Initial Thoughts on "The X-Files"

            I have been for a little while working my way thru the “X-Files” on Netflix.  I did this because I remember disliking the series in my youth because of its confusing BS.  I know realize that the BS did not come until much later and was mostly concentrated in the “Mythology” of the series, the long ongoing plot of an alien conspiracy that never gave solid answers and logically should have wrapped up in season 6 but kept trucking a long time after the audience felt that it would ever really deliver.

            But, I digress.  I have been watching the series and overall really enjoy it, and I liked a few of the new episodes that were on Fox this year as part of a revival.  To that end I am going to look over some of the series and point out some of the highs and lows.  Before I dive into that though I would like to point out a broad observation that started to crystallize as I watched.

“The X-Files” Episode Categories.

            Different episodes of a show, especially a show with such a consistent mood tend to use certain standard ideas.  These help to outline and pitch stories to the producers.  Being a horror science fiction show with lots of police procedural aspects and romantic tension “The X-Files” has a lot of bleed in how it handles things.  Things start as a serial killer, but the killer uses telekinesis or is a shape shifter, is a for instance.

Watching the first couple of seasons I have noticed some broad categories.  They are not exclusive, plenty have elements of others but the focus of the story tends to be on one of these particular core elements.

Aliens… What the show is “about” in the broadest sense

            Is the government trying to kill you?  Have you seen strange lights in the sky?  Have you lost time?  Transmitters in your teeth?  Then Mulder and Scully need to talk to you.  This is also where the cyclones of BS start to swallow the show in later seasons.

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Balrog Infestation... the scientists dug too deeply and too greedily

            Are you a scientist or industrialist who wishes to explore the world for knowledge or profit?  Well get ready to be infected, eaten, or encounter that which man was not meant to know because for some damn reason there are horrible monsters living in the shadows and just beneath the skin (often literally).  Retroactively these stories make a lot of sense based on the nature of the shows aliens and how they have interacted with earth in the distant past.

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Brotherhood of Evil Mutants

            Are there a series of murders with a uniting theme and something that seems to be gross going on?  Then you are probably dealing with some horrible branch of the evolutionary tree, or the inevitable outcome of global climate change or the splitting of the atom.  While they are not always evil they are a slave to the dark instincts that exist within all of us.

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Frankenstein’s (Blank)

            Do you or someone you know wish to better the world thru science?  Get ready for that science to murder the shit out of you, me and everyone else because there is often a murderous instinct in the base code.  I don’t know why, but nobody seems to have read, “I, Robot” in this universe and refuses to program their creation with the very basic command of, “Do not harm the creator”.

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I am not saying it was magic.... But it was magic.

Ghosts?  The Afterlife?  Magic?

            Having nightmares of a past life?  Or are you seeing horrible things happen to the folks around you after a friend/loved one’s murder?  Who are you gonna call?  The FBI.  This is when things stop being about science and start going straight into the land of magic.

This is also an area in which the show starts to highlight how insane Mulder would be.  The man believes in everything.  You know, just because you believe in aliens doesn’t mean you believe in voodoo, ghosts, or werewolves right?  Thinking that there is enough evidence to believe in one thing does not mean you have faith that other seemingly equally crazy things also exist.

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How did this get here?

Just Some Asshole

            Rarely there is an instance in which there is no supernatural component.  This really should have happened much more frequently… But for some reason tracking down serial killers, the central conceit of nearly all other FBI procedural dramas is considered too boring.  I feel this is a missed opportunity as having Scully be right about something from time to time would have been good for the show, but here we are.

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This is actually a kid friendly version of the "X-Files" based on a series of books I read when I was a kid.  While it has budget issues the writing and acting are top notch and very funny.  If you want something lite to watch I recommend it.
It is also on Netflix.

Spooksville

            Are you in the middle of nowhere and follow a religion or lifestyle at odds with Midwest American values of the 90’s?  Then you are probably about to be involved in some kind of horrible conspiracy.  I guess Chris Cater grew up near a lot of gated communities that he just grew to dislike them.

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Wacky Comedy

            Numerous episodes play with expectations of the audience and use to differing effect the premise of the show to illicit a laugh at its own expense.  I tend to find these the strongest of all the episodes and they are the highlight of any season.

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Dungeons and Dragons, "Rocks or Boiling Oil"

            I am putting off doing movie reviews this year, since few movies really inspired or surprised me in 2015 I am kind of not-all-that-motivated to write about them.  I may get around to it, but I just have more pressing matters for the moment.  However I still want to write and have been kicking around stuff, here is a little of that.

            I play Dungeons and Dragons.  For those who do not know Dungeons and Dragons (henceforth DnD) is a table top game, a group of players use some loose rules for characters, events, monsters, and magic to collectively write a story together.  One person is the main writer, called the Dungeon Master (henceforth DM) who creates the world and adventures, and the rest are the players who each control one (and in rare cases a few) characters that go thru the adventures.

            A good DM makes efforts to encourage creativity in the players by giving them obstacles and a variety of resources with which to combat them.  Rather than just a straight up sword fight, you must sword fight while balancing on rafters, swinging on chandlers, and dodging arrows fired from other enemies.  Instead of just attacking the enemy army you can cast spells to make the terrain slippery or muddy, you can poison their rations, sneak in at night and kill the leaders, or cause a stampede of wild beasts thru their camp.  A DM wants the players to be participants in the story and make the adventure their own.

            Bad DM’s do not suffer the creativity of their players and instead push their players to play the game the way it SHOULD be played.  Rather than fostering creativity they instead take the track of, “I’d really like to discourage this behavior.”

            There is a lot of online material focused on DnD, it is a cultural institution in many ways and served to inspire countless video games, novels, and movies (for good and ill).  One of these websites is “Table Titans” which is primarily a comic strip about a group of friends playing the game, and the epic fantasy adventure that their characters get up to.  However the website also has a section called “Tales from the Table” in which various stories are told about funny or strange stories that can come up in a game of DnD.

This is the start of the comic's 3rd season and introduces an interesting fantasy world to explore.

Most of these stories told in “Tales from the Table” are caused by DM’s who are complete assholes.  Either taking things literally, shutting down creative ideas, or not playing the game the way the players are interested in playing (or vice versa, players not showing respect for their friend who often times puts lots of work into stories and adventures that the players in turn ignore or complain about).  The website has no comment section or boards on which to discuss these stories and as such I can never level any criticism on the situation, and since one recently came up that I thought was especially bad I decided to respond to it here.

“Rocks or Boiling Oil?” is an example of a DM being both lazy and vindictive and putting the blame on the player.  If you ever feel a creative bug encouraging you to DM a group of friends (not just in DnD, but other games like Gamma World or D20 Future) please do not be like this guy.  Try to find a FUN way to resolve the situation, getting pelted with rocks for a few minutes before inevitable failure finally arrives is not fun.

"Star Wars: The Force Awakens"

Star Wars

            It is my 300^th entry on blogger and I am going to use this entry to talk about the biggest movie in the world “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”.  It will be an early start to my annual reviews of movies from 2015, and maybe I will get some sympathetic traffic to here from people randomly googling these kinds of things.

            Since this is the kind of movie that is really big and you could go thru it scene by scene to talk about things I liked or didn’t care for I will do my usual thing of disjointedly asking questions, critiquing, and giving out compliments.  SPOILERS obviously, overall I thought the movie was a solid 8/10, with a hearty recommendation from me.

 

Remember, this whole franchise is built around coincidence and destiny.  And an awesome score.

            People like to point out that the plot is (in an outline) the exact same plot as “Star Wars: A New Hope”, but I would posit that it has a lot of points and scenes taken from all of the original trilogy, which is fine.  The original trilogy is 38 years old, taking that same story outline and presenting it with modern effects and dialogue, and using that basic story to kick off the new franchise is a good idea.  It is akin to saying, “This is what we are going to be doing from here on out, this is how we are going to do it.”

            However there is some grander subtext at work here too.  The main character is a scavenger who makes their living picking thru the remnants of the old franchise, and the main villain’s central personal crisis is whether he will live up to the classic iconic villain.  It is almost like the movie is picking thru the old franchise to find the best workable bits and is terrified of not living up to the legacy of the original films?  Am I reading too much into this?  Probably not, they draw attention to this all the time in the movie, I feel this was exactly what they intended.  There is a literal shrine to Darth Vader in the bad guy’s bed room.

 

"I feel the pull of the light"

            Let’s talk about one of the things I really liked, Kylo Ren.  Kylo is the best villain in Star Wars.  He is powerful, he has a goal, you understand his motivation, you understand his inner conflict (say what you will about Darth Vader, if Luke did not say the words, “I feel the good in you” the audience would have seen ZERO evidence of Vader turning into a good guy), and he acts like someone who is powered by rage, fear, and pain.  My favorite scene with him is the final lightsaber fight in which he pounds on his wound to work himself into greater levels of frenzy, that is some brutal violent shit right there.

            His armor is cool, his lightsaber is cool, and he kills the most beloved character in the franchise.  The only thing missing from that scene is Han saying the words, “I love you” followed by Kylo saying, “I know” and then kicking Solo’s body in the blackness.  Also, have to love Chewbacca’s reaction, he has just seen his best friend murdered by (what I imagine) is his god son, he probably baby sat Kylo, had the family over for Life Day (HA!) and now he is trying to kill the kid.  That is some emotional baggage.

 

Boy was my character oversold in the marketing.

And now for something I didn’t like, anybody else think that the stormtrooper Captain Phasma was a huge waste? I can't help but think some script pages got lost or something got rewritten.  For instance, when that random stormtrooper has that electro-tonfa and fights Finn... Why not make that Phasma? It would make sense that she would call him traitor, it would even make sense that she would have that kind of unique weapon on her person (working with Kylo all day I imagine she mentally preps for the day he decides to hack her to pieces and so she keeps around a weapon that could block a lightsaber long enough for a retreat).

I also did not like how easily she is captured near the end. Han, Chewie, and Finn take her hostage and demand that she lower the shields... And she does. I kind of expected a marine captain to not just roll over and lower the defenses to the single most important military asset in the galaxy. It would have been cooler had she just said, "You're going to have to kill me." Then Finn doesn't (because he knows that would be brutal and accomplish nothing), and they keep her prisoner, then they find Rey, have her try to use the force on Phasma and then just have the Captain pull a Jabba and say, "I am not so weak minded." Then have her do something clever and escape down a garbage chute.

You might be saying, "Well, then how would they get the shields down?"  To which I reply, "Just have the plot move forward the same way with the group planting charges." Dropping the shields ultimately wasn’t enough, so why not just skip that scene all together?  Having them forced to use the charges to let the Resistance attack thru would be fine, it has the exact same impact on the narrative and echoes "Return of the Jedi" even more so.

With those two changes you take a character that barely has any lines and fights no one, and instead turn them into someone who is clever, tenacious, has unique armor, an anti-lightsaber weapon, and is resistant to the force. She becomes a cunning dangerous adversary that promises to be a recurring threat in future movies. As it stands she is literally thrown in the garbage.

She is apparently returning in the future but I can’t see why they should bother, she is already a joke.  Single biggest disappointment in the new movie.

Now a positive thing, Finn is now my favorite character in the franchise, more or less summed up by his first interaction with General Leia, as she tells him how brave he is for defecting from the first order.  Turning your back on the military dictatorship that is the only life you have ever known because you see the violence and suffering they are inflicting on the galaxy is brave, and without Jedi powers he fights Kylo Ren, a fight he cannot win.  He is also a great straight man to Poe and Han’s wise cracking, a position that is always underappreciated (honestly without the straight man most comedy just falls flat).

As for Rey, Poe, and BB-8?  I love them all.  Each is fun in their own way and they do not step on each other’s toes at all.  While Finn is my favorite, any one of the human characters could have been the hero in their own movie and would have worked great.  If these are the type of hero the new era promises then I happily await more entries.

 

Couldn't we have just had a fleet of Star Destroyers?

Now something I dislike, The Star Killer Base is the absolute worst kind of writing in a sequel.  Upping the stakes by increasing the destructive yield of bad guy’s weapons.  It is lazy.  WE HAVE AN EVEN BIGGER DEATH STAR.  Yawn.  The conflict and drama between the characters is what I am here to see, not just more planets getting torched.

If they had to have something like this, then it should not be in the first movie.  Hint at it.  Have rumors of a new Death Star being built and the Resistance not knowing where it is, have it show up in the 3rd movie as the big thing that dwarfs all other confrontations before it.  Showing the hologram of how the base is a 100 times larger than the Death Star comes off as comical in this movie, if it had been built up to it over multiple films it would have been terrifying.

The Star Killer Base is the thing I dislike the most about the movie and it does bring it down for me.

How is Harrison Ford still so devilishly handsome?
Unattainable standards for male attractiveness in films, I am being oppressed.

 Something I like, the returning original cast members.  While Luke is barely there at all he unquestionably looms over the whole film and looks the part as the hero who completed his journey to Jedi master.  The story in which is betrayed by the knights of Ren (how cool is it that there appears to be an entire clan of Dark Side Force users?) is legitimately sad, he was supposed to have been the guy to return order to the galaxy and he just couldn’t manage it.

Han, Chewie, and Leia are all great.  I did find it strange that in the 50 years they have been working together Han never fired Chewie’s crossbow, maybe they should have had Finn fire the crossbow, and since he is a storm trooper you could have him say something like, “This thing is so much more accurate than my old blaster” to joke about how Stormtroopers never hit anything.

C-3PO is used appropriately, he pops in to ruin the moment between Leia and Han (just like he did in “Empire”) is funny, offers up some exposition, and then steps back into the back ground.

Harrison did his best performance in a decade, fully embracing and saying goodbye to the best character he ever played.  Really, when it came to the old cast they did everything right, showing how they changed and where they went since the happy ending of Jedi, and using them as launch pads for the new cast.

General Hux, I actually think he is a pretty good character.  They do not directly compare him to anyone in the original trilogy, he gives one impassioned speech, and otherwise serves as the calculating counterpoint to Kylo Ren.

 Something I did not like, the politics.  I had to look up what was happening in the movie’s political conflict.  And while it makes sense after I look it up, the fact that it made no sense in the movie hurts the film overall.  It is not necessary I suppose as the movie moves very fast and is not about Space Politics (that should be left for Star Trek), but it is the motivation of General Hux, and General Leia, and the impetus of the story, so maybe making that a little clearer to the audience should be a priority.

One last thing I do like, everything else.  The music, the effects, the costumes, the action, and the pacing.  If Disney were to put out a statement talking about how happy they were with the film and how they want to continue to be the mainstay of pop culture, I would just nod and be happy.  Much like Marvel, Star Wars is a huge franchise that will reach millions and millions of people, this film promises that the franchise will be committed to fun, adventure, and good characters that kids and adults all over the world can watch and love and serve as a common cultural touchstone for all the right reasons.

While this movie is not perfect, it didn’t have to be, we have decades to explore an entire galaxy of adventures, and a company that wants to put the people who love that universe in charge of making things people love.  Hooray.

Score: 8/10

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Marvel's "Civil War" (the comic)

This movie trailer just dropped.  It looks great.  I am going to talk about the god awful comic that inspired the movie.

I have a theory, the reason most smart people in the Marvel Universe (and comics in general) tend to be scientists rather than lawyers is simply because in comics you can make up bull shit gibberish and call it science, you can't make up law and everyone just say, “Yeah, I can see how that might pass and spike controversy”.

Unfortunately Marvel Comics back in 2006 decided to base one of the biggest events of the decade around a legal misunderstanding… and it made not a lick of sense.  After a number of incidents relating to superhero misconduct (for instance, the Hulk destroyed a good amount of Las Vegas while being mind-controlled, and Star Fox date raped a woman and fled the country) the last straw came in a very stupid way.

A group of young superheroes called The New Warriors found a group of escaped super villains hiding out in Connecticut.  What they should have done is kept their distance, formulate a plan, and call for back up if they needed it, one problem though, the team was being followed around by a camera crew because they were part of a superhero reality show akin to “Cops”.  The bad guys saw them, a fight broke out, and one of the villains, named Nitro, caused an explosion that killed hundreds of people including dozens of children.  Several of the heroes died as well.  This was the 9/11 of the Marvel universe and prompted a change in how the government interacted with the heroes.  All the superheroes now needed a license to use their powers.

Strangely the actual bad guy, Nitro.  He is barely mentioned in the rest of the event.

Captain America saw this licensing issue as unethical and took to leading a group of superheroes who did not want to register as a freelance group of heroes, he gave them all new cover identities and they continued to fight crime.  Iron Man was on the other side, since he was a former Secretary of Defense (yes, Tony Stark) Iron Man was made head of the licensed heroes and given the directive to stop vigilantes from operating, either they registered with the government (which means they would receive training, pay, benefits, and have to take orders) or they would be jailed until they registered.

As I previously mentioned writing law in comics is difficult and in this instance it was especially bad because at no point did they print the literal text of “The Registration Act”.  So no one could actually point to the law and say what it was the argument was about.  No soft language that would require review.  The registration act was unwritten not because it was complicated, but because Marvel's editors did not know how you would word a law to make such a disagreement possible.  There is an issue of She-Hulk that explains her legal justifications for why Registration is correct (there is no corresponding argument from another super-lawyer because it would require the creative staff to really hammer out a legal fiction that could illustrate the point).

I actually find this to be a sad state of affairs because Dan Slott wrote excellent super-cases for his run on She-Hulk (can a ghost testify against his murderer, can Starfox be tried for rape because his love powers can manipulate a woman's will, can a supervillain sue a hero for excessive force, what constitutes cruel-and-unusual punishment for a super-max prison?)  All of those topics were really cool to explore... And unfortunately no one else can really write that kind of stuff.  (Really, Dan Slott’s writing on that comic went into the toilet toward the end too, so maybe even he couldn’t have fixed this).

There is a massive argument going on that has no foundation on either side.  So instead we have to infer what the argument was about from each side’s behavior… AND HO-BOY everybody acted out of character

 

Whose side are you on?
I don't know.  What the hell is this all about?

The single biggest issue I have with the story is that both Iron Man and Captain America seem to be going against what I think their positions would be.  Both suffer tons of characterization, and in the case of Iron Man (outside the main "Civil War" book) suffers outright character assassination.

1) Captain America has had a teen sidekick die and has advocated against other teen heroes namely the Young Avengers.  Captain America is always the first hero to advocate against new people getting into the life of a superhero, and that makes sense he was frozen and lost his entire life to being a hero, why would he want someone to make that same sacrifice?  He is also critical of heroes who use too much force or use being a hero as an excuse to have fun or seek thrills.  The idea of heroes needing to receive training and licenses to operate makes a lot of sense.  But he is against it, and during the series he employs the Young Avengers (a group of teen heroes he told to stop operating) to help his cause, all of which makes him a massive hypocrite.  And then the Punisher shows up having murdered two super criminals and is immediately teamed up with by Captain America.  Hypocrite.

Also, Spider-man getting this beaten up by the two chuckle heads that Punisher killed is kind of disrespectful to Peter Parker as a character.

2) Cap's identity is known to the government, he lives in the helicarrier when he is not in Avengers tower or mansion, he gets a pay check from the government to go on missions for them and has a tremendously flexible work load that allows him to apply his skills and abilities to those missions he sees needing his abilities and his moral compass.  If anything he should be advocating that other superheroes receive the same support from the government to help them escape unfair persecution (“Spiderman, Hero or Menace” for instance).

3) Cap has used his legal status as "Champion" to form his own team of Avengers in the past so he is clearly not above using the rules.  This is more an extension of #2.  SHIELD was initially against or resistant to a new Avengers team forming because of how a previous team had ended (Scarlet Witch went crazy, killed 4 team members, and nearly destroyed all of New York), Captain America was so adamant about wanting to create a new team that he invoked his special status with the government to overrule all objections and create a new team.  Does he feel those rules are a detriment?  If so he gives no indication of such.

4) Iron Man is also acting out of character so let’s talk about him some.  Tony has been managing from behind the scenes the superhero community for years.  He formed the group called the Illuminati along with leaders from other super teams to help coordinate their efforts; Charles Xavier, Mr. Fantastic, Namor, Black Bolt, Doctor Strange, and Iron Man have all been taking the lead without the government’s oversight.  I think that these characters ESPECIALLY TONY, would not want to relinquish this control to the government which has shown itself to be run by idiots on more than one occasion.

Poor Charles Xavier, it is hard to do an action shot when you're an 80 year old man in a wheel chair and your powers are completely imperceptible.  He looks like he is having an ice cream headache.

5) Tony has gone to war with the Government to keep his armor technology from being misused.  The entire reason he became Secretary of Defense was to end the perceived abuse of his inventions.  So now he is going to sign up to give the government control of literal super geniuses?  Even if the government had no access to his armor, there are other super inventors whose inventions they could misuse.

6) Let’s get back to Cap.  Steve has his team give up their true identities and live under assumed names with no end to the war in sight, claiming that living under an assumed name is temporary, and the fact that these people cannot go home till their insurrection is over should be seen as a necessary and noble sacrifice.  Tony does not require that, if you register your identity doesn't have to be public and you get a paycheck, back up, training, and benefits/retirement. Cap is actively causing people to give up their lives, Tony is benefiting their lives.  Really, this aspect of the registration should be seen as a good thing by both heroes, and since Tony has been funding the Avengers and has in the past tried to set up shell corporations to fund hero retirement it would make sense for him to still create these kinds of systems but not be on the side of registration, Tony (by analogy) would be in the rich people, “let’s privatize social security” camp.

I do not think words can express how much I hate this quote.  It all at once encapsulates everything that is wrong with political discourse in this country and in the world as a whole.  You could replace Captain America with literally anyone, be it Glen Beck, Bernie Sanders, Jared Fogle, Jenny McCarthy, Bill Nye, or the Red Skull and not change a word.  It is empty rhetoric, and all Captain America does to justify his position in the entire story is say crap like this.

             7) After years of fighting super criminals and murderous mad science, the SHIELD agents sent to capture heroes are dubbed "Cape Killers" even though no heroes are killed by them.  It actually makes little sense on numerous levels.  In fact there is an incident in which a registered hero tries to take in a non-registered hero and the registered hero is killed in the ensuing fight.  (Seriously, how is training and accountability a bad thing?)

             8) To help keep unlicensed heroes (and you know BAD GUYS) jailed during the Civil War Tony Reed Richards and Hank Pym invent ultra-prison in a dimension called the Negative Zone.  Why are heroes being jailed in the negative zone? I do not understand both the moral "why" and the legal "how" that allows this to be accomplished.  This is less a character issue and more of a “why didn’t they write down the registration act” thing.

             9) Tony Stark and Mister Fantastic clone Thor in an attempt to create more heroes (kind of like the Ultron program in “Avengers: Age of Ultron”).  Unfortunately the clone is not ready and it uses lethal force to subdue a “hero” named Goliath (it should be noted that Goliath was 50ft tall and charging clone-Thor at the time and knocked several SHIELD agents off a building.  It should also be noted that Goliath is a black guy, and I think that it was SUPER AHEAD OF ITS TIME commentary on excessive force).  Regardless I don’t so much see this as out of character, but another thing that should have happened differently.

Maybe Thor should have used a TASER to take down the charging suspect?

With the above listed reasons I feel that the whole of Civil War should have been different.  I think that the Iron Man led Illuminati should have been against registration and Captain America should have favored registration.  I think that Tony should have made the clone-Thor as a way of evening out the fight with the mounting government forces and it causing the death of a hero should have prompted Iron Man to surrender.  Everything in the comic was backwards.

If they had shown the registration act and had Captain America explain the issues that caused him to react as such, and Iron Man explained why he did what he did, I would understand why this was happening, but none of it makes any sense.

Thankfully the movie is going to sidestep all of this.  Rather than arguing over the place of young heroes and training, instead it is a very different Captain America and a very different Iron Man fighting over (I think) whether Bucky Barnes needs to go to trial for all the terror and murder he was forced to take part in.

The only complaint I have with the movie universe (so far) is that Tony and Cap seem to not be friends in the movie universe.  Tony seems to see Cap as a stick in the mud who would be useless without the inventions of Howard Stark (Tony’s dad).  And Cap sees Tony as lacking morals, having only taken action to help people after suffering a personal attack (while Cap tried and failed numerous times to get into the military trying to fight and make the world better).  As to whether the argument which causes the fight will make sense… I think it will, this is the creative team behind “Winter Soldier” and that is my favorite superhero movie.

Don't even get me started on how fucking stupid Spider-man acts thru this whole thing.
(Though it is still less stupid than Black Panther)

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If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

"The Simpsons" Missed Opportunities

Apparently “The Simpsons”, one of the most iconic bits of American culture ever produced will finally end (maybe) after its 30^th season.  This will make it one of the longest running shows ever in the same league as “Doctor Who” and “Guiding Light”.  I feel that its end is a good thing.  While the show is iconic it did not evolve nearly as much as it should have, and I feel that one of the best episodes of the series in one that explored how the show could have allowed the characters to grow up, “Lisa’ Wedding”.

Unlike other series this one still had more stories to tell after a wedding episode.

I generally think that the show had a lot of creative people on staff and created such an expansive cast of characters that there is a host of missed opportunities they could have explored and didn’t.  They even made a whole show joking about how they did not take advantage of that stable of characters, that was “The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase”, and a make-shift could-have-been-a-pilot, “22 Short Films About Springfield” two more episodes I consider among the series’ best work.

The reason I wrote this blog is I wanted to point to what I consider the biggest missed opportunity for a spin off from “The Simpsons”: Hank Scorpio and the Globex Corporation, from “You Only Move Twice”.

My favorite single appearance character in the series, and maybe my favorite character overall.
Voiced by the great actor, Albert Brooks.

It is my favorite episode of "The Simpsons", and the fact that Hank never returned to the series is a crying shame.  A series starring this character, a comedy spy series (a concept that has existed for decades) but told from the position of a villain.

Each season could be another giant scheme in a new base of operations and the logistics and mishaps that comes with running them. Volcano Island, Ice Castle, Undersea lab, Oil Rig, ancient city like El Dorado, and a Moon Base. You could have parodies of the Avengers (the British ones), Get Smart, the Manchurian Candidate, and the Prisoner (something “The Simpsons” did with the episode, “The Computer Wore Menace Shoes”)

If you do not know what this is, relax.  Nobody who watched the show was entirely sure what it was about either.

Hell, you could have parodies of every James Bond, sure we see the classic Sean Connery version get murdered, but what about Roger Moore?  You could also have Scorpio take down rival bad guys, like Rattle Snake (instead of Cobra), Phantom (instead of SPECTRE), Micro (instead of Quantum), and Chimera (instead of Hydra).

Have him golf with 3rd world dictators who are seen as absentminded puppets of the CIA and take stories from their real life eccentricities to develop them. The show could have actually raised people's general awareness of real life evil dictators.  I know who Omar Al-Bashir is, but having him played for comedy would let the various Cletus citizens of our country know too.

Now I feel sad and let down with the world.  Not merely because this show never got to exist, but of how many could have and didn’t, of how “The Simpsons” could have been the starting point of lots of shows like “All in the Family” had been decades prior.  Sure it still had a major impact, but it could have had more, it could have evolved and grown, and the fact that it didn’t is sad, it was kept frozen in time and now 30 years after it debuted it will end and that will be it.

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Killing (Baby) Hitler

A few days ago, before a massive terrorist attack reminded people what real danger and tragedy were there was a really stupid question going around the internet and it was this, “If you could travel back thru time to kill Adolf Hitler when he was a child, long before his influence as a Nazi leader, would you kill this baby Hitler?”  Presidential candidate Governor Jeb Bush said THIS. 

Now, how did a question like this come to be part of popular parlance enough to actually prompt a response from rival presidential candidate Doctor Ben Carson?  (Seen Here)  It is important to understand the nature of these questions, this is a word problem that illustrates the conflict between Utilitarian and Deontological ethics.

Utilitarian ethics are focused on the outcome of an action, or the total utility.  They would say that killing Hitler serves such a greater good (preventing the Holocaust) that the "wrongness" of killing a baby is completely offset.

Deontological is focused on individual actions, and that doing something wrong, even for a good reason is still wrong.  They would say that committing the wrong of killing an innocent person (or at least killing someone before they have done the wrong they would become most famous for) is so unethical that doing so is evil regardless of what it is stopping.

Technically speaking Stephen Colbert gave the "right" answer.  (Seen Here)  The “correct” unstated third option is that with the power of time travel you can set things right that do not involve killing, but instead require the more difficult task of helping.  Hitler was not always evil, he was an art student that grew up in a difficult family, he liked dogs, he was funny, and suffered a host of maladies.  He was a person both before and after being a monster.  Given time and patience you could turn his life toward something positive, help him become the artist he wanted to be instead of beast he became.

Generally speaking, I feel that not taking a second to consider the implications or the inability to consider that there might be a third option, is indicative of uncreative thinking.  I feel that lack of creativity means that such an individual would be a poor negotiator, and would be a poor leader.  Or maybe he just thought it was a stupid question and gave a flippant response because it is a really stupid question.

Though the image of Adolf Hitler as a 60 year old man having retired to the United States to teach painting on PBS, talking about happy little lamp posts, that is a timeline hard to envision.

Unfortunately all of these arguments still ignore the deeper problem of the situation, that fascism, eugenics, and a policy of murdering various minorities in systemic ways (Native Americans, Africans, and Armenians) already existed.  And that the need for food and living space to be taken from “minorities” was already happening, the world was already running out of people that were different colors to abuse and eventually different gradients of white were going to be used as justification for mass murder, which is just how you forecast a pattern.  A Holocaust in Europe was inevitable.

While Hitler is the biggest advocate of the process and was undeniably evil he is kind of being scapegoated for the whole thing.  Millions of people participated in the endeavor, and since not all of them were prosecuted, and none of them want to confront the fact that they shepherded people out of homes and into ovens.  People want to blame Hitler, so they can feel better about themselves having been "tricked" into being monsters.

So I guess there is a fourth answer: It doesn’t matter if you could kill Hitler, because he was not the only one murdering.

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CBS Streaming "Star Trek" 2017

There is a plan in motion to create a new “StarTrek” series which will premier on CBS, and then the rest of the series willstream on a new pay to watch online service that CBS has chosen to run.  I do not care for this.

This is going to end up like all the rival streaming services on the internet trying to supplant youtube.

Look CBS, we get it.  You want more money.  Who doesn't?

By look at how Yahoo lost $42,000,000 on streaming content, and they are an internet based company that were producing a cult TV show, "Community".  Why are you following their example?

There are already two 500lb gorillas in the cage with you, Hulu and Netflix.  Both have hosted your content in the past, and Netflix is currently streaming all the old "Star Trek" series and several movies.  Why not just partner with one of them?  You don't have to worry about shouldering the production costs yourself, you don't have to worry about producing enough first person content to fill a streaming service.  No additional server hosting and maintenance.

You are not striking out into new territory, you are late to the party, and you are going to spend $2,000,000 a week (that is a conservative estimate) for 3 months and then realize it was all a colossal failure and end up whoring out the streaming rights to Netflix and Hulu anyway to try and recapture the lost production cost.

"Star Trek: The Next Generation" was one of the first shows to cost more than $1,000,000 per episode to produce.

After this catastrophe, some idiot on your corporate board who thought of this stupid plan will blame the "Star Trek" brand name for no longer being a draw.  Ensuring that you will not get to merchandise the license to half of what you could have.  You want to create Lego sets.  You want Kirk and Spock to be in Lego Dimensions, we know you do, because the fans want that.  You want to sell play-doh dispensers shaped like the enterprise.  You want a line of micro-machines.  You want 10,000 t-shirts shipped out daily.

You want money, and this kind of streaming shit is not going to give it to you.

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