

Please don't emphasize your violence due to your youthfullness. No penis, don't.

War Heroes # 3
Written by Mark Millar
Art by Tony Harris & JD Mettler
Published by Image Comics

Using Planetary # 27 as cover, War Heroes sneaks onto the shelves a year after the last issue arrived. Like a lot of 2009's Mark Millar comics, it's gross, kind of ignorant, loud. Unlike a lot of 2009's Mark Millar comics, it's confusing and hard to follow, with an entire action sequence devoted to a character who destroys things Tasmanian Devil style without actually depicting the character in anything correspondent to physical movement. It's just a bunch of panels of a stereotypical Muslim infidel (the model seems to be any of those Aladdin type movies where the entire cast consists of white people in greasepaint) posing next to destruction. It's enough to make one think that the draw of comics like Kick-Ass and Old Man Logan might be completely tangled up in the art. That would be really, really weird.

Planetary # 27
Written by Warren Ellis
Art by John Cassady
Published by Wildstorm Comics

This is that comic that took a long time to come out, but it's not like the book would've been served very well by a stunt fill-in: this was John Cassady's book to be lost, and while he isn't given the same opportunity to shine here--with a "boring, nerdiest episode of ER ever" script, as one individual put it--his work will live on in the eventual collection, which is the only place that Planetary can hope to find its home. But Cassady's art--clean, pretty, somewhat predictable--can't conceal the one thing that ten years of comics taught, which is that Warren Ellis has one voice, one tempo, and a Trending Topics library to pull from. Someday, people will just go ahead and read James Gleick and the rest of the high bookshelf types who have struggled to bring top tier physics to the armchair--one can imagine that's what Ellis was hoping they'd do all along, god forbid it couldn't have been "read more super-hero comics", which is the other general attitude--and then one can get around to praising Planetary for the only thing it really deserves praise for: sometimes, it was pretty to look at.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

Television Of The Weak: Akiva Goldsman Could Ruin A Birthday Party That Had A Pony In Attendance

This week, it's all about some Fringe, Archer, Dollhouse, Mad Men, Dexter, House, Sons of Anarchy

Fringe: "Fracture" by Matthew J. Brady

There's a fine line between enjoyably dumb and just plain dumb, and Fringe crossed over onto the less-worthwhile side this week, with a plot about inadvertent suicide bombers and hints that the continuing subplots are pretty much a what-the-fuck mishmash of ominous portent and anything that can keep stringing weird shit along for a few more seasons. At least, that's what I take away from it; even if his name isn't too prominent in the credits, I still sense the hand of Akiva Goldsman in the works (he's a "consulting producer" now). There's an ominous sign for you.

Anyway, we get a plot involving ex-soldiers who have been taking a serum that, when triggered externally, crystallizes their bodies and then makes them explode. There's an evil former officer who is behind it all, and we've got a dumb race to stop one of them from blowing up in a Washington, D.C. Metro station (the soldier is a pretty housewife from Illinois, so you won't be surprised to learn that she survives). It's a bunch of calculated crap that's meant to make it suspenseful, but it's pretty goddamn lame, even for this show. We don't even get the usual quirks; Walter's schtick this episode is limited to a "one Mississippi, two Mississippi" countdown to the lady exploding and yelling at Peter for eating a cheeseburger in front of his pet cow. And the subplot about Olivia trying to recover from the injuries she suffered on her interdimensional jaunt quickly got tiresome as well; she was pointed to a guy who works at a bowling alley (played by veteran "that guy" actor Kevin Corrigan) for help, and he takes the Mr. Miyagi tack of training, making her do annoying stuff until she snaps and suddenly makes a breakthrough. Yawn.

Yes, it was an eye-roller of an episode, even taking a side trip to Baghdad so Olivia and Peter can hunt down one of his old contacts for some help finding an Iraqi doctor who is now ostracized after working with the Americans. This show is on Fox, isn't it? You'd think they would have him getting high-fives from Sean Hannity, not stuck working as a cook because nobody likes him. See what this show has reduced me to? Dumb political jokes? Let's not do this, Fringe. The teaser for next week seems like we might be getting back on the way to the good stupid, with a character illustrating that it's bad for universes to "come together" by smashing two snow globes into each other. Subtlety! Do it up right, fellas.

Archer: "Mole Hunt" by David Brothers

H Jon Benjamin captured the hearts and minds of our great nation as the obnoxious, disgusting, and hilarious Coach McGuirk on Home Movies. Time passed, Home Movies got cancelled, he's done a few shows since, most notably Lucy, Daughter of the Devil, and now he's back in an all-new role on FX.

Sterling Archer, code-named Duchess, is the top agent at ISIS, if only because his mother is the director of the agency. However, while he's cut from the same cloth as Bruce Wayne and James Bond, he's... a screw-up. He's rude, arrogant, insensitive, and completely, totally irresponsible.

Archer is the kind of adult cartoon that Adult Swim specialized in a few years back, full of dirty jokes and outrageous violence. There's an extended "Let me just put the tip in" sequence that's much funnier than that joke has been in several years, if only due to the variety and, ah, length of the joke.

In a way, Archer's nothing new. It's a funny spy show, a little dirty and a little sexy for the 18-24 set, and full of things that'll make your mother ashamed to have given birth to you if you laugh at it. Remember the naked John Lennon and Yoko Ono picture? Imagine that with an old lady and a hairy dog. Bam.

But the cast is killer. H Jon Benjamin's disinterested, self-centered, and yes, McGuirk-esque approach to Archer makes him equal parts endearing and frustrating. Malory, his mother, is the mother from Arrested Development playing more or less the same role, though somehow even more spiteful.

Really, it's an Adult Swim show that's just a little smarter, a little meaner, and a little more likely to bust out actual curse words instead of gimmicky bleeps. It's also laugh out loud funny, filled with easily abused archetypal characters. Archer's a douchebag, and his douchebaggery is amazingly entertaining, whether it's embezzling ISIS money, telling a quiet secretary that she's ugly when she cries, or slapping drinks out of people's hands.

Maybe that makes me a jerk, but the real jerk in this situation is FX, who showed a sneak preview in Fall for a show that premieres in January 2010.

Dollhouse: "Instinct" by Matthew J. Brady

The ratings for the season premiere of Dollhouse were reportedly not very good, which isn't exactly unexpected, but is still unfortunate, especially in light of episodes like this, which join Fringe on the far side of the dumbness border. The setup for this week's adventure in personality-borrowing, which sees Echo turned into the mother of an infant, is screaming for a twist that never comes, and eventually you realize that the extent of the premise was realized in the first couple minutes, when we saw her breastfeeding the kid, and it all goes as expected from there. It could have been interesting, since the father was acting all suspicious, but no, he's just an asshole who didn't want to deal with a kid, so he hired a glorified wet nurse. The real complication is supposed to be about Echo's personality discovering the unreality of her situation and going post-partum crazy with protectiveness for "her" child, but it's really all about how women have some sort of incomprehensible, quasi-mystical quality that connects them with babies and gives them feminine intuition, and the Dollhouse is doing Very Bad Things when they mess with that. For a show that's all about neat sci-fi ideas and their ramifications, well, I guess that's expected, but I don't have to like it.

The main plot is thin enough that it needs support, so other subplots show up to do shore it up here and there, including November returning for a checkup and over-explaining her motivation (really serving to make Helo uncomfortable, which is the only thing she's good for anymore) and the anti-Dollhouse senator moving forward with his crusade after getting some information from a source that will probably either never be explained or turn out to be somebody who doesn't make sense. Gotta fill in those minutes somehow. I'm still waiting for more of that glorious stupidity; next week's serial killer plot looks promising. Is it bad when the preview for next week is the best part of the show?

Mad Men - "Souvenir" by Sean Witzke

Still contender for best theme song ever, way to go RJ.

After the last round's apocalyptic run-on sentence of an episode, suddenly this show is mostly concerned with minutia. There are a lot of jump-cut time lapse portions, a lot of daily ritual. It's a strange decision that doesn't pay off until the very last scene of the episode, the kind of smart delay that leads to diffusion of expectations. The dynamic went from an elliptical, self-reflective structure to some Altman shit. It's how people behave and present themselves. It's all surface, on a show that already puts a premium on surface. It's also a Pete Campbell-focused episode, so half of it is a wash. The Don and Betty half, though, is gold. The only problem is you might not realize it until those credits snap over.

We open up to Pete Campbell reading Ebony magazine. Yeah, I'm supposed to care about Pete Campbell this episode, and I just can't do it. Ooh he took his shirt off. Sexy as a sheet of drywall. He watches tv all day, buys groceries, talks to his next door neighbor's (German?) au pair.

Don and Betty together in the kitchen, talking about catchup plot points to show that, hey, time has passed. Betty has a sequential day as well, emphasized by her primping in the mirror, almost pushing Sally out of the way and ignoring her as she does so. She has a hearing with Neidermeyer about some nonsense about water tables. Fucking topicality, the show is set in the 60s. Betty is interested in the dude from the dinner party, who is Rockefeller's assistant? Aide? Something like that? They kiss, Betty drives away, maintaining her Grace-Kelly-on-Xanax attitude towards most things. Her weird giddy shimmy and sudden deadeyed stare at hugging Don are all the more fake and forced after this. And now that she's kissed mayor's aide guy (like the guy with the ice skating rink on Futurama) she's all happy.

Joan Holloway is now a manager at Hermes, which doesn't shock Pete Campbell at all because this is probably the first time Pete Campbell has had to think about Joan Holloway for more than 10 seconds. Because ITS THE PETE CAMPBELL EPISODE, Joan is reduced to a walk-on. I call bullshit, and suddenly I miss that scientologist lady who married the guy from Thunderant.

"Two dollars, Don? That's what he makes in a week." Don and Betty arrive in Rome, Betty speaks to Conrad Hilton for a moment and there is a jumpcut to the two of them in bed, partially dressed. We're supposed to guess at whether or not they had sex (they didn't). Betty speaks fluent Italian with an almost-passable accent, gets her hair did. Don doesn't speak anything but drinking. Betty and Don pretend not to know each other at the resturant - "I'm only in Rome for one night, I won't have my heart broken." The two of them have sex. The infidelity thing, while more on Don's side than Betty's, is just becoming a component of their relationship at this point. They fool around behind each others backs, lie to each other constantly and I never get the feeling that we're waiting for the writers to spring that card on their marriage. No, Don's false identity is here for that, so weirdly the infidelity is just something that happens, it's not a stick for plothammering. When that moral superiority is taken away from the writers, the result can only be positive for the show. And they're all over each other here. They never left the hotel, as they say.

Cindy Brady beats up her brother, kisses the neighbor boy. No one cares. When Betty gets home, she singles Sally out because she's a horrible mother. Then she stares at her masturbation couch, lectures Sally on her not to go around kissing boys. Because she knows, she totally kissed the mayor's aide after he got Fry tried as a minor.

Pete kind of forces himself on the German au pair once he got a financial hold over her. Like a date rapist. The au pair's employer basically tells him he doesn't care what he does, just to not fuck with his home life. "Be smart and keep it out of the building", he says like he's been there. When Pete Campbell's wife comes home you remember that he's sympathetic only because his wife is completely unlikeable and her trying to get busy with him is fucking repulsive. It doesn't help that she's dressed like a Flintstones extra. Pete on the verge of tears, unable to look at his wife. Yeah: still don't care. I don't even feel the "fuck this guy" vibe that Pete was cultivating in earlier seasons. He's a paper doll, a non-Laurie House character. Pete and his wife talk over dinner, and he tells her he missed her. The two of them have to represent Mr. and Ms. Capitalism, because there is absolutely no passion in their lives at all.

Betty has made a decision for Don against mayor's aide, which should reverse in two episodes when the real shit goes down... but wait... Betty shows herself a lot here - the educated, intelligent woman who never wanted to be a suburban housewife comes home from Rome and realizes she hates everything about her life except for Don. Fucking finally.

Dexter: "Remains To Be Seen" by Tucker Stone

Continuing the "let's ignore things that used to be interesting", the most recent episode of Dexter includes a portion where Dex loses his temper and yells at Quinn. Now, Quinn--like most of Dexter's supporting cast--is an underwritten shitbag who fails to entertain at every turn of his perpetually scowling face, but when you compare that scene with every other time Dexter has "lost his temper", it's a pretty painful example of how much this show has abandoned (or lost) what used to be a major portion of its charm. See, up until now, Dexter never lost his temper. Ever. Because he couldn't. Dexter would play people, he'd imitate anger--the moment when he snarled "I own you" to force Doakes into a public confrontation, the moment when he pushed Jimmy Smits into an ill-thought out rage through a faked meltdown--but real temper? Not a chance. Over and over again, through voice-over, through Dexter's behavior, it was made clear that Dexter wasn't an emotional creature. Part of the twisted pleasure of the second and third season was tied up in this (and the climax of the Ice Truck Killer, even more so)--because Dexter struggled with unexpected feelings he couldn't comprehend or explain away. Was it anger? Love? He couldn't tell, because how the fuck would he know? Now, he doesn't register them at all. He gets angry, he behaves irrationally, and what was once fascinating becomes pat, confusing.

A lot of complaints with the show end up, unfortunately, in one single pile: this isn't as entertaining as it was, and it's because "they're doing it wrong." That's a boring attitude to have, and even if it's true--and it may not be, it may just be personal taste crushed against popcorn failure--it's not a tremendously intelligent way to watch a television show. Thankfully, the moments when things do work are still widely available--Dexter's compulsive frenzy to find the missing body parts (inside his own mind), the slow, methodical nature in which John Lithgow hunts his next victim--both of those sequences catch up with the general appeal of the show, which is that we want to see someone completely awful, see them do something completely awful, all so that we can more fully enjoy the moment when Michael C. Hall strips them naked, covers them in plastic wrap, taunts and torments, and finally, right at the moment when it becomes a bit too upsetting--slaughters them like an animal, smiling all the while. It's gross. It's vile.

But it's the one thing this show hasn't fucked up yet.

House: "The Tyrant" by Tucker Stone

Okay, let's see if we got this right: not only does Andre Braugher lose his guest spot role so that the dude from Due South/The Shield can show up and play the show's umpteenth version of House-but-not-really, but Taub barely gets acknowledged while the show devotes roughly 15% of its run-time to the soul-numbing reunion of Omar Epps with his Wyld-ing Out handbag? And now Chase is being saddled with the "impossible to ignore, forever" label of being-a-fucking-murderer?

Oh, and House apologized like four times. This is a difficult road these Fox-ters are making bitches roll.

Guest POW this week, in case you missed the numerous advertisements--which you didn't, I've been wiping my ass with freebie Darth-Vader-On-House toilet paper for three fucking weeks now--was old James Earl Jones. (He used to stutter! Did you know that? Every speech teacher in every "waste of life/money" acting program in the country whips out that old chestnut around the second or third class, which is roughly around when everybody realizes that none of the "skills" taught in speech class will ever be used, ever, anywhere, by anyone, unless one becomes a speech teacher.) Old Jones did have a nice little line about "maintaining order", but he didn't follow it up by saying "throughout the galaxy, as father and son", but hey, House is all about the missed opportunities these days. And while it was abnormally pleasant to have a patient die--Cutthroat Bitch is the only one that sticks in memory, but the last season is a blur--it was just as abnormally disappointing to find out that Chase is now saddled with future storylines where he will sit morosely in rooms while the camera frames him as if he's being lit by a flashlight. It's not that popping the guy was necessarily a bad choice, it's that It's A Fucking TV Show, one that's never mastered the art of the long-form story--making one of the main supporting castmembers into a Doctor Who Kills only works when you're planning on getting rid of the character, or when you're planning on having that one moment be the central point of the character's existence for the remainder of the show.

As per usual, House was played by Hugh Laurie and was thereby rendered immutably perfect, despite the scene where he made a simple mistake, compounded the mistake, and then did a magic trick that had a 50% chance of miserable, incarceration-causing failure. Still: pretty shitty stuff!

Sons Of Anarchy: "Smite" by Tucker Stone

Having not seen the first season of this show, due to the whole "bikers? who cares?" mindset, I'm unaware of what "the book" contains. Based off this episode, everyone on Sons of Anarchy has CancerAids, and "the book" is where they'll find the antidote. They talk about it in symbolic terms, laden with bullshit-staring contest scenes, they cradle it like a premature infant made of the thinnest glass, they cut to close-ups of the title...they never say what's in the goddamn thing that's so fucking awesome, but whatever it is: must be pretty fucking awesome. It's odd, because one wouldn't imagine that the leader of a biker gang is much of a wordsmith, considering his biker gang spends all of its time in one small, shitty town that has a population of A) the biker gang and B) 13 people who don't like the biker gang and C) a really busy hospital where some women work so that other women may cry. But hey, what do I know. I don't wear fucking chaps.

Like last week, this is an episode that treads back and forth between whether or not Jax and...shit, I don't even know his name, the Ron Perlman character...okay, whether or not they'll...wait. Make friends? Love each other? Something something biker gang? Bros? It definitely has something in it about bros. Anyway, you can watch those parts and pay attention if you want, but the only thing that makes it worthwhile is seeing the bikers sit around a table while Ron bangs a gavel. (Lightly? Why does he bang it so lightly? Hell, if I had a goddamn gavel and a reason to bang it, I'd bang that shit like a Fiji drummer.) The show also has some scenes where Peggy Bundy tries to run after the blond woman who kidnapped her and passed her off for the whole gang rape thing, and that's tough enough, made even worse when her doctor apologizes for how much all that running must have hurt due to the fact that Peggy's vagina is all dry from the gang raping. (Dude, that last sentence isn't some gross thing being written to be gross, that's the actual fucking shit that happens. The doctor even gives her a prescription for estrogen, since her vagina is dry, and the estrogen will fix that, and maybe later she can go running after the people who raped her and it won't hurt as bad.) So yeah, you can pay attention to that as well, if you want, but if you do--fuck man, don't tell me that shit. Way my memory works, i'll forget it soon enough, don't want to know there's people out there flicking lighters for that particular piece of Yuck da Fuck.

Opie has a couple of good scenes. He sits around not giving a fuck, terrifying the hell out of people, gets flirted with by a junkie porno star (in front of her kid), looks at her like she's from another planet, and the whole time he continues to look as if he actually dresses and behaves like the character he's playing, as opposed to nearly everybody else on this show, all of whom look like they took off a paisley dress shirt and threw on some leather jackets the costume department stole from The Warriors.

Oh, and Henry Rollins is still a really terrible actor. I think he was worried that people might have gotten used to him being on the show, so he made sure to remind the viewer this week of that basic fact. Still, the next week might have guns going off, and the only cool action this show has yet had has been based around Opie walking directly into gunfire and blowing people's faces off. Something to look forward to!

-David Brothers, Matthew J. Brady, Sean Witzke & Tucker Stone, 2009

The Virgin Read: Is That Britney, Bitch?

Each week, the non-comics reading Nina Stone picks out one random comic book based off her own made up criteria, reads it, and then writes about that experience. While she's been doing these columns for awhile, she's only successfully managed to enjoy, remember, and keep up with one series. This week, she picked Teen Titans # 75.

Teen Titans #75
Written by Felicia D. Henderson
Art by Joe Bennett, Jack Jadson & Rob Reis
Published by DC Comics

Is it? Look at her. Coach Daniel, the gym teacher at the school where I work, spied the cover of my Teen Titans comic and said, "Damn! They're not teens anymore! She's hot."  

So, that's the first thing.

Secondly, before you ask me if I read "the Ravager back-up feature": No. I did not. And I won't. I don't read those. I mean, you're asking me to commit to the title comic. I didn't ask for more, and I don't want it. I don't read those.

And now to answer the question of questions, "Nina, why did you pick Teen Titans this week?" Let me tell you, the guys at the comic book store asked the same thing. But it was with disdain dripping from their smirks. Well, I chose it for a pretty simple reason: because I have yet, in all these months (years?) to read Teen Titans. So, why not? Why not see if Teen Titans appeals to this 30-something gal, or at least try to see if it's really appealing to 'the teens" who I'm assuming are the target audience. Right?

Maybe not. I don't even know what can I really say about this comic? I can't say that I want to get on board and read Teen Titans from now on, nor do I want to catch up. But I have to give some kudos, though. I understood it. I could follow it. And no, there's no recap, but there are character descriptions, which is just as good, maybe even better. If I know a characters personallity or powers, than I know, like, how to be entertained by them - know what I mean?

However, after my post last week, you'd think I'd be all stoked that we have superhero-ish women with powers like telepathy, empathy, and martian changeling-ism (I think I just made up a word!). But in this case, no, I didn't really care.

The thing is that I'm a little confused. Who is this comic for? To reiterate Coach Daniel, these folks are not teens. They don't look like teens, and they only sort of act like teens if I'm gauging their age by their behavior, which is similar to the way 20-something reality TV stars behave. (Which is basically "teenager with open bar.") So, they really aren't teens, and I don't think this is a story that would really appeal to teens. I think it might appeal to "tweens." But the comics written for tweens are those more like Power Pack, right? (Okay, I cheated and asked which comic it was where the little kids played with Wolverine in the museum. I didn't remember that it was Power Pack. But it was.)

This is basically a Sci-Fi comic, though, isn't it? In Super-hero clothing? And I could be wrong, but I think the average sci-fi lover needs something a little more solid to sink their teeth in. I mean, I know the "fi" stands for fiction, but these are people who dig their science too, and love when things are at least roughly approach being scientifically plausible. In this case, we have some giant, weird, blobby monster whose description is just broad and unstructured: "an extra-dimensional entity of unknown origin." (Otherwise known as a six-headed monster.)

Hey - does Cass resemble Batgirl/Stephanie/Spoiler or is it just me? Or is it just Britney I see?

The art? Is that what you asked about? Some strange body positions and muscular fetish pictures. I think it was an attempt at sexiness, but a lot of it looked really strange to me. There was a page where the team were in the operating room--or whatever that was--and at the top of both pages are 2 frameless pictures on opposite pages from the same room. I thought it was supposed to be one big picture, so I read it that way. Then, when I realized it made no sense, and saw that there were duplicate characters, I figured out that the comic book had fooled me. And yeah, maybe that makes me a dope, a sucker, a great pretender, but I had to just comment on that - that's some bad art planning. The pictures meld together in a way that draws the eye across, rather than down the page. Good trick if that's what was intended--too bad it wasn't!  

So that's it. That's all I have to say. Not the deepest thing in the world. Mildly entertaining. But can I live without it?

Yes. Yes, I can.

-Nina Stone, 2009

Comics Of The Weak: Rise, Children Of Wetwork

Quiet, shitty week, so there's also a new comics post up at Savage Critics.

G.I. Joe Cobra Special # 1
Written by Mike Costa
Art by Antonio Fuso
Published by IDW Publishing

So, this thing reportedly contains "vistas of possibility" that "are so staggering in their vastness", which apparently means that there are "vast" possibities to be found in a comic that consists of a nonstop internal monologue and a gimmick construction technique. (The comic repeats itself structurally, with the center of the comic being the point when the individual delivering the monologue changes.) It's the Cloud Atlas of G.I. Joe comic book specials spun off from Sleeper rip-offs. That's a vista of possibility? Besides all that, it's one of those comic books where every single page has been processed through one of the hundreds of grainy filters available in the digital Effects suite, none of which are able to conceal that the drawings look to be lifted from poorly traced catalog pictures. Go figure: some people eat stickers, y'know?

Blackest Night: Titans # 2
Written by J.T. Krul
Art by Ed Benes & Scott Williams
Published by DC Comics

This particular tie in to the "no seriously, people like this one, you shut up" event that DC is currently publishing had the most potential to have an actual story, whereas the Superman one has to spend a good portion of its page count threatening to resurrect Pa Kent, and the Batman one basically exists so that DC can remind the reader that all of the Bat-characters have the same origin. See, the Titans have spent the better part of the last 15 years executing nearly every character it has come into contact with--when it comes to "storytelling options", you couldn't ask for a wider library of characters to create zombie stories out of. That leeway, of course, runs in tandem with the other legacy the Titans has had for the last 15 years, which is that it's usually written and edited by people who were home-schooled inside a crystal meth lab. So when you put two and two together, you end up here: a comic about a dead baby that rips out a chunk of mommy's neck while a couple of old Rob Liefeld characters argue with each other about which one of them is most responsible for them being completely unpopular. It's all very meta, which is fine, until you realize that if the only thing you have to reference is "other things, also shitty", going meta won't make you John Barth.

New Mutants # 5

Written by Zeb Wells

Art by Zachary Baldus

Published by Marvel Comics

This comic looks like it was published by Pirahna Press for eventual inclusion on Liquid Television, it has a character who talks like that alien everybody hated in the Star Wars prequel movies, and it's about mutants, or Native American girls punching surfer dudes. (She has a feather in her hair!) It's not going to make anybody fall in love with comic books for the first time, but it's a readable object, which is more than can be said for Gotham City Sirens and X-Men Legacy, which are the kinds of things that one has to abandon after the first couple of pages due to the searing pain in one's skull that shows up when the human brain says "Really, there's absolutely nothing to be gained by following this experience through to conclusion." That's not really a compliment, but then again: neither is the gnawing realization that God is real, and he's punishing you.

Superman # 692

Written by James Robinson

Art by Fernando Dagnino & Raul Fernandez

Published by DC Comics

It's not even a complaint anymore, it's just an acknowledgement: all DC Comics include a reference to some comic nobody cared about (this time, it's the Human Defense Corps mini-series) and a scene set at some sort of funeral/wake, this one being a bar where a man in a spandex costume props himself on a tiny stool to air out his balls/show off his balls/who fucking knows why, so he can deliver a eulogy. (Bonus points for the person not actually being dead.) Since that sort of stuff only takes up a small portion of the comic, the reminder is filled with some kind of boring exposition about magic and a hilarious subplot about how the Justice Society characters are having trouble fixing the sewer system in Metropolis. Considering how uninteresting and hard-to-follow Superman comics are unless one is willing/obsessive enough to read all eight of them a month, it would be kind of pleasant if they'd just have one title in sole devotion to that particular piece of obscurity. Nothing says Eisner like an eventual collection of "Power Girl & The Toilet Snake".

Wolverine: Weapon X # 5

Written by Jason Aaron

Art by Ron Garney

Published by Marvel Comics

Airwolf wasn't a very good show, which is why it's sort of criminal that it's so easy to track down and watch these days--like every other not-very-good television program that one has fond memories of, due to the fact that watching it lives in memory next to "the day I first wiped my own ass", it doesn't hold up when one watches it post-death-of-a-parent adulthood. That's what makes trust funds and being a vegan so intensely valuable, because both can postpone the eventual feeling referred to by some as "maturity" and by others as "being a snob". If you never stop liking the shit--the unbearably stupid, fundamentally juvenile shit--that gave you a boner when you were 11, you can still have a good old post 30's night marathoning Airwolf while drinking like a fake I.D. carrying 17-year-old. Agree or disagree, when it comes down to it, the acid test is pretty simple: this is the comic where Wolverine flies around in a combat helicopter. Check Yes or No.

Die Hard: Year One # 1

Written by Howard Chaykin

Art by Stephen Thompson & Matthew Wilson

Published by Boom

Yep, that Howard Chaykin. Ouch! Besides the overall weirdness of using old Bruce Willis for a photo reference, instead of just googling "Bruce Willis Moonlighting", which would've provided pictures of young Bruce Willis, this comic consists of dialog that is 100% expositionary bullshit...with ellipsis between...every line of...dialog. If this particular comic where made into a film--that can't happen, right? that should never happen--the movie would consist of at least seven hours of dead space, with the characters pulling a Liv Ullman in every scene. It would probably still make money though, which always proves that something is really fucking great, even when it seems like it's actually...really...horrible.

Genesis

Written by God, some dudes

Art by Robert Crumb

Published by Norton

Heyzeus Kreesto, what a boring, boring, boring, boring, snoozey mcsnoozey [insert generic insult] borefest this fucking was/is. It's one thing to read subversion into something that barely contains it (especially when the author actively claims subversion's absence), it's another thing entirely to lionize something so incredibly toothless when there's more controversy contained within a Madonna music video from fucking 1989, otherwise known as The Decade That Succeeded By Ending. Is God an old white man? You guessed it. Do Abraham and Isaac hug it out following the whole "i'm gonna stab you for da Lord" sequence? Why not. But hey! All the women look like his sketches of women always do! The part where shit blows up? It blows up real good! Otherwise?

It's better than this. But it pales in comparison to this. And at the end of the day, if you're not more interesting than Lego people fucking, and you're Robert Fucking Crumb, something done fucked up somewhere down the five year line.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

Music of the Weak: The 100 Greatest Songs of the Millennium (So Far) - #20-11

PREVIOUSLY: #100-91 - Introductions, yacht rock, epic narratives, Elvis tributes, and one-man Canadian supergroups.

#90-81 – Jazz revisionism, shady fact-checking, Muppetized gangsta rap, and the no pussy blues.

#80-71 – A ragtag assembly of pop stars and other hate-able entities.

#70-61 – More pop music, Australian pop, bedroom pop, Kanye West, and the decade’s greatest use of drum machines.

#60-51 – Sex, suicide, misogyny, and a brief appearance by Amy Winehouse.

#50-41 – 8 songs that deserve your attention, 2 songs that probably already have it.

#40-31 – Dylan covers, guest spots and banging camp.

#30-21 – Electronica and “Rock is Back!” hype cycle relics.

20. Luomo – “Tessio” (2000)

For a song that set the tone for a decade’s worth of dance music, “Tessio” doesn’t have an epic amount of dance-ability. Instead, it’s the sound of walking from room to room in a multi-story club, mulling over some moment of gravity, probably a break-up, or an impending one—one moment, you’re feet away from speakers blasting house music; the next, you’re only hearing traces of it coming from the next room; later, the music is only comprised of clear thoughts charging through burbles of conversation. It’s a song with a ton of illusions—false endings, echoes, women singing about eschewing women from their lives—that somehow lead to epiphany. Microhouse, the sub-genre that Luomo helped ignite at the turn of the millennium, takes its name from its association with minimal techno. In Luomo’s hands, it could refer to the degree to which tiny, ephemeral changes take on monumental importance within the music. “Tessio” lives in the distance between two points on either side of a large room, or in the slight shift between two thoughts.

19. M.I.A. – “Paper Planes” (2007)

Often, the most universal pop moments are also the weirdest. On the one hand, the chart ascent of “Paper Planes” thanks to its inclusion on the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack made perfect sense. Tucked away at the end of M.I.A.’s 2007 watershed Kala, it always stuck out as a potential crossover moment—though no one could have ever predicted just how big it would get. On the other hand, it also features an abrasively atonal Clash sample, an army of kids singing about taking your money, and a chorus composed of well-place gunshots, so how prepared could people have been for it to storm its way onto the iTunes charts? For all the talk about politics surrounding her, “Paper Planes” is the moment where M.I.A. actually makes the thing the deal by flipping routine gangsta threats not once, but twice—first, by gender; then by putting the implied violence in the mouths of children, artistically rendering it the necessary evil that rappers always claimed it was. There are still pop flourishes, but even they are subversive. In M.I.A.’s hands, even finger snaps sound an awful lot like gunshots, or is it the other way around?

18. Phoenix – “If I Ever Feel Better” (2000)

The zeitgeist has spent ten year slowly bending toward Phoenix. No other band this decade has had such a slow, stately progression toward legitimate success. When this year’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix became a bona fide hit for the band, it retroactively validated everything that Phoenix had done since their yacht rock and Air-inspired debut in 2000. “If I Ever Feel Better,” one of their first great songs, may fit perfectly into today’s musical landscape, but back then it was an anachronism. A four-on-the-floor disco stomp with some of Air’s lounge-y open space, and an AM radio veneer, “If I Ever Feel Better” sounds more vital with each passing year. It’s a bonus, then, that Thomas Mars stuffs it with resonant imagery (“I’ve watched all my castles fall/ They were made of dust after all”) and a dogged enthusiasm for the impending moment when he’ll be able to look back on all the “hard time” and laugh. “I can’t wait,” he sings,” “I can’t wait, I can’t wait, I can’t wait.” Hopefully the band’s newfound success means that moment has come.

17. The Knife – “Heartbeats” (2002)

There may not be a better representation of the way the 00’s changed the proliferation of music than “Heartbeats.” Released at the very end of 2002, The Knife’s best known single would have been relegated to cult status as a Swedish hit, had it not found its way into the hands of some industrious mp3-bloggers (most notably Fluxblog’s Matthew Perpetua). “Heartbeats” was always fated to be a modern standard—it presaged the internet’s fixation with Swedish pop (which carried over to Annie and Robyn), and gave Swedish songwriter José Gonzalez his biggest hit. Though most of the song’s charm comes from the interplay between the purposefully chintzy keyboards and Karen Dreijer Andersson’s alien vocals, “Heartbeats” was malleable enough to survive—even thrive upon—the acoustic rendering by Gonzalez, and even a full-on choral version by Scaly & Kolacny Brothers (an all-female choir). Now more than ever, good music will out.

16. Iron & Wine – “Bird Stealing Bread” (2002)

No other song this decade has rendered lost love as wistfully as Iron & Wine’s “Bird Stealing Bread,” and lord knows they’ve tried. A folk-inspired, banjo-playing beardo seems to crawl out of the woodwork every five minutes these days, and every one of them has a new poetic way of letting us know he once got his heart broke. “Bird Stealing Bread” is heartbreak made easy, sitting on the porch allowing your mind drift to an old lover and wondering if she ever thinks of you. That’s how it happens—it’s not willful, it’s slight, just a fleeting thought that colors everything that comes after it. In Sam Beam’s hands that thought unravels into a million loose insecurities. He wonders why he hasn’t seen this girl at any of their old favorite places. He breaks out an old picture of them on their favorite day. He wonders if her new boyfriend makes her smile when it rains. The memories cluster until he’s finally unsure whether she would even say hello to him in passing, and, all of a sudden, the “bird stealing bread” in the title and one of the song’s recurring images, is a metaphor for how quickly your stray thoughts can force you down a bleak road.

15. Gnarls Barkley – “Crazy” (2006)

Most pop songs that reach the ubiquity that “Crazy” had in the spring and summer of 2006 have more than a whiff of novelty about them. Gnarls Barkley’s monolithic hit was the opposite. Break “Crazy” down into its component parts, and you end up with a handful of musical ideas that could have been conceived centuries ago—a plodding bass line, ascending strings, and just the slightest bass drum kick. Cee-Lo’s vocal performance has only two levels, immense and immenser. When he launches into the chorus’s glory note, it’s like somebody hit him in the kneecap with a hammer. “Crazy” is as basic as it gets. Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo have no need for Poloroid-shaking or a Jay-Z cameo, because “Crazy” taps into something magical and universal, the way only a perfectly written song can. At the end of the decade, “Crazy” can take a place next to “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” or “The Weight” in the pop pantheon without a single catchphrase.

14. Amerie – “1 Thing” (2005)

It’s nearly impossible to discuss “1 Thing” without bringing up “Crazy in Love.” In the hands of producer Rich Harrison, both tracks run parallel to one another—the Chi-Lite’s horn sample on “Crazy in Love” analogous to the resplendent use of The Meters’ “Oh, Calcutta!” on “1 Thing.” But the two songs charge in wildly different directions. “Crazy in Love” uses the climactic horn break from “Are You My Woman? (Tell Me So)” in a similar fashion as its used in the orginal—the horns blast, then the vocals kick in; it’s a one-two punch. In comparison, “1 Thing” whips around on itself like a three-minute whirlwind. Harrison adds bongo, cowbell, and cymbal to Ziggy Modeliste’s already frenetic playing, but keeps Leo Nocentelli’s guitar-chords stripped down, so that the song is 90% drums. Compared with Beyoncé’s diva turn on the “Crazy in Love” vocals, Amerie’s singing is wispy and weird, a nearly absurdist flurry of tuneless disco calls, throat-scraping pleas, and bell impersonations. Both songs leave you winded. But, while “Crazy in Love” utilizes front-to-back pop conventions in order to gain its seismic success, “1 Thing” defies them. Ding dong ding dong ding.

13. Eminem – “Kill You” (2000)

Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter because it most accurately represented how people actually sounded when they spoke. The idea was to use poetry to abstract the way that conversations sounded, but to make them sound more real than real life, amplifying the music of conversation by identifying and then exploiting it. Eminem’s “Kill You” marks the hugest leap forward in conversational poetry since at least Rakim, and he uses plenty of Shakespeare’s tricks—cadence, internal rhyme, alliteration—in order to do it. Over a beat that sounds like a computer constantly shutting off and restarting, Eminem rattles off nesting doll lines like, “Think I’m sayin’ this shit ‘cause I’m thinking it just to be saying it” and twists the word “Vicodin” to sound like he’s revving a chainsaw. Walmart shoppers may have balked at Em’s drug-snorting, whore-abusing, mother-raping content, but, in truth, Marshall Mathers was the most successful 21st century Macbeth we’ve ever known, employing fantastic language to expose the workings of a deeply fractured mind.

12. R. Kelly – “Ignition (Remix)” (2003)

R. Kelly has singlehandedly redefined the idea of the unhinged musician, marking its evolution from Jack Kerouac-like rambling outsider to possibly inebriated favorite uncle that you definitely wouldn’t trust around your children. On “Ignition (Remix),” Kelly’s most indelible and lasting hit in a decade full of them, he runs a litany of sex metaphors—some successful (“I’m about to take my key and stick it in your ignition”), some not so much (Why is it like Murder She Wrote once he gets her out them clothes? Wouldn’t images of Angela Lansbury put a swift end to Kelly’s erection? Or is it really as much of a freakin’ weekend as he says it is?)—around a track of studio noises as goofy, awkward and funny as sex actually kinda is. If you’ve ever tried to sing “Ignition” at karaoke, you’ll know that “Ignition (Remix)” is the song, reinventing not only the original, but the whole idea of a remix in the first place. And somehow it’s only a preview! But, as funny as “Ignition (Remix)” is, the ultimate joke of it is an infinitely darker one: If every child molester could present a defense for himself as bulletproof as “Ignition (Remix),” the world would be a much scarier place.

11. Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings – “How Long Do I Have to Wait For You?” (2004) 

When people refer to Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings as “retro-soul,” the backhanded implication is that song as immaculately soulful as “How Long Do I Have to Wait For You?” could only have been written in another era. Not true. The Dap-Kings channel as much of the 80’s, 90’s and present into their music as they do the work of James Brown. Disco-funk, Afrobeat, hip-hop’s mid-decade horn infatuation, the party Prince throws at the end of Sign O’ the Times—it’s all in. The supple work of El Michels on Bari Sax, Neal Sugarman on Tenor, and Dave Guy on trumpet; Binky Griptite’s cascading guitar lick, which nimbly cuts back and forth across the song; and, of course, Jones’ virtuosic performance, which summons up a wealth of emotion that belies her tiny stature—these all combine to form one of the most vital songs of any era. We’re just lucky enough that they belong to ours.

-Martin Brown, 2009

Television Of The Weak: Daddy's Back

This week, we see the return of Matthew J. Brady--the "J" stands for "Just like that, yeah, now work the shaft"--alongside coverage of Fringe, Dollhouse, Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy, House, Lie To Me & Dexter.

Fringe: "A New Day in the Old Town" and "Night of Desirable Objects" by Matthew J. Brady

It looks like Fringe is acknowledging the debt it owes to The X-Files, since the season premiere contains two references to the previous show. And maybe that's because these first two episodes of the new season seem to be especially blatant in copying aspects of the Mulder and Scully Hour, including the government threatening to shut them down, shapeshifting assassins, killer mutants, and an agent who has near-supernatural abilities of prediction. Sure, it all gets the unique Fringe treatment, so far as that goes. We've got the usual scenes in which Walter acts strange and funny, like getting excited about exhuming some graves, or examining a body and excitedly announcing "The anus is soaking wet!" And Joshua Jackson and Anna Torv do seem to do their best at acting, but they continue to be pretty awkward, especially when Olivia is getting all upset and frantic after being injured and suffering memory loss.

Oh yes, the plots. It is nice to see some significant developments taking place, with Olivia abruptly returning from her extra-dimensional jaunt by crashing through the windshield of a wrecked car an hour after the accident took place. If that doesn't make sense, don't worry, it's never explained. Parallel universe stuff, it's crazy! There's a killer chasing her who can assume people's forms by jabbing some nasty device into the roof of their mouths, and Fringe Division is getting shut down because they just can't show results, and the government needs to justify the spending, dammit. That's a common plot, but it doesn't really make sense in this case; didn't all the cases they solved last season (including stopping a major terrorist arms deal at one point) count as results? Eh, it's kind of a bogus threat anyway, since it gets resolved pretty easily, if somewhat troublingly, positioning the department as a source for new sci-fi military weaponry.

But there's still some pretty interesting plot turns, including the introduction of a new character (a hot lady agent at that) who doesn't do too much yet but does seem poised to become more important in the future, and a regular being killed and replaced by the shapeshifter. That's a cool idea, but the actual replacement has a hell of a major plot hole that just gets glossed over. That's going to bug me for months.

And then the second episode gets back to regular business, although there's running plots about Olivia recovering and discovering new, Daredevil-like abilities. But the main plot is right out of Mulder's dreams, with a mutant freak living underground and yanking people under to eat them or something. It's so rote that you can figure out the whole damn plot a few minutes in. Eh, they gotta get used to the new(-ish) status quo, I guess. I'm already used to it though, so they better not take too long.

Lie to Me – “The Core of It” by Martin Brown

Let’s start with an admission: I may have trashed the single episode of Lie to Me I watched for TV of the Weak a couple of months ago, but I subsequently tracked down and watched every single episode of the first season over the course of the summer. It’s what we here at the Factual Opinion like to call “research,” mostly so we can feel productive in our down time—as in, “I like to research Lie to Me while I’m eating my lunch.”

Truth is that Lie to Me is a better show than I initially gave it credit for. Any procedural worth watching these days also watches other procedurals, knows the tropes, and subverts them at every opportunity. So, while Lie to Me’s premise was a pretty blatant mid-season grab at that CBS Mentalist money, the show, more often than not, made up for it with fast-paced, high-plot-turn scripting.

At least, it did in its first season. If “The Core of It” is any indication, Lie to Me is in for a SVU-rific season, because they’re kicking this bitch off with one of the gnarliest procedural clichés in the book: Multiple. Personality. Disorder. And, yes, before we go any further, one of the personalities is a hooker.

Played by Erika Christensen—who you know as Michael Douglas’s crack-smokingest daughter in Traffic—the subject has a good side, a bad side, an angry “protective” side, and some tenuous ties to a murder in a skeevy hotel room. My questions are these: Who suffers more at the hand of a multiple personality order episode, us or the actress? Who’s more uncomfortable? Is Christensen proud of the moments where she has to switch between personalities, or does it make her feel dirty? Did Tim Roth look at this script and go, “Are you fucking kidding me? This isn’t even about someone who’s lying! That’s the whole fucking point of the fucking show!” Are network procedurals where one-time Oscar nominees go to die? Is my pasta ready yet?

Dollhouse: "Vows" by Matthew J. Brady

Dollhouse season two! We didn't think it would happen, but it's here! And probably as dumb as ever, while trying so damn hard to be smart. I've already got a new high point, which is an early scene in which Helo does push-ups and clicks his pen a lot to try not to imagine Apollo fucking Eliza Dushku. That's right, the special guest star here is Jamie Bamber, for some Battlestar Galactica wink-nudging. He plays an arms dealer, and sport a British accent that sounds oddly fake, considering Bamber is British. And Echo marries him as part of an undercover operation, in another plot that sounds good but doesn't make sense. What, did she meet him and he proposed the next day? Maybe that's what she was working on all summer. And surprisingly, she actually does some decent acting in one scene that involves spousal abuse (the day after the wedding!) and accusations of undercovery. It's the later scenes of action and mixed-up personalities where she goes back to her old struggles, and that's the stuff she's supposed to be good at.

In other news, Amy Acker's character has gotten way more fucked-up ever since she discovered she's an Active imprinted with a doctor's persona. Now she's in existential despair, not trusting anything about herself to be true, and spending all her time fucking around with Topher, since he's her (obviously imperfect) "creator". It's pretty funny, even if (yet again) it strains credulity that they would keep her around like this. But who needs logic when you've got fun plot devices? That's Dollhouse for you, and really, I probably wouldn't have it any other way.

So, new status quo: Paul is Echo's handler, and she seems to be aware of all the personalities with which she's been imprinted, and maybe even able to access them. Victor got his face fixed, since Olivia Williams can't live without fucking him every so often. Boyd is questioning his mission, or something like that. Oh, and he's got the hots for Whiskey now, because he feels sorry for her. Also, there's a senator who's out to take down the Dollhouse's parent corporation, which seems like an easy threat to take care of (don't tell me they don't have lobbyists). And, I dunno, there's probably some other crap to pay attention to, but that doesn't matter for now, because next week sees Echo become a baby-stealing crazy lady! That'll bring in the viewers! I think I've learned to embrace the idiocy, or at least look forward to complaining about it. Yeah, that's the ticket. Let me down, Joss Whedon; I'll only enjoy it.

Mad Men - "Seven Twenty Three" by Sean Witzke

What does it take for Don Draper to sell his soul? Does Don Draper still have a soul?

This episode opens up with Peggy Olsen in bed with somebody, Betty lying in repose in her gilded cage looking like a goddamn Varga painting and Don Draper lying with his face all bloody in an empty motel room. Like Breaking Bad and shit! Don goes into work and Conrad Hilton is already there, waiting for him. The two of them have this great relationship for a tv show. Every word is a power struggle, and while they respect each other its blatant that Don feels nothing but contempt for Conrad's cowboy bullshit. Fuck your bible and family photos, Don's got some fucking drinking to do, Connie. Drinking and staring into the blackness of his soul is how this son of a bitch does his goddamn work. Respect his process, you cowboy millionaire jackass. Hilton gives Don work and then prods him with a stab about infidelity. Which is great, especially because Don seems like an adulterer and is - this season he's remained very faithful to his wife and that hasn't been brought up very much.

You remember the guy who came way too close to sexually assaulting Betty at the garden party? Yeah she goes and asks him for a favor, for her civics club or whatever it is. They get along really well and have lunch together - and we learn she was an anthropology major at Bryn Mawr. Betty, who a doctor called "infantilized" is an edjucated woman. Which should tell you all you need to know about Betty, and why she is clearly going nuts - "Thats what you need, a fainting couch". She'll probably end up with crazy molester government advisor guy by the end of the season.

Don, for all his backdoor escape hatch logic, is disgusted by his coworkers shortsightedness. "Do you wanna shear the sheep every year?" he asks to no response.

Peggy Olsen gets a Hermes scarf from Duck Phillips, and we get a conversation between Pete Campbell and Peggy Olsen. Pete knows all the facts and is completely ineffectual and stupid, Peggy is smart but hasn't been paying attention to the minutia of the job. Both of them will probably pay for their ignorance by the end of the season. They should!

Don has a meeting with Jared Harris (yay, he got to keep his job after that dude got crippled!), Roger Sterling and Burt Cooper. They want him to sign a contract, when we all know that Don doesn't sign contracts. It doesn't matter, Jared Harris, that it's the kind of contract Nike gave Michael Jordan after he threatend to fuck them back to the stone age. Don ain't signing it.

Dumbass - Don Draper is fucking gooned and even he knows not to stare into the fucking eclipse "You stare at the sun every day?". Also no one wants to hear about your run. And Hippy teacher - Don Draper doesn't want to fuck you, lady. Seriously. If he wanted to he'd already have done it.

Peggy Olsen tries to sleaze Don Draper for the Hilton account, catches him at a bad moment, as she usually does. He tells her to quit the shit, that he's done helping her out and she should realize how much he's done for her. "You're good. Get better, stop asking for things." Then Peggy fucks Duck Phillips. Which is fucked up because no one should ever do that. Then she does it again.

Roger Sterling tries to get at Don through Betty, and burns that last bit of the bridge between him and Don. Betty is disgusted, and so should you because the dude was in blackface, married his secretary, and this is still the most crass shit he's ever pulled. They talk about it. Or Betty brings it up and Don tells her its none of her fucking business what he does. Then Don calls on being Betty is a massive narcissist, leaves her with the crying baby, keeps drinking while he drives to nowhere. He picks up two clear highway bandits masquerading as newlyweds. They talk about how theyre getting married to dodge the draft, and Don doesn't give a shit. "Are you a spook?" "Nope, I'm in advertising". They tell they're high, once again Don does not give a shit. They give him phenobarbitol to knock him out, and they don't because there's enough alcohol in his system to run a goddamn space shuttle. Don sees his father drinking in the corner, laying into him about his worthless job and soft hands. I like to think that Don hears that in his head all the time and we're just seeing it now. Then the damn kids knock Don out, he wakes up w/ a broken nose. Six episodes in, this is clearly the point where everything starts to crack and in two or three its all going to fall apart. This shit is gonna get bad.

Betty buys the fainting couch, Don goes into work and explains the nose as "fender bender" without anyone asking. Burt Cooper makes a power move against Don, telling him he stands on the shoulders of someone else and that he knows a little bit about him, asks him to sign the contract. Even though he says - wel sign Don, but you're not Don. I don't know if Don would have signed ten minutes ago but his hallucinated father mocking him and the wake-up call of being jacked? Don signs it on one condition - that he never has to deal with Roger Sterling ever again. Last scene is Don telling his gilded-cage wife that he signed it and then, trudging up the stairs to the tune of "I sold my soul to the company store". All it took was a broken nose and to be called a soft boy by his dead father.

Sons of Anarchy: "Eureka" by Tucker Stone

This episode continued the display of how little the writers seem to grasp the strength of the actors they've got: namely, that they've got the wrong lead. Jax is attractive, sure, but when he's put into scenes with Opie--the straggly, taciturn widow who doesn't realize that Hellboy murdered his wife, played by Ryan Hurst--Jax's basic lack of charisma and range is laid so wide open that it's pathetic. Take a look at the two methods Jax has for delivering his lines--a smirking, "oh i'm such a boy" grin on his face or a sullen "i didn't want to play with you" whine to his voice. When he's thrown into scenes with Hellboy, it's nearly unwatchable--Jax should have the upper hand, knowing what he does about Hellboy's betrayal of the club's overly serious ideals, and while the script provides the dialog with which to build that illusion, Jax is incapable of delivering them in any fashion beyond a childish whine. When contrasted against the best scene of the episode--Hurst folding his gangly frame onto a curb alongside Ron Perlman and accomplishing the same goal as Jax while still respecting and strengthening Perlman's authority--it makes Jax seem that much more ridiculous, while making the brotherhood of the show seem far less saccharine than it does in the mouth of its blond pretty boy. "The road helps," is what he says, and all of a sudden, I'm sitting here giving a shit. Considering how much smarter everything gets when Opie speaks, it's obvious that the writers have already figured out what a talent they have in the dead-eyed actor who plays him, and yet they continue to throw out the meatiest screen time for a lead who grows more intolerable with every minute he appears. But that's the nature of any visual entertainment, or at least the ones with an American bloodline. The attractive take the spotlight, counting on the talented to let them coast. Forget it, Jake. It's cable tv.

On the other side, the fallout from Katey Segal's gang rape remains as horribly predictable to watch as it is offensive, with Henry Rollins seemingly unaware of what the word "subtlety" might mean. Watch as he bounds around the street, grinning and chuckling like a buffoon! Listen as he yammers to what can only be his overly tattooed spawn about practice meeting perfection, and "all that shit" about hard work! The guy couldn't telegraph whatever subtext he's been told the scene includes any harder if he was wearing a t-shirt that said "I'm an evil, evil, evil monster! Gang rapingly racist I am! What a stinker!" While Adam Arkin isn't exactly lighting the house on fire with his portrayal of Most Pensive White Supremacist Who Spends Six Hours Dusting A New Wooden Sign, at least he's got enough sense to deliver some of his tired schtick with a variance of tempo and volume. God knows, that's the only innovation that can be found in a line like "that sounds...like a threat", only one of the many stock phrases Arkin spits out after gnawing on the sides of his mouth. (What the hell is Arkin doing with his cheeks before he starts talking? Every close-up includes a shot of him where he appears to be moving pebbles around in his mouth, like some kind of Buddhist squirrel.)

For whatever reason, I'm probably going to stick this out a little longer. The action scenes are terrible, the jokes aren't funny, but some of these guys--Ryan Hurst in particular--are doing an excellent job creating a compelling take on how far some men will go to maintain the only relationships they can feel comfortable in. Sons isn't very romantic with it's male/female pairings, but when it comes to male/male, it's the redneck version of Little Women. Alcott would be proud.

House: "Epic Fail" by Tucker Stone

Surprise, surprise! 

1) It's called "Epic Fail".

2) It's got a lot of Olivia Wilde. 

3) It has very little of Chase.

4) Andre Braugher is apparently not going to have any more good scenes.

5) Hugh Laurie does a good job.

"Hey! That sounds like a shitty episode of House!"

It IS a shitty episode of House! Sure, it had some choice moments, like the always intoxicating opportunity that arises when House and Wilson do their best impersonation of Cowell & Seacrest--just fucking kiss him, no one lives forever--but it's also just another way station on the road towards regularity. Considering the people who run the show still haven't gotten around to changing the opening credits, the constant pretense of "change" has worn sick and weary, and nobody but a fool would wear it. Cast it off! Cast 13 off while doing it! Seriously, cast that character down a well. Sure, some people will complain that you're being sexist or bigoted or whatever, they'll claim that Fox is pulling a Rupie Murdock Shuffle on this female bisexual character with a choice spot on a prime-time television show, but get this man, those people are Fucking CRAZY, because any scene that 13 is in would be vastly improved if her character were replaced by an upside down broom wearing a tie.

Oh, and they better be kidding about Taub quitting. That's some rifle/tower kind of shit right there.

Dexter: "Living the Dream" by Tucker Stone

The problem with Dexter has always been the same: Michael C. Hall is physically incapable of filming on a constant basis, and, like 24 before them, the writers have to come up with shit for everybody who isn't Michael C. Hall (or Jack Bauer) to do so that their main horse doesn't come down with a broken femur. (At some point, the people who run Dexter even admitted that problem--Hall, like most humans, is only available for 24 hours out of any given day--and then blamed the torturously awful romantic subplots of the non-Hall actors on that very subject. Damn you, Michael C. Hall's human body! Why must you demand sleep and the intake of food?)

Of course, none of that explains why Julie Benz continues to grow more and more repellent as each minute of her performance rolls on. Jesus, how did she get this job, anyway? Was it a Make-A-Wish foundation kind of thing?

The new season of Dexter can only compound those problems. Whereas the second season took the smart turn of having the entire arc focus on Dexter's attempts to evade the capture by both law and Lila, the third almost completely abandoned his struggling sociopathy while inventing a new (and barely explored) serial killing nemesis to fill up time. With season four, we see yet another new, incredibly talented serial killer, this one played by John Lithgow, who has had as many great performances as he's had bad. And that's the mix, with many flavors congealed. Dexter's wife, empowered by their new baby, now feels comfortable ordering him around. Dexter's struggles with faking emotion go unmentioned, and that entire thread--which was both the show's strongest guarantee of humor, while also being the engine for what made it most fascinating--seems to be all but abandoned. Dexter himself no longer seems to even be driven by his need to kill, treating his sole murder as one half of desire as it is of necessity. The questions that the pregnancy and marriage raised--whether Dex is emotionally capable of love for the child, the wife--aren't addressed. The curious sound of Hall's voice as he tried to explain his behavior to himself has changed to one of simple narration, no longer serving as the oasis of confused deceit that made the character so unique. Simply put, Dex isn't lying to himself anymore, so he's not lying to the viewer, and his character has lost what made him so enticing to begin with--now he's just another dad with a neglected hobby and a nagging wife.

That's not to say that things can't change--they certainly could, although the melodramatic sight of John Lithgow screaming in a scalding shower doesn't bode well. If the only thing we'd seen of Lithgow's Trinity Killer had been the horrifying opening murder, which singularly pointed to how incredibly frightening and well shot Dexter is capable of being, how much more terrifying would he have seemed? That scene alone trumped everything in the third season, and stands alongside the best parts of season two as some of the most unsettling sequences the show has ever done. Nude, whispering and comforting, the razor comes down..that's not something that anyone is likely to forget. 

But one scene isn't enough, and every season premiere of Dexter before this one has served as an extended Table of Contents, displaying what major problem the remainder of the season will see Dexter exploring. And while it would be nice to have some hope...hell, you saw season three, right?

-Matthew J. Brady, Sean Witzke, Martin Brown, Tucker Stone, 2009