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| Yup; that's Central City and Keystone! |
- Really, Iris? You didn't back up your dissertation to the cloud? Come on, now.
- Huh, Thawne looks like Barry, except with different hair color. Whaddaya know.
- "Can I have part of your cookie?"
- Apparently Barry Allen went to the Peter Parker School of Solving Your Parent' Murder Through Collage.
- WHOA. You say "a little snug" as if that's a BAD thing...?!
- Fish Mooney has been sleeping with Michelangelo Milano instead of Mario D'Leon? What a moron.
- BRIGHTLY COLORED CHEMICALS IN OPEN CONTAINERS! That's comics.
- Defibrillating a guy who just got struck by lightning? That's TV.
- "She's talks a LOT." ha!
- Balloonman. I honestly don't care what you think. Balloonman was awesome. Absurd? Of course. That's the point. We are watching Gotham slowly go round the bend.
- "Cool."
- And we never even saw what happened to guy Oswald wanted to ransom. Because we didn't need to.
- Wait, did Jason Schwartzmann just steal your laptop...?
- Gotham sure isn't shying away from the "vigilanteism" issue, is it?
- No, Tom, I don't know why you took your glasses off, either.
- "What part of 'irreversibly evil' do you not understand...?!"
- Barry went from 'what's wrong with me?' to "Awesome!" in nothing flat.
- Well, at least her dog lived.
- "More or less." Heh. Reason enough.
- Oh. I finally watched "The Spirit". But the only thing about that that made me happy was that it ended.
- Well, no, Barry didn't wear a bow tie. But he wore a plaid untucked shirt covered by a too-tight sweater, which is the modern equivalent, I suppose.
- I was TERRIFIED, knowing that the Penguin was behind that door. They've made the Penguin terrify me.
- Vibe. Or at least Vibe-to-be.
- Huh; it appears someone at CW has seen "The Gondoliers".
- Gods need neither bank robberies nor starships.
- Well, all existing problems for the Awesomes have been solved! Yep. All existing problems.
- ALL of the 312 DCU shout-outs. But particularly Jitters.
- Hm, no, actually, you already had abs when they wheeled you in. I checked.
- John Wesley Schipp. Love that guy.
- Scarlett Johannsen managed to still find work after "The Spirit". Good for her.
- Grodd. Heh.
- Oh, so THAT's the connection between her and her?! Yeah, I did NOT expect them to go THERE. But they DOVE there.
- Speaking of going there....we all knew that they WOULD with Harrison. But not in the first episode!!!
- Gambi. Heh heh.
- "Flash" had me sold the second that the opening flyover of Central City and Keystone looked EXACTLY as it should. Oh, and I WANT THAT MAP.
- "So it's not boring." Heh, Reason enough.
- The need for the mobs to stop Arkham from opening being both strategic and symbolic.
- Yeah; I cried.
"'What part of 'irreversibly evil' do you not understand...?!'"
ReplyDelete"Well, all existing problems for the Awesomes have been solved! Yep. All existing problems."
The Awesomes. Living up to its name, tenfold.
Oswald Cobblepot has beens surprisingly terrifying. But I forgot that the Flash was on, and ended up watching "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" instead.
ReplyDelete"IT'S A BIG W, I TELL YA!"
ReplyDeleteSally, you can go to Hulu.com and watch the Flash there.
I did like the turn between "what's happening to me" and what amounted to "oh, that."
ReplyDeleteI think my big objection about the show is Iris. The actress is great, but the way she shoved Barry after the thief was...troubling. Although the "I'm going to this science thing that I refuse to understand and we're totally not a couple" is an appropriate update to Silver Age shrewism.
Agreed on Balloonman, too, and I'm surprised there was no balloon-traverses-the-full-moon or "I'm Balloonman" bit. (The Li'l Brucie vignettes have to go, though. Do they add anything to the scripts?)
Also, since you bring it up, I feel like there've been a few semi-gratuitous Gilbert and Sullivan references, this season. Maybe there was a festival in Hollywood?
I love, for certain definitions of "love", that Alfred is doing the worst job imaginable helping Bruce through trauma that could easily break a kid. We see Bruce getting worse and worse thanks to Pennyworth's neglect, while at the same time starting to turn himself into the sort of person who could carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. Episode three and he's already a better Batman than Christian Bale, having internalized that you don't take the lives of even killers (recall that Christian Bale was gonna shoot his parents' killer). Bruce's arc may be the least consequential in any given week, but it's the one I enjoy the most. David Mazouz is crazy good as Bruce Wayne.
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah, the Penguin is scary for once. I don't believe for a second he means any harm to Jim Gordon -- he knows Jim saved his skin and probably wants to be his friend -- the problem is what happens when Jim rejects Oswald's friendship.
ReplyDelete(The only way I see Jim getting out of this with his head intact, and Barbara's, is if Carmine Falcone is put on trial for Oswald's murder ... then all of a sudden, Jim's keeping Oswald alive will be a forgivable transgression because it exonerates Falcone.)
I'll admit, I haven't visited The Absorbascon in a while, but when I saw Future Vibe I immediately wondered "What does Scipio think of this?" I... didn't hate it. I'm into it, which makes it different from the other two DC-based shows on right now. I'm not quite as into Gotham but I'm giving it chances. I have not given Arrow a chance at all, is that wrong?
ReplyDeleteIt's NEVER wrong not to give Green Arrow a chance.
ReplyDelete"the problem is what happens when Jim rejects Oswald's friendship."
Actually, what I am expecting is that Oswald will remain "loyal" regardless. Just as Selina will remember Jim saving her. And Eddie will remember getting respect from him.
What the show is doing -- intentionally or not-- is providing an explanation of why none oF Batman's foes try to kill Commission Gordon.
Actually, the dissertation thing caught my attention, too. I backed up my master's thesis in four locations (physical locations -- no "cloud" back then) as well as printing hard copy regularly. When you put that much work into something, you do NOT screw around with one lousy copy.
ReplyDelete"What the show is doing -- intentionally or not-- is providing an explanation of why none oF Batman's foes try to kill Commissioner Gordon."
ReplyDeleteInteresting ... almost like Jim Gordon is unwittingly creating a power structure outside the Falcone / Mooney system, that will ultimately render Falcone / Mooney obsolete. I figured that Jim was going to pull Bullock back -- Bullock went bad only because he didn't see any way not to until Jim came along -- but people on both sides of the law who have got Jim's back, that's wild.
Yes, that's what hooked me, I think, that criminals have basically taken control of the government and Gordon is building what amounts to a shadow government. Without that, it's just a police procedural in the worst city ever, but Gordon's taking everybody seriously and taking their needs into account makes it something different and more interesting.
ReplyDeleteFalcone pretty much laid it on the line in the pilot: Disrupt any of the factions and the resulting infighting destroys everybody's legitimacy at once. So without a new authority...
So far I've only seen the first episode of Flash. I've seen a lot of theories online about Harrison Wells having the newspaper from the future (obviously an alternate future, where there are still "newspapers" by 2024). All the theories I've seen speak of Harrison himself being from the future.
ReplyDeleteWhat if that's not right? What if he somehow invented technology that let him pull objects from the future into the present? A certain DC Comics character tried to do that, but never succeeded (beyond seeing his own future death at the hands of the Justice League of America, which he tried repeatedly to forestall by killing the Leaguers first).
I was late seeing the Flash pilot but as soon as I saw proto-Vibe, I thought of you. :-)
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen Gotham yet, but based on what you and others have said, I'm pretty intrigued.
Glad to see someone else loved baloonman!.
ReplyDeleteHonestly I think Gotham is a prequel to batman 66
Hm- the assistant girl's fiancee that was 'killed' in the lab was named Ronnie... Wonder what his last name is, hm?
ReplyDeleteI forgot the word 'accident' in the above...
ReplyDeleteRedforce, you now have that answer, but "Caitlyn Snow" was also one of the Killer Frosts over the years.
ReplyDeleteWhat surprises me about the whole Ronnie subplot is that there's no Martin Stein in evidence. You'd think a fancy reactor that makes Ronnie Raymond vanish would have been designed by (and killed) the Professor.
Loosely related, I decided to give Arrow another shot. I rejected it on the basis of the unpleasant pilot, but figured that might not be fair, given the connections with Flash.
Turns out it's actually...well, decent. But the reason I bring it up is that their recurring genius IT helper character is (for some reason conspicuously) Felicity Smoak, who became Ronnie's stepmother in the comics.
Firestorm's kind of a weird choice of mythology to bring onto another superhero's turf (or pair thereof), but seems an awful long way to go for an Easter egg...
I've seen the first three episodes of Flash, and I have the same question about Multiplex and the Mist.
ReplyDeleteWhen they use their powers, why/how do their clothes change, too?
Speaking of Firestorm and Easter eggs, I noticed the movie theater Iris and Barry were walking by (out of?) in the most recent episode had a Blue Devil movie on the marquee. I wonder what the actual likelihood of a live action Blue Devil is? They're probably saving that for season two.
ReplyDeletePowers in the DCU are always context-sensitive, Dale. They contrive to not embarrass the wielder, except sometimes as a gag when the hero first busts loose. Or unless the character evokes the Hulk.
ReplyDeleteIt comes from the acquired history of billowy sleeves that avoid getting caught in car doors. Or maybe Mopee got a job with the Comics Code Authority.
I hadn't noticed Blue Devil. This is almost starting to look like careful world-building, rather than just haphazard shout-outs or Easter eggs. Time will tell, I guess.
John, usually in the comics there's some wonderfully comic-booky explanation, though; "unstable molecules", or similar. On TV are we just not supposed to notice? (Like we weren't supposed to notice Grandpa Munster was a vampire, yet went outside in sunlight?)
ReplyDeleteIt's very simple, Dale. At least in comic book terms.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things I find intriguing about the show is the thought that they are creating (again, either deliberately or inadvertently), a sort of "unified field theory" of super-powers.
If you assume that Flash is accessing another dimension (per Mark Waid) and using its energies for various speed effects, then it makes sense that others are accessing that same dimension/energy for different effects. So Weather Wizard is controlling the motion of air molecules, and also slowing them down/speeding them up to change temperatures and create weather effects.
The Mist is shifting some of his mass (and that of his clothes) to the speed dimension and using that "speed" energy to move his remaining molecules (shifting part of his mass to another dimension is really what Flash does when "vibrating through objects" -- also, frankly, when running, because F=MA, but don't get me started).
Multiplex's duplicates are energy constructs pulled from the speed dimension, so they duplicate his clothes (similarly, in the comics, Wally used to create his uniform from pure "speed force").
Heatwave and Captain Cold have weapons that are obviously speeding up/slowing down molecular motion (as Cisco notes, more or less).
And so on. I've probably put more thought into this than the writers. But that's how I rationalize it.