RIP Harold Ramis

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

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

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

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

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

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

And as to what he could imply about the show:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things we learned from XFiles

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

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

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

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

4. Barely-seen monsters are the scariest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES:

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

The Pros and Cons of Pop Up Tee

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

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

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

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about you? What do you think?


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

On uber-shipping and Agents of SHIELD

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

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

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

Here's what we have:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twelve Papers I Haven't Written About Sleepy Hollow

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

Five Great Things About Almost Human and Five Kinda Sucky Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Five Not So Great Things:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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



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

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