RIP Harold Ramis

More wild and unbased speculation about the next season of Doctor Who!

This is apparently the newest recurring character / companion on the show! And best of all, he's apparently a teacher at the same school Clara works at. 

The school Ian and Barbara came from in the very first episode of Doctor Who, 50 years ago last November, when One stole away his first companions.

I'm just all O_o about the whole thing because it looks an awful lot like The Moff is shaping the show into a big loop. We've diverged a lot from those first episodes so long ago, and what with the general trend of bringing in threads from Three and before over this past season, it seems we're getting something along the lines of a return to the show's roots--or a sort of in-show reboot, back to the beginning, without having to actually go back to the beginning.

So here's where my speculative brain is going on this: First, this dapper man's first official picture:

• He looks stern; can this mean the Doctor is going to be loopy and needs a firm hand to keep him in line? Or that they'll be butting heads because they're both stern and disapproving?
• He's a good-looking MALE companion! Not another pretty girl! And one that's not already attached to a pretty girl, specifically, the way Rory was. Unless he's Clara's stay-at-home boyfriend who follows her. But that would be a redo of Amy and Rory and each companion is supposed to be different, so...
• He looks no-nonsense, which might be wonderful, what with all the actual nonsense the Doctor tends to get into.
• He also looks like he's capable, probably smart, and not easily intimidated. It's been ages since the Doctor had a companion he could count on to do stuff for him like Ian or Harry or Jamie, and I would SO LOVE if that's how he was!
• A strong male presence on the Tardis is something we haven't seen in a long time, and it will make for a different dynamic--especially if he actually is unattached and not so easily bowled over as poor lovely Rory was.

And as to what he could imply about the show:

• More companions! I really want the show to max out on companions again, which it hasn't done in the new series. 
• If we're echoing the early episodes with two teachers from the same school, all we're missing is the granddaughter--and that's the perfect opportunity for Jenny to come back! Jenny who didn't die at the end of that episode she was in because Moff asked RTD not to kill her, and who we've been waiting for a return of since then!
• Also, if we're wandering around the Doctor's old stomping grounds, think about how old companions could have settled there, and how maybe we could meet one, or their child or grandchild! It was fantastic when Sarah Jane came back, and when Jo came back on the Sarah Jane Adventures, that was fantastic, too, and it would be SO NICE to have just a little bit more of that.
• Also, I have a head cannon that ex-companions eventually find each other and support each other through the rough transition back to everyday human life, and it would be beyond awesome if that turned out to be true--that they hang out and raise their kids together and keep track of the Doctor's appearances and actually know who he is and what he does.
• Also, if we're getting back to roots, maybe we'll also get back to historicals! Almost every other episode of the original seasons was literal time travel, if not most of them, and we haven't had almost any episodes that hinge on past human history at all in Eleven except maybe that one ghost episode which was deliciously 70s. And in Nine and Ten, we got, like, one a season--Dickens, Shakespeare, not a whole lot else. And there's SO MUCH HISTORY to explore! Plus, it'd be way cheaper than always jaunting off to some alien planet or spaceship.

I just get more and more of an impression that we're really going to bring back the Classic Series this season, and I really, really like the idea. Which also makes me scared that it's actually going to be something else entirely, and then I'll feel like they missed a big opportunity. And then I'll be sad.

But it's always like this before a season, isn't it? Lots of speculation, lots of awesome theories, and then lots of other stuff happening during the actual season.

What do you think this new dude brings to the show? Share in the comments!

Guardians of the Galaxy is already yanking on my fandom-center

I literally know nothing about this comic except that there are a lot of mismatched aliens and one of them is a raccoon. And I only know that because of various casting calls on the webs. But now here comes the first real trailer, and suddenly I really want to see it and I really want it to be awesome.

If this even approaches how much space Avengers takes up in my mind (and it might, since one of the baddies is Lee Pace who I already adore), we're in for a lot of posts about it after I see it.

Also, because of this two and a half minutes of footage, I have a burning need for a Starjammers movie, and the whole Corsair-is-Cyclops's-dad-and-Marvel-isn't-making-the-XMen-movies be damned!

Things we learned from XFiles

Recently, I discovered that the extraordinarily strange El Rey* channel way up in the numbers plays The X-Files in the afternoon several days a week, and so I've been soaking in the vintage fandom goodness. And I'm noticing some life lessons the show passes on...

1. Scars are always a sign of creepiness and creepiness always scars you in a way people can see with a casual glance at the back of your neck or behind your ear or on your upper arm

2. When faced with a reasonable explanation, it's probably actually the weird impossible one that's right. If its the simple one, its the simple one that sounds super-crazy.

3. Codependency involving all sorts of really weird obligations = true love. Like autopsies at all hours, or "I know this sounds crazy, but trust me", or late-night drama that you can't tell anyone about. Totally true love.

4. Barely-seen monsters are the scariest.

5. Humans are usually the cause of the worst unexplained phenomena, one way or another.

6. Stoners, children, crazy people, and circus freaks know much more about reality than anyone else ever. Also, they're much more likely to disappear, mutate, or die horribly than anyone else.

8. Everyone's parents have really weird secrets they aren't telling you. EVERYONE's.

9. The government is WAY more organized and in control than anyone ever once gave them credit for, because there's no other way to explain something so complex, and yet so little-known as this Conspiracy.

10. ALL forms of physical contact and / or all combinations of glances between partners are Meaningful. Everything has so much subtext that it totally drowns all actual text. 

What life lessons have you gotten from The X-Files? Share in the comments!

NOTES:

* Old cop shows during the day, X-Files alternating with Dark Angel in the afternoons, and Chopsaki and various 'sploitation films and grind house at night? What?

The Pros and Cons of Pop Up Tee

Periodically, I buy geeky tees. I mean, I sort of have to, what with the insane levels of geekery infused into my very blood, and there are SO MANY AWESOME ONES ALL THE TIME. It's seriously one of my goals in life to be able to afford these shirts whenever I want them.

So when I saw that Pop Up Tee had a bunch of art nouveau ones, I had to. And since I haven't bought any from this company before, I'm doing a Pro and Con post here!

(i mean, how could i turn down a ten-and-marty teamup OR a princess bride anything? these are callbacks to some of my earliest fandoms!)

Pros:

• Sales last 3 days instead of the usual 24 hrs
• Shipping is included in the price, so if it says 12.99 (which is does), that's what you pay total
• Offers 20 themed designs instead of one or two
• Has men's and women's cuts and goes up to 5XL
• Ships from inside the US
• Is probably the fastest I've gotten one of these limited edition tees yet
• Printing is great-looking with good detail and no blurring or anything like that
• Designs are great

Cons:

• Does not have the slimmer-cut, relaxed / thinner cotton, lower-neckline shirts that I prefer, only regular high-neck teeshirt style
• Does not ship overseas
• The sizes are bigger than the standard established by most of the limited edition tee companies, so they came bigger than I expected
• How the heck am I supposed to choose one or two out of twenty awesome ones???
• Does not come with candy like Qwertee

Have you gotten anything from Pop Up Tee? What's your experience with them? Or, what's your fav daily shirt site? Share in the comments!

Sherlock Season 3 is changing the game and here's why

I know a lot of people (especially on Tumblr, where I spend far too much time these days, what with the liveblogging and such), were kind of ticked off about this season, but a lot of those people seemed to have been angry that it didn't start or end with Sherlock and John confessing their undying man-love for each other, and that's just...

Okay, I'm going to digress for a second to say this one thing about ships: You can want whatever you want, you can root for whatever you like best, but none of it counts until it's cannon. If Sherlock and John end up together, that will be so awesome, but they've also specifically said in the show and out of it that that's not the intention, so it's like slamming your head into a brick wall to get angry when it doesn't happen. Better to be happier for what we do have, and then be delighted if we find out that they actually are going to end up together further down the line because Moffatt Lies and TV Is Changeable.*

Anyway.

I really liked this season. I was pleased with how giddy everyone was to get back together and be a team again, with how they handled the changes that happen naturally when someone is away for an extended period and comes back, and I was very pleased with how under all the giddiness, there's also this deep core of sadness and misunderstanding and Sherlock at a total loss of how to handle any of it.

And there's SO MUCH to talk about. A lot changed and a lot, it seems to me, is going to continue to change, and so here's everything I want to talk about in no real order:

- What if Moriarty is now a meme, a martyr for the cause of some other villain? We saw him die with a point-blank gunshot wound to the face, and that's going to be hard to fake, but the easiest and least annoying way I can think of is to have it be just his image, taken over by whoever took his place as the Nepoleon of Crime--because whenever a villain is suddenly gone without an heir, someone else would step in quickly enough, and Moriarty has been proven real even as Sherlock was absolved, and why bother making yourself visible when you have an image to hide behind that people already know and fear? Sherlock spent two long years getting rid of all Moriarty's men for them, so they could just slot their own dudes in, easy. Heroes Make Their Own Villains.

- Sherlock does not make vows, so the fact that he made one is incredibly important to his character. Even when John was stomping around being angry at the world, Sherlock defined his whole existence on keeping the only vow he has ever felt strongly enough to make: to protect John’s family. But he forgot that he’s part of John’s family, too. And he defined John's Family as something that he isn't part of or able to do anything but protect because of it. We're left with the problem of Mary, more on that later, and the fact that Sherlock literally just handed over his life to the people he least wanted to be controlled by because he knew that otherwise it would be John who did it and he would have failed to save the Family.

This is especially interesting because we find out that Sherlock isn't the orphan he always basically portrayed himself as. His parents are both alive and both trying to be involved, and the lonely childhood raised by Mycroft seems to be some sort of protective armor story that he tells--something to keep him from being connected to people, or some shared phobia between the brothers, or a long-standing power-struggle. And the family that he chooses, with that as his basis for what a family is, is John and Mary and the Baby.

- There seems to be a concerted effort on Sherlock’s behalf to build relationships this time around—whether because he has grown that much, or because he doesn't want a repeat of how easily it would have been to take his whole world down, he went out of his way to be nicer, more dependable, more empathetic. This is probably the most obvious change in the series, moving Sherlock away from his identification as an uncaring sociopath and closer to the book-cannon Sherlock that is arrogant, but actually does care about things. It remains to be seen whether it's true change or just an effort to be more normal as some symptom of how happy he was to be back in his own life. In my opinion, both are sort of awesome potentials.

- This whole season was from Sherlock’s PoV rather than John’s. What if Sherlock was always this human and we just didn't see it because we weren't inside his head? What if John has been so amazed at him that he misinterpreted almost everything that has happened since the beginning?

- The first ep was hyperactive joy of being back in his own life; the second was a big ball of feels he didn't know what to do with and did the best he could, and the third was closer to what we generally think of when we think of this show—more serious, more dire. But even so, we keep the more open, connected, raw and loose Sherlock, and if this is the tone being set for the next season, I'm frankly a little worried that all this stress and strangeness is unhinging him. When we meet him in season one, he's safe and balanced and doing what he does. It's not that great an existence, but he could have carried on indefinitely; at the end of season three, he seems close to burning up or cracking up or losing control in ways that will be really interesting to see--but also heartbreaking and possibly dangerous for the future of the show and its fandom. Not to mention the safety of my own heart.

Because it really does seem like he's not only gone a little fast and loose, doing more stuff on the fly and less planning ahead, but that he's literally a little off the rails. He keeps getting sideswiped and thought around—whether that’s because his mind is becoming overloaded with connections and emotions or because the baddies know his limits now and he hasn't figured out that he needs to move back / expand his limits, is still to be seen. I keep coming back to how he was talking to himself because he was literally hearing John's voice, and I wonder if it's creeping insanity, or if it's like a form of shell-shock--did he start talking to John while he was away to remember who he is the way people in PoW movies talk to memories and hallucinations?

- Molly is amazing and we’re not talking about her enough. Through the whole season, she's the only one who seems to see through Sherlock. No matter what's going on, she's the one who notes the moments of sadness and confusion and raw panic that everyone else, even John and Mrs Hudson, wave off. She was the one who saw the fear and sadness before the Rooftop, and it's good that she's still seeing it while also being braver and more secure in who she is and who he is and how they fit together.

- What if Mary is part of Meme-iarty’s plan? What if she’s still active and still on a mission and is just so undercover that she’s starting to go native—but there’s still things she needs to do and everything that’s happened with her so far is only the start? And that’s why it’s hard to tell if he really tried to kill Sherlock or not--because the endgame hasn't happened yet, so we don't know whether she actually ever wanted to kill him**, or whether she was trying to just get him out of the way, or if she ever really intended to kill Magnusson, or whether there was ever anything on that flash drive that she probably knew by then that John wouldn't actually read...You know, the more I think about her, the more I feel like she's still mid-story; the season-resolution was between John and Sherlock, and she isn't resolved at all, no matter how much John forgives her. And that makes me both fear and anticipate what's coming next for her. A woman who Sherlock knew was lying about something, but who still flew under his radar...

- Mycroft literally sees Sherlock as a little kid when he looks at him. It breaks my heart--and it totally explains a lot of their relationship. Assuming Sherlock is the same age as his actor, he's closer to half a century than he is to childhood (I"M SO SORRY BENEDICT FOR SAYING THAT), but Mycroft still looks at him and sees a slightly chubby schoolboy who needs to be protected. And probably comforted, though Mycroft doesn't seem capable of even knowing how to start doing that.

- Sherlock has two other totally normal names*** that he could be called by, so the only inference is that he’s chosen the weird one; we can assume Mycroft is similar, probably, since most families name their kids on similar patterns. They've both chosen to be what they are. And now Sherlock is choosing something different.

- The parallelism in this season is crazy, bringing a lot of old ideas back around; does this mean from here on out is like a new start?

- Molly listing her bedroom as one of Sherlock’s bolt holes + her very pointedly mentioning how happy she was with Tom and how much sex they were having = me wondering if maybe there isn't a secret and failed attempt at something going on there before he disappeared across the world. Like, maybe there’s all sorts of things that we don’t know about yet, and one of them is that while he was trying to get out of country, there’s story there between him and Molly, and Molly’s still sore about it even while she still obviously feels strongly for him. If that's a story, what other stories were just not mentioned because we have three episodes and none of them were about what happened while he was away, yet?

- It is deeply annoying that Sherlock’s mom was as smart as Sherlock or Mycroft and then, because babies, turned fluttery and busybody. On the other hand, I can totally see young Mycroft realizing that his mom is losing her brains and seeing it get worse when the baby comes along, and between the two of them, building up a deep fear of attachment because attachment makes you stupid, and they feel like not being stupid is all they have, for whatever reason. And there are, in reality, plenty of women who give up everything distinctive about themselves the second they have kids. Maybe the younger women on this show will eventually NOT DO THAT and offer an alternative story.

- It occurs to me that the fandom is blaming John for breaking his promise to Sherlock that things wouldn’t change, but it seems to me as if Sherlock bowed out—this whole season has been about him realizing that things have already changed, that a lot of the change was brought on by his not being there, and that he can’t just actually expect that it wouldn't have. And so he gets out of the way, which is not something he would have done before, and probably a huge sacrifice from him and his self-centric view of the world. He thinks Mary is worthy of John, and that he can’t give him whatever normality and love it is that he wants. So he removes himself after the wedding makes it obvious that it's the two of them, not the three of us as they kept saying. But without him, John is at least a little bored and frustrated, and that’s what (accidentally) brings them back together—John heading out into the world to get a little adventure on his own, since he knows that his best friend isn't dead and so he doesn't need to avoid all the painful things that remind him of Sherlock--and that he loves, too.

- Mary was so upset in the second half of the last ep that she lost most of her sparkle; if this is a proper reset of a season, and they continue with stability as three of them in the next season, I really hope the charm and cuteness and cleverness is back. Like, she relaxes back into her Mary Persona, and it's great--and then we again find out that she's playing everyone, and things are even more complicated because now the baby's born and she's been working with them, and it's been functional for however long has passed between this season and the next.

And so my conclusion:
- This feels like a transition season: like things are changing and shifting and gaps are forming, and we’re only seeing what it most important this this particular moment--not all the background shifting that is only being hinted at and not quite caught on to by most of the characters yet. Like how the last season overlapped and filled in gaps with the rest of the series****, this last one opens up gaps and asks questions and sets up something new.

I have a very strong suspicion that season four will be back to the feeling of everyone in control, back to the stability of adventure that we had in the earlier seasons, but that in reality, the villains have gotten cleverer because Sherlock has been both very visible and study-able and because he's tried to hard to create a power vacuum, and so there are going to be lots of spaces that they don't yet know are there, where contexts shift and everything is already more different than they (or we) realize.

What about you? What do you think?


NOTES:
* Moffatt also really needs to check his mouth in interviews. I don't think he's intending to queer-bait, exactly, but I do think he's incapable of leaving things alone and that it's being interpreted as queer-baiting. I also think he's on the bottom of an uphill learning curve and not handling it all that gracefully, and really needs to learn when to stop talking.
** I think she did, but did it in such a way that if he didn't die, she could use that for the next stage of her plan. We're in a spy novel now, and that means that she's James Bond in a way; she can think in branching what-if's and make contingency plans for them. So instead of killing him with a sure-thing headshot, or a heart-shot, she gave him a mostly-mortal but slower gutshot that would probably kill him and would otherwise convince him that she wasn't trying to kill him, even though she probably was.
***Also, since I plan to name my kids strangely, this is encouraging; I can blame it on Sherlock even though I had the idea ages ago.
****Especially Reichnbach; watch the cues of setting and clothes; those scenes happened in between all the other scenes we'd seen up until then, so that that story actually took much longer than one episode to tell.

On uber-shipping and Agents of SHIELD

Confession time (even though it's not really a confession at all if you've seen my Tumblr): I'm a shipper. Like, hardcore. About 80% of a time, I wind up watching a show because of a particular couple I want to root for, and I go into new shows looking for the people we're 'meant' to root for--because come on, shows totally set this stuff up early, no matter what Chris Carter said for seven of the nine years, no matter what anyone who has ever created a modern-patterned show in the last fifteen years has to say about it. At the very least, they're preying on brains like mine, and throwing a bone every once in a while to keep us tuning in.

But here's the thing also: I'm a flexible shipper. I'm willing to invest in any relationship where the characters have chemistry and might make a good story, but this is something that's a whole lot less common in TV, and one of the many reasons why I like SHIELD so much (despite the reasons I'm a little annoyed with it).

We're not yet done with the first season of SHIELD, and almost everyone is up for grabs ship-wise. And that's what today's post is about: the glorious and heady freedom of shipping everyone on a show with everyone else!

Here's what we have:

• Skye and Ward (Skyward) - The most obvious, what with him being her trainer and whatever she has that's closest to a partner--the standard ship that comes built into crime-solving shows: partners fall in love. And that'd be fine and fun because they're so opposite, temperamentally and actively, but it would also be obvious and a little dull. And also because...
• May and Ward (Mayward) - Which is already going on! How awesome is that! First half of the first season, and two unexpected characters are together, working through their mutual isolation, trauma and anger issues, and they work! And not a single one of the team has had anything to say about the fact that May is a lot older than Ward, and so it's not only an age-gap, it's a reversal-of-the-typical-genders age gap, and it's thrilling! It's so cool! And if it doesn't last, we have...
• May and Coulson (Mayson) - Because they've obviously known each other for a long time, have a lot of history that we haven't even explored yet that might include a past relationship, and currently have about the closest thing to an instinctive partner relationship that we have on the Bus. A few of the scenes they've had together showed great chemistry, and there's also the reversal, again, of gender expectations with Coulson being relatively chatty and emotional in comparison to her stone-faced everyday. And...
• Ward and Simmons (I've heard Chemical Agent and I kind of love that name so I'm going with it) - In the angry-stick episode, they were flipping adorable, and I can see a whole lot of promise in seeing her softness work against his hard-as-nails attitude about everything, her sciency-ness against his hands-on-let-me-shoot-it-ness. Opposites make for awesome TV romances. Unless...
• FitzSimmons - The one handed to us by the show pans out. I mean, it's obvious that those two totally adore each other. Simmons jumped out of a plan in one ep and threw herself over a grenade in another to save Fitz, and Fitz has flat out chosen to risk death to stay by her side almost every episode. Ironically, though, the feeling I get is that she's much more platonic in her feelings than he is--like they're twins from her PoV, but potential loves from his, and that's awesome-sauce drama right there when that comes out. And if it doesn't pan out we have...
• Fitz and Skye (FitzSkye) - Which is unexpected a little, but when you see the two of them in a scene alone, not as unexpected as it seems when Simmons and Ward and anyone else is in the room. The train episode had a great team-up scene with the two of them and a really charming quiet chemistry that totally won me over. Plus, the dynamic of a relationship with the scientist pulling Skye out of her fixed orbit exactly between science and action might be nice, as she's still in training and will still have to be action-y as the show progresses. And, barring some revelation of relationship, there's...
• Skye and Coulson (Skyson) - Which I just adore. They have good chemistry, though it's not obviously non-platonic, and they're getting nicely emotionally close lately. It's a sort of Buffy-and-Giles thing, which is great and worked wonderfully, and never turned non-platonic, so to make it different, why not a little age-gap romance? Think of the storylines! So much conflict! Head-agent and lowest-rookie = so much rule-breaking, older and younger = societal pressure and judging (though different from what Ward and May would get if they were open about their relationship, if it actually becomes a full relationship), and how will the rest of the team react? Plus! If Ward and May are still there at the same time, there are so many parallels that can be drawn, and I do so love parallelism in my storytelling. 
• And Chloe Bennet who plays Skye has said she'd be up for Skye and Simmons to get together, which would be a minority love, as well as unexpected from how things are set up but not out of the blue since they get along really well, AND would answer why Skye didn't fight harder for that one episode boyfriend she had in the beginning, why her and Ward come across as sort of a BroMance or a twinsies thing, and would resolve why Simmons is so much more platonic in her affections than Fitz is!
• And of course, Coulson and Maria Hill seemed a little flirty and awesome in the first episode and it would be fun to get that back, since she's the only pre-existing friendship / relationship of any sort that Coulson brought into this show--they went into The Battle of New York ('s early set up) together, and only one of them came out and only one knows exactly what happened to the other and hasn't yet had a chance to react to the other knowing what that was yet. All sorts of potential story.
• And maybe this is just me, but I really want to see Akela and Nick Fury team up with long coats and matching eye-patches, whether romantically or not.

Non-romantically (but really, give me a chance and I'll ship it), we have...

• Fitz and Ward would make awesome, awesome bromance partners. Fitz wants to be a man of action and Ward could really use a little emotional attachment and softening, and in the one episode we saw of them in the field together, they worked really really well.
• Ward and Coulson have a nice fresh-agent / established-agent understanding, and it would be amazing to get more depth on that front--like, was Coulson more like Ward when he was young and new and fresh out in the field? Could he offer guidance and advice specifically for Ward that Ward then totally ignores and learns lessons from? I think they could be awesome as a makeshift father-son deal, especially since Coulson seems so sad that he gave up the chance at a normal life that would probably have included kids, and Ward is SUCH an orphan.

Basically, the only relationship I don't support is Coulson and that South-American revolutionary, because that was just...spiky. It didn't sound right or feel right at all. Icky x 100.

When I was looking up stuff for this post, I found an article where they asked if there were Too Many Ships but it was written early on, and I think the show has found a way around the issue--it's not too many ships, it's ALL the ships. In all the forms. Right from the beginning, we have lots of potential loves to root for and lots of bromances and even a few triads (I'm rooting for functioning triads rather than ill-fated love triangles!), and surprisingly enough, the unexpected and the nontraditional pairings we're being given are the more interesting ones! By allowing everyone to be sort of in love with everyone else, the show lets the team have deep emotional ties quickly--which is what the first half of the series really needed, ties other than because-the-plots-says-so keeping them together--which allows us to have deep emotional ties. And also allows the show to explore, sweetly and quietly, a series of under-represented ideas about what love and relationships are, versions of the same that never show up on mainstream, primetime, network TV shows. 

If they follow through, there's plenty of time to try on all of these relationships--expected, unexpected, age-gap, opposites, same-sex, more-than-two-people...it could be epic in the actual sense of the word. Now we just have to keep the ratings up enough that it survives past it's given second season.

So what's your favorite ship on Agents of SHIELD? Did I miss someone you want to talk about? Share in the comments!

Twelve Papers I Haven't Written About Sleepy Hollow

1. Time Traveling Revolutionary : How Ichabod Crane Is and Isn't the Embodiment of the Revolutionary Spirit
2. She is Shady, She is Queen : The Fandom Response to Katrina Crane
3. Everybody Loves Abbie : Detective Abbie Mills and the Delicate Social Work of Being A Strong Female Character
4. Let's Be Frank : Possible Career and Story Trajectories for Captain Frank Irving
5. An Argument In Favor of A True Platonic Inter-Gender Partnership
6. An Argument In Favor of A New Portrayal of the Path to True Love
7. Occult History : How the Insertion of Hessians, Freemasons, and Magical Artifacts Alters the Context And Therefore The Meaning of the Revolutionary War, and Therefore Changes The Whole Meaning of Our Country's Independence
8. The Ever-Expanding Cast, or, How It's All Ichabod's Fault
9. Off The Walls Bonkers : Sleepy Hollow as a Demonstration of a New Take on Pacing and Drama for the Paranormal Investigation Subset of Television
10. Mills Sisters, Hunters : Sleepy Hollow as a Feminine Response to A Decade of Two Brothers And An Angel, But No Girls Allowed
11. Ten Things We Can Guess About Abbie Mills : A Characters Study
12. This Is Outrageous! : Ichabod Crane as a Mirror for Modern Social-Norm Idiocy

Five Great Things About Almost Human and Five Kinda Sucky Things

I actually really like this show; it's cool, it's usually fun, it's smart enough to be interesting, and it's got Karl Urban who could probably star as a broom--an angry, snarky broom--in a show about people not sweeping, and still be good. But it's also got issues. Here's my take on the show right now:

Five Great Things:
1. Super cool tech
The tech really is cool. And it's everywhere. And it's layered over the actual physical world of wherever they film this show (Vancouver? Everything genre is filmed in Vancouver.) the way it would be in reality, as if it built up naturally in the years between then and now. And it's totally not-bashful about it, either. We've gotten four different kinds of androids, Runaway-style ID-seeking bullets, fancy new drugs, clones, EMPs, holograms, bionics, mental enhancement that makes you psychic, all sorts of neat visuals. It's like Blade Runner and RoboCop had a baby with less rain and more daylight.

2. Androids that don't much care about Azimov's Rules and are still cool
Up until now, almost all Androids we've seen had those laws-- Don't Harm Humans, Don't Let Humans Be Harmed, Don't Put Yourself Before Humans--but these guys don't have that. MXs are to protect humans who are deemed good, but don't seem to have much trouble blowing away the baddies; DRNs are, apparently, more human that the humans they work with, at least part of the time (see #3); XNs are batshit crazy terrorists; Sexbots are programmed to be super-into whoever they're with. None of them have even dropped a line about Azimov, and that opens up so many different stories.

3. RoBroMance
The sort-of-predictable set up of the loopy but extra-human android being matched with the cold and closed-off, almost-inhuman human is done really well here. Dorian is just awkward enough to believe that he's somehow not human, and Kennex is hard and mean and almost cruel, but contrasted perfectly with grudging respect for Dorian and that adorable crush he has on his lady-friend. And watching the two of them interact with the world and each other and learn to trust each other is something beautiful. Whatever else these writers have against them, no one can say they don't know how to build characters!

4. Trying to tackle the Big Questions
Starting with "What Does It Mean To Be Human?" and going on from there. They get points for being Big Question SciFi, which we sort of don't see a lot of on TV these days. They're just sort of...not going far enough for their answers. See below for more on that.

5. Rudy
Everything about Rudy. He's played by a staple of another geek franchise, he's nerdy and awkward but wants in on the action and holds his own, he's fanboyish and therefor can stand in for the viewer, he's adorable, he's smart, he's apparently the only scientist they have (Abby Sciuto Syndrome*), and he's proven many times in these few episodes we've gotten that he's just generally a great character.

And Five Not So Great Things:

1. Problematic race
Not as problematic as some, but still on the problematic side--they've got a pretty diverse cast of droids and people at the office, but the main guy is still white, the Captain is still white, and there's this sneaky thing where they keep killing off criminals who are not white without any character development for them. And they keep doing stuff like that sexbot who had cloned skin that was way, way lighter than the skin of the girl they cloned it from. I mean, if crime has gone up 400%, are we supposed to believe that it's only minorities who are to blame for it, most of the time? I can see that they're trying to show a multi-racial future, but they're still falling back on annoying tropes that make it more obvious rather than making it seem more normal by treating everyone the same.

2. Problematic women
They get points for casting a woman to fill the role of the Captain, especially since they had written her as a male character originally, and they get more points for keeping her tough and awesome after casting a tiny lady to fill the role. But there's only one other woman on the regular cast, and I can never remember her name. And every sexbot who has had a line or a part in the show has been an overly-sexualized female with no one really protesting that (Dorian protests that she's an android like him, not that she's a woman who's being treated badly, which is good but also falls into the category of treating women weirdly). Kennex's deep-undercover and possibly-awesome ex is literally never on screen in realtime. The killer bot that they took on recently went right to the sexiest of the bodies in the robo-morgue without even blinking at the others**...

It's just annoying that we're in the future, everyone is supposedly pulling together, and we are still seeing these half-done things with women and minorities.

3. Kennex really needs to stop inflicting the exact same damage on all MXs
Every time he gets mad, he shoots an MX in the head right through the eye, and we've seen it about five times in only a few more episodes than that. Jeeze, K, find some other way to express yourself. Or at least shoot the guys a different way.

4. Patchy world building
If weapons-grade EMPs are available and they take out the MXs, why isn't every single criminal out there carrying around the things, rendering half the police force useless against them? If there's some big wall that keeps the bad element out of the city, why didn't we hear about it before last week? Do sexbots get to have breakdowns the way DRNs and killbots do? If they have the capacity for android law enforcement, why not work on that, develop better iterations of the thinking bots, and not put any human cops in danger at all?

We're still in early days, so a lot of this might get cleared up later, but does it really take that much time up to drop one line about why this or that isn't being done all the time? Or to set things up for future episodes? There isn't an episode that goes by where something awesome happens that immediately brings up the question of where was this last week / why isn't everyone doing this / how come we've never heard of this before? And it's annoying.

5. No villain
This one might have been fixed by John Laroquette's guest appearance, and as Dorian's maker-dad it might be fixed well, but there has been no indication previous to this that there's all that much organization to the 400% crime increase or that there's anyone out there on the other side doing anything about it. There's a sort of nebulous idea that Kennex's ex is involved in some criminal paramilitary thing, but there's no face to put on it, no leader making public announcements or taunting the cops; we find out that there's this wall, that we've never heard of, and all these easy-to-access places where mad scientists can go, but there's no faces there. We need at least one face for the criminal element, someone to hold all the random, faceless thugs together, someone to be the brains behind all that brawn--someone with a plan better than just this week's single crime.

Better yet, I'd love to see a dozen of them, all different, and all with their own plans. There's A LOT of crime in this world, so there should be a lot of criminal masterminds behind it--blackmailers, drug lords who don't get shot at the end of the episode, gun runners and black market people, corrupt businessmen and politicians, more corrupt cops who also don't die at the end of the episode, mad scientists, doctors who lost their licences and are not involved in shady dealings, gang leaders looking to branch out or looking to take over other gangs. There should be alliances and wars going on between them.

And the goodies should have a similar set up--not just the cops against the world, but a whole cast of support, military and political, local and business and community, thieves and snitches and informants and spies and inventors and so on, who help them keep up with the demands of the criminal world.


Basically, it comes down to the fact that this show is a police procedural, but the feel and the set up is more like a retro-80s future adventure, and those always have villains and conspiracies, and it would pull together a lot of the randomness. Think of the Pattern in Fringe. Think of the escaped baddies trying to change time in Continuum. Think of the conspiracies in X-Files, but with more consistency and actual payoff. Hell, even Castle and Bones and NCIS have Faces, enemies that pull strings and tie storylines together!

What do you like most and least about Almost Human? Share in the comments!



Notes:
* Like in NCIS. Abby is their biologist, DNA and fingerprints specialist, computer specialist and hacker, evidence-analysis specialist...basically, the only sciency-thing she doesn't do is the medical examining, because that's Ducky's job. It's easier for a show to have one science person than a whole team of them (unless it's Bones and it's about the team), especially if there are lots of other characters around, but it gets a little ridiculous when you start looking closely and listing their skills.
** The argument can be made, and has been, that the sexbots and the killbots run off the same OS as Dorian and each other, so if she's looking for a new body, one with the right OS would be best; but that is not even hinted at in the show. Also, none of those deactivated bodies need to be in sexy clothes and laid out as if they're a buffet, and yet they are; it would have made more logical sense to have them all changed into prison jumpsuits and their original clothes in evidence bags, which means the sexbot was being shorthanded--oversexualization is all we need to know about her, and the killbot doesn't need to even look at other bodies to find the right one. Lazy.

Some videos I watched and enjoyed this week

I'm just gonna put this right here - Thor: The Dark World Blooper Reel

Ten Ways to Tighten Up Agents of SHIELD

Obligatory warning: SPOILERS up to current episodes as of writing, so, you know, be smart if you're not caught up and care about that sort of thing!

As we come out of a hiatus, just to go immediately back into hiatus, I think it's time we had a little discussion about Agents of SHIELD. See, I really really like this show, but I don't love it, and I think it's because of the ten points I'm about to talk about. When the season started, I thought this would be the one show of this past new season that I would just adore, but that honor went to Sleepy Hollow (which, to be honest, I thought would be dumb but fun--shows what the commercials can tell you about how great a show is before it airs!), but while I like the set up and I like the characters, there's just this list of little annoyances that keep me from happily adoring SHIELD. I'm here till the end, but I'm also just complaining a little bit, and that's not how I like a show to be.

The most annoying part is that it's all stuff that could be fixed! And that they seem to be actively trying to fix, but that keep sort of backsliding or coming out weird*. I mean, none of us have any real insight into what the writers room, the producers, or the MCU series producers are using the show for, but it would be nice to have a little idea about just what the show's own identity is, that doesn't seem to just...blur away when a new writer starts a new script. But that would be fixed by addressing this list, so let's get to it!

1. Figure out what to do with Skye

Her mystery is fine, but she needs a purpose. In fact, I like her mystery. I think it's mostly been paced well, and I adore that she's a secret hidden thing in and of herself, and that she's both potentially dangerous and worried about it. That's fantastic. And if what's going on right now with the gutshot and the preservation jar goes where I want it to go--into her being a super power of some sort, even if it's a non-offensive power like resurrection or healing or talking to machines or something (see #4)-- it'll be even better.

But up until now, she's just sort of been there. She's on the team but she's now allowed to do anything. She's picked up because she's a world-renowned hacker who managed to breach SHIELD and make a whole lot of injustice public, but she's not being used to their advantage, so why didn't they just put her in jail and then wash their hands of her? She wants to join SHIELD, but then almost immediately betrays them, but then it's not really that bad a betrayal (see #10), but everyone acts like a jerk about it, but she still wants to stay...

I get that her goal is to find her parents. I like that. It's part of her mystery story. I get that Coulson likes her. But May's reaction to her has been wildly out of proportion, Ward frequently looks like a jerk when it comes to her through a lot of the early season, and for several episodes, she's just sort of sitting there, offering to help, and even those who like her are ignoring her, and there's no solid reason why or real confrontation about that.

This past episode did a lot to give her a real place on the team somewhere between Ward and FitzSimmons, and that's perfect, if they keep her there. There's an established divide between the fighters and the thinkers, and if she's a new thing, there's no reason why she can't serve as both. But I'm weary when it comes to her--and wary--because the show just sort of backslides to 'she's here because she's a main character' while everyone else actually has a purpose, and it makes her stand out in the wrong way.

2. Give us just about anything about may that comes from May

She's the team tank, which is great, because she's so little and pretty but still so utterly badass. She's battle-scarred and didn't want to go back in the field, which is also great, because the fact that she did shows a lot about how much she respects Coulson and trusts his judgement. But as I said above, her reaction to Skye borders on irrational for a large chunk of what we've seen, and literally all her backstory comes from Coulson telling us--almost none of it comes from her, whereas everyone else has had their own chance to feel and emote and respond to their own stories. She's holding back so hard that she's a blank wall, and though there have been a few moments in this second half--when she told the interdimensional guy what Coulson told her in that failed Op, when she held Ward's hand this past episode after the train, when she actually played a joke and smiled--where she's had her own opinions and feelings about things, she's mostly just hostile all the time about everything.

Ming Na Wen can kill a person with her side-eye, and that's fabulous, but she's really only been given the chance to play off Coulson fully, and it leaves her sort of...lacking.

This one, too, has been addressed some as the season progresses, but if it ends with us still not having any idea why May is so against Skye (it feels personal, but there is literally almost no reason why it should be, since they've disproved most of the theories about why that should be), if she doesn't loosen up enough to get her own story from herself, she's going to wind up uninteresting, and that would be a terrible shame.

3. More espionage, and make it weird

In the comics, SHIELD did a lot of espionage. It was a spy organization. It was awesome. The episodes where our team gets to spy on stuff and go undercover--the one where Ward and Fitz go out into wartorn Eastern Europe, and this past one with the train--are some of the best episodes, and I think it's because when someone's undercover, everyone has a specific job to do AND they're outside their comfort zones / allowed to have leeway that can't have when they're at the office / play off each other in new combinations depending on what's needed for each op instead of being teamed up exactly the same ways every time they go out in the field.

This last one is the most important, I think. Characters in any show (or anything at all with characters, really) work best when they're allowed to bounce off each other, work with each other, react to each other, conflict with each other, and some excuse to keep changing up how they function while demanding that they trust each other explicitly is exactly what this show needs--it's when the characters, and, I'm willing to bet, the writers, pull together and make sense as a team, not just these random people that Coulson happened to like and put in a plane together.

Plus, espionage puts the team as a whole, and SHIELD in general, into situations with other world organizations, lots of other operatives on any number of other sides, and broadens the world. When they're out there doing their jobs, they're not just five or six people tracking down weird widgets, they're a crack team of special operatives who are good at their jobs, know what they're doing, and exist in a wider world of complicated social, political and semi-paranormal allegiances. And it's awesome.

4. More powers--whatever their excuse--and don't kill them off by the end of the episode

See, this one annoys me, and has since the beginning. We're introduced to Coulson in the movies as someone who does his job politely and kindly while these crazy-powerful weirdos are busting shit up, and then when he gets his own show, there's no superpowers around? I understand why they'd want to keep the team normal--the show was sold to us as these normal people who deal with the weird stuff--but there's absolutely no reason why they can't come into contact with more special people over the course of their work. And no reason why they have to all be shuffled off at the end of the episode never to be seen again, or never to be encountered again.

Akela? Back in the fold, so bring her back. How totally badass would it be to see her working beside Nick Fury or Maria Hill, or as part of some other crack team that we don't see on a daily basis (because these guys can't be the only one, right? Right? Even Stargate had other teams, and lots of them, and we got to see them and know them, some.)? Or even just our own cozy team, since she's already known to Coulson, and she's known him since before whatever changes happened to him, and she has an awesome cyborg eye that once had a direct connection to one of their current Big Bads and would be a big help... See where I'm going with this?

Extremis victims? We know not all of them explode and / or burn up. We know that some adapt. We also know that Tony Stark has first hand experience dealing with the disease / toxin / whatever it is because of helping the one person he can't live without get past it. I understand that Tony doesn't play well with others, that RDJ is probably too busy or expensive for a TV show, and that no one on the Avengers knows that Coulson is alive yet, so we're unlikely to get Tony, but Gwyneth Paltrow has guested on TV before so we could have Pepper** offer her advice (see #5). Or SHIELD could have just 'appropriated' Tony's research. Or someone could just mention that Tony is a place they could go to get help with this problem. I mean, it's kind of a big deal that several of these dudes recently went bonkers all over the planet, but SHIELD is still acting like we know nothing about them; someone has to get with the program.

In general, it's been a very important couple of years for normal people in the MCU--a big green guy takes out part of New York, a frozen supersoldier is discovered and revived, a god levels a town in New Mexico, a very visible very rich guy openly admits that he's a super hero, another god beings aliens down on New York... There's got to be lots of alien tech laying around. There's got to be scientists and tinkerers who were already getting close to creating cyborgs and super suits and bio-weapons and cures that create powers and whatever else, and now they all have this huge, looming reason to try harder. Either as goodguys or as badguys. And there should even be normal people without powers but with strong morals or no morals who go out in masks and do stuff. The Marvel comics are packed with hundreds of side characters, throw aways, displaced team members, wild backstories, forgotten old heroes...why are we seeing so little of them here, with the people whose job it is to literally deal with this stuff?

5. Cameos! By anyone!

We got Stan Lee this week! That means this is really and truly part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe after all! And there's rumors of Lady Sif showing up sometime, which would be awesome.

But I mean, there are piles of Heavy Hitters in the world now. And each of them has people around them who aren't the stars of those movies, but are important and are recognizable, and are often played by actors who don't shy from showing up on TV. This is the perfect place for those characters to have a little more life between their movies--for them to report something weird going on, for them to answer a question the team has that we know they'd be able to help with (ahem*Pepper*ahem), for them to even just be in a recording of something that they team is looking into now!

SHIELD is presented in the movies as this wondrous international entity that can show up anywhere at any time, and already knows about everything, and then they get their own show and they're always a step behind, aren't using the resources we-the-audience know for a fact they already have, and then in Phase Two movies, they aren't even showing up. It's...inconsistent, since there's no reason they should really be behind like that, and it's annoying since there's no reason.

And, worst of all, it makes the show look like the unwanted stepchild of the MCU when it's set up to be this glue between movies, incorporating all the new info, adding layers of meaning and story, using the new weapons and reseach, connecting this team of super-powered movies between the times when they're needed to connect themselves. Where are all these people?

On a side note, though, the Hidden Asgardian story was great. Because they've been in contact with earth for ages and there really isn't any real reason why there shouldn't be people like him around sometimes. I hope he comes back.***

6. More stories directly related to what happens in the movies--not just an awesome one-liner

Although that line about the God Of Cleaning Up Their Own Mess line was amazing.

Okay, so Thor 2 happened in, like, five minutes of real time or something. Maybe SHIELD needs more than one day to get to where the Big Bads are busting stuff up or whatever****, sure, but the episode where they went to handle cleanup--which I'm sure SHIELD as a whole has to do a lot of--was a missed opportunity, pure and simple.

The end-titles thing had a giant frost monster running loose in London, chasing birds and not even trying to hide. If that's not the thing that SHIELD's favorite top agent would take his team to investigate, why are they even there?? Maybe the show's budget can't handle a giant frost monster. Okay fine; show the aftermath, where they're all covered in slime and something huge is being carted off under a tarp. Mention the damned monster. Don't be the biggest source of inconsistency in the MCU. I mean, really.

Ahem.

On the level of pure story, SHIELD is the one that anticipates, addresses, and deals with aliens, powers, evil geniuses, villains, whatever, in this version of the Marvel Universe, since heroes are new and teams of heroes haven't yet formed on their own. There should be all sorts of stuff that SHIELD is getting from the fallout of the movies that we aren't even getting hints of--all it would take is a half-mentioned thing in a communication from Headquarters, a quick image that gets shut down in a file, mention of another team who did whatever with that thing that we found after so-and-so. I mean, Coulson does a lot of name dropping already, so probably not from him, but in the worldbuilding for the show, there should be near-constant hints at the tech, the research, the intel that's coming from these events, and there are a lot of them now. Some of them big enough to make Tony Stark a cult icon in foreign countries.

This is all a big deal, and we're hearing so little of it and seeing even less.

7. Stop letting the commercials explicitly promise more than the episodes deliver--or deliver more

I'm pretty sure the show-people have little to no control over what the network says about it in a trailer, but SHIELD's commercials have been overselling as much as Bones' and the Mentalist's used to. If they're going to call an episode 'devastating' it had better be devastating, and the revelation that Skye is a possibly-freaky unknown object in the form of a rescued baby? That's not devastating; that's cool. Which is great, except that telling the fans that it's going to be one way emotionally and then delivering something else entirely is just putting the emotional investment of the show in an out-of-sync alignment. You want your fans to feel the way the show feels, not being told how to feel and then delivering something else.

But another way to deal with this is to just deliver what you promise. The show has so much potential for big emotional drama, and there's a certain amount of leeway for borderline melodrama when you're dealing with topics like these, branching off of movies like those, and they're frequently just not using it. This goes directly into #10, so I'll pick it up there in a bit.

8. Give us more real emotional connection with the core team, and that includes between the team members

This most recent episode did it right. I'm withholding saying that they finally hit that groove where it all works and makes sense, because last time I thought they did--the one where Simmons jumped from the plane to save the team--they were back to fractured not-quite-there-ness the next ep, but I'll just go ahead and stay that that's what we want. The way everyone connected with everyone else and the interpersonal draws and blocks and ties all pulled tight--that's how it should be. Everyone on the team lives in the same place, functions in dangerous and should-be bonding situations with each other, and has lots of different directions all of this could go in, emotionally.

We should see this all the time. And the best way to show character and character development, is to get this stuff all the time. The best way to get viewers emotionally invested in the characters is to let the characters get emotionally invested in each other, and they finally did that for the whole team, and it was beautiful. I'll have to write a whole post about the developing ties in this show (with a chart!) to really get into it, but everyone was invested this time, and the show just sang along.*****

9. Have their unknown items be more than one-shot deals

They find a lot of weird stuff that no one has seen before and no one knows what to do with, and then they just pack it up and never think about it again. Take two or three episodes to figure out what they are and exactly how to best pack them up and keep everyone safe. Have it take a while to learn how to neutralize them. Make their effects on the team slower and over the course of a few eps, especially in things that should linger like that Staff of Awful Rage that really should have left Ward more angry and unhinged than it did, even after the actual effect of it wore off. Show them researching stuff after the episode they find them in, or, if they're determined to not be the ones who do the intensive research, have Simmons be reading up on them, or have Fitz be talking to whoever IS doing the research, or have the camera come in on Coulson catching the squints up on what's been discovered since they handed the artifacts off. Have Fitz tinkering with unsanctioned widgets based on what he learned by looking at the things they found three episodes before.

Those two live for the tech and the science and the weirdness there--I have so much trouble believing that they'd just wave goodbye and never mention the stuff again. I feel like they'd just be collecting up information and diagrams and notes, and saving it all up for when they could use it later, that there'd be periodic moments where they're trying to solve a new problem and one of them shuffles through the stuff on their desk and pulls out something they aren't supposed to have, and say that it's because of how that one thing did this neat trick that they thought they could retro-engineer into this new thing and...

Basically, I just want the Objects of Unknown Origin to have more direct impact on their lives, what they think about, how they react in the future, and what they go into the field with--physically and emotionally--than they have been having, because if Skye is going to be one of them, there really needs to be more resonance. And just from a purely story-based PoV, there needs to be more consequences, more usability to the fact that they find these things and often fall prey to them. And that it's their job.

10. Stop pulling punches

Things that are set up as super-emotional--the reveal of what they actually know about Skye, revelations of betrayal, character-bonding or un-bonding moments--should actually be emotional. The banter is amazing, but the purpose of witty banter is to lighten the weight of heavy dealings, and the show, so far, hasn't really had any super-heavy dealings.

Skye cried and Coulson comforted her, but we didn't hear what he really said to her or what she said after, and there's still no reason for why May is so mean to her even though she's shown that she knows exactly what use Skye has on the team and that she thinks she's best used as a free agent.

Skye seemed to be selling them out early on and then we immediately found out it wasn't that at all, and it wasn't that big a deal, and they took her back-- but then everyone was mean to her as if it had been a big deal, and it took forever for her to win back trust she hadn't really won to begin with because this happened so early on, and she whined about it a little but never got really honestly outraged like I'm sure most people would.

Ward was possessed by an alien-god staff that brought up all your personal demons and fed them to the rage and power, and they were explicit about how it lingers, and then it totally doesn't and he hasn't had any anger issues since--AND the shared trauma pushed him and May together but didn't throw any light on her, really, and the combination of their personal neuroses hasn't yet caused any trouble or shown any stress on their selves or their stories. Not even as little glances or shrugged off things; Ward might be insecure about it and unsure of his feelings, but he hasn't even mentioned that it was pain and rage that got them together to begin with. That's a lot of trauma to just leave untouched.

Although a lot of these emotional disconnects would be solved by fixing #1, 2 and 8 up above.

And then, plotwise, there's all the... well, the best way I can describe it is isolationism of the series. I understand that they want it to stand on its own, but it's explicitly part of the movie continuity, and withholding information we already know, denying that movie-based answers exist to show-based problems, and pointedly not connecting those dots just feels like a cheat. Add to that that we have three major character mysteries (what is Skye? what happened to Coulson? what does May even think or feel about anything at all?), and it comes across as willfully not using what we know is already there--drawing things out, not giving the promised payoffs for our patience, holding off on the potential. All of which also counts as pulling punches.

You can't have a series this tied into the wider universe and make it only look internally for answers; Coulson alone should know more than some of these situations are letting on, and it's frustrating when the big shiny call-backs--the Extremis stuff, especially, and the Supersoldier stuff--have such obvious resources at their command, that Coulson knows personally, and then he's not even mentioning them or giving a reason why he can't use them. The team may not know that he's familiar enough with Pepper that she knew his first name, or that Steve is his idol and now works for the same company, but WE know, and Coulson knows, and those plot-punches need to be loosed.


And I'm not even going to dignify my constant complaint about various hiatuses by putting it on the list because that applies to EVERY DAMN SHOW right now, and we already know that SHIELD is confirmed for a second season. But it stands. Complex shows require consistency to watch, and having months between episodes is dumb; it starves the audience, which does increase anticipation, but also creates annoyance and frustration, and that means any flaws will gall all the much more. But I know that that isn't really the fault of the show, so we'll just put it over here with the rest of the fire and be done with it.

I guess it looks like I have a lot of problems with this show. And I sort of do. But I also love it and wish it could be as good as it promises--as good as it's set up to be and as the series that spawned it is--as good as it obviously can be, since there are two or three episodes where it's locked-in and just shines. It's the frustration of liking it so much and then seeing all the things that could have been handled better, that could have been so much more epic or touching or consistent that makes me make lists like this.

But this has gone on way longer than I thought it would, and if you're still reading, you deserve a say in all this: What do you think about the series? Where does it bother you and what do you think are its strengths? Discuss!



Notes:
* I shouldn't use 'weird' in an article about SHIELD; there's too much i-before-e conflict in one piece!
** In Iron Man 3, Tony says he's saved her--but I don't think he said he'd cured  her. I really want her to turn out to be living with these violently explosive powers, doing her CEO job, not being a freak of nature or a villain or a superhero, but able to properly understand the problem and help others understand it. Because I mean, damn. What a wasted opportunity, otherwise.
*** In fact, I'd add him to the show. But I'd also add almost everyone I like to the show as a regular and we'd wind up with a core cast of twenty characters after a few seasons. Though, really, that would be accurate to how established Marvel teams like Avengers and X-Men handle recruiting in the comics, so...
**** Though I don't buy it because they were at the hammer in Thor 1 before Thor even got there, and he was specifically looking for it.
***** Did you see how Simmons just jumped in front of what she thought was a grenade to save Fitz, without even thinking about it?? Did you see how heartbreakingly upset Coulson was when he found Skye?? Did you see even May being afraid??? And did you see Ward worrying that May was flirting with Coulson and Coulson warning Ward about messing stuff up and Fitz being sweet and cute to Skye and Skye trying to live up to Coulson's example, and and and...??

Guesses about Doctor 12* based on what we've seen of his official outfit

So here's the official announced look of the 12th* Doctor! I'm not going to describe it, since you can see it right there, but here's what I like, and what I can infer from it:

• It's basically 11's outfit, but less obviously outdated, and, as the comments circulating with the picture said "with all the frills stripped off". Frills, in this case, seem to mean texture and color (other than red), but also pants that are too short or too formal, and the poor bowtie.
• There's a sweater! I love that there's a sweater, because that could have just been another vest or waistcoat, and instead we have something that is specifically warming and of a softer texture than tailored clothes--to me, that indicates some sort of lingering softness of character, and since I'm under constant fear of the Doctor getting so dark and fatalistic that I don't want to watch it anymore, this is a good thing.
• He looks a bit like a wizard. The Moff generally gets more and more fantastical the longer he gets to play with something, so I guess this follows--Ten was brilliant, but was someone else's creation and was very much like a man; Eleven was a fairytale creature who was sometimes sort of godly; it follows that Twelve* could very easily be a sort of wizardly character, who doesn't have that much in common with ordinary people at all. That could be either charming or terrible, depending how the stories go.

And it looked sort of familiar when I first saw it, but I couldn't figure it out until my bestie sent me this picture, and it all clicked:

He looks like Three! Less fussy, more angry, but the same sort of basic color-blocking as THREE! Who very rarely gets referenced, but who has been more and more referenced as the series closed out last year (the Ice Warriors, the Great Intelligence, etc), and so it makes sense.

See, I have this idea that the Doctor, despite changing all the time, is actually just showing different aspects of whatever underlying personality links all the Regenerations together, and when you're getting up to Twelve (or Fourteen) incarnations, you're going to start showing different interpretations of previous interpretations. So Twelve* could very easily be a reprise of Three the way Ten was similar to Five and sometimes Four, the way Nine had a lot of Seven, the way Eleven had a lot of Two and a lot of Four. Because despite being written by dozens of different people over the course of decades, there has to be a unified intelligence and basic personality underneath, or he's not really the same person each time.

So! Now we can get to the meat of this extrapolation: What do we know about Three that we can hopefully see applied to Twelve*?

• Three was the one who was trapped on earth because of ticking off the Time Lords.
• This, I think, could be key. We have the potential return of the Time Lords during Capaldi's run, and therefore a return of their Laws and their enforcement of the Laws, and the Doctor has never, ever done well with meddling from the home world. Just because he wants to free them and bring them back, it doesn't mean he wants to put up with their crap, and that could be an awesome storyline--especially when we think about how the Council is supposedly insane, and the Doctor is a different man now.
• Three was pompous and pushy and impatient, but also charming and occasionally sweet.
• All of which I can see Capaldi being. And it would be awesome to have a Doctor who isn't the least bit worried about people liking him, who just does what needs to be done because he's the only one who can do it, and doesn't put up with people being jackasses about it.
• It might also lead to my personal wish of a return of a professorial sort of Doctor who is actively teaching people to be better or to be more futuristic than they are--rather than just accidentally teaching them by dragging them with him everywhere.
• Three had silly but adorable Jo, and then had the early and wonderful Sarah Jane.
• I can easily see Clara being a less-useless Jo: the helper, the one who patches things up when he ticks people off, the one who is always there when he needs her. But Clara is already sort of an heir of Sarah Jane by being smart and snappy and able to keep up with the Doctor, and she hasn't yet become the damsel in distress either companion eventually became, so maybe she can sort of make up for that.
• Three had a support staff, of sorts, in the Brigadier, Benton and Yates.
• We've already met the Brig's daughter and seen how much power she has, and I would absolutely adore if she stuck around more. And we could have the science-girl with the asthma as one of the other regulars that comes with her--she's not particularly brave, she's physically unsuited for adventure, but she's smart and she can hold her own, and she already knows about aliens and has dealt with them face-to-face. We'd just need, like, a perfect UNIT soldier to even out the team, and there you go!
• This also could be the return of something else that I've been wanting: more companions. There's no reason it has to be one, or very rarely, two. The Doctor in the past had as many as four or five, on occasion, and it's great story-fodder, having that many people from different places and with different goals, all in one problem together. Plus, it helps alleviate the problem of the Companion repeatedly falling in love with the Doctor--there's other people around, so stress-bonding is more complicated.
• Three was an action-Doctor, with gadgets and fast cars and Venusian Karate.
• Eleven, Ten, Nine, were no strangers to action, but they were all sort of...accidentally action heroes. They tried to avoid it and wound up in the middle of it. Eleven was more of a warrior, specifically, and less of a person who's first thought was to drive quickly to where the problem was and then chop it into submission. While I would more enjoy a Doctor that stays in his lab tinkering with widgets, a Doctor who specifically goes out to right wrongs as opposed to waiting until he lands on them accidentally, might be fun. It would clean up a lot of the moral ambiguity that has collected up on the show--he'd be actively seeking out specific injustices with an eye toward putting them right.
• Three had a lot of quarries and caves.
• And wouldn't it be nice to have a good quarry, or a good monsters-in-a-cave story?
• Three also had some awesome alien planets and a few memorable alien creatures.
• I would love to have a reunion with Alpha Centauri, mostly because I would like to see how they'd redesign a seven-foor-tall green penis with one eye, horse-hooves, and a cape. 
• And there's always Peladon, and the monster that can be sung to sleep, and the Princess who wanted to marry him.

And then, of course, there are my own personal wants and wishes:

• My bestie and I decided that we'd love if the Doctor frequently forgot that Clara wasn't his pet, and occasionally just petted her on her head and offered her, like, a sugar cube or something. We also decided that Strax would love the sugar cubes and would constantly be trying to get them when Clara turned them down.
• I'd love if the Doctor had some silly quirk that Clara had to keep track of--like he was always stealing little things, or he went into people's spaces and rearranged all their things all the time.
• I'd love if he was bumbling and lovable, like Seven, but also had that deep layer of outright manipulation--though it would have to be toward a purpose, not just vague manipulation without an end-game; we get enough of long-term stories that never quite end up anywhere specific.
• I'd love if the Doctor finally started wondering what happened to his old Companions--or if Clara sought them out and brought them back to his attention--so that we could get the occasional update the way we did with Sarah Jane in "School Reunion". There's piles of grown-up Companions still around who didn't die when they left, and it would be amazing to see how their lives turned out. (also, I feel like at least a few of them would have formed some sort of support group to help the new ones adapt after they left)

What do you guys think? What can you infer from these first glimpses of the new Doctor, and what do you hope the new series will be like? Share in the comments, and be sure to sign up for email updates or RSS to keep track of the conversation!

Notes:
* This one is an actual *, but in general, I'm going to refer to him as the 12th* or 12* because he's actually, apparently, number 14, but wibbly wobbly and so on.