I'm only 10' into today's Doctor Who episode, but so far ( Vague spoilers for that.Collapse )

Update after watching it: ( Read more...Collapse )

Only one episode to go in my (mostly re)watch, I'm afraid. The K/S is pretty much on par with TOS, and it has some beautiful lines like:

McCoy: (After an encounter with an advanced alien who turned out to have visited Earth and passed as a god for various civilization, something that happened so often I have to assume they all sort of stepped on each others' toes): Spock, I wouldn't suppose that Vulcan has legends like those.

Spock: Not legends, Doctor. Fact. Vulcan was visited by alien beings. They left much wiser.

That's on par with Worf's "Our gods are dead. Ancient Klingon warriors slew them a millennia ago. They were more trouble than they were worth."

Humans... Well, if we go by the myths, we mostly had sex with them, and/or used them as figureheads in our own politics and self-destructive wars. I love the "humans are the Doc Browns of the Quadrant" fanon, but even before we confused the Vulcans by building a warp engine out of scraps (and then doing the very first initial testing in space, piloted by the lead scientist/engineer), ancient godlike aliens probably talked about humans as being (a) much likelier to have sex with you than most other species, (b) apparently good listeners if you seemed omnipotent enough, but in the back of their little but twisty minds constantly trying to figure out how to use your literally otherworldly knowledge to increase their social standing in their pitiful societies, or, yes, get laid.

Centuries later, why do you think (Watsonianly speaking) there are half-human descendants of almost every humanoid species in the Quadrant? B'elanna is half-Klingon, Deanna is half-Betazoid, Spock of course is half-Vulcan, and I'm pretty sure there are others, often with cultural or political implications. Both Spock and Deanna belong to hugely influential families in their societies, and although Worf's is a slightly different situation — Klingon parents, human foster parents — the former were of course pretty much as elite as you can get in the Empire. Add Janeway's somewhat, er, forceful adoption of Seven, and even Data's situation, and you get a picture of humans not just (or maybe necessarily) friendly in the sense of "we don't fight other species just because they are different", but rather with the systematic habit of sleeping with or adopting anybody who looks close enough to humanoid.

I'm aware of the Doylean reasons that might make this the result of sampling bias, but there's a case to be made that, as exaggerated as Kirk's reputation might be (and as exaggerated as Riker's self-image might be), humans as a species have a long, pre-warp history of sexual xenophilia; maybe something specific to the species, maybe a side effect of the multiple "gods" that hit on us during our formative years as a pre-planetary culture. In any case, it could be an underrated factor in the shape and spread of the Federation.

(I've seen the "WARNING: humans will mate with anything" graphics in Tumblr, but it'd be hilarious if "down for weird sex" were the humans' equivalent of Vulcan logic or Klingon fighting as a species-defining particular skill.)

PS: What about Sarek? I don't think he was *strategic* in his family building — he canonically loved Amanda, Spock, Michael, and, I assume, Sybok &mdahs; but I have to wonder if he might not have concluded or suspected that the strong strain in Vulcan society for cultural and biological isolation would eventually be counterproductive and should therefore be somehow made more flexible. Not something the Vulcan society at large was prepared to consider, and not perhaps something he was ready to argue for, but if, as I said, it wasn't the reason why he married Amanda and adopted Michael, perhaps it's an argument that made it possible, specially the former. I don't think Sarek would've married and have a child with Amanda, regardless of his (Vulcan face: ughhhhhh) feelings for her, if he thought it would be harmful to Vulcan society.

Alright, so far the series is

• About 40% Dick still being unable to cope with the psychological damage of the Robin training and lifestyle, a damage subsequent and unrelated to the murder of his parents. AFAIK this is the first time I've seen that issue discussed — not the damage due to what's done to you because you're Robin, but the damage due to what you can and do because you're Robin — and it's very much a realistic one.


• About 20% everybody else's issues, from Rachel's quite serious "I'm haunted and also hunted" to Kory's well-balanced response to being an amnesiac badass with superpowers.


• About 20% slightly fluffy found family stuff.


• About 20% creepy bad guys.

One one hand I'm a bit disappointed about the Dick-centered storyline (I almost wrote "phallocentric," but we all dodged that bullet), while recognizing the Doylean sense of it. On the other hand, it might be the most interesting take I've seen on the Robin-to-Nightwing transition, not that the latter has been mentioned yet, and the one who reflects best on Dick. Instead of a not unrealistic but a bit, well, unnecessarily angry wanting to get out of Bruce's shadow/finding himself/etc. (not that being a teenager under Bruce's theoretical care doesn't explain and justify any number of emotional handicaps during adulthood), we have a young adult realizing that he was, at the very least, *allowed* a lifestyle with a tremendous psychological cost and absolutely no support system in that area. Cops (and, I would hope, soldiers) get counseling after violent encounters, even or specially if they inflicted damage. Bruce and Dick hurt a lot of people in very painful and brutal ways from very close quarters almost every night, and never mind their own periodical brushes with death, and although Bruce probably has an MRI machine in the Cave and keeps their bodies as close to healthy as their lifestyles allows, neither of them got the therapy they needed. Bruce might be wounded enough that the added damage barely registers, but Dick (or at least *this* Dick) wasn't, and by the time he knew well enough to understand the cost of being Robin, the training and damage were literally bone deep.

If nothing else, and Titans is a few other things as well, it's a quite interesting and often extremely and brutally visual indictment of the Batman MO. The violence looks cool, and they are all badasses, but it's also shot in a way that lets you know it's ugly and hurtful and in some ways *diminishes* them, and then you have Dick saying it very explicitly.

In Fast and Furious 9: Furious Night, Cipher performs on herself a destructive brain uploading process that injects her mind into the Deep Shadow Net, taking control of every advanced military device and facility in the Western world. She secretly builds and launches a miles-long space station housing her program and armed with advanced orbital and defense weapons. World governments not feeling like acceding to her demands, WWIII looms.

So Mr. Nobody, barely escaping an attack from a Seal strike team following a phony order planted by Cipher 2.0, warns Dom and the gang just in time for them to weave a narrow path through an entire platoon of urban combat systems in LA. During the next hour and a half or so they have to build from scratch a fleet of combat vehicles outside Cipher 2.0's control and travel through the world collecting favors until they can build a giant linear rail gun hooked into the Hoover Dam and, while the gang fights a hopeless stalling battle against Cipher 2.0's robots, shoot Dom and his pressurized car on the least defended end of Cipher's space station.

The climatic race is then Dom driving is car on the outside of a space station, car pressed again the surface by extra nitro rockets, so far and so fast that he can evade Cipher's defense weapons, reach the central core, and put inside it a mini-nuke they stole from a French arms dealer's submarine mansion twenty movie minutes before during the heist part. The bomb explodes, but Dom survives by diving through his back seat into the car's lead-reinforced trunk, which falls somewhere in the Pacific. They find him three days later on a beach, drinking from a coconut in the porch of the cabin he built for himself.

Got this fantastic (creepy, sad, and above all, harrowing) look at, as the summary says, Horatio, a long time afterwards:

Absent Thee From Felicity Awhile (1013 words) by Lexigent
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Hamlet - Shakespeare
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Hamlet/Horatio
Characters: Horatio (Hamlet), Hamlet, Ophelia (Hamlet), Laertes (Hamlet)
Summary:

Horatio, a long time afterwards.
Content notes: sleep paralysis, horror themes, canonical character death, non-canonical character death.

And I wrote this short scene where Lady Macbeth is visited by one of the witches in the back seat of her limo (no, not like that):

Fathomable Prophecies (1081 words) by marcelo
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Macbeth - Shakespeare
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Lady Macbeth, Witch (Macbeth)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Historical
Summary:

Choice can be a blood-soaked thing, slippery and perhaps unreal.

Trigger warning, obvious from both the trailer and the very title of the episode: Spiders. BIG spiders. YMWV, but I listened to rather than watched a significant percentage of the episode.

Another trigger warning: An obvious non!Trump character.

( Vague, or sometimes specific but not really key-to-the-plot spoilers.Collapse )

A couple of things that came back to me as I watched them again, maybe thirty after I first did: the gutpunch that was the "Spock saves wee!Spock" episode, and the awesomeness that was Spock II (canonically, there's a *giant* Spock working with the also giant clone of a former Eugenic Wars scientist to try and revive an advanced civilization of intelligent plants; there's nothing less than perfect in that scenario).

Among the things I did not remember, this immortal exchange between Cyrano Jones and James Kirk: "The what?" "The wheat!" And back then I wasn't quite aware of the slimy piece of crap that is Harry Mudd (or rather, that he was slimy in ways that are more "creepy and dangerous" than "humorous"), but I confess tI laughed when, while doing the running footnoting of Mudd's explanation of how he left the robot planet (Mudd: "I, uh, borrowed a vehicle." Spock, deadpan as usual: "Stole a spaceship."), well, Mudd: "And left to find haven on Ilyra VI. A charming planet, an innocent and friendly populace." Kirk: "To whom you sold the Starfleet Space Academy."

Then he frowned and sighed "Harry..."

I know I said the animation style in this series is time-and-budget-appropriately horrendous, but at the same time they somehow manage to make Kirk's variously appalled expressions almost photorealistic at some deep symbolic level.

It's easy to make fun of Star Trek: The Animated Series, as the dialogue is generally bad and the animation is atrocious perhaps even by its contemporary standards, but before 10 minutes had passed of its first episode, they were visiting a dead star at the edge of the galaxy and found orbiting it an alien starship 300 million years old of a more beautiful design than most in the shows (not to mention the movies), possessed by a magnetic lifeform that after trying to take control of the Enterprise, ended up possessing the dead star and begging the Enterprise not to leave it.