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I know this isn't the biggest plot conundrum in SV, but I am both proud of myself and a little sickened by the show because I figured something out: the crystals don't screech for Clark to find them unless People of Destiny are touching them, e.g., Lex and Lana. Otherwise Clark would know where the Shanghai crystal is now. It's not ... nonsensical, exactly, except that I don't see how Lana got to be a Person of Destiny (any more than I see how she got to be a Person of Convenient Cheongsam). She's not up on the cave wall like Naman, Seget, and Clark's destined love; she's entwined with the crystals because her crazy witch ancestor had a thing for them, right? (Side note: how sloppy does everyone involved with a scene have to get before the terms "ancestors" and "descendants" get confused on-air?) So the nonsense has merely taken a step back. If they were going to integrate Lana into the mythology, I think they needed to go deeper, much as I hate to say it – Jor-El should have given her the tattoo to signify her impending guardianship of Clark's SV secrets, or something.
And speaking of Jor-El, how much do I hate that Clark takes his warning at face value? Rather than even pathetically acknowledging the illogic in trusting him as Lana and Clark do with Lionel, Clark just runs off to do his dad's bidding. Because that's worked out so well thus far.
On the really cheap complaint side, I was saddened to see that Michael Rosenbaum successfully fought off the demand to take off his shirt this time. Jensen whatsisname had to take off his shirt; I don't see why MR didn't. Were they worried that two half-naked guys would look gay? 'Cause, fellows at the WB: that rainbow rose over SV long ago. Or should that be, "the really gay horses left the Barn of Solitude long ago"? (They were frightened off by what Clark & Lex were doing in there.)
Sheri S. Tepper, Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse: This is a short book, apparently the third in a series about Marianne, who has some sort of connection with Higher Powers that isn't all that important in this book. She's also heavily pregnant when she gets sucked into an errand for her dying aunt, an errand that involves returning a golden matchbox to a person who just might be connected to a rash of disappearances around the world. I didn't feel lost having missed the first two books, and it was interesting to read early Tepper, before she started to write long, but already concerned with gender roles and their reversals.
Johanna Sinisalo, Troll: A Love Story, translated from the Finnish by Herbert Lomas: Angel, a gay photographer, comes across some thugs beating up a baby troll – an endangered and highly elusive species whose physical similarities to humans are the result of coevolution rather than common ancestry – rescues the troll, hides it at home, and begins an emotional and sexual journey. The story is told by mixed POVs interspersed with scholarly texts on trolls; the language is a few degrees awry from lyrical, and I wonder if that's an effect of translation. It was a quick, compelling read about the ways in which people try to make others conform to their images of an ideal; the photographer's reaction to the troll is not, in the end, terribly different from other characters' reactions to Angel's beauty. Worth seeking out if you can deal with the suggestions of perversion – there's nothing explicit.
Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots and Something Rotten: Further adventures of Thursday Next in Jurisfiction. In The Well of Lost Plots Thursday is pregnant, though her husband has been erased from history by the evil Goliath Corporation. Thursday is hiding out in an unpublished book in the Well while getting further training in Jurisfiction operations from Miss Havisham, but she can't seem to stay out of trouble – she even gets involved in rewriting the plot in her book in an attempt to save it from disassembly back into primordial text (the fate of many failed books). Something Rotten sees her back in the "real" world, or as real as a world obsessed with Jane Austen and fighting a centuries-long Crimean War can be. Thursday's husband is back, in fits and starts, but Goliath is making the move from corporation to religion as part of its attempt to fight an oddly specific prophecy, and if Thursday can't lead her cricket team to victory, the world will be destroyed. Wacky plots treated seriously are Fforde's stock in trade, along with satires of various book-related things – technology and eBooks in The Well of Lost Plots and Hamlet and its various adaptations in Something Rotten. I can't say I ever laughed out loud, but there were moments where the farce really worked. Sadly, the most farcical page in The Well of Lost Plots was probably the permissions page, where it appears that mere references to several books were made only with the copyright owners' permission. And people wonder why I don't think fair use is enough to protect transformative uses!
Sean Stewart, Cloud's End: This was the last Stewart I picked up, though there's still one more book out there. It's set in a world where dreams, or something like dreams, create islands, which eventually stabilize enough for people to colonize them. A small group of islanders travel from the edge of the world towards the center, where a war born of spirit-induced madness threatens to wreak horrible destruction. There are spirits who can become people and people who become spirits, including one who "twins" one of the main characters, taking on all her memories. As usual, the strength of the book is Stewart's lyrical writing. In general, I like his books best when they're set in a mundane world so the language gets its best contrast with the subject matter, but Cloud's End managed a good balance of mystical world-building with description of that world.
Octavia E. Butler, Patternmaster: In a possibly postapocalyptic world, people are either mentally null slaves or psychically talented masters, though most of the latter are subordinate to other, stronger psychics. There are also mutated rebels who cannot be mentally controlled, though they can be killed by telekinesis – a good twist, I thought, having differential vulnerability. But the rebels are distant threats in this story of a young man coming into his own strengths, betrayed by his mentors, forced into the household of a man who will either break him or kill him. This was Butler's most brutal world yet, because the characters were all so compromised by their circumstances; not one of the main characters was moral or even aspired to morality. They never realized their own corruption and rarely acknowledged the horrors they inflicted on others. Even when the protagonist did a bit to mitigate the sufferings of some of the null slaves, it was mostly in his own self-interest and he didn't care enough to pursue the issue past the time their pain was shoved in his face. With all that, I didn't dislike the story – I just wished there had been some hope in it, but I could tell that hope would have been a lie.
Octavia E. Butler, Lilith's Brood: This is a collection of Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago, the story of three generations of survivors of a devastating nuclear war. After the war, the alien Oankali plucked a few surviving humans from Earth and began modifying them genetically as part of a program of "trade," involuntary as it was for the humans. Unaltered humans are not allowed to breed. Altered ones can only breed with the assistance of an Oankali. I found the first novel most compelling, because it was so good at evoking the protagonist's impossible choices (or lack thereof) when she's selected to be a liason between Oankali and other humans. Butler's theme is pretty much always "compromise," in all its meanings. I understood why the other humans hated and feared Lilith even as I also understood exactly why she went along with the Oankali plans. The later novels deal with more advanced Oankali-human hybrids, and while the Oankali remain alien and unable to understand certain things that seem obvious to humans, by the end the hybrids seem to be becoming different from Oankali or human before. The Oankali were frustrating, inflexible and inhuman, but that really worked; what they thought they had to learn from humans was not at all what the humans wanted them to learn, which is unusual for a first contact story.
So many comics to review! In the meantime: why are you not reading Ex Machina? Go, go, go – the first trade is out and Mitchell Hundred, God from the Machine and Mayor of New York City, awaits you!
And speaking of Jor-El, how much do I hate that Clark takes his warning at face value? Rather than even pathetically acknowledging the illogic in trusting him as Lana and Clark do with Lionel, Clark just runs off to do his dad's bidding. Because that's worked out so well thus far.
On the really cheap complaint side, I was saddened to see that Michael Rosenbaum successfully fought off the demand to take off his shirt this time. Jensen whatsisname had to take off his shirt; I don't see why MR didn't. Were they worried that two half-naked guys would look gay? 'Cause, fellows at the WB: that rainbow rose over SV long ago. Or should that be, "the really gay horses left the Barn of Solitude long ago"? (They were frightened off by what Clark & Lex were doing in there.)
Sheri S. Tepper, Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse: This is a short book, apparently the third in a series about Marianne, who has some sort of connection with Higher Powers that isn't all that important in this book. She's also heavily pregnant when she gets sucked into an errand for her dying aunt, an errand that involves returning a golden matchbox to a person who just might be connected to a rash of disappearances around the world. I didn't feel lost having missed the first two books, and it was interesting to read early Tepper, before she started to write long, but already concerned with gender roles and their reversals.
Johanna Sinisalo, Troll: A Love Story, translated from the Finnish by Herbert Lomas: Angel, a gay photographer, comes across some thugs beating up a baby troll – an endangered and highly elusive species whose physical similarities to humans are the result of coevolution rather than common ancestry – rescues the troll, hides it at home, and begins an emotional and sexual journey. The story is told by mixed POVs interspersed with scholarly texts on trolls; the language is a few degrees awry from lyrical, and I wonder if that's an effect of translation. It was a quick, compelling read about the ways in which people try to make others conform to their images of an ideal; the photographer's reaction to the troll is not, in the end, terribly different from other characters' reactions to Angel's beauty. Worth seeking out if you can deal with the suggestions of perversion – there's nothing explicit.
Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots and Something Rotten: Further adventures of Thursday Next in Jurisfiction. In The Well of Lost Plots Thursday is pregnant, though her husband has been erased from history by the evil Goliath Corporation. Thursday is hiding out in an unpublished book in the Well while getting further training in Jurisfiction operations from Miss Havisham, but she can't seem to stay out of trouble – she even gets involved in rewriting the plot in her book in an attempt to save it from disassembly back into primordial text (the fate of many failed books). Something Rotten sees her back in the "real" world, or as real as a world obsessed with Jane Austen and fighting a centuries-long Crimean War can be. Thursday's husband is back, in fits and starts, but Goliath is making the move from corporation to religion as part of its attempt to fight an oddly specific prophecy, and if Thursday can't lead her cricket team to victory, the world will be destroyed. Wacky plots treated seriously are Fforde's stock in trade, along with satires of various book-related things – technology and eBooks in The Well of Lost Plots and Hamlet and its various adaptations in Something Rotten. I can't say I ever laughed out loud, but there were moments where the farce really worked. Sadly, the most farcical page in The Well of Lost Plots was probably the permissions page, where it appears that mere references to several books were made only with the copyright owners' permission. And people wonder why I don't think fair use is enough to protect transformative uses!
Sean Stewart, Cloud's End: This was the last Stewart I picked up, though there's still one more book out there. It's set in a world where dreams, or something like dreams, create islands, which eventually stabilize enough for people to colonize them. A small group of islanders travel from the edge of the world towards the center, where a war born of spirit-induced madness threatens to wreak horrible destruction. There are spirits who can become people and people who become spirits, including one who "twins" one of the main characters, taking on all her memories. As usual, the strength of the book is Stewart's lyrical writing. In general, I like his books best when they're set in a mundane world so the language gets its best contrast with the subject matter, but Cloud's End managed a good balance of mystical world-building with description of that world.
Octavia E. Butler, Patternmaster: In a possibly postapocalyptic world, people are either mentally null slaves or psychically talented masters, though most of the latter are subordinate to other, stronger psychics. There are also mutated rebels who cannot be mentally controlled, though they can be killed by telekinesis – a good twist, I thought, having differential vulnerability. But the rebels are distant threats in this story of a young man coming into his own strengths, betrayed by his mentors, forced into the household of a man who will either break him or kill him. This was Butler's most brutal world yet, because the characters were all so compromised by their circumstances; not one of the main characters was moral or even aspired to morality. They never realized their own corruption and rarely acknowledged the horrors they inflicted on others. Even when the protagonist did a bit to mitigate the sufferings of some of the null slaves, it was mostly in his own self-interest and he didn't care enough to pursue the issue past the time their pain was shoved in his face. With all that, I didn't dislike the story – I just wished there had been some hope in it, but I could tell that hope would have been a lie.
Octavia E. Butler, Lilith's Brood: This is a collection of Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago, the story of three generations of survivors of a devastating nuclear war. After the war, the alien Oankali plucked a few surviving humans from Earth and began modifying them genetically as part of a program of "trade," involuntary as it was for the humans. Unaltered humans are not allowed to breed. Altered ones can only breed with the assistance of an Oankali. I found the first novel most compelling, because it was so good at evoking the protagonist's impossible choices (or lack thereof) when she's selected to be a liason between Oankali and other humans. Butler's theme is pretty much always "compromise," in all its meanings. I understood why the other humans hated and feared Lilith even as I also understood exactly why she went along with the Oankali plans. The later novels deal with more advanced Oankali-human hybrids, and while the Oankali remain alien and unable to understand certain things that seem obvious to humans, by the end the hybrids seem to be becoming different from Oankali or human before. The Oankali were frustrating, inflexible and inhuman, but that really worked; what they thought they had to learn from humans was not at all what the humans wanted them to learn, which is unusual for a first contact story.
So many comics to review! In the meantime: why are you not reading Ex Machina? Go, go, go – the first trade is out and Mitchell Hundred, God from the Machine and Mayor of New York City, awaits you!
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From:
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See, this I actually liked. Mainly because I am a miserable sucker for visuals, and Lex stumbling into the temple later on, black and red and golden, sharp edges and angles contrasting with the arches and sacred feel of the building...it made me happy and had a better color scheme than him shirtless would have. So I forgive the fact that we missed out on EntirelyShirtlessLex.
Of course, all my thoughts on Sacred were entirely superficial. I gave up watching the show with sound somewhere around "Unsafe." Things are so much happier that way. *G*
Linzee
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Related to that, when I saw Fforde read a while back he explained that (iirc) Eeyore was supposed to have had a role in the awards show scene (presenting an award, I think?) but that he ultimately hadn't been allowed to use the character.
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oh, THANK YOU. i thought maybe i was going crazy, and then i decided that the only thing i pause and rewind for on this show is clark and lex lying to each other's faces, so this didn't count. but what's scary is how many people involved with a SHOW and a NETWORK also have to get sloppy for this to make it to air.
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# 2) Is the screeching crystal thing from the Superman comic canon? I was assuming so, but I thought Lana wasn't canon. I've been slightly confused by last few eps, but figured it was because I missed about the last season-and-a-half.
# 3) Off-topic: take a look at this:
http://www.lex18.com/Global/story.asp?S=2989614&nav=EQlpWjof
Can zombies be designated an FTO? ;-)
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You'd think that threatening a school with zombies wouldn't count as a true threat, but you'd obviously be wrong in the eyes of the law.
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Wrong in the eyes of the law about writing stories about ZOMBIE invasions?! What law would that be? (Still shaking my head)
From: (Anonymous)
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"Gee, maybe the authorities there know something we don't!"
I mean, really, if you lived in the Buffyverse or the Smallville verse, maybe you COULD nail somebody for attempted terrorism for raising a zombie army!
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Thanks for the thoughts on 'Sacred'. I've just caught up with season 4 over the weekend, and I'm all 'lalala' about the whole show by now, because nothing makes sense this season.
I have resigned myself to ogling the eye candy instead. Seems to be a popular way out of the dilemma. :))
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Good perception on when the stones are ringing!
True - they don't ring or call Clark every time.
Perhaps they do not ring when a certain person is touching them (Lex acutally was about to touch the stone), but if the intention is not right. For example the person who has the stone is about to misuse their power i.e. Lana as Isobel to do whatever - if it was said on the show I didn't follow - and Lionel to swap the body.
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I find myself wondering if it was actually intentional the more I think about it. It's just too big of a mistake for *everyone*, including Jane Seymour, to just ignore. I think Genevieve is actually Gertrude, especially since Lionel made a point of telling Lana that Jason was a direct descendent of Gertrude. It would explain why Genevieve is so intent on beating Isobel to the crystals and why she says that Isobel is going to kill her. That's my guess, at the moment.
Though what any of this has to do with Superman?? Beats the hell out of me...
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My head's still reeling...
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Sing it, sistah! Or words to that effect. This was the book that really got me hooked on comics, so I take great pleasure in pimping it out to anyone who will listen to me for five minutes.
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I find that I can't read Butler when I'm depressed. It's too painfully well written, and sometimes I need books that allow the fantasy of choice and happy endings. I wonder how much Butler's views on compromising for survival are informed by her life experiences as a Black woman in the U.S. They'd have to be, I'd think.
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Somewhere she has an essay on Kindred where she says she didn't understand slavery until she associated with some local kids who lived in abusive homes -- she didn't understand why people didn't just fight back or run away.
Her novel Survivor is also loosely linked to the Clay's Ark/Patternmaster sequence, although it's basically a different first contact tale using a shared background, and also it's not very good; I believe she's refused to have it reprinted.
Patternmaster is very early--I think either it or Mind of My Mind was Butler's first novel. Her later work isn't necessarily less bleak, but it does, like Dawn, manage to be more sympathetic. (I understand why they retitled the series Lilith's Brood, but I was very fond of the title Xenogenesis.)
Clouds End is the one Stewart novel I dislike, and I thought it was going to be one of my favorites beforehand. Too wispy, not grounded enough.
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I think that our culture teaches so much about personal fulfillment and self-definition that most of us don't realize that major life choices can be limited to bad and worse or that risking even a precarious and unpleasant existence for uncertain gain (especially with possible loss) is *hard*. I think that many people also don't accept, until it smacks them in the face, that there are things unpleasant things in the world that other people just live with, making what changes they can. (I took a class a community college a few years ago and watched a 17 year old white boy try to convince the professor, a 30-something, female, Black psychologist, that racial prejudice no longer exists. He really believed it.)
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Not only is it ridiculous that Clark took his warning/word at face-value, but they actually had Clark deliver the line, "At least he's never lied to me" in reference to Jor-El.
Really, Clark? Jor-El's *never* lied to you? So I guess that was some *other* artificial intelligence version of your biological father who *kidnapped* some poor teenager, wiped her of her own memories, reprogrammed her as Kara, sent her to you claiming to be another Kryptonian to get you to leave town and then, once she'd served her purpose, *vaporized* her. 'Cause all of that looked like a Great Big Lie to *me*, dumbass.
And you know, as
They *walked right into a trap*. Even if Lionel didn't have anything to do with that, Clark and Lana wouldn't have been in that position if they *hadn't listened to him in the first place.* I think the creative team thinks they'll stop us from complaining about people blithely trusting Lionel if they have the characters say shit like "I know I shouldn't trust him", but that's just *lip service* if they end up *trusting what he tells them anyway*. And it's infuriating with Clark, especially, how *everyone* else - Alicia, Lionel, Jor-El - all get second, third and fourth, etc. chances, but he treats Lex like Lex isn't fit to be scraped off the bottom of his shoe. Really, Clark? You're really going to tell me that Lex keeping the Chamber of Clark Kent is *worse* than Alicia not only trying to kill you on one occasion, but then *drugging and kidnapping you* with red kryptonite? Or Lionel double-crossing you and nearly getting you killed in 'Memoria' *and* trying to kill both Lex and Chloe, not to mention ordering Lex be subjected to ECT he *didn't need*? or Jor-El *nearly killing Jonathan* and kidnapping you for a whole summer? You *really* expect me to think Lex investigating you, the caves and the meteors (which, I'm sorry, actually *do* mean something to him personally) is *worse* than kidnapping and multiple counts of attempted murder and thus, makes him unworthy of the same forebearance you've shown all these other people who've fucked you over?
Yeah, and I bet there's a bridge in Brooklyn you want me to look at, too.
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"Some other Kryptonian AI." Yep. That's probably who it was.
In my good moments, I can tell myself that Clark is differently irrational with respect to Lex because Lex's betrayal with the CoCK broke his heart; he didn't love any of those others so it was easier to forgive them. And Lex may also seem different because he promises to change and then doesn't, from Clark's perspective. But mostly these days I just have a heavy heart when it comes to the boys.