Video - Interns of F.I.E.L.D. - Episode 1: "Villains" - YouTube

Interns of F.I.E.L.D. - Episode 1: "Villains" - YouTube: ""

Guys? This is my new favorite show.



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Lauren on Life is Strange, 1.3 Chaos Theory - Video Game Review

photo from Steam

Beware: here there be spoilers.

Life is Strange, episode three, "Chaos Theory,” begins the same day as episode two. Night has fallen on a school shocked by the attempted suicide (if you’re lucky) of Kate Marsh. Students are rethinking their behavior toward Kate during the past few days, and Max is sneaking out.

The events of the day have (somehow) convinced her and Chloe that there is a connection between what happened to Kate and Rachel Amber’s disappearance, so the two of them break into the principal’s office and go through his files, looking for clues, though what the clues are for is not really clear.

After deciding whether or not to steal five thousand dollars from the school, the girls decide to break into the school’s swimming pool and take a dip, leading to an irritating game of cat-and-mouse with the school’s security guards. This section of the game was pretty week since there’s relatively little forward motion on the story and almost no character building to it. I personally felt that it was just so the developers could get the girls in their underwear, and when I showed the section to a friend, she concurred. The whole swimming bit just seems like fan service for the boys who might happen to play the game – a disappointing turn for a game with so much emphasis on female characters with agency and important relationships.

 

photo from lifeisstrange.com

The next part of the episode plays out in the Price house where Chloe takes some heat from her mom so Max can sneak into the garage and snoop through David Madsen’s (Chloe’s step-father’s) things for more of those nebulous clues. When she gets back inside, he arrives home, tired and grumpy from a night of trying to chase down the students who broke into the school’s pool. Max is then faced with the choice of backing Chloe’s vitriolic (but not unfounded) attack on her stepfather, or trying to smooth things over. Either choice will still lead to a fight with Chloe and the revelation that she’s angry with her biological father for getting into a car accident and dying.

And here I found myself wondering what on Earth the game was up to (in a good way). Unhappy Max finds herself staring at the last picture of herself and Chloe together when they were happy and carefree. And suddenly, Max is five years in the past, watching the last day of Chloe's father's life unfold, but this time, she's got the power to change it, and she goes for it with the confidence that it's what Chloe would want.

But there are always consequences and the change Max made has had big ones. She didn't just change Chloe's life, but her own as well. When she snaps back to the present, she finds that she's in a totally different group at school. She immediately goes to see Chloe and finds out just what she's done. Chloe's dad is alive, and Chloe is paralyzed, wheelchair bound, and dying of respiratory failure.

photo from lifeisstrange.com

 The game sticks faithfully to the imagery it had established for Max and Chloe, and capitalizes on the connection to the natural world that's been a big part of the weirdness going on in Arcadia Bay. Throughout the episode, dead birds are strewn everywhere, a good sign that something is terribly wrong. After Max changes the timeline, a pod of whales beaches itself in the harbor.

While it's a logical fallacy to assume that an event occurring after another event must have been caused by the first event, it seems pretty likely that Max's meddling is the cause of all the weirdness.

I have a terrible feeling that everything Max does is only making things worse and that the game is going to have to cycle back to the beginning, where Max will have to choose not to interfere in Chloe's death. This is me making a prediction. I think I'm worried because I'm starting to like Chloe. In fact, she's the character I like best in the game despite her volatile temperament. It might have to do with the fact that she's the best voiced character in the game (in my opinion) as well as the most fleshed out. My favorite characters always die, though, so Chloe is in grave danger!

 

photo from lifeisstrange.com

Since we just passed the halfway point in the game, I thought I'd do a quick list of my likes and dislikes:

I like:

Chloe - she's kind of a jerk, but she's interesting and is stuck in a really sucky situation, so there's a lot of room for growth and change here.

Warren - He's a smart and genuinely sweet guy who likes Max, and is respectful about it. He doesn't creep on her the way a lot of love interests do to a female protagonist (unintentionally perhaps) in other games, books, movies, and TV shows.

The mechanics of Max's time travel - it works nicely for the puzzle-solving aspects of the game, creating some fun game-play, like blowing up, and then un-blowing up the principal's door.

The themes- I mean this both broadly (friendship, pursuing one's dream, etc) and really specifically, like the doe being associated with Max, the color blue, and the blue butterfly, with Chloe, and the destruction of nature progressing through the episodes.

The mix of regular and extraordinary - I like the way the kids are concerned with the social and practical problems of being in high school as well as the troubling vision of ultimate destruction that Max had and the out of the ordinary trouble that Chloe found herself in.

I dislike:

Max - she's inconsistent, makes terrible decisions, isn't well voiced, and we would never be friends (alas!).

Long, pointless cinematics - there are weird scenes in the game, especially when Max is waking up, where I have no control of the game, but nothing is happening. I find these moments frustrating because I'm being shown that nothing is happening, but I can't do anything to get things started.

Big decisions that come to nothing - Since the timeline was reset, nothing I chose matters now. Unless Max puts things back again in a future episode, all agency that I was given meant nothing. Before this, not seeing the consequences of choices was at least understandable, because certain things were sure to play out in the future.

The choices - actually, despite having choices like turn in or don't turn in Nathan Prescott, there are a lot of places where things happen that I would have liked to choose anything else, like breaking into the swimming pool. Being forced into something that stupid made me grumpy. I realize that the writers are trying to tell a story with some accompanying game play, but there are moments when I think they'd have done better just to make a movie since they're forcing certain things anyway.

The dialogue - and this is the biggest one for me. I sometimes get the feeling that whoever wrote the lines didn't really know the story that well. Things like David Madsen calling the high school a college, put me off. As far as I know, the terms aren't interchangeable. The way lines seemed stitched together so that statements wouldn't fit together. This was really bad in the scene where I had to talk Kate off the roof. One line from Max seemed to have convinced her to live, and then Max suddenly reverted to begging Kate to come down, and Kate made statements that contradicted things she'd just said. It definitely tarnished an otherwise powerful moment.

Click here to see the previous episode.

My history with time-travel TV (and movies)

The other day, while we were all chatting about the random tangents that happen from Danyi's Monkey Talks, I started thinking about how flipping much I love time travel stories. Like, I Love them. I'd marry time travel stories if I could, and I'm pretty sure they would have come back in time because they were already in love with some random picture of me in the future. That's how much I love them.

I suck at putting things in chronogical order, which is ironic considering the subject of this discussion, but here's sort of how they go:

The Early Years, the ones that became a part of what makes me me:

Between Back to the Future and Quantum Leap, that's most of my childhood covered with time travel stories, not to mention the occasional episodes of other scifi shows where people wound up back in time and had to fix or not fix something. Kiddle reminded me that "City On The Edge of Forever" is one of the best Star Trek episodes ever.

There was this block of old 50s and 60s scifi that used to play in the afternoons when I was a kid. Time Tunnel was side by side with Land of the Giants, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and Lost In Space, and between them, I'm pretty sure, they layed down the foundation of my love for scifi travels in general.

And, of course, like every kid in the 80s who knew what PBS was, and like every kid in the UK ever, I watched The Doctor. Half of his stories aren't even time travel, but it's literally in his and his show's DNA, so he goes here.

The Teen Years. There was some sort of flap of these stories between middle school and high school, so there's lots here:

If "be excellent to each other" isn't a good message to take throughout time, I don't know what is.

I love this show so much, and as far as I know, it only exists now in usually-hard-to-find TV and VHS rips, and was never put on DVD and very rarely rerun. But it's so great. I mean, it's so 90s, but it's also fun and has spikes of seriousness, and Frank is one of the most fun nutballs on TV. It's great that you have to be literally a little crazy to pilot a time ship.

Terminator is an insanely awesome franchise that has existed literally almost as long as I have. I wrote and presented a paper on how they keep rewriting the apocalypse, creating their own struggle while also maintaining a perpetual pre-apocalypse, something that most stories, even time travel ones, don't do. There's a difference, I think, between the regular world -> apocalypse dynamic and the regular world -> pre-apocalypse ->apocalypse dynamic, and Terminator basically created it. Also, amazing love story, and I still maintain that SCC is one of the best shows I've fallen in love with and then had canceled on me.

And Time Trax! Another second-string scifi show I loved, that's never on reruns or DVD.

And this baby:

Note how there's more in this segment of my life than the previous. And now look at the Current Era of time-travel! Isn't it glorious?

Doctor Who is hard to classify to an era, since it has literally been around for more than 50 years, but I started watching it again after college, so I'm going to put the main part of it here. The Doctor is so un-bound to time, that his stories are some of the best uses of time travel or plot device when they're working right--stories that couldn't have existed without the time travel, rather than just ones where someone travels to the story as if it's a car or something.

And those wonderful stories! All three are off the air now--Continuum closed, Primeval never renewed (and the spin off wasn't good), and Terranova canceled with so much promise and not a lot of cohesion. But, of course, if it hadn't been canceled, I wouldn't now have...

My favorite show that's currently one the air! Oh my god, I talk about this show entirely too much, but it's really that good, and I can't stop won't stop about it. Being in the fandom for this show has literally changed my life and made this blog possible. Also, it's the most-sensical full-time time travel show I know. And made of about 700% feels, too, which is amazing--managing to world-build, character-built and complex-story-build all at once? Why haven't they won all the awards?

And for bonus, we have Legends! It's on a normal network channel*, so bonus, and it takes the totally opposite tack as my beloved 12 Monkeys--Legends of Tomorrow is a romp, pure and simple. They stole Rory from Doctor Who, gave him Captain Jack Harkness's backstory and a cool ship, and now he and the crew are just jumping around time and picking fights and messing up their own timelines. It's so much fun.

Related story-shape: Time Traveled Characters: These guys get honorable mentions, because time travel is a deep part of their world, but not the main plot-movement device.

What're your favorite time travel stories? Have I forgotten anything desperately important? Share in the comments or come talk to me on Twitter!

*CW has been around long enough to count as that now, right?

Letter from the Editor #2 - February 2016

Hello my lovely nerdistas!

Last month, we started seeing the lovely Lauren's video game posts, and her intro post is currently our top ranked post! Yay Lauren! This month, we'll start seeing a few more Fangirls popping in and sharing their geekery, too!

We're also almost done with the winter hiatus! By the end of this month, Just about all our favorite shows will be back on the air, so there should be lots of stuff to talk about! We'll be wrapping up on the XFiles's return to TV and the premier season of The Expanse, and we're just getting started on Lucifer. Will Sleepy Hollow pull it together and give us an awesome season 3B? Can Blindspot keep up the pace? Will Second Chance be the next Fox-induced piece of bitter grit I have to polish into a pearl so I can sleep at night?

Will Pride and Prejudice and Zombies be ridiculous-cool or ridiculous-awful? And man, I'm sure Deadpool will gives us PILES of stuff to talk about!

We're in a golden age of geekiness right now, and the list of things up for discussion is only going to get longer and cooler as the year goes on, so stay tuned!

What would you guys, our readers, like to see us talk about, do, or feature here? What are you looking forward to or concerned about this month, this season, or this year? Let us know in the comments, or come talk to us on Twitter!

• Letter from the Editor #1