Lauren on Life is Strange, 1.2 Out of Time - Video Game Review

photo from Steam

Beware: here there be spoilers.

Life is Strange, episode two, "Out of Time," starts the morning after Max’s big adventure in time rewinding begins. Max wakes up after staying up late doing some research on time travel and has to start her day, going through a routine that hasn’t changed, despite her new powers. She’s still an eighteen-year-old, after all.

Her need for a shower puts her in contact with the other girls in the dormitory and she immediately finds a use for her power, rewinding moments and conversations so she can get the optimal outcome, letting her be a little heroic and play peace-keeper too.

The interaction with Max’s classmates also reveals that something is going on around a quiet student named Kate Marsh.

And here, the game really started grappling with difficult material. Oh, there were hints of it in the last episode: Chloe’s strained relationship with her mother, outright hatred of her step-father, and her missing best friend, Rachel Amber, but these hints primarily served to make Chloe a compelling, if not entirely likable character.

In this episode, however, the implications of sexual violence against Kate Marsh brought things to an uncomfortable level for me. This isn’t easy material. It also puts Max in a place she might once have avoided – does she get involved to help Kate, or back away from the situation in order to keep flying under the radar.

More than the mediocre voice acting and crummy dialog, Max’s willingness to run off and play with her powers at Chloe’s request broke the immersion for me. The whole time I was playing through an awkwardly contrived fetch quest in the junk yard and letting Chloe bully Max into doing her bidding, I kept thinking about Kate’s plea: “I need to find out if Nathan Prescott helped me… or hurt me after that party.” This is not something I could walk away from in real life.

photo from lifeisstrange.com

Even while I was saving Chloe (twice) during the morning’s adventure, I kept wondering why Max would cling to someone who borders on emotional abusiveness and is suffering mainly from the consequences of her own actions when she had another friend in desperate need of support and reassurance, a friend who was drugged, filmed, and possibly even raped, whose pain was now being deepened by her sudden notoriety and the hasty judgment of her family.

Of course, I can remember being a teenager, lonely and anxious to be liked. I had a few people who pushed me around like Chloe does with Max, but I don’t see the same vulnerability in Max. Sure she wants to be liked, but she hasn’t shown signs of deep loneliness and need that usually go into a relationship like the one developing between her and Chloe – it just feels a little inconsistent to me.

I was relieved when Max finally got back to campus, and then saddened to see Kate’s plea for help rejected by the photography teacher.

The hopelessness and isolation of Kate’s situation really resonated with me, and I wasn’t sure how much more of Max’s hesitation to help her I could take when there was a call to the girl’s dormitory and I knew before Max got there what I would see.

I had to watch Kate throw herself from the roof twice before Max got herself in gear and made it up to the rooftop where her overused powers sputtered and died, leaving her (and me!) in a horrible situation with no take-backsies. If Kate jumped again, she would be gone for good.

The emotional burden of Max’s exchange with Kate, trying to talk her down from the edge, shows just what a good job the writers did setting the situation up. I could even appreciate what they’d done, having Max fritter her powers away earlier in the day doing things that had kept me somewhat frustrated.

Ultimately, I was lucky that I had paid so much attention to Kate. If her plight hadn’t been so important to me, I might not have had the information I needed to bring her down safely.

I don’t know if it was just me, but saving her didn’t give me a sense of relief or satisfaction. All I could think about was how close she’d come to dying, not because Max had spent all her energy earlier in the day, but because simple things that didn’t involve superhero skills hadn’t been attended to. This was powerful for me, and a little too much like real life, but I think it’s this power in the narrative that will keep me playing despite the bad dialog, the rough voice acting, and my own personality clash with Max.

photo from lifeisstrange.com

Like Kate, I need to know if she was hurt at that party and if (as Max suspects) what happened to her is connected to the disappearance of Rachel Amber. And I need to know that Kate will be ok.

The game closes with a super unlikely event - an unscheduled lunar eclipse. Even with all the weirdness going on, this was a little much for me to buy. Unseasonable snow? Plenty odd, but it worked with the vision of crazy weather the game started with. Short of the apocalypse coming and all life on Earth ending, I have trouble with the idea that the moon itself moved in the heavens to give the people of Arcadia Bay a bad omen.

Still, certain themes seem to be carrying through here. Max's powers aren't the only weird thing going on, and nature has a big part to play in the imagery of the game. Max is still closely tied with the deer pictured on her t-shirt a second day running, and one even appears during her junkyard adventure with Chloe.

Chloe is even more tied to the color blue and, I suspect, to the butterfly Max caught on film in the first episode.

Rachel Amber’s disappearance is always at the edge of everything, suggesting a darkness at the heart of Blackwell Academy.

It will be interesting to see if they can carry these themes through all five episodes in t a meaningful way. In the meantime, I'd really like to hear some other thoughts on the outcome and content of this episode. If you've played it, please let me know what you thought!

Click here to see the previous episode.
Click here to see the next episode.

Okay, here's the problem with Fox, in ten easy points

1. It insists on buying high-concept, deep-genre shows
2. It allows those shows to be made well at the beginning
3. It launches them with not a heck of a lot of promo
4. It has developed a hairtrigger "whelp, I guess it's canceled" response to anything at all that's not the biggest numbers ever
5. It refuses to let genre shows build an audience
6. It keeps making the same show over and over again, technically*, and then cancelling
7. It doesn't care if people like the show, it's running some sort of biggest-numbers experiment so fuck all of us
8. It fails to see that constantly offering and taking away is giving it a reputation for unreliability
9. It fairls to see that more and more people simply won't bother watching next time for fear of loving it and losing it again from the same channel that already cancelled so many
10. It doesn't listen to the right voices along the way, and keeps making more and more of the same mistakes

*For the last few seasons anyway. Sleepy Hollow was a runaway hit with a crazy british guy, a pretty black cop, and a weird supernatural story. Minority Report was a crazy psychic guy, a pretty black cop, and a weird scifi story. Second Chance is a crazy reborn guy who is a cop, with a pretty Indian scientist, and a weird scifi story. Lucifer is a crazy british supernatural guy, a pretty white cop, and a weird supernatural story. It's like a random story generator, just rearranging things to see what works, but they all work and they're not giving them a chance. It could have been a channel full of shows all in this same niche, but it keeps bumping them instead.

I'm getting more and more salty. I'm sick of it.

Sami on The Magicians 1.2

The Magicians airs at 9pm on SyFy Monday nights.*

Episode two! Just as neat as episode one! This show hits the ground running and keeps going, and I hope it holds up!

This picks up right where last episode left off, right after The Beast plucked out the Dean's eyes and everyone noticed that Q and Co were able to do something about the paralysis spell that had trapped everyone else. Quentin knows that this happened because they tried to summon Alice's brother and somehow that let The Beast through, but he doesn't want the administration to know because that's forbidden and he doesn't want to be expelled. If he is, he'll get mind-wiped, and he can't handle going back to the ill-fitting mess he used to be. 

But he's not the only one hiding things. Penny has always heard voices, since he's a mind reader, but one of them has always been able to cut through all the noise, and taught him all he knows about magic. He's never met him, but he's his only friend--and he just found out that only friend is The Beast that everyone fears and hates and is evil. So he's determined to leave.

In Magical Fight Club, Julia shows up for her tour and falls into a test-trap. They lock her into a meat freezer with another initiate, and they have to figure their own way out. Julia refuses to give in and does what needs to be done--cutting into a human body that's being stored there--to be able to work the spell they need to not die of cold before they can find their way out. Turns out that other initiate was the one in charge, and she likes Julia's spunk.

Meanwhile, Quinn is a mess waiting to see what'll happen. He picks a fight with Penny and gets a spell he doesn't know how to use correctly tossed back at him--and breaks his arm super bad. And he learns that everyone has a dark past here--Elliot killed someone accidentally because he didn't know he was telekinetic until he was pushed too far, and pushed a bully in front of a car. He says that magic comes from pain--that you have to have bad stuff like that to do it.

And Quin is more and more convinced that Fillory, from the books, is a real place. They know that there are alternate worlds that they can sometimes interact with, and it seems too much to be a coincidence that there's that truth, plus these books full of kids who disappear through clocks written by a man who watched several neighbor kids go missing, and these dreams Quinn has been having that gave him the sigil he needed to do the spell that let the Beast in.

In the end, Q doesn't get his mind wiped, and he gets on probation instead of expulsion. The Specialist likes that he's doing his best and he wants to do magic so badly despite not being super great at it. And unbeknownst to him, she has a talk with the Dean--blind and broken-handed--that implies that she and he were part of something similar to this that happened before. And that's a really interesting way for the story to go--the administration of this magical school doesn't block or deny the kids, but wants them to succeed to do what they couldn't do themselves before. 

And there's moles in Breakbills trying to get info and supplies for the Fight Club!

Two episodes in, and this show has so much story in it, but doesn't feel crammed or rushed or shorthanding. It's giving everyone their moments, and it's implying more without having to explicitly state it all. In fact, no one is explicitly saying anything at all. They're letting all these kids figure stuff out for themselves, which is both exciting and potentially disastrous, and it's so interesting to see how it goes. There's so much going on, and it's going to be so cool seeing how it all goes together as the season unfolds.

I'm really enjoying how this show looks. Breakbills is lit so warm and glowy, and then the city is bland and grey, and the Magical Fight Club is all chilly and blue. Magic looks awesome here, all complex systems and precise hand-gestures. And The Beast! SO GOOD. A man made of moths in a suit who can walk through mirrors. Quinn and Co broke got the other students out and broke the mirror, and the school is redoing all the wards, but apparently Alice isn't meant to be there but hasn;t been magically ejected yet, and The Beast got in once, so who's to say he can't get in again? 

What did you think of episode two? What do you think happens next? Tell us in the comments, or come talk to me on Twitter!

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• Sami on The Magicians 1.1

*Because apparently every damn thing needs to be in one hour on one day. But it also reruns later, after midnight, like most SyFy shows do.

Sami on Lucifer 1.1

Lucifer airs at 9pm on Fox Monday nights.*

I'll be honest. I wasn't sure that Fox could Do The Thing when it came to this show. I mean, it's got this mix of literal hellfire-and-demons, sexiness, nightclubs, temptation, and...police procedural? It could easily have been a mess--or to have erred too far on the side of "look how sexy we're being, ooh" and forgotten that we have to like the people, too.

I guess I didn't have to worry about that!**

Lucifer--the guy and the show--is fun, sassy more than sexy, and full of both cackles and giggles. Giggles for the cute and silly parts, cackles for the wisecracks and wrathful vengeance.

Here's what happened in the pilot:

The Devil got tired of hell, and decided to go on vacation, living among people and running a nightclub with a cold-blooded demoness named Maze who totally had some guy under her skirt as she stood at the bar in her intro. He's been around long enough that he's helped a pop star build her career and is now helping her out because she's a mess. He assures her he's not interested in her soul, she just owes him a favor, and the favor is to get herself together. I feel like this is going to be an important point about how his power works. 

He's also been away long enough that Heaven has noticed that no one is in charge of Hell, and that means all those demons are escaping to earth and all those bad people are going unpunished. A big fierce angel comes to try to strongarm him into going home, and it's neat. His wings look weird, but everything slows down real cool when the angel and fallen angel have their talks***, and the way Lucifer reacts like a sulky child makes me think there's more to it than just that he decided one day to up and leave and doesn't want to to back. Like that something bad happened. Something he's specifically running away from that is harder to handle than the fact that demons are escaping all over. Tho not in this episode.

Anyway, the pop star agrees to put her life together and get back on her feet as a functional adult--and then she gets shot to death in a driveby. Lucy is also shot, but he can't die so he gets better, but she was his friend and he's positively wrathful about her death. The killer instantly crashes his car (karma? hand of god?), and before he dies, he tells Lucifer that he just pulled the trigger and he did it for the money.

The shooting draws the attention of the cops--specifically Chloe Decker--which leaves Lucy as a witness. He tells them what he saw, and doesn't bother pretending he's not an ancient immortal being, which makes him look crazy, so she sort of blows him off. She goes on with her case, and he tracks his by getting people to confess things, one of his skills. They meet up again after he's gotten the pop star's boyfriend all riled up, and then "charms" him into confessing that he actually did love her and didn't kill her. Chloe arrests Lucifer for interfering with her case, and he's sort of "ooh, this is new" about it all, and talks her into letting him go along while she investigates his friend's death since he's the one that got her the information that they need to talk to a shrink.

The shrink leads them to an actor the pop star was sleeping with, which leads them back to her manager. The man that Lucifer set her up with to further her career. The man who's career was ruined when she left him at the altar and took her talent with her. During the arrest, he shoots Chloe, and Lucifer uses his invulnerability to protect her from a whole bunch of other bullets, and then makes sure the manager "got what was coming to him". We almost see his demon-face, all red and scary in a cracked and blurry mirror, and his full anger is super impressive. He doesn't say exactly what he did with the guy though...

And it was so much fun.

On the way to the psychiatrist, Chloe has to stop to pick up her daughter, and that whole scene is golden. Lucifer saying he doesn't like kids, then immediately befriending the first one he sees, a tiny gap-toothed girl sitting outside the principal's office for standing up for herself against a bully much older and bigger than her. And then Lucifer spooking the bully before meeting Choe's ex and being totally uninterested in the manhood contest he tries to start, but super interested in the fact that Chloe even has an ex. So great.

And at the psych's office, the woman's reaction to his "charm" has he calls it when he throws a whammy**** on someone. The psychiatrist making a deal with him--information for their case and he'll sleep with her and it'll be good. Him noting that Chloe is immune to his charms, and the psychiatrist noting how much that bothers him. And then when the case is over, Lucifer goes back to the office to hold up his end of the bargain, and makes a new one: he'll sleep with her as much as she wants, if she'll listen to him, because he's got a lot on his mind.

That's a lot of sex, in that scene, which could have been offputting, but the show handles it well and plays it mostly for laughs, and it's all off screen. The fact that Chloe is immune is great, of course, and also gives them a reason to be together in future episodes--as he says, "I've proven myself to be an indispensable resource and you're a pariah in the precinct and need a partner" (or something close to that). He's good at getting people to confess things, and she's immune and he wants to know why. 

The two leads have great chemistry. Lucifer is super charming, but also sort of a dork and a shiny-eyed spectator that's mostly amused by all the stuff that humans get up to. Both of them have implied depth that should be great for further episodes. Trixie is the perfect level of cute-but-not-annoying, and the fact that she instantly loves Lucy and he's so awkward about it is great. There's a lot to work with in this pilot, and if the transition into the actual season goes well, it should be really fun to watch. The pilot was charming--tho not "charming", I didn't feel the need to confess anything--and exciting and balanced and interesting. The usual "and it's a police procedural" works surprisingly well with such a strange addition as the actual living Devil, and it's surprisingly wholesome for all the implied sex and drugs and rock and roll. 

I wonder how long before someone flips out on principle without even bothering to watch the episode?

So basically, I really liked it, and if it stays that good, I could desperately love it. What did you guys think of Lucifer? Share in the comments, or come talk to me on Twitter!

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*Currently after X-Files; don't know what'll happen in a month when the usual monday shows come back...
**Now I just have to worry about Fox's track record of giving us what we want just to cancel it MINUTES LATER OH MY GOD WHY.^
^This is because of the news that they're already moving Second Chance to the Friday deathslot, as well as rearranging other stuff. How is anyone supposed to bother watching, FOX, when everyone knows you'll just cancel it? How are they supposed to try when you keep moving stuff around?
***And the first one happens while Bowie is playing, so there's points for that. The sound track in general is really awesome. All songs mentioning or talking about the devil, it's pretty great.
****Or should I say "bedevils someone"?

Sami on X-Files 10.1 and 10.2

The XFiles airs Monday nights at 8pm through February.

The XFiles is back, you guys. The weirdness, the spookiness, the office, the pencils in the ceiling, the Mulder and Scully working together for the good of the world. And for the most part, it's right.

Episode one was a mythology episode like any, but maybe a little more sensical than some of them. Scully, who's been working at the dimmest-lit hospital in the world for the last seven years and seems to always be splattered in blood there, calls Mulder to tell him someone has been looking for him. That someone is Tad O'Malley, a right-wing nutbar making a fortune off of fear on TV...who happens to have stumbled across exactly what Mulder has been looking for all this time. 

Tad is creepy. Like, I'm not sure if he's supposed to be, but he's basically romancing Mulder AND Scully, and it's creepy. He takes Mulder to a hanger and shows him a triangular ship retroengineered from alien technology, and it's like handing all the cookies in the shop to a five year old. He's sold. Tad's idea is that the conspiracy is real, but the alien part was all subterfuge.

He introduces Scully to a girl who's been abducted a bunch and claims to have alien DNA and to have been impregnated and de-pregnated several times--Scully's story on steroids, basically. She also says she can read minds, and it seems as if she can, and that's a great way to get some backstory in about how Mulder got depressed and Scully wanted to move on with their lives, and it destroyed their relationship. Which is heartbreaking.

Tad also tries actually seducing Scully, which she's apparently vaguely surprised and intrigued by, but the second Mulder needs her, she doesn't care, and that's what I like to see.

Anyway, Tad wants to talk about Sveta (the girl) and Mulder and Scully's work on his show, and Mulder wants to see where this rabbit hole goes, but Scully thinks he's lying. A DNA test of Sveta's blood shows no alien DNA. It falls apart then when she's out and Mulder's in and Tad's confused, and Sveta goes to the news and says Tad paid her to lie, and it's a mess.

But Scully apparently lied about the results AND sequenced her own DNA several times and there actually is weirdness going on there. But Sveta and the hanger with the ship get attacked and destroyed, including all the scientists they met, and so that's the new arc for the mythology--who's telling the truth and who's manipulating the story again, and, of course, as always, what's the actual truth?

It wasn't as non-stop complicated as some of the old mythology episodes, and was pretty straight forward for that. But there was the reveal that Cancer Man managed to survive again, and is apparently still dealing with Mulder poking his nose in--and probably still worrying about whether he should have just killed him or not, I'd assume. Oh, and they've reopened the XFiles, so M&S are Special Agents again!

And the space between the mythology is taken up by Mulder and Scully trying to figure out where they stand with each other, how they want to handle this opportunity, what they feel about it, and how they can be partners again. It was a lot of them bashing heads about whether it's alien or not, whether it matters if it's alien or not, and Scully trying to rein in Mulder's tendency for crazy that led him to the depression that drove them apart. But there was also Scully being a doctor, and Mulder tracing down leads, and the two of them always being there for each other even with all the baggage between them now. Scully says that the Xfiles was the most challenging and intense job she ever had and Mulder was the most challenging and intense relationship, and the way she said it, it sounded like her life now, even as a surgeon and doctor, is less fun and interesting. Scully has been dimmed by time, and it's sad--so, of course, she has to come back to the XFiles. Mulder, for his part, never really left, even though he left the FBI. And, apparently, Skinner was looking out for him all this time anyway.*

So it was basically a happy homecoming for them, eventually, despite all Scully's eyerolling, and it was definitely a happy homecoming for all us fans. It's been 14 years and endless lifetimes, but the XFiles fandom is like:

and is suddenly everywhere. Livetweeting was a joy--a perfect blending of how I used to watch this show with my family and talk about it all week between classes with my friends, and my modern TV habits of watching and talking at the same time. It was almost all positive--from the second Mulder starts Mulder-loguing at the opening and we all switched to all caps and tried not to burst into tears from the sheer joy of having XFiles on our screens again, to the end when we all knew we'd only have to wait one day for the second one. And it was amazing watching everyone get more and more annoyed as the first ep was delayed by the football game.

It's not exactly the same. A lot has happened with politics and conspiracy theories and world events since XFiles went off the air, but the PBS Idea Channel video about it is right: there's a real-world-paranoia reason XFiles existed when it did, and there's a related but distinct real-world-paranoia reason for it to come back now, rather than five years ago or five years from now. It feels like something we need when it's suddenly back, something that we missed and didn't even realize how much. 

Tad's loony conspiracy theories blend in the logical progression of Mulder's with the post-9/11 anti-everything paranoia all over the internet now, making it both more crazy and more real again. Rooting it in the now while maintaining the framework the show has always had.

SO. GOOD.

The second episode was a good old fashioned evil-science episode, and felt more like the team we all know and love. Episode 1, everyone was a little awkward, as they should be, coming back to something they both thought was behind them, but they were back as a team and working right in episode 2.

A scientist goes bonkers and hacks his boss's servers, bleeds at the eyes, and then stabs himself in the ear with a letter opener until he's dead, all because he's hearing a sound no one else can hear. This leads them to his secret boyfriend who tells them he was worried about his kids--even though he's single and doesn't have any.

Scully pulls strings to get them a meeting with the biggest funder of her own hospital, who happens to also be where the leads are all going, and he shows them his pet project: keeping all these kids with really weird deformity-conditions in closed rooms so he can see what makes their genetics do this in isolation, and see if his ideas for treatments work. While they're there, one of the girls almost gets out and freaks when they try to take her back to her room, and things go flying off the food cart the orderlies are pushing. Mulder must be getting rusty; he didn't even comment on obvious mental powers.

But a girl they meet at the hospital, who was pregnant and being kept there, disappears, gets hit by a car, and has her baby taken from her belly, tips Mulder off that he's not trying to cure these kids, he's trying to do hybridization studies. Combined with Mulder experiencing the sound himself and finding out that it's from a kid who was presumed killed at birth trying to talk to people's minds, leads them back to that scientist. That boy is his son, who his mother "let out" to save him from whatever experiments he was doing on her children. The girl at the facility is his older daughter. They know each other on sight, and they know what he did to them. Together, the telekinetic and the telepathic, break out and go on the run after melting their mad-scientist-dad's brain.

I miss Scully's case reports on this one. We don't get a lot of seeing what they conclude from this, since Scully was knocked out and didn't see what happened and Mulder was being tossed across the room and also affected by the sound and missed them escaping, too. Or so he says. 

There's a little indication that Mulder is not quite willing to give up his underground tactics--he stole the first dead guy's phone and used that to find a lot of the people they talk to this ep--but mostly it's good times again. Mulder and Scully sent out by a grumpy Skinner to solve a mystery that is right in their wheelhouse. Scully misses the most unusual stuff because she's knocked out. Mulder catches some of the attacks but isn't the point of them. It was so great to see again.

So far, a third of the way through the revival (already???)** the series is looser about whether or not Scully sees things, and she's long past rigorously denying that anything is extraterrestrial, but they still have the believer and the skeptic roles to play. The show is also the modern desaturated cool-tones rather than the old too-dark-to-see shadowiness, and I miss the cleverness of hiding the low-budget monsters in shadowy corners, but I like how it looks a lot like Fringe now, which supports my theory that Fringe is an offshoot division.

And best of all, it's not bad. I was so afraid that it wouldn't be good, but it's good, and I'm so happy it's back. The fact that they're calling it Season 10 rather than some revival one-shot gives me hope that this will be a regular thing--six or eight or ten episodes in the off-season, between their other TV shows, new ones every year for a while. What a time to be a geek!

What did you guys think of this return to the land of aliens and conspiracies? Tell us in the comments, or come talk to me on Twitter!

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*That scene was so shippy. The starving Mulder-Skinner shippers just got a feast with "I was looking out for you like I've always looked out for you"!
**I love a short series--it means all story and no wheel-spinning--but the seasons do go fast, and then there's so much waiting. Almost all of my fav shows right now^ are short-season, and I feel like all I do is wait!
^XFiles, of course, but also Sherlock, Doctor Who, 12 Monkeys, Killjoys, Dark Matter, Stitchers, Mr Robot, and now The Expanse, Colony, and The Magicians. So much waiting.

Sami on Agent Carter 2.1

Agent Carter airs at 9pm on ABC Tuesday nights*.

Peggy is backkkkkk!!!! And she's awesome right off the bat, as she should be, because she gets so little screentime despite how important she is to the MCU. We got a two-hour / two-episode launch this week, so there's lots to go over.

Jack is still an ass who can't handle a woman who can do things. Peggy managed to track down and set a successful trap for Dottie Underwood, and she'll only talk to Peggy, but when Jack gets a call from Souza over at the new Hollywood office, she's the only agent he can spare because he wants her out of his face. Which means, of course, that Dottie won't cooperate and he can't stop the FBI from taking her away. He does, however, make some career choices that are almost definitely how Hydra gets into Peggy's project.

The ass.

Across the continent in LA, Peggy is happy to see Souza, but he's surprised to see her because he expected more than one and not her. He really shouldn't have been surprised, because he knows Jackass as much as Peggy does, but whatevs. Apparently, they never did have that drink he asked her out on last season, and things got awkward, and it's adorable.

Their case is neat: a lake that froze almost solid in the middle of a heatwave, and a body of a lady in the middle of it. While they're trying to decide if the ice was to cover the murder, or the murder was incidental, the body of the lady keeps not defrosting, and then infects the ME who is supposed to autopsy her. He shatters, she stays frozen, and they track the trail to a science firm that once worked on the rush to create atomic power during the war, and accidentally created a rift in the world in one of their tests. Which led to zero matter: this angry** black stuff that sucks up all energy it comes into contact with, which is why people and things keep freezing.

Along the way, they meet a politician who had been dating the dead girl on the side, and his would-be moviestar wife. He attends at least one overly-pompous Hydra meeting, and she pays off the nobody cop who kills the guy who would have told Peggy what this was all about, but that doesn't really slow our Pegs down much. She's caught the eye of Dr Wilkes, who works for the company experimenting with this thing, and after he gets her to go on a date with him so they can talk about this stuff in a nice safe public place, she talks him into helping her steal the zero matter.

That doesn't go well. It gets out, Wilkes gets either exploded or sucked into a portal***, and Peggy is shaken and scared and sad. Plus, the actress-Hydra-lady gets infected with the zero matter in some new way that shows as a crack in her head rather than a violent freezing.

Around this, as always, is piles of delightfulness.

Mrs Jarvis is amazing. She's a hugging chatterbox who knows exactly what her husband was up to last season and is more on board than he is--which is saying something, since he basically begs Peggy to let him be her partner again because LA is horrible and his job is boring since they stopped working together. She also makes Peggy a gun-garter that hints at her being Peggy's Q and I want that so bad. And she has absolutely not a single shred of jealousy about Peggy's interactions with her husband, even when she walks in on them tussling as he's trying to prove his new fighting skills, and when she signals that she needs him in the middle of the night.

And best of all, she thinks Jarvis is equally as adorable when he's poorly trying to catch a flamingo named Bernard and when he's going off to save the world.

Rose is there, too, transferred with Souza, and she's already got more screentime to be awesome. She's taken up surfing!

Souza now wears low-key Hawaiian shirts and has a tan, and is dating someone that he didn't tell Peggy about. Violet loves Peggy on sight, and wants to show her around town, which makes both of them super uncomfortable, but not so uncomfortable as Pegs is when she finds the ring he was going to give to his cute little nurse girlfriend. Souza, however, still has feelings for Peggy--when she calls Jarvis, and Jarvis calls the office for help, Sousa drops everything and takes what he's got--Rose and Jarvis--and storms off to save her, despite her not needing saving. He was so upset! And he literally shoved people out of his way to get to her when she came out of the wreckage. Rose knows that he cares about her, too. He's not been subtle at all.

It's sort of glorious.

Peggy is semi oblivious; she likes him, too, but she steps back when she sees that he has a girlfriend, and haltingly starts trying to move on with Wilkes. So of course he dies / disappears. It's going to give Peggy a complex. She can't catch a break when it comes to love, and that makes her attempts to make friends and open up to people that much sadder.

Agent Carter is off to a great start for season two! It's snappy, it's delightfully vintage, and it's now set in a great time and place for Hollywood, and an interesting point in history as the world recovers from the war and tries to figure out what happens next. That's hinted at when Red Foreman offers Jack a place in whatever comes after the now-going-obsolete-he-says SSR. Hydra is making moves all over the place in the background, and it'll be interesting to see how it does that without Peggy, who fought them directly not long ago, noticing what they're doing.

And it's also great how much lady-bonding there is! No one is jealous of Peggy in the lady camp; all the girls think she's the coolest thing and just sort of wrap themselves around her socially clumsy but professionally awesome self and make room for her in their lives without her having to prove anything.

Her and Jarvis still have a delightfully Steed-and-Mrs Peele vibe about them, maybe moreso now that he's actively going into her cases with her. Her and Souza have a bond that's under whatever they're both currently doing with their lives, and it's great and sad and charming, and it'll be great seeing them working together again. There's that scientist who feels like the field agents get all the glory and leave him out. There's Rose who is probably the best receptionist in the world. There's the SSR's cover as a casting agent that should offer all sorts of bonkers interludes--and dovetails nicely with Howard Stark's new venture as a movie maker.

There's so much going for this season, and it looks great and is just as delightful as it was before, but with new stories and new complications. If they can avoid letting the Hydra stuff take over the plot like Agents of Shield did, it could be even better than season one! I just hope that the first black character they've had isn't actually dead the same story he's introduced in, because that's lame as crap, no matter how great it is to see Peggy pissed off about racism.

What did you guys like best about these two episodes? What do you think the next episodes are gonna be like? Share in the comments below, or come talk to me on Twitter!

Tweets about #agentcarter from:pirategirljack, OR from:sineater_danyi, OR from:kiddle, OR from:trincynna, OR from:ohgress, OR from:manisandmakeovers, OR from:acciolacquer include:retweets

*For the next six or eight weeks, anyway, and up against Shadowhunters and iZombie, which is a terrible crime of programming if you ask me.
**It's like literally angry, all thrashing around and attacking things. It looks like the portal from SHIELD when it's active, and like the Ether from Thor 2, and I hope that's  intentional and not just a lack of imagination from the SFX guys, because think of those implications, dudes.
***I'm rooting for portal so a) SHIELD can meet him later when he falls through or they find wherever that stuff goes, or b) Peggy can find him again but with a Blink-episode-of-Doctor-Who time-drift where he's old and they've missed their opportunity for love and it's sad and they have to deal with it, but he's got info now that she needs. If they go that way, I want him to not die like in Blink, but to get hired as a consultant or a scientist or whatever, and still be sweet on Peggy.

A quick roundup of Danyi's Monkey Thoughts!

Over on her 12 Monkeys fanblog, Danyi has been doing a series of things to think about in 12 Monkeys Season 1, and it's been so much fun to share theories and swap ideas and play around with speculation. Go take a look:

#12Monkeys #MonkeyThoughts https://t.co/nyl2eN35gn @kiddle @pirategirljack @mrscify @eurasianjes @pshaps @12MonkeysSyfy @F_U_ng

— Danyi (@SinEater_Danyi) January 20, 2016

It's Friday! Which means #MonkeyThoughts #12Monkeys https://t.co/jOXYnomnGp

— Danyi (@SinEater_Danyi) January 15, 2016

It's Wednesday! Which means time for another Monkey Thoughts! https://t.co/yQsZ7Kp3ld #12monkeys #MonkeyThoughts

— Danyi (@SinEater_Danyi) January 13, 2016

And this first one about Ramse and his role in all this.

Keep track of her on Twitter for links every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday!

Sami on Colony 1.1

Colony airs at 10pm on USA Thursday nights.

Okay, there's another cool new show on the block, guys,

The first episode is a little slow at first. It starts out looking normal, with a family getting ready for the day's work, and then there's this cool shift--the normal mechanics work is actually handing and moving alien power generators. The typical wifely home-life is actually working for the resistance in secret.

Will (must not call him Sawyer) then forges papers to go from one part of the city to another against the rules to find his son, and that's when things get interesting. See, the city of LA is divided up into these huge walled segments, it's implied the walls went up quickly, and they don't look like cement or something. They're also watched by flying alien drones and human collaborators called Redhats. 

And they're the focus of resistance attacks.

Will is the only survivor of one of those bombings, and it makes him noticeable; to get out of being punished, he's recruited by the governor to try to bring down the resistance he doesn't know his wife is a part of. They woo him with all these luxuries that no one can get anymore--like bacon*--while threatening his family if he refuses, so he has to say yes.

Meanwhile, Katie, the wife and mother of this family, has her own story going. She's trying to barter for insulin for her sister's family, and gets super tough when they try to swindle her--but also learns that dogs can be used to home-brew your own insulin, so maybe she'll have a new cottage industry now? 

And she's nervously involved with the resistance, though she didn't know about the bombing that almost kills her husband and makes him visible to the powers that be, and when Will is recruited, she offers them the opportunity to use her as a double agent. Which should be more than ripe for story-fodder!

This first episode, like I said, is slow. It's from some of the people who made Lost, so it's not answering any questions, like, at all, and I know that bothered some people. It also feels a little like typecasting for Sarah Wayne Callies since she's once again in an apocalypse (of sorts) with a husband that went missing, a kid who isn't in the house where he should be, and up to something sneaky. But it's also setting up a lot of story, and since we have ten episodes this season, we should have enough space to really get into the details of this story, without getting bogged down in wheel-spinning like mystery-based long-series can get.**

Here's what we have so far:

• Mysterious aliens*** that we have yet to see anything but the drones and that one space ship**** launch from took over and walled off the humans.
• When they did, they made cars almost obsolete, so everyone rides bikes, and I wonder if that means they're trying to save us?
• Everything is rationed and work is regulated.
• People can't leave their districts without forging their papers, but there seems to be a big underground in forged papers and human-smuggling, and it's not that hard when someone else isn't trying to blow you up.
• Will and Katie have a middle kid who was somewhere else when the walls went up and they don't know what happened to him since. He just had his twelfth birthday.
• The resistance is incredibly vague--they're illegal, but do they want to free the humans or are they just rejecting the aliens? Do the aliens want nefarious things, or are they just misunderstood?
• The other two kids haven't had much story of their own yet, but they're going to be between the resistance and the collaborators now that their parents are each on one side, so they've probably got something coming up.
• There's a little bit of a Falling Skies vibe, but less obviously scifi and more creeping and subtle, so far.

Hopefully, now that things are set up, we can get things moving on the story! If Mr Robot is any indication on how USA is doing their high-concept shows now, we can probably expect things to keep being different than we think they are, and for the ten episodes to get super rich and complicated with story--which is exactly how an invasion-or-colonization story should be!

What did you guys think about the first episode of Colony? Share here in the comments, or come talk to me on Twitter!

 Tweets about #colony from:pirategirljack, OR from:sineater_danyi, OR from:kiddle, OR from:trincynna, OR from:ohgress, OR from:manisandmakeovers, OR from:acciolacquer include:retweets

*I maintain that bacon would be like gold in the apocalypse.
**Cough - everything after the first season of Lost by these same people - cough.
***Probably aliens.
****Probably a spaceship, or some other sort of transportation-event.

Lauren on Life is Strange, 1.1 Chrysalis - Video Game Review

photo from Steam

Life is Strange, episode one, Chrysalis, has a lot of the elements I look for in video games: an interesting premise, compelling characters, depth of story, and the added bonus of a realistic female lead character.

While the writing is a little rough - the dialogue feels stilted and a little on the nose, there’s room for this to improve since this is the first of five “episodes.”

Max Caulfield is the right blend of regular (she faces the same anxieties and challenges as the average high-schooler) and remarkable. She’s quiet in class and a bit disconnected from the other students, understandable since she transferred to Blackwell Academy as a senior in order to take advantage of its notable photography program. Despite her tendency to appear shy and reserved, she has a lot going on in her thought life, providing interesting commentary and insight into the school and the characters around her as she moves through her day.

Max Caufield - from lifeisstrange.com

The fact that she was willing to transfer to a new school to pursue her passion of photography isn’t the only thing that makes her remarkable. When faced with a situation that is every school’s nightmare, a shooting in the girl’s bathroom, Max steps in to save the day by exercising an ability she didn’t even know she had: the power to undo time.

The decision shifts her outside of her comfort zone, immediately putting her on the radar of the school’s suspicious head of security and forcing her to choose between her customary anonymity and reporting part of the incident to the school’s principal. Either choice is sure to have later consequences.

I doubt there’s a single person out there who hasn’t wished that they could go back and do something over, and Max is no exception. She takes advantage of her new-found “rewind” to build relationships with the students around her, fulfilling a very common desire to be liked.

The ability to rewind doesn’t make her flippant, though. She feels every event deeply and carries the emotions and experience with her even though she erased the cause.

The first episodes hints at a couple of themes, including the imagery of the deer that seems to be associated with Max somehow and the blue butterfly that seems to go with her power, or perhaps another character - I couldn’t help but notice someone with hair that matches who ought to be important to the unfolding story, and some discussion of local Native American traditions.

Max and Chloe - from lifeisstrange.com

With about four hours of gameplay, two if you ignore all the odd items that Max can explore in her surroundings, it’s a good afternoon’s playing time, and should put the entire game at somewhere around twenty hours total. I’ll try to keep track as I play through the next episodes so I can put out a good final estimate.

The gameplay is best with a controller. I use an X-Box 360 controller with my PC since the interface for keyboard and mouse is awkward to the point that it had me frustrated. My experience improved immensely with my controller in hand.

So far, the game seems promising. I’m hoping that the clumsy dialog and (to be honest) amateurish voice acting will improve as the episodes go on so that both support the promising story that is hinted at in the aptly named Chrysalis episode. I look forward to seeing how the themes carry through the story and getting to know the characters better as the game progresses.

Hi, I'm New Here!

Hello everyone!

I'm Lauren, one of the ladies who recently joined Professional Fangirl! I am incredibly excited to be here and can't wait to start talking with you about the things I love. 

Let me tell you a little about myself:

I am a devoted writer, committed gamer, avid hiker, undaunted crafter, and apprehensive (neophyte) coder.

I love science fiction, fantasy, superheroes, and horror in all mediums, so I spend my time, writing, reading, watching, and playing all of them.

I love deeply, and nothing gives me greater joy than sharing the things I am passionate about.

My job in customer service supports my writing and gaming habit, and I hope one day my writing (and creating video games!) will support my customer service habit.

I have a few poems published, some short stories on their way out, and a couple of full length manuscripts in editing before they're sent out into the world. I also blog in other places when the fancy strikes me and have lots of articles, press releases, and web content floating around the internet from my freelance writing gigs.

I may either be the child of neglectful dragons, or a time traveler's progeny, hidden in the past for some great destiny. I'm still working out which.

I have applied to be sent to Mars in 2022.

I hate cooking, even though I'm good at it.

I am a connoisseur of tea.

And chocolate.

And this is my favorite blog on the Citadel.

Thank you so much for taking the time to get to know me a little!