Lets talk about the MCU!

Okay. There's a lot to talk about, and this is probably going to be long and wandering, but you've been warned.

Here's where we are, as I see it:

• Tony has dealt with his demons and isn't but is Iron Man, which I take to mean that the trilogy of his movies is actually a trilogy and there's no immediate plan to do an IM4--but we know that he's back in some capacity for Avengers 2, so there's that. As a fighter or just a consultant or a tech guy remains to be seen.
• We still don't know if Pepper was cured of Extremis or just stabilized, and if she was cured, why isn't Tony sharing that info around, and if she was stabilized, can we look forward to Pepper-as-hero later?
• We know from SHIELD and Cap2 that Extremis is still in play, and that it, along with Centipede (which uses alien tech), has been absorbed into the massive experimental mess that is HYDRA. And the special that came on TV before Cap2 informed us unequivocally that Extremis, Centipede and the Hulk are all attempts to recreate the Super Soldier Serum that created Cap, so that's still in play--and in HYDRA's hands.
• Cap now knows that Bucky is still around and will definitely be going after him, and Bucky now knows that he's been used and lied to, and will also go  in search of himself. Which should be cool.
• SHIELD meanwhile, is a mess. Fury is assumed dead (though Coulson and Cap and Widow know he's not), loyal agents are in hiding or dead, and it looks like up to half their roster was actually HYDRA all along. The powerful half, it would seem, leaving Coulson as the highest ranking field agent and Hill as the highest ranking leader-agent (since Fury is underground), but both out of a job, though they're handling that in different ways.
• HYDRA seems to be based on cells like a terrorist organization--Garrett has taken over Centipede, and thinks he's a big deal, but there's also those who turned Bucky into Winter Soldier, and he doesn't seem to know about cyber-Zola, and neither of them seems to know about Nazis messing with the Staff and Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch.
• Thor brought us an understanding of the Nine Realms and showed how SHIELD isn't able to respond to this stuff anymore--they didn't answer Darcy's call and they didn't show up early to deal with this stuff before it went wonky the way they did all through Phase 1. Now they don't exist at all, except for whatever bases are so-called "safe" and whichever field agents rally behind Coulson or people like him.
• Thor also brought us a Loki who faked his own death to replace his father and get his brother out of the way, and it's super-unclear as of yet whether that was just to rule, or whether there's still some tie to the Other, the Chitauri, and Thanos that lingers after the Avengers--some debt he owes them, some further plan of Thanos's that we don't know yet, but that Thanos's creepy smile at the end of Avengers implies?
• And we're informed in the credits that the Aether is an Infinity Stone, and that the Tesseract is another, and that the Collector wants all of them.
• And there's definitely a third Thor movie coming, where he'll almost definitely wind up going against Loki again, and if they defeat him--if he doesn't play the "I'm a manipulated victim, I HAD to try to kill you" card--then he's back in play as a villain and he's already tied to Thanos who is already tied to the stones, and we've got one third of them already, so...
• SHIELD brought us a bit of fallout from Asgard already with Lorelai, who escaped because of Malekith's men busting up the prison, but wasn't killed because "Odin" wanted her brought back alive, and we're pretty sure that Loki has totally replaced Odin, so what's that all about, then?
• SHIELD is also bringing us all sorts of potentials--the Berserker Staff, that helmet that infects people, Gravitonium, mind-altering tech, that probably-Kree half-body in a place that wasn't SHIELD but probably also wasn't HYDRA since Nick didn't know for sure if he was going against HYDRA, Deathlock, a name drop for Abomination...Some of this has to feed back into the movies, otherwise, why bother having SHIELD around, the perfect incubator for plot-bunnies and fallout and foreshadowing?

Near future:

• Guardians of the Galaxy hasn't happened yet, so I can't really say definitively what it'll bring to the story, but a lot of articles seem to be already dismissing it as silliness or something out of left field, whereas I'm more than sure there'll be important things there--Benicio del Toro is in it and he's playing the Collector again for sure, so I'm willing to bet there's going to be a connection there--he knows of another stone, or he's actively looking for one, or the Guardians have a lead on one even though they don't know it.
• Also, they're already in space, where people have just started to notice that Earth is around, messing with Cosmic Powers, and being protected by gods, and being attacked by aliens, and so on, and one of the characters comes from there, so I bet he'll wind up being directly connected in some way, too.
• One of the articles below claims that Marvel doesn't have plans for a GotG2; if that's true, there has got to be a really strong and plot-specific reason for the movie to show up now that they're into mega-plot-land and have just announced a tentative plan up to 2028. It's all got to matter, eventually.
• The Netflix original series' for Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist that are coming out soon-ish have been confirmed once and for all to be in-continuity. They're smaller productions than the movies, and, being that they're people with a specific location (Hell's Kitchen, where Cap's mom lived, apparently) and without massive showy powers (that I know of), they might even have smaller budgets than SHIELD even. The Powers That Be keep talking about "street level" and "gritty", which will add a dimension of realism that might otherwise start disappearing as the movies get cosmic, so that'll be nice.
• It's unclear whether they'll be set in the past, when Hell's Kitchen was the way it was when the comics were written, but if they are, that'd give precedent, in this world, for people to be dressing up and fighting crime, making all this Avengers-centric stuff less crazy.
• If they're set modern / current, then I'm guessing they'll be in direct reaction to the Battle of New York, which, as I see it, is something we need to see. New York was trashed by friggin aliens and saved by a monster, two spies, a guy in a cape, a guy in a metal suit, and someone who froze to death 70 years ago; everyone with a single semi-heroic bone in their body--as well as anyone with a villainous bone--would start coming out of the woodwork all over the place. A precedent has been set for costumed crusaders, and they should be everywhere, and most of them should be nuts or incompetent or power-hungry.
• The whole meaning of Agents of SHIELD has been shifted from people who work for SHIELD to people who are all that's left of SHIELD, and I'm willing to bet that the next season will be about getting them functional again--and I'd absolutely love it if they were reorganized as a freelance group associated with the Avengers, rather than having the Avengers associated with them. Like, the big-name heroes set the bar, and the normal people and small-name heroes doing the same job are what makes up the new SHIELD. 
• There was a rumor I heard that Team Coulson might show up in one of the movies, and, sooner or later, Coulson is going to have to tell his actual friends Tony & Pepper, Thor, Cap, Widow, Hawkeye and Bruce that he's not actually dead. Hopefully this'll happen in Avengers 2, because I really need more SHIELD and more Coulson in my movies. And it's useful to do it all at once so that he doesn't have to repeat himself a jillion times over the whole course of the next Phase as he meets each one again individually.

Wild Speculation Time! 

There's no way to really know what's going on until it happens, and part of the joy of this series, for me, is that I can't guess what's coming up (rare, since I both write and know how plot works, and watch a lot of TV and movies and understand how those are built), but here's what I think could be factors going into Phase 3 and beyond.

• Ant-Man is confirmed and already being made, and according to comics cannon, he's involved with Ultron and Vision, who are both in the next Avengers movie. So yay, a reason for Ant-Man, of all people! He's also one of the original Avengers in the comic, so if he joins up by A3, we'll have most of the original team on board at once.
• One of the incarnations of Vision in the comics was in love with and married Wanda Maximoff, and they're both in the next movie, so there's something that can be carried forward there. He's also part of one of the reasons she went bonkers (one of the times she went bonkers), but Elizabeth Olson is saying Wanda is already totally off her gourd, so maybe her being married to him and improbably having kids and improbably losing them is not a story they're going to be tackling at all. 
• They also seem to have changed her powers from "probability manipulation" to a combo of telekenesis, psychokenisis and mediumship, so who knows. Although, being able to speak to the dead or to aliens across the universe or anything like that could be very useful for introducing magic-based characters like Dr Strange, or reaching across space to get to, say, GothG or Thanos or Loki, or any of the other space-based stories that may or may not tie in to the main story here on Earth.
• They could easily spin off GotG characters into other stories set in space, or bring them down to join the Avengers. One incarnation of the Guardians that doesn't include any of these characters are semi-members of the Avengers, so there's at least a little link between the movies there.
• It's super-unlikely that any of the X-Men characters will show up, but after Age of Ultron, there's space for the Avengers to expand all they want. It might even be necessary as the threats to the world get bigger and stranger, and SHIELD is already starting to uncover people with powers, tools of power, or scientific accidents that look like a crop of crazy new villains. Sooner or later, they'll start teaming up and causing havock, and there you go, excuse for an expanded team, especially if SHIELD never gets back on their feet, or takes too long doing it.
• In the comics, there are a number of spin-off teams, and Fury DID go to Europe to make contacts, so...
• Daredevil was a member of the team at some point, and he's got a show in the works, so maybe some of the other Avengers and Avenger-linked characters could get their own shows if these four are successful and well-done?
• I feel like this is sort of a test-run for another branch of the MCU; they take a few years and put out TV shows that are delivered whole and then link up at the end. If it works, they can do it again with other heroes, and shuffle the resulting characters into the movies, or into other shows, or have them pass through SHIELD or whatever.
• We saw in IM3 that Trevor wasn't the Mandarin, but we also saw in the short about him that there's apparently a real Mandarin somewhere who wasn't happy about his use of the name. Does this mean he'll be coming out of the shadows, too, another villain for the crazy world here? Or will be turn out to be someone else we already know--good or bad, and I'm sort of hoping someone who seems good--and that he'll be revealed to be, all along, part of HYDRA's plan, or Thanos's, or Loki's, or behind some of what we've been blaming on one of those guys and part of a separate thing? Layers in layers in layers, and it's better every time we find out we've had it wrong all along, after all!
• If you follow me liveblogging SHIELD on my Tumblr, you'll have noticed that I don't think it's a coincidence that Garrett was posing as the Clairvoyant, using SHIELD info to act like he knows the future, at the same time that Zola was existing as a sentient computer and creating an algorithm that does the same thing. So with HYDRA and Nazis back in play, of which he was both, I think we'll see the algorithm again, and that it'll be sentient, and that Garrett was actually using some of those results or the List of potential threats to HYDRA as his info-source--or that he actually had nothing to do with that and, just like he was feeding info to dudebro (who's name I can't remember, the rich guy) and to Raina, he was having info fed to him by Zola and / or the Algorithm, whether he knew it or not.
• I also think this is why Zola, who cared enough about his own preservation that he was willing to translate his consciousness into computer form when computers barely existed, wasn't worried at all about a giant bunker-buster missile headed straight for his abandoned safe-house--because he's got backups elsewhere, or because he didn't just make the Algorithm, he IS the Algorithm, and that it'll be WAY IMPORTANT at some point in the future.
• Agent 13 just feels like she's going to be important. I'm pretty sure she's going to turn out to be Sharon Carter, descendant of / family of Cap's Best Girl Peggy, but maybe she'll also be important in rebuilding SHIELD or expanding the Avengers or something that still hasn't happened yet.
• Falcon is the grandson of one of Cap's Howling Commandos, and I feel that that's going to be important, too.
• I heard a rumor, too, that there was a specific reason Hawkeye wasn't at all involved in the fall of SHIELD--or even mentioned as it happened--and that we'll find out what that reason is, eventually. Which is good, because when they were questioning people's loyalty in the middle of Cap2, Cap could have pointed out that Clint was compromised before, and Nat could have defended him, but he wasn't even brought up, so I assume they both know he's beyond question and I want to know why!

A digression: If Marvel keeps being a crazy juggernaut of money-making, I really hope the other studios decide that making nice and getting a cut is better than maintaining strict divisions in franchises that are not naturally divided at all because:

1. I want to see how they can make X-Men and Spiderman work in the MCU
1. Spiderman, I feel, would be easier to stitch in--they just have to mention the Battle for NY once, and we'll know that all this costumes-and-experiments stuff was brought to a head by aliens.
2. X-Men? It'll probably have to do with how they handle the continuity-stitching they're already up to in Days of Future Past, and I'll probably do a post about how they could do it after I see that movie.
2. I want to see what Fige and Whedon will do with those things
3. I want to see who wins out in the battle to be Quicksilver
4. I really want an Avengers vs X-Men movie

But back on point. So here's what we have in play, in summary:

• Extremis, Centipede, and through Hulk, the Gamma Tests, all working to recreate Cap, who is the only successful example of that work.
• Hydra, who has a lot of heads, as befits the name, and a lot of independent scientific experiments running at once--and so far, no indication of who is in control of all of it, or if it's just a super-invasive and totally decentralized thing. Which might be cool, but we need a face to make it personal, at least for a while.
• Loki on the throne, and Asgard back in control of the Nine Realms, now that the Svartalves are out of the way and the Convergence is done.
• Thanos, who is, in the comics, obsessed with the Infinity Gems, and two of which are now in the hands of the Collector.
• Space-based bounty-hunters.
• Chitauri remnants after the Battle for New York, and Chitauri leadership that still knows where Earth is.
• Mandarin who may or may not be a real thing after all.
• Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, separated from the baggage of having a father who is a major villain in another studio's epic, but still possibly connected with A LOT of great stories in the Avengers cannon.
• A quartet of on-the-ground lower-powered but very well-trained heroes about to work into the continuity somehow, and who will likely decide whether other heroes like them get to get shows of their own, too.
• A history of Shorts that add to the stories and will likely keep doing so.
• A history of in-credits scenes that stitch the stories together and had better keep doing so.

But how does it all fit together? And how does Ant-Man fit in? And what wonderful new weirdness will we get AFTER that?

What do you think?



Sources, cuz I actually have a few this time:

• http://www.nerdist.com/2014/04/confirmed-marvels-netflix-shows-will-be-part-of-the-marvel-cinematic-universe/
• http://www.nerdist.com/2013/11/new-shows-based-on-marvel-characters-coming-to-netflix/
• http://marvelcinematicuniverse.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline
• http://www.thewire.com/entertainment/2014/04/how-does-the-winter-soldier-fit-into-marvels-grand-plans/359989/
• http://sciencefiction.com/2014/02/18/marvel-studios-phase-three-plans-leak/
• http://sciencefiction.com/2014/04/27/kevin-feige-talks-thanos-guardians-of-the-galaxy/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_Gems
• http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/kevin-feige-marvel-has-plotted-693317
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Avengers_members
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Avengers_members#Guardians_of_the_Galaxy_.281978.29
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_(Marvel_Comics)#Second_android_Vision.2F.22Jonas.22
• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2015381/
• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2395427/fullcredits?ref_=tt_cl_sm#cast
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avengers:_Age_of_Ultron

Options for the Mentalist's season ender

Warning, this will be shippy.

Okay.

So going into the last three episodes of the season, Lisbon has been dating this guy Pike who is nice and normal and charming, and he's asked her to move to DC with her. She's been waffling about whether she'll take him up on the offer or not, and has only just told Jane about it. Jane took it okay, telling her that if she's happy, he's happy, while her face made it clear that she wanted him to tell her to stay and his made it clear that he was being a martyr for her wellbeing, and my face made it clear that these two were crushing my heart to pieces.

So here's the options I see them having as they head into the finale, without the usual comfort of a confirmed renewal, despite the fact that Simon Baker's contract apparently runs for seven years and this is only six.

1. He'll let her go, thinking it's best for her, and she'll go thinking he doesn't care and never knowing that he does, and everyone will be broken up and all the fans will riot.

2. He'll let her go and she'll decide not to and come back to him, which would be nice, but I really want HIM to make a definitive move on HER, because every woman we've seen him interacting with in the whole run of this show has been the one who made all the moves, and it never got serious because he's the one who's damaged and not ready. Him making the move would prove that he IS ready and I would CHEER MY FACE OFF.

3. He'll tell her not to go, and she'll go anyway, and then realize it was a mistake and come back and they'll have that talk they should have had AGES AGO about how they feel about each other and how they treat each other.

4. He'll not give her a reason to stay, and she'll go, and then Cho, Fisher, Abbot, Wylie and like, everyone else who has ever met them, will tell him he's being an idiot and this was the wrong choice, and he'll run across the airport to catch her before she gets through security and THE WORLD WILL IMPLODE WITH HAPPINESS.

This last one, I think, would be even better if she'd already decided of her own accord, thinking that Jane didn't like her that way, that she didn't actually want to give up her life here in Texas that was just starting to make sense to fly off to DC where she's got nothing, not even a job lined up, and has to start from scratch. So she leaves him at the security point, and THEN Jane comes running up with his revelation, and then they can meet on even, fair, balanced ground as equals and totally make out.

See, my interpretation of how he's been acting is that he's worried and jealous and annoyed (probably at himself), but that he also realizes that he's not been the best of partners for her (cough-leaving her with all the mess and not sharing his plans with her for ten + years-cough), and he thinks that she is happy enough with this hard-working, normal, stable guy that he's trying really hard to get out of her way and make it easy on her. Which is heartbreaking, because he's trying so hard to be the good loser of a contest that he hasn't really made any definitive moves on, that he doesn't realize that she's giving him every single opportunity to tell her to stay. The more episodes we get, the more it looks like she's willing to stay even if he's just being a petulant baby who needs tending, and the more it looks like he's determined not to do that, and the more it looks like they'll part unhappy on both sides.

Which is why I'm more and more sure they'll end the season making out.

Because this might be the end of the show, if they don't get renewed and if Heller can't get them picked up on any other network (I say shop it to one of the ones doing well with the reruns!), and if those two don't end up together, the whole show will be ruined for a vocal and active part of the fanbase. Also, there's no reason not to get them together if we'll never get more episodes! They (the writers) can't ruin it with them being together if there's no more show.

And if they do get another season, miraculously, they can work on proving, as Castle and Bones are, that being together DOES NOT EQUAL the death of the show. I mean, think how hard it was to deal with Jane when he was only sort of tied to anyone; now think of him still being him, but with a vested and spoken and admitted interest in the wellbeing of a woman who puts herself in harm's way every day. And imagine her wanting him to be a boyfriend and him still being Jane! Imagine the two least-likely-to-properly-communicate-feelings people on TV trying to figure out how to be a functioning couple! And imagine the team dealing with the two of them being obviously together!

Gold, I tells ya.

Bonus points if any of this happens:

• Wylie is so swept away by the love in the air that he proposes to that blonde girl in the desk next to him.
• Abbot and Fisher or Cho and Fisher decide to confess their feelings for each other in the spirit of honesty and love.
• Jane takes off his ring, and then buys a new one for Lisbon and tells her that they've known each other long enough they should just skip right to marriage.
• She accepts.
• OR she proposes to him after he confesses to her.

The ad for next week looks promising-- I know ads lie, and especially so with shows like this, but we have Drunk Jane (or seemingly drunk Jane) looking like he's worried about being finally sent to jail and losing everything he's just gotten back + Pike sort of pushing Lisbon for an answer + Jane showing up at Lisbon's house alone at night (which is one of my favorite things that people on TV do and something I've been wanting to see for AGES, whatever the context) + Jane finally telling her, if gently, that he hops she decides to stay. And that ad doesn't even tell us anything about what else might be going on--like that new villain, or that missing girl, or, like a case.

So what do you think / hope will happen as we careen into what could be the last few shows ever?

The 80s Fantasy Movie Trinity of Labyrinth, Legend and Last Unicorn

I once wrote and presented a paper on Sex And Subversion in 80s Fantasy Movies*, mostly as an excuse to talk dirty about 80s Fantasy Movies, and discovered that there actually is this whole adult underlayer to some of my favorite fantasy movies--the ones that shaped and defined my brain as a kid, and that I find still super-watchable now.

Basically, if you want to understand me, you've got to have watched these movies**, and preferably have done so when you were young and impressionable so they could sink into your brain like weird glittery life experiences.

Labyrinth:

I don't remember the first time I saw Labyrinth clearly; I remember being afraid, but also being super-fascinated, and I'm pretty sure I made my mom restart it the same day and watched it all the way through--a sort of kiddy version of mind blown. 

You've got your puppets that are equal parts scary and awesome, the hallmark of the Froud-Henson partnership***. You've got your moral ambiguities that you aren't likely to find in kids' movies these days. You've got your big sister who isn't that great a sister having to deal with the consequences of being a selfish git and losing a baby--which is terrifying, as a big sister, to watch. You've got your incredibly catchy songs and wildly quotable dialog. You've got your super-lush and inventive fantasy locales that aren't like any before or after.

And, of course, you've got your David Bowie and his codpiece.

(Tangent: I've been reading one of the gazillion Bowie bios, and I'm relating so hard with his early frustrations that I think him doing a cult classic childrens film right when I was the exact age to be influenced by it was kismet. I was meant to have Bowie in my brain, and I was a fan before I even knew he was also a pop star with twenty years of music already behind him at that point.)

The movie is a great look at a hero's journey through the lens of whatever crazy imagination seems to  have permeated the 80s, and it was one that featured a female main character who saves herself and doesn't fall for the male's wooing--which, basically, I didn't even really consciously realize was wooing until much later. I found out, while researching that paper, that there was, in an early draft, a scene after the garbage village, where Sarah falls into Jaireth's bed. Like, literally into his bed, while he's there looking fetching and trying to sway her. 

Which goes to prove that I wasn't bonkers when I started noticing the layering in the plot--the kid's adventure story lays over a story of coming of age and claiming yourself for yourself, of sexytimes hinted at and denied, and of friends that may or may not be part of her personal mental breakdown but are beloved all the same.

Legend:

It was also super-early in my life when I saw this one. I don't even remember seeing it the first time, but I know for a fact that when I saw it again on TBS when I was 11, I knew every character and every scene, despite having not seen it in years--probably since that first time.

This one is not really as subtle in the seduction metaphors and also features a female lead who saves herself, but she does it for love--which both charmed the crap out of me and contributed to my long-lasting romanticist heart, but also sort of makes me think about how I can tell stories now where the girl doesn't need a dude around to break the spell.

This one also features the first time when something explicitly evil was shown to me as attractive and charming--and started me on a long history of loving Tim Curry, even before I knew about the wild lunacy of Rocky Horror.

But it's the imagery that gets me in Legend. Unicorns that are obviously just horses with horns glued to their heads, but shot in a way where they actually look like they could be magestic and magical as the movie says they are. That dark dancer coming out of the shadows and taking over Lily's purity, merging with her****, and turning her into the bride the Prince wants. The Gump and his fairies and the diversity of them--and how one is a wild bitch, one is a drunk, and he's about nine, but scary and charming at once. The goblins turning everything into a Narnia-like winter. The swamp-hag Meg. Jack, the feral boy who is way cleaner and sweeter than any feral boy has a right to be, brought in and civilized by the beauty of the princess who would rather go tromping through the woods than act all princess-ly. 

So many juicy images to chew on and think about and uncover the meaning of as I grew up a writer!

Last Unicorn:

For a long time, I thought this movie was some beautiful dream I'd had. I didn't know anyone else who had seen it, and I couldn't find it anywhere. Then it was on TV a few times through my late childhood, and then I bought a copy on DVD right when DVDs were first a thing, and somewhere in there, when I was working my first job as a bookseller at the Friends of the Library Bookstore, I found a copy of the source book for 10c and discovered the wonderful joy of reading a Peter S Beagle book.*****

This story features the seduction themes the least, and more abstractly--she's being seduced, sort of, by Haggard, but she's also being seduced by time and mortality and being human, and falling in love is sort of the worst thing that could happen to her because it ties her to the time and place of the man she loves the way nothing else could have, when she was immortal. Which is so sad. 

And as I grew older and learned my genre, I discovered that there's actually a whole lot of play with the form of fantasy here, something that Beagle likes to do--there's a prince on a quest to win a princess's hand, but the princess doesn't get it and the quest isn't that satisfying to him. There's a beautiful princess under a curse, but the curse is being human and she wants out. There's an evil king who happens to be the father of the prince, but he's evil because he grew up unloved and isolated, rather than just being evil. There's a magician who is really bad at his art, but also has a direct tap to the real power in the world--the kind that's a primal force of nature, and that he can't control, but that most people can barely even know is there. And there's a whole section that's a sideways take on the Robin Hood story.

Together, these three movies are a fantastic base for an understanding of how stories should be told and how they're constructed--and with that as a conclusion, maybe I should have put this post on my writing blog, but really I'm talking about some of my oldest fandoms, so it stays here. 

What were your earliest fan experiences and what did you get from them? Share in the comments!

NOTES:

*At ICFA, which I desperately need to start presenting papers at again.

**Plus Princess Bride, Dark Crystal, Flight of Dragons, basically all of Disney, Ghost Busters, the Rocky Horror TV cut, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Short Circuit, Batteries Not Included, Cocoon, DARYL, The Boy Who Could Fly, Last Starfighter, Enemy Mine, Flight of the Navigator, Breakfast Club and Pretty In Pink. Yes, I consider all of them 80s Fantasy Movies. These dudes will probably crop up on this blog at some point or other in their own posts.

***I really wish they'd done more movies, actually.

****I actually added two matching colors to my nail polish shop based on this theme--Lily Light and Lily Dark.

*****I also picked up A Fine And Private Place which is equally as beautiful despite being of a much more practical tone. It's what The Graveyard Book reminded me of. Neil Gaiman, I think, must have been influenced by some of the same things as me, because Mirrormask, written by him, also sorts into this category, somewhere between Labyrinth and Legend.

I can't keep up with the geekery OR The best problem for a fangirl to have

I have a confession to make: Despite all the many (many) fandoms I currently have and participate in*, I'm behind on the newest wave of new fandoms. I feel like I'm missing out, and I fully intend to catch up at some point, but here's the thing: this is the best thing that can happen to a fangirl. It means, in no particular order, that:

• There will always be more awesome shows to get into.
• TV right now is super-great in a way that it didn't used to be.
• There's all these new 'ships I don't even know about yet.

In interest of full disclosure, I haven't yet managed to see:

• Resurrection
• Believe
• Under the Dome
• Mad Men
• Breaking Bad (and I'm not sure I want to with this one)
• Ripper Street
• Copper
• Call the Midwife
• Three Musketeers (is this even on yet?)
• Teen Wolf

And I'm behind on:

• Downton Abbey
• Game of Thrones
• Continuum
• Once Upon A Time (what even is going on with that?)
• Grimm (did it ever get as good as it felt like it should be?)
• Misfits (which I think is over now)

Sometimes I feel bad. But then Tumblr tells me basically (with much skewing) what's going on and I feel less behind than ever AND I feel like I have something awesome to look forward to. In an ideal world, where I didn't have stories to tell and didn't need to do anything but watch TV, I'd be caught up on everything that interests me, and I'd be super-active in ALL THE FANDOMS, but that's not the way of things. The way of things is that I liveblog about ten shows and don't have a lot of time to catch up on ones not currently airing because I have Other Interests like writing and eating and reviewing books and sleeping.

So I look forward to when I can get to those other ones and arrive to the party late, but enthusiastic.

Now it's your turn. Fess up! Which fandom shows are you woefully behind on and which have you not managed to catch at all?

And related, what do you feel about spoilers? Personally, I don't much avoid them--they give me something to extrapolate from when I want to know what's going to happen, and they're always different in context. 

NOTES:
*Current: Sleepy Hollow, Almost Human, Agents of SHIELD / MCU, Castle, Bones, The Mentalist, Walking Dead, Hell on Wheels, Doctor Who, Sherlock, Cosmos (old and new), Game of Thrones, Intelligence, and the continuing / vintage fandoms of 80s Fantasy Movies, Firefly, Farscape, Star Trek, Star Wars, 80s Cartoons, Primeval, and a handful of Forgotten Fandoms I'm slowly working my way through here on the blog.

Why I miss Sleepy Hollow and what I want from Season 2

You guys, seriously, thirteen episodes isn't enough when the majority of other shows are twice that and are still on. I mean, I love the format, and I firmly believe that keeping the number of eps per season short is a lot of what makes this show a chunk of concentrated awesome...but I miss it so much now. And the fall is really far away.

In the order of whatever I remember first, I miss:

• The interplay between the characters--old-fashioned vs modern, English vs American, skeptic vs believer, boss vs underling, secrets vs trust, navigating a really weird new reality while living in the normal world you have to protect.
• The chemistry between Abby and Crane, totally regardless of where it goes (though I do want them to make out, like, all the time).
• The well-handled melodrama--it's epic in the real sense of the word, affecting everything and everyone, and it's totally nutbars, but it's also anchored with real, relatable emotions to honest, likable characters.
• The breakneck pace that shatters usual expectations of how shows run--there were numerous times through the season where I thought "well, this'll be, like, a third-season arc" and instead it's the next episode or two, letting us get to the meat of the stories as well as letting us get past the expectations and into new ground.
• The diversity of the cast and how it closer shows how the real world looks even though the setting of the show is pretty dang far from reality as we know it.
• The gleeful sense of play--with history, religion, mythology, culture, time, backstory, basically everything, it's all up for grabs.
• How there's not really any other shows like it on TV*, and therefore it's an oasis of differentness on the networks**.
• It has such rich storylines! Everyone has something that you can really get your teeth into, and all of it weaves artfully back into the main storyline so that everything matters, and the fact that they're all here because of a prophesy actually seem accurate and not just convenient and incidental.
• How it swings effortlessly between really sad and really funny, without either making the show depressing or stupid.
• The uncertainty--which is weird, because usually not knowing what's going on annoys me, but in this show, anything could go any way, and even when it goes in a predictable way, they do it with flare and energy so that it feel new. 
• The way you can sometimes see the influences--there's Supernatural, but there's also a feel of X-Files sometimes, a little of Fringe, a little Indiana Jones or National Treasure or, like, every show on History Channel about Templars and Masons and secret knowledge and conspiracies ever--but how it takes those influences and makes them its own so that it feels like a logical next show to watch, not like a rip off.

Last season was a string of good episodes, with a high proportion of very good and a low proportion of what-the-hell-was-that, and that, of course, is what I most want from Season 2, regardless of anything else. I want the quality and the pace to continue no matter what they do with these suddenly beloved characters. 

That said, I'm a writer, and I love playing with story, so here's what I want to see from everyone when they come back:

ICHABOD:

Icky really needs some time to process everything. Toward the end of the season, he was starting to crack a little, and if he doesn't get some downtime to journal it out or discover modern psychotherapy, I fear for his sanity.

I want him to question everything--his wife's motives, General Washington's involvement, the loyalties of everyone he knew back then and everyone he's met since waking up. Because he was put on this path, and someone along the way has to know more than they're saying.

I also hope he never fully adapts to the modern world, but does continue to find things he likes in it--like Jared in Pretender finding all his snacks.

ABBIE:

I hope she saves herself. I mean, I hope Ichabod keeps his promise and finds a way back to Purgatory to get her back, but by then she's already gotten herself out of the Safe House and figured out the rules of how the otherworld works, and gotten herself to where she can meet him. It would be cool if, along the way, she also finds out some truths about herself, her place in the prophesy, how to work against it, the Great Plan, etc, too.

JENNY:

I really want to see more of her Tomb Raider life--I want to know just how deep her relationship with Corbin was, I want to see her pulling in favors from her contacts, and maybe a few of them becoming regular characters to help with the cause, and I want to see her and Abs working as a team. I have a theory that she's supposed to be a protector for the Witnesses, a sacred warrior or something, and it would be so cool if I was right about that.

Also, I really want her to punch Ichabod for leaving her sister, and maybe to get into it with Katrina, because that would be awesome.

ABBIE AND JENNY TOGETHER:

They keep coming back to their joint and weird past, and I really want it to have meant something. Their dad left early--so maybe he was seduced by evil, or he was a member of a shady secret society that may or may not be a help to them, or he was trying to protect his girls from something supernatural he was involved in, or he was doing what one or the both of them are doing now. Something. Their mother went mad and died, but she also made sure they both know the Bible backwards and forward, and she encouraged other esoteric knowledges in them--so maybe she knew what they were and the fear and stress is what drove her crazy, or maybe she was a prophet that no one listened to and it led things to where they are now, or maybe she was something they missed doing / saving / learning from in their shared past.

FRANK:

He took the fall for his daughter, and I don't want Maddie to go to jail or anything, but Frank can't stay in jail. A segment of the internet seems to think he'll be the next new Horseman, and that would break my heart but could be a really good story. Even better, personally, is I'd like to see him almost become the Horseman, and then halt it himself because he likes Team Good and doesn't want to kill them--and then redeems himself without dying and brings useful knowledge back to them so that he can act in all of this, instead of constantly having to react.

KATRINA:

I want to see her being the powerful badass everyone says she is, and if she does it in some other way than knocking heads together, that'd he super-awesome, too. I want to see her take responsibility for the fact that literally all of this is because of her--her choice to save Ichabod, her abandonment of her son, etc etc--and I want it to be because of something greater than her being unable to deal. I really want it to be something that's not immediately good or bad, because real morality isn't just good or bad. I wrote more about her already on my writing blog before I started this one, and I still want most of what I said there.

I just am really sick of her being passive-- sent to Purgatory for hundreds of years to haunt her own house, used as a pawn to control the Horseman and then given to him like a ragdoll, sent on the run when she fell out with her coven. She needs to stand her ground somewhere, define herself as a character in a show full of defined characters.

MACY and her mom:

Macy now knows there's all sorts of crazy in the world, and she's sort of bonded with Jenny, so I want to see more of that. Maybe she gets Jenny to help her break her dad out of prison because her mom is in shock or denial and won't help. Or maybe she goes looking herself for some magical thing that can help and gets in trouble--or, conversely, doesn't get in trouble and does save the day so that everyone has to accept her as part of the team. 

I hope Cynthia either gets on board or leaves of her own accord--because if she's killed to get to Frank, that's the easy way out. It'd be awesome if she joined up and she and Macy were super-cool mother-daughter evil-fighters. I haven't decided yet if I want her and Frank to make up; I like him so much better with Jenny, but there must be a reason he married Cynthia to begin with, and she seems smart and competent so far.

HENRY:

I really want his story to be one about redemption. He's evil because of how he started out, but now he knows them and he knows they're good people, and I want Ichabod especially to fight through the pain and the fear and win him over to she side of good. They need a real, solid victory once in a while, and why not this one? Plus, having a son who's old enough to be your father is automatically interesting, interaction-wise.

CORBIN:

He's already sort of a ghost in Abbie's head, but what if he's actually a ghost, still doing his work after death? He's still super mysterious, but what if he's connected to the Covens, what if they gave him the ability to come back as a spirit, or he stole it from them, or it's a curse, and what if in Season 1 he just didn't have the power yet to be visible to everyone? And I really want him to have safehouses, allies, hidden weapons, secret knowledge, lockboxes of artifacts, all over the town and the area, set up because he knew a lot more than he was sharing. He'd be the perfect one to serve as an usher to get everyone to where they needed to be to combat the end of the world, so it'd be cool if he knew that's what he was doing--and if he complicated it himself by getting emotionally involved.

VARIOUS COPS:

They've got to start noticing that things are going weird and it's focused on their co-worker and her weird new partner and the new boss they hardly know. Lets see them joining up, or actively fighting against, or also being in the Covens.

THE COVENS:

It's still blurry about which is which--is Katrina really in a good coven, or was she a good person in a bad coven? Is there really a good side and a bad side when it comes to the witches? Who else is associated with them, and who is part of them? Is there a modern witch who could help them with all that, who would have 200 years more knowledge than Katrina, even if not her power?

ALSO:

• How long until the Masons come looking for their dudes, and who will they blame for it?
• How long before we meet actual Knights Templar?
• If the Hessians are the ground force, what are their officers like? Are there other people there before we get to the demons calling the orders?
• If these Horsemen are being built from flawed humans, where is the power coming from? Are there actual eternal forces of evil lurking behind the Veil, also waiting to come through? And if they do manage to properly defeat one, will they just build another out of some other flawed and angry human to replace him?

I'm sure there's more I could go on about, but this is getting long and losing focus--these last bits are multi-season stories, probs--so I'll leave it at that. But I will ask this: What do you want to see in Season 2 (or later)?

NOTES:

*The closest would be early seasons of Supernatural, which has a lot in common on bare facts--two people with secret knowledge against the apocalypse and all--but has a different dynamic. Also, SH seems to have learned from SPN, and skipped the lead up, just dived right into the moral stuff that took SPN longer to get to. Or Buffy, though it's more like a segment of Buffy--the part with Willow and Tara and Giles and magic, mostly.

**And I watch A LOT of TV between old fandoms still on, new fandoms emerging, Live Blogging, and the habits I developed when I was reviewing everything under the sun.

Why I love @Midnight (and it's only partly because of a pre-existing crush on Chris Hardwick)

I mean, look at this cutie!

Thanks, Chris!

Okay, if you haven't seen the show yet, it's at "11:59 and 59 seconds!" on Comedy Central (the watermarks might have given that away), and it takes all the crazy and stupid and awesome and hilarious stuff that happened on the Interwebs that day and makes it into something that sort of has the shape of a game show. Well, everything that they can cram into half an hour. The contestants are comedians, friends, writers, stars of shows Chris Hardwick likes. The categories are ridiculous. A sample:

• Contestants have three words to make Chris cringe
• Contestants have to come up with as many weird things to suit a given hashtag as possible
• Contestants have to write reviews for really weird stuff on Amazon, Yelp, or whatever they were found on
• Contestants guess which of two ridiculous things are real--usually real tweets, or fanfic and fan art premises, or quotes from crazypeople

And guys, it's so much fun. I would watch much more than a half hour of this show. They somehow manage to cram so much stuff into that half hour (minus commercials) that it never feels like I'm being cheated, and I still want to watch more!

Why?

Because Chris Hardwick is one of us who happens to have a really awesome job where he gets to rub elbows with all the stuff we love--and it doesn't make him jaded or superior or anything shitty like that, it keeps him gleeful and puts him right between us and the most awesome stuff the internet and geek culture has for us.

Because the show is irreverent in that way where you know they really love it and know all the details, but they aren't afraid to poke fun at everything people take too seriously.

Because even though Chris is supposedly the host, he's actually turning over most decisions to the audience, to the contestants and the interwebs (though tweets, mostly), and gives back to the fans some of the love and participation they give him.

Because it's probably the most self-aware internet culture has ever been.

Because it's an excuse for really funny people to stand in a room together being the way they probably are when they're gaming at home--or, at least, the way we were when I had a gaming group.

Because they actually convinced a major channel to pay for this to happen four days a week, and that means I get to watch Chris Hardwick summing up the geek experience as it happens almost every day.

Because it offers a nice, easy-to-digest way to process all the piles of new memes and spoilers and trailers and jokes and videos and rumors and really weird stuff that comes out of the internet every day.

And most of all, because it's really funny.

There are times when it gets alarming--I mean, geeks do, and that part of why they're geeks--and there are times when the jokes go a little into touchy territory, but the point is to evenhandedly poke all those kneejerk spots and show us the holes in our logic as well as the logic of the things we love, and it's done so charmingly that most of the time it doesn't hurt. It's like the best slumber party ever. It's like how a world run by geeks would look. 

Captain America: The Winter Spoilers!

(gif from here)

This is so not a spoiler free blog, so if you haven't seen the movie yet 1) what the heck are you waiting for, 2) stop reading right now, and 3) if you're still reading, you've been warned and any spoileration is totes on you. And there's SO MUCH I want to talk about.

So! In whatever order it occurs to me!

They mentioned Steven Strange by name!
I'm one of the ones rooting SO HARD for a Doctor Strange movie. I haven't read a huge number of his comics, but I have loved the ones I have read, and I feel like he's off the wall enough that he'd be awesome on screen. Also, he wears the most ridiculous outfit in the comics, and I have a burning need to see how they make it less dumb but still look like him.

He's on the list, too, which means he could become of threat to evil-Shield, and that's already making his super-interesting. Also on that list? The Hulk. Which gives awesome nods toward the idea that sooner or later the avengers are gonna have to take Hulk down--and with Tony and Bruce being Science Bros, that's gonna be HARD.

SHEILD IS DOWN!
And it is spectacular! Coulson and Co have been chasing the edges of this thing all season, and they really know more than Cap does at this point, even though Cap is the one who brought it down with his bare hands in one day. Or did he? Because he took out the main building, he exposed the leadership and the conspiracy, the destroyed the three deadly new weapons...but Shield is global, and Hydra has held out for ages, so who knows what's still around and how they'll react?

I smell a Cap 3 in the works already, even though it'll literally be, like, three or four years before there's a gap in the schedule for it.

Cap is so cute.
Through the whole thing. Not as awkward and naive as he was before, but still sweet and a little unsure and adorable whenever he doesn't have to destroy something large with his bare hands because he's been hanging out with Hulk and picked up some destructo-power. I mean, that plane? Pure Hulk Smash. But he maintains his integrity, and he has cool one-liners, and he wrestles with the weight of who and what he is and where he finds himself--and he still won't ask a girl out because maybe she'll say yes, and he jokes with the other old soldiers, and he remembers things without getting mopey over them.

I just want to squish his face. That notebook of stuff to get to know alone qualifies for a face-squishing.

Bucky!
I mean, I knew who the Winter Soldier was about the moment they told us the name of this story, but still. There wasn't a lot of non-mind-controlled stuff with him, but the dude played what he had really well--the fierce brainstorming, the conflict, the resistance when it started coming back. And in the meantime, he was about the most badass single villain we've seen (who wasn't Loki, who is only mostly a villain anyway).

Speaking of, he's sort of in a Loki-adjacent relationship--brother/brother-like that went bad and now needs to be redeemed. Though, not being a god of chaos and mischief, I bet it'll go better in the end for him. I'm SO looking forward for Cap 3 and seeing how he does as a free agent in search of meaning and memories, while also sort of being where Cap was in Avengers, time-wise, since he was active through the last 70 years, but wasn't aware of it and so has to adapt now.

Maria Hill continues to kick ass!
She is such a great example of a woman in a man's world who can hold her own without being exactly the same as a dude. She's still a lady. She cares about things in a womanly way. But she will totally kill you if you get in her way while she's busy being loyal as a second in command to someone who went rogue and no one knows why. Beautiful.

Fury is so much more badass than we even thought.
Action!Fury is something I wanted to see before, not just BehindTheScenesInCharge!Fury. This time, we got it in spades, and it was great. Also, I'm pretty sure that zappy-carvy thing was actually a lightsabre. Just saying.

We also got emotions other than annoyance and anger, we got compromise, we got real human interaction (he had a grandpa? he didn't just appear whole and angry?). And we got him facing down the one person who he thought he could trust the most, and finding out that the one he thought he was in control of was actually the one he needed to trust. That's a lot of emotional stuff going on for our Fury.

Agent 13!
Her name is Sharon! Maybe Sharon Carter, relative of Peggy, cannon girlfriend (at some point) of Cap? Even if she's someone else entirely, she was believable as a guarded but friendly neighbor, as a badass chick in the ranks, and as a brave rebel when things went south. She survived the climax, she moved on, and she's still there when the movie ends, so I'm hoping for Big Things in Cap 3 for her!

Falcon is so neat.
Saucy, irreverent, super-capable, brave, caring, very human, and still also very much a super hero in his own right. I hope he gets his wings back. I hope he is there in Cap 3. I hope he gets a movie of his own! I hope he gets to meet Rhodey and they can talk about how annoying it can be, being the sidekick when you're super capable on your own.

Someone write that fic for me.

The tag! The Twins! Loki's staff!

Holy crapballs, that was an awesome tag! Not only did we get straight-up Nazis still doing whatever stuff they do, telling us that we still have Hydra, that it didn't entirely merge with Shield, but we got nefarious studies done on Loki's staff, and THEN we got QUICKSILVER AND SCARLET WITCH! They're supers who were apparently made, rather than born, and so far they're as separate from the quandary that is Magneto-belongs-to-another-studio-that-is-currently-using-him--but they're there! And they're nuts. And they're likely to be villains.

The second tag, while informative, really could have been Coulson showing up and telling Cap "I'm alive, I'm doing what you're doing, and I'm with you", but I guess that was too much to ask, what with the fact of his show and all.

Will Loki want his staff back? Is it Asgardian or Chitauri or Other or a merge, and what will the mean old Nazis do with it? What have they already done with it? How much of what they did with it was involved with the whole Insight thing? Does it have anything to do with The Twins?

Super-spy-ness x 1000000!
Which is exactly what a movie set in Shield that finds out no one can be trusted should be! It's also what I wanted Agents of Shield to be all along, so maybe now that can happen--what with the last ep happening concurrently, as far as I could tell*, and Coulson basically doing the same thing Cap is doing, though from the other direction.

Weird targeting system ready to take out twenty million potentially awesome new characters!
This was amazing! A dead Nazi scientist who survived his own collapse by duplicating his mind on fifty thousand reel-to-reel computers, came up with an algorithm that used modern documented and surveillance technology to study people's pasts and predict and manipulate their futures**, to identify people who will later be a problem for Hydra, and take them out now! It's a stunningly complex and super-techy-cool idea to be the heart of the conspiracy (as far as we know), and I really hope that Zola had backups of himself. Because he was totally not worried about that bunker-buster that took him out, and he isn't yet a screen in a big thug-belly yet.

And now there's a list! A list orders of magnitude bigger than the one that Coulson was working off of, though potentially from the same place, or working on the same ideas. A list of people who could become heroes and villains and mega hackers and whatever else might mess up Hydra's plans, and that is so evocative.

Natasha and Steve flirting!
So cute. Mostly because Steve was like "um, what?" and Nat was like "I'mma just gonna mess with you some more". Also because I read a lot of Steve-tasha fanfic after the Avengers and all of it was not at all like the actuality of them flirting. It was adorable, without ever really becoming a thing, and her trying to set him up with someone while simultaneously flirting with him, while also saving the world? So much fun.

Wonder where Clint was?
My bro read an article that says he was missing for a reason and that we'll find out what that reason is eventually***, but what made me think of it was that when they were in the middle of Questioning All The Loyalties, he wasn't even mentioned. Not even by Nat, who is his closest friend, as far as I can tell, who wouldn't question him, and certainly not in any way that she'd have to defend him.

And now I'm super curious about that.

Nat just in general.
I really like the idea that he trusts her, that he can see through the layers of snark and artifice and know that she's trustworthy, and that it's surprising to her, since she basically just has Clint and Fury and not much else in her life, when the Avengers aren't around.

AND! She got to use her zappy things, she got to be a total badass, she got a little sliver of backstory, and a whole lot of exposure that hasn't fallen out yet, and she was loyal even when no one else was. She was open and sweet and killer and dangerous and hackerific and self-sacrificing and basically just wonderful through the whole movie.

Not all the avengers were on that lost tho.
I don't remember exactly, but it was just Hulk, I think. Tony has been helping Shield with their tech****, Cap, Widow and Hawkeye work for them, Thor is off the grid because he's off world most of the time, which means that the one with the most power in the team is the one that's most exposed if this List goes wonky and someone starts tracking down those people for some reason.

And now I want that to happen. And I want Bruce to have to find and team up with other people who WERE on that List, and form his own team to survive the fallout of Shield being torn up and exposed--because you know the various pockets of crazy there are now going to go off on their own, trying to do whatever they were meant to do, but in their own way.

Poor old Peggy!
She was a heartbreaker--and then she broke my heart. I love that Steve found her. I love that he visited her and held her hand and treated her like she was still the young lady he knew, that he could have loved. I love that he stayed with Shield because she helped found it.

What if when they reassemble the Avengers, they just all bring all these new people with them, and they're like "what, he's cool."
I mean, Tony has Rhodey, who is a hero in his own right, and Pepper who may or may not have an adapted form of Extremis***** and who has worn the suit and could use it (and did, in the comic, at some point); Cap has Falcon and maybe Bucky if he can get him back; Clint and Nat have each other, and maybe Agent 13, and almost definitely Hill; Thor has Selvig and Jane and Darcy and Ian-the-intern; Hulk has Betty, maybe, and probably someone else. Who knows what the connection with Guardians will be, but Antman was actually a member in the comics and comes with his own team and allies.

So what if they just all join up in, like, Avengers 3? What if what we're headed for is the mega-team the comics has, with dozens of people who can answer any call, even several at a time?

That'd be awesome, that's what.


So what do you want to talk about from Cap 2? I'm up for any and all discussions!


NOTES:
*Jemma went to the Triskellion without Fitz and was cut off because something was happening, and they don't know about all this yet because they were dealing with their own something, which hasn't fallen out yet. Which means maybe Simmons can have something to do with the recovery and some first hand info about what happened there to bring back to Coulson and Co, and they can start lacing all the disconnected facts they've been chasing together.
**Imma call it that The Clairvoyant is part of the Algorithm or reads it, and that's how he Knows Stuff and also how no one ever sees him. Also that Coulson was right about Pusher From X-Files not being the actual one.
***I hope in a short. If not, I hope it means he's getting his own movie set up and they just haven't announced it yet.
****And he is going to be so pissed when he finds out they were The Enemy All Along, and that they've been using his tech for Evil when he specifically and explicitly stopped doing that himself.
*****I'm going to keep saying she does, and that she's living with it and learning to use it so she's not a helpless bystander to Tony's adventures anymore, and that she just hasn't been called on to save the world yet, until such time as cannon proves me wrong. And maybe even after that, depending.
Also, speaking of that, the wrap-up stuff at the ends of the movies isn't instant; it takes a while to take a widget out of your chest, scavenge your old collapsed mansion and fix your girlfriend; it takes a while for Hill and 13 to get new jobs; it takes a while for Thor to clean up the mess and come back to Jane. So those parts could be concurrent, and that's why they don't mention each other--they might not know about each other yet, since they're all working it out for themselves, still. I think I'm very interested in seeing how the Official Timeline***** is going to look by the time Ultron happens...
******Also this one: http://www.slashfilm.com/infographic-marvel-movie-universe-timeline/

Three ways to make a new Star Trek show I'd watch

My very first fandom (or, at most, my co-first*) was Star Trek. When I was five and six years old, we were still living overseas, and when the weather would shut down the regular programming, the USO channel would play Star Trek and old Godzilla movies all day and all night until the typhoons passed. My dad and I (and I suppose the rest of the family) would sit and watch the whole Original Series at least once a year because of it, and by the time I was a teen, I could tell you what episode we were looking at from the first shot that opened the ep, from the sound effects, from a tiny glance while channel surfing.

I wasn't entirely on-board with Next Gen at first, but we were still overseas at that point and we were living somewhere where there were only four channels and one of them was in Gaelic, so we watched the whole first season without really deciding whether we liked it or not. But by the end, and especially when it found it's feel in the second year, I was sold. It concluded during my birthday party when I turned fourteen, and I stopped the party for two hours to watch the finale.

It was that important.

DS9 was probably the most adult of them, and it took me a while to grow into it, but I appreciate it more now. Voyager was great until the last season really pissed me off**. I didn't like Enterprise despite liking most of the characters. I love the reboot as the totally different creature it is.

And I miss ST on TV, so here's some ideas about how to make an awesome new Star Trek show!

ONE: Make it about the redshirts

It's become a known fact that redshirts don't matter to the point where people who have never seen Star Trek know that 'redshirt' means you'll die soon. So what if we gave those dudes faces and stories? They're the ones who are actually running the ship, after all!

Advantages:

• Humanize the totally dehumanized disposable crew members.
• Show what the crazy actions of the bridge crew mean to those who are just trying to live their lives.
• Really interchangeable cast--people can last an episode or a season and be replaced easily, and so the commitment from the actors is not super-strict, meaning more people can be on the show and it could effectively be immortal, because cast-changes would be set up as an early and frequent occurrence.
• Totally different view of the Federation and Starfleet is possible.

TWO: Set it in the new universe of the movies
Because it's a whole new universe, everything is wide open, and that means they can both expand the context of the movies and tell whole new stories on weekly TV.

Advantages:

• No previous history to worry about, so no making it fit into the old continuity (a big problem Enterprise had).
• Chance to premier all sorts of other aliens in their new-series interpretations, without having to devote a whole movie to each one.
• Slick new look without clashing with the old series' at all.

THREE: Make it in the universe, but not Starfleet.

Most of these shows are basically soft military scifi, but the Federation is made of hundreds of planets and almost as many peoples, and piles of them also have spacefaring traditions. Hell, there's even humans who aren't in Starfleet, but who live and work on ships. Lets see a show about scientists and adventurers who team up to find treasure. Or about a monk and a scholar. Or about traders just trying to pay the bills. Or about misfits working on a mining ship who find themselves in a weird position. Or about bounty hunters. Or about a mixed-species family on a space station. Lets get all those other stories!

Advantages:

• There are so many non-military stories that could be told!
• People outside a strict military structure have a lot more freedom of choice and action than those who run a flagship and have super-defined rank.
• More opportunity to show how normal people live and what the events created by the fancy ships do to them.
• A really good chance to show real grittiness--my biggest peeve with ST is that everything is so clean it doesn't look real or lived in, so this would be a chance to show that things actually do get lived in, that things aren't all top-of-the-line tech, that normal people have to make do and invent ways to keep making do.

I'd watch all three of these shows at once. How about you? How would you set up a new Star Trek TV show so that it wasn't something we've seen before and avoids the issues older shows had?

Notes:

*My very first movie was the second Star Wars, and I grew up with them on TV and VHS; but I also grew up with Star Trek, and I see no reason at all why they have to be opposed fandoms. I love them both!

**Six years of Chakotay being quietly but demonstratively in love with Janeway, and then out of nowhere he's on his fifth date with Seven, with little to no previous indication of impending couplehood, no resolution of his feelings for Janeway, and no reaction from her to this new development???? No, just no.