If I Had a Shrink Ray...

[thedeadlyhook]

A long update, because I've been away for awhile. Just busy. Well, and okay, not feeling very well. But that's all a bit TMI. Maybe I'll get into that later.

I've signed up for Writercon. I couldn't, ultimately, resist. I've made no travel plans as of yet, no hotel reservations, but I'll have to soon. Anybody still need a roommate?

Tonight's Smallville: Quoth Clark, "my _____ is greater than all my other powers put together. Answer under the cut. (Hint: sadly, not the answer it really should be.)

"Power to hurt Lana." That's right - Clark actually says this to Chloe, after he breaks up with Lana (make that breaks up again - jeebus, doesn't anyone maintain a concordance on this show? They already broke up!). "My power to hurt Lana is greater than all my other powers put together." toysdream, with a laugh, remarks: "I might've filled in that answer a little differently."

This is really an episode in which you have to make your own fun. Toys and I spent most of it comparing notes on how, in the DC Comics universe, Brainiac is the shit because he has a shrink ray, with which he shrunk the bottle city of Kandor, and Superman never once in his career (that we're aware of) managed to reverse this. In the Marvel Comics universe, shrinking tech is small beans - every two-bit bank robber, it seems, has one - but in DC, no matter how ultra-powerful Superman is, he can't reverse Brainiac's shrink ray. Which begs the question of why Smallville doesn't roll out an Incredible Shrinking Clark episode - now that would be cool.

Digression: Remind me sometime to tell you about the plot bunny I'd had for an Incredible Shrinking Buffy episode for Season 6. It would essentially replace "As You Were." Remember all that stuff about Buffy being made to feel all rotten about herself, and with the stinky job, and oh-so-inadequate next to perfect Sam and perfect Riley? Yeah. Like that. Only with the literal shrinking.

Ahem. Back to the Smallville plot.

A few amusing Professor Fine moments. Intriguing, if a bit gruesome, opening scene with plague corpses and The Marsters doing T1000 impalement tricks and heat vision. But then the plot wanders off into the weeds. Lex tracks Fine to the rain forest, puts forth his theory that Fine is a - wait for it! - Federal agent, investigating UFOs. Yes, this is Smallville ripping off The X-Files. Unfortunately, badly. Sorry - the college prof. thing was way more fun. And this just makes Lex look stupid. Or infatuated with JM's fetching wavy hair, which is by far the more fun interpretation. Oh, if only the slash possibilities were ever followed up on in this show, sigh...

Meanwhile, back in Smallville, a whole other plot is going down. A frighteningly boring one, completely filler freak-of-the-week fare in which a hypnotist girl puts the whammy on Clark to turn him into her boyslut. On Lex's orders, we find out later, to break up Clark and Lana. (Who are, hello, once again, already broken up! Agh! The continuity on this show sucks meteor rocks.) Cue shirtless Welling, against the wall thrustiness, guest star girl's scanty panties, and horrified reactions from everyone from Lois to Chloe and then, sob, Lana. Boo fucking hoo, and dirtybadwrong, and yeah yeah yeah, eyeroll.

And of course, this is all to set up a Lana/Lex possiblity. Dun dun DUNNN!! End on dramatic shot of Lex. How sinister. (finger down throat barfing sound)

Okay, now let's run down the really stupid stuff, shall we?

1) Ma Kent, after hearing of the breakup, gives Clark a speech about how maybe Clark lied to Lana and let their relationship die because he knew, deep down, that "she wasn't the one." Uh huh. Because this is how moms talk. Really.

2) Lex worked a blackmail scheme on hypnotic chick and didn't expect her to turn on him. So Lex is totally stupid now? Thanks, just checking.

3) Even hypnotized, Clark did not do the bumpy with hypno-chick. Just like in that whole Red Kryptonite phase where he went to live in Metropolis for months and was evil, he never got it on. Oh, and that thing where he got married in Vegas, and yet still didn't do it. Because Clark is just that pure, dammit, even mind-controlled. Say it with me: SUPER LAME.

I'm really starting to think this show opearates most on the world's biggest slush pile of spec scripts. The hypno-chick plot could've run at any time, in any season. I half wonder if they don't even film this stuff in random order, and splice it all together later.

So... yeah. WhatEVA. Next week looks like Lana the Druggie episode. I'm nostalgic for the days of Kryp-Tuck.

More to come shortly: finally saw V for Vendetta, about which I had a number of thoughts; I feel like I can explain now both why the Wachowski Brothers are successful filmmakers and why the end of the Matrix trilogy dropped the ball. Relation to the original comic? Peripheral, although the visual set was well reproduced, but what was changed was interesting. And Hugo Weaving ratchets up in my estimate for going through the whole movie in the mask. I'm becoming quite the fangirl for that guy.

... and I've finished Herself's book. (sniff) More on this to come.

Farscape thoughts: Ultimately, the more of this series I watch, even in order, the more convinced I am that it has not several points to make, but one major point - that John Crichton is a new kind of explorer, of a generation who knows what to expect from space travel from watching sci-fi. All his in-jokes and references make sense in this context - Crichton, by being able to efficiently "map" the aliens he meets into recognizable character patterns, can understand other cultures and creatures the way his companions can't. (Do any of the races in Farscape even understand the idea of drama, or narrative? Do they have a tradition of theater, entertainment?) Crichton's seeming frivolity is really a bitchin' survival skill. He manages to cope with things that would drive others mad - Brain Scorpius, for example, is internalized as "Harvey," his own personal companion rabbit. Somewhere between The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and Buckaroo Banzai, and yes... Star Trek... there you are.

Comments

[thedeadlyhook.livejournal.com]

I am full of the Farscape thoughts right now. It's taken me awhile to register that it's not so much doing that gradual buildup thing, where we learn the characters bit by bit, so much as flinging us fully developed archtypes that we, and Crichton, learn more nuances about. It's got more in common with Star Trek than I'd realized... and even that's part of the point. Crichton interprets this universe from the POV of someone who's seen Trek. Which I just love.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

And Buffy. Don't forget he wonders one time how many times he has to kill Scorpious (and laments that by the time he makes it back to earth, BtVS will probably be over. That last one always cracked my shit up).