Legacy of the Twelve Colonies Volume IV: Battlestar Galactica... There's a Starbuck Waiting in the Sky

Forgiveness, like revenge, is a dish best served cold. At least, that's what mom always told me. Learning to move on from any kind of sustained animosity or after being wronged is no easy feat for either the forgiver or the forgivee (unless either one of those parties is a complete sociopath, which in that case, problem solved, I guess), and in my own experience, forgiveness is almost always driven by some utilitarian purpose. This isn't a knock against any variety of situational pragmatism: in fact quite the opposite. Most important decisions in life tend to be made only when our hand is forced. (Or maybe I'm just an indecisive bastard.) Real life has a way of throwing curve balls; it's these changes in our personal situations that tend to act as catalysts for our really big decisions. And rightfully so. In life, as in film, we're often far better served by what we need rather than by what we want. And the contingency that serves as an impetus for driving decisions should also necessarily bleed over into the content of those decisions:

Like trust, respect, love, and making on offer on a house, forgiveness should always be conditional.
 
This may seem counter-intuitive, but essentially what I'm arguing for is forgiveness in the sense of accountability rather than forgiveness in the mystic sense of the Christian (or Cylon) tradition, which is tainted by this concept of absolution. People absolutely should be given second chances, but it's important to make this distinction between accountability and absolution. Accountability is a process of accepting responsibility for one's actions, and involves an effort on the part of the individual who wronged someone to better themselves and atone for what they've done; it's also a process that involves that individual's society (either on a macro or micro level) to work with and support them, and reintegrate them back into the group. Absolution, on the other hand, is an abdication of all responsibility by all parties to have to change or strive to do better; it's a surrender, in the worst sense of the word, of any kind of moral obligation for everyone involved, sacrificing the need to process uncomfortable emotions like hate, anger, guilt, or resentment in favour of a self-indulgent and immediate gratification.

Like much of the series, Season 4 of Battlestar Galactica doesn't shy away from difficult ethical questions like this. Season 4 was, in many respects, centred around this core theme of the pragmatism of forgiveness, and that divide between accountability and absolution. Well, that, and, of course, hot robot sex.

Legacy of the Twelve Colonies Volume III: Battlestar Galactica... The Occupy New Caprica Movement

In the wake of 9/11, the Terrorist became the bogeyman de jour. One of the most defining characteristics of this new threat was their propensity for using suicide bombers. It's a difficult mindset to understand and one typically associated with the evil hordes threatening to kick down our front doors. So it was all the more striking for a sci-fi show made by Western Devils just a few years after the single most iconic terrorist act in modern history to empathize--quite effectively--with what amounts to a terrorist movement employing suicide bombers against the enemy.

Granted, Battlestar Galactica does give us more meat to sink our teeth into in terms of contextualizing the extreme measures the survivors of humanity are willing to resort to in order to fight back against their cybernetic oppressors than, say, nobodies favourite real-life assholes in al-Qaeda. At the outset of Season 3, we're presented with a scenario and point of view that makes such methods more easy to swallow, but that in itself is a pretty incredible feat considering the political landscape both then and now. Ask anybody in the Western world--especially residents of the good 'ol US of A--in the wake of the 9/11 attacks whether they could ever fathom what it would take for somebody to consider going to such extremes, and what few answers you would have been able to remember after waking up in the hospital three days later probably wouldn't have offered much insight into that sort of mindset. For most people living in modern times, it's a nearly unfathomable thought experiment. So to have it tackled in a mature and nuanced way in a sci-fi show about humanity's struggle against annihilation at the hands of usually pretty sexy murder-bots is a feat unto itself.

Legacy of the Twelve Colonies Volume II: Battlestar Galactica... Cross-Species Pollination and Burdens Laid Down

I like my television shows how I like my women: coherent, engaging, relatively free from plot holes, and benefiting from a strong narrative arc. Also, a healthy budget doesn't hurt either. Also, after diving into Battlestar Galactica, a love of cigars and fine liquors is also a plus. Also, strong doses of Katee Sackhoff are also basically a must. Being Katee Sackhoff is even better. Or maybe just a show about Katee Sackhoff taking names and kicking ass, or just kicking ass, or just doing whatever the fuck she wants to do because Starbuck is a fucking god.

After a strong start, I think it's safe to say that I did not find it too hard difficult to become completely immersed in Katee Sackhoff the world of the reborn Battlestar Galactica television series. As far as television sci-fi goes, it's hard to think of a real contender in recent years. It's as exciting as it is insightful, effectively dealing with moral, social, and political issues in a fairly nuanced way without any really definitive black or white answers, but more of a murky grey maybe flecked with, I don't know, whatever colour explosions are. Red and orange maybe. (I don't know, I've been watching a lot of Archer recently, and I totally can't help but read that last sentence in Archer's voice. I know, right?)

Legacy of the Twelve Colonies Volume I: Battlestar Galactica... Sex, Guns, and the Apocalypse

I was raised on a steady diet of sci-fi (and Whoop-Ass, a can of which a day is conducive to keeping away all manner of punk-ass bitches), though for a short while I underwent a definite nutritional deficiency. I never bottomed out completely, but for a time, I was most certainly not getting my daily recommended dose of science fiction, and all of the health benefits that such a regime typically provides. It was really kick-started again a few years ago with the double-shot of Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, the second and third installments in the beloved (except for the ending, apparently) video game franchise sensation. Besides being catapulted to one of my top ten trilogies of anything in any medium, the Mass Effect series also ushered in my own personal Sci-Fi Renaissance (think RENAISSANCE MAN but with less military training and more sitting on my ass on the couch watching movies and playing video games, slightly less Danny DeVito, and basically a lack of anything that even vaguely resembling the archetypal ‘90s comedy except the name).

My reborn, ravenous appetite had some pleasant side-effects, such as a willingness to expand my horizons, the most notable case of which involved overcoming my irrational hatred of Joss Whedon and discovering Firefly, which turned out to be incredibly awesome. Another sci-fi narrative/phenomenon that has been on my radar for some time is the remade/rebooted/reimagined Battlestar Galactica series that ran from 2004 to 2009. (Incidentally, Tricia Helfer, who featured heavily in the Mass Effect series as EDI is also one of the leads in Battlestar Galactica, which was another reason to throw myself into the fray.) The show was developed in large part by one Ronald D. Moore, whose Star Trek pedigree gives him all kinds of street cred on the proper street, which just happened to be one I had frequented all too often in my youth and then basically took up permanent residence on.

The Legacy Syndrome: The Bad has Been Broken and We're All the Better For It

Gonna find my baby gonna hold her tight
gonna grab some afternoon delight...

In GOODFELLAS Henry Hill's (Ray Liota) description of fellow gangster James Conway (Robert DeNiro) included the following poetic and memorable line in a movie chalked full of poetic and memorable lines:

"Jimmy was the kind of guy that rooted for the bad guys in the movies."

Well, as it turns out, a great many of us are more similar to the psychotic Jimmy than are probably willing to admit, though not for the reasons you'd suspect.  There are many characters that have existed in various media from folk tales to reality TV ("Don't laugh!  This ain't reality TV!") that have embodied the antihero, which has become a cultural buzzword that has come to dominate the communal conscious.  In fact, if one were so inclined, one might effectively argue that the Age of the Hero is over and we are currently living in the Age of the Antihero.  While depending on whom you ask, the term "antihero" has either become another worn out, meaningless word like "awesome," or "epic," or "transvestite hooker" or a fundamental addition to the parlance of our times.  I fall somewhere in the middle, like the meat of the philosophical manwich.  The term "antihero" - much like "postmodernism" - can be part of an effective arsenal to intelligently contribute to various ongoing cultural dialogues with other free-thinking citizens as long as it is used sparingly and treated with the proper respect and care and not paraded out in front of friends and family in order to appear cosmopolitan and learned - much like a transvestite hooker.

You see, the reason that Jimmy and I and probably a lot of you can relate to the antihero is because most of us pretty much are antiheroes in our own life narratives.  Basically, the antihero is the protagonist of a narrative who does not embody attributes typically considered heroic such as altruism or selflessness or sacrifice... ness or the tendency when fucking a person in the ass to provide the goddamn common courtesy of a reach-around.  These individuals are typically self-centered, though they do have some sort of "code of (dis)honour" that anchors them and keeps them from drifting so far into the dark waters of moral ambiguity that those in the audience can no longer relate to or sympathize with them.  The fact is, most people are assholes most of the time, sometimes deliberately and sometimes through no fault of our own.  Most of us aren't heroic supermen who always do "the right thing" and, in fact, aren't always sure of what the right thing is or if there even is a right thing.

The archetype of the antihero was most recently exemplified in the quite excellent television show BREAKING BAD, which chronicled the misadventures of high school chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin Walter White (Bryan Cranston) as he cooked crystal meth in order to provide a nest egg for his wife and two children after he passed on from the lung cancer with which he had recently been diagnosed.  With help from former student Jesse (Aaron Paul) (of course you realize that I'm going to have to punctuate the rest of this article with random, emphatic exclamations of "Bitch!") and a host of wacky characters, including crazy Latino drug dealers, calm and collected Latino drug lords, sadistic Latino hit men, a dismembered Latino head-turtle-bomb, and his (not Latino) DEA brother-in-law who has no idea his wife's sister is married to the greatest thing to happen to crystal meth since somebody created a terrible drug using incredibly volatile and harmful chemicals (for some reason) that gets you high for a little while but ultimately basically rots your face off from the inside.  And they say innovation is dead.

I am the one who knocks... And occasionally the one who
sits surrounded by fat stacks of cash and stares menacingly
in case somebody happens to walk into my field of vision.
I mean, from that exact angle, I will scare the shit out of you.

Much like Tony Soprano, Walter White was a character who, on paper, is the kind of guy that beating to death with a tire iron would literally and quantifiably make the world a better place.  But in the context of the narrative of BRAKING BAD, it's seductively easy to sympathize with Mr. White, yo, because he's presented not as a desperate man engaged in increasingly depraved and destructive criminal activities but as a man with untapped potential a little down on his luck who is now properly motivated to solve increasingly complex problems.  We see things through Walt's eyes, so we see the production of crystal myth from a clinical (yet passionate) perspective as an entrepreneurial enterprise, a business.  He's like the little kid selling lemonade in homemade stand in front of his house who transforms into a soft drink magnate with a multinational corporation unleashing sugary drinks en masse to an unsuspecting yet willing public.  He's a businessman, an entrepreneur, who, with the right application of talent and motivation, can rise through the ranks and carve out his own sizable piece of the pie.  It's a twist on the same philosophy that gave rise to the trope of the American Dream.  Walter White is relatable because he's a projection of how so many of us would like to see ourselves; the underappreciated genius who given half a chance could excel - really fucking excel - at something and assert themselves and establish themselves as somebody to remembered for that one Great Thing who is also a part-time badass with a heart of gold (sort of like Han Solo).  

For some, the dialogue surrounding BREAKING BAD - especially the final season - revolved around a moral analysis or commentary on Walter's actions.  However, discussions about the morality of Walter White and especially of whether he was "a monster" (or "the devil" if you want to be dramatic like Jesse, bitch) are, at best, tangentially relevant to the mythology of the show.  Besides the incredibly useless and unhelpful endeavor of trying to categorize people according to essentialist notions of "good" and "bad" - as if people could only ever wholly embody one of these two alignments - from the very outset of the series, it was clear that BREAKING BAD was never a morality tale.  If it were, then it would have explored the (tens of ) thousands of lives ruined or severely harmed through the recreational (?) use of the thousands of pounds of methamphetamines that Walter and Jesse produced over the course of five seasons (or two years in BREAKING BAD time).

The only way to read the show and not be considered a soulless, sociopathic asshole is as an analogy or some kind of Western mythos.  Just as we in the audience were meant to sympathize and "cheer for" Tony Soprano in THE SOPRANOS, it was obvious that Vince Gilligan and the gang wanted the audience to sympathize with and cheer for Walter White.  Throughout the narrative, everything that transpired was ultimately filtered through a prism that bent the audience's perception to match that of Walter's.  Everything that happened in the show would always be shown in relation to Walter.  And if you were to interpret BREAKING BAD on a purely literal level and still garnered any enjoyment out of it, you would be a quantifiably terrible human being.  The shit that Walter White - not to mention almost every other character on the show - did could be classified somewhere on a sliding scale of moral reprehensibility.

Some might point to Walt's literal partner in crime Jesse as the show's moral compass and heart, but people seem to forget several important facts.  One, Jesse was the catalyst for Walter's transformation into the chronically knocking and dangerous drug lord Heisenburg, bitch.  Without Jesse's street connections to crack into the very competitive illegal drug market, Walter's plan to cook and sell meth might have ended as merely the insane ravings of a madman.  Two, Jesse spent a great chunk of the series as a degenerate junkie who was constantly engaged in criminal activities related to the distribution and ingestion of various mind-altering substances.  Three, despite his initial objections, Jesse ultimately guns down an unarmed man in cold blood.  Yeah, he felt guilty after, but curiously not guilty to actually turn himself in or, you know, face the consequences of his actions in any meaningful, mature way.

Walter's wife Skylar might also be seen as the moral yin to Walter's yang, but she, too, also existed in an ethical twilight zone.  While some spewed forth extremely vicious vitriol against Skylar and the actress playing her (Anna Gunn) for some reason, I never hated the character as some seemed to.  Skylar seemed kind of annoying sometimes, which was natural because we were seeing her from Walt's point of view as someone who was questioning him and impeding his ability to manufacture and sell poison to faceless users who could have included schoolkids and nuns for all he knew.  The worst part about Skylar wasn't that she was annoying; it was that she seemed to exist independent of any sense of agency and simple as an entity for Walt to lie to.  She only got more interesting when her own twisted morality was revealed.  Not only did she have an affair with her boss, she was also complicit in covering up and enabling Walter's rise to drug power.  Also like Jesse, despite her later reservations about her questionable decisions regarding her (admittedly limited) involvement in the drug trade, she also wants to get out scott free and avoid any actual consequences if she can.

For some, the foil to Walter's villainy was Hank's unquenchable thirst for justice.  But a closer examination reveals that Hank was also an asshole, just an asshole of another variety and caliber.  Hank wasn't exactly a  lighthouse of morality guiding everybody through stormy seas to a safe haven.  In the family proceedings prior to Walt's descent/ascent into the role of drug kingpin, Hank was the big swinging dick of the gang.  However, in the fifth season when he finally discovers that the drug lord Heisenburg is actually his seemingly mild-mannered brother-in-law, Hank becomes obsessed with bringing Walt down not for any moral reasons but because of wounded pride and the challenge to his alpha dog status.  If Hank was going the Robocop route to Serve the Public Trust, Protect the Innocent, and Uphold the Law, then he would have gone to his superiors right away with all of his suspicions and/or evidence even at the potential loss of his job, which he (probably) likely figured would be forfeit for, you know, being a top-ranking DEA agent who has been unable to identify a drug kingpin sitting right under his nose for almost two years like some kind of 70s style high school teacher mustache.  See, that's the very definition of nobility: sacrificing of oneself for the common or greater good.  But Hank wasn't interested in serving the greater good, only his own ego.  The real issue with Hank was that he was simultaneously A) envious of Walt who succeeded to a far greater extent in his chosen field than Hank ever did (or as it turns out, would) in his own and B) suffering from wounded pride for having been "one-upped" and outsmarted by Walter there by stripping Hank (in Hank's mind anyway) of his superior social status.  (Also, Hank eagerly admitted that he didn't give a shit about Jesse when he was working as an informant and would gladly have sacrificed him if it meant bringing down Walter.)

Hail to the king, baby.

All of the main characters were antiheroic to some degree, showing inclinations towards both socially positive and negative decisions and acts.  The point of the show wasn't to depict some epic battle of good versus evil.  No, ultimately what BREAKING BAD was all about was legacies and the establishing and passing on thereof.  Walt himself summed it up best when he declared to Jesse that he was "in the empire business."

This is another reason why it's easy to sympathize with Walter and others like him.  The need to establish a legacy, to do that one great thing that will live on in the collective memory of as many people as we each deem are necessary after we've all gone up to that great meth lab in the sky.  It's a form of immortality in a way to have something you created and built up stand as a monument to your memory long after you are gone.  It's one thing to be remembered, but it's another thing entirely to have somebody stand in the shadow of your creation and stare up in awe and wonder; if this monument, this achievement is so magnificent, how much greater must be the one who created it?  Creating a legacy is not just an effort to be remembered but the ability to differentiate oneself sufficiently by creating something unique that nobody else could have.  To look upon one's works and despair as was encapsulated in Shelly's poem Ozymandias recited to chilling effect by Walter White at the beginning of the (quite excellent) BREAKING BAD episode of the same name.  When your creation is so monumental that even its ruins inspire awe and wonder, then you know you've maxed out your legacy points.

For some reason, contemporary storytelling has relied on the trope of the criminal empire to address this concept of legacy in regards to empire building, otherwise known as the SCARFACE effect.  Bitch.  This, in part, is what has lead to some misinterpretations of BREAKING BAD and similar narratives as morality tales.  I think the key to viewing the trope of the criminal empire as containing the DNA of Shakespeare's famous dramas and tragedies.  In reality, those involved in the upper echelons (and lower echelons for that matter) of the drug trade are generally terrible people who would just as soon shoot you as shoot you full of their product.  But as metaphors or analogies, they represent a more visceral kind of empire building where one man or woman can rise to the top through sheer force of will (and a lot of bullets or exotic poisons).  It's a tantalizing proposition because in that dog eat dog (or man hit other man with Pontiac Aztec) world, one's rise to power is ultimately dependent upon the pure strength of that individual.  The concept of the criminal empire has been romanticized, and its a pill we can all swallow (bitch!) because through these narratives each member of the audience is enticed to see themselves as that exceptional individual.

A criminal empire is also enticing because it is an underworld with a unique and privileged membership and clientele.  It's appealing because if you have access it's like a secret fraternity.  You feel empowered because you have access to another world that other people can't even see even though it's right there in front of them.  It's a backstage pass of the highest caliber.  One can't help but feel a certain high not only from being able to traverse across boundaries between worlds most people can't even see but also to wield clandestine power right under the unsuspecting noses of all of those without that access.  There's nothing quite like being the werewolf in sheep's clothing, so to speak.

Huh, so that's what a donkey show looks like.

The other appeal in seeing legacy and empire in this sense is that it is a template of individual talent and ability that can be applied to various situations in our own lives.  From the pseudo-fatalist perspective, an individual rises to emperor status through the proper application of one's natural or unnatural gifts.  The problem with looking at people's talents as "callings," that is some kind of cosmic force urging us down a particular path is that people always assume that callings are noble of purpose and divine in spirit.  If the Calling Theory were true, we'd have to accept that just as many people were called to do as much shitty stuff as good.  When Walter finally admits to his wife Skylar in the final episode that he embarked on his little adventure mostly to satisfy his own ego and need to establish a legacy, he also admits that he was really good at cooking meth and he really enjoyed cooking meth.  If you're going to subscribe to this kind of fatalistic concept of individuals being called upon by some Entity to be really, really good at something, then you're also going to have to eventually confront the fact that all talents are not distributed equally across the spectrum of whatever prevailing moral philosophy is being used to measure their relative worth.  I mean, odds are, given the sheer odds, most of us are probably (and evidently) really talented at really useless stuff or really terrible (in the pejorative sense) stuff.

Which leads us back to the archetype of the antihero, bitch.  In order to balance out our most likely problematic talents and self-centered legacy- and empire-building tendencies, we like to try and embrace some sort of moral code (actually, it's more of a guideline).  A twisted moral code no doubt, but a basic set of rules and general lines in the sand that we continually convince ourselves that we will not cross in our pursuit of legacy.  In our relatively antiheroic lives, we need some kind of anchor to hold onto some semblance of what we consider to be humanity, some kind of redemptive quality to keep us from going all the way over the edge in our own minds or in the minds of others.  In a way maintaining a code is like maintaining some sort of karmic balance, a check mark in the Cosmic Ledger to show that despite all of the shit we bring into this universe, we also haven't completely extinguished all light either.  It's OK to be the scoundrel so long as you help blow up the occasional Death Star.

BREAKING BAD was that rare specimen; a critically acclaimed and popular television show that didn't overstay its welcome and try to milk another four or five seasons just for the sake of making a couple more bucks. The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, as they say.  It was the perfect proof of concept that it's OK to break bad, just as long as you do it well, and no doubt its legacy has been secured for the foreseeable future.

May you (and I) go and do likewise.

Amen, bitch.

Rating: BREAKING BAD is 10/10 = One Head Who is the One Who Knocks

The Undead Can Be Such Dicks

I recently had the chance to watch AMC's The Walking Dead on BluRay thanks to the Easter Bunny who somehow knew exactly what I needed: zombies, and more of them.  For some reason I have had a mild zombie obsession in the past couple of years, though it has not been a completely fulfilling one.  Shortly after I decided I wanted to ramp up my zombie movie collecting initiative I became acutely aware that zombies had become "mainstream," and that there was a whole subculture of zombie fans who were on the brink of making it no longer "sub".  Zombies have exploded in the public consciousness recently, though thankfully not to the point of  vampires (Although I have heard talk of a zombie rom-com (I can not make this shit up) called WARM BODIES, where a zombie and a human try to make it in a crazy, post-apocalyptic world. You can check out more info over at JoBlo.) with whom our culture has had a pretty passionate love affair with in recent years.  Just mention TWILIGHT in a room full of teenage girls and watch the insanity that ensues.  Thanks to this mild-teen-angst-and-budding-sexuality-loosely-shrouded-in-a-vampire-story an entire generation of guys named Edward and Jacob are currently in a prime position to get a ton of pussy for a few years, and then lead sad, shallow lives as hollowed out shells of human beings knowing that they "peaked" at age fifteen and then were mocked mercilessly for the rest of their lives until they die alone at age forty-five from high blood pressure as fat, balding corporate middlemen who were little more than scenery at their jobs and whose only legacy will be the ass grooves they left in the shitty chairs in their cubicles, where they sat for hours on end envious of their coworkers who actually got their own offices.

And while zombies are not quite at the point of cultural saturation as vampires, they are still popular enough to make me question my own level of excitement.  I'm not sure exactly why as a fairly rational human being I would still feel the need to deprive myself of pleasure on account of other people.  Perhaps it's because I like to construct my identity on the basis of the Theory of Premeditated Self-Marginalization.  Basically what this philosophy (conceived of by yours truly) boils down to is a mandate never to get too heavily or intricately involved in any social contract.  It means -at most- existing on the fringe of any given social group to which I might be categorized to belong to.  The purpose of this philosophy is fourfold:

1) To reap the benefits of being a part of this social group ie. building social capital which may pay off for me later.
2) To avoid the headaches that inevitably come with being emotionally invested in something that probably doesn't really matter much anyway.
3) To remain aloof and give me a feeling of superiority I might not otherwise get in my day to day life.  (The Amicable Rebel Syndrome).  This allows me to participate within the social group, but still gives me the moral imperative to criticize the members contained therein with impunity (if pulled off correctly) and -if necessary- abandon ship when the shit hits the fan.
4) To retain "plausible deniability" and avoid responsibility when whatever social group it is inevitably fucks up.

Now one might label this as "anti-social behaviour", but what it really is is "quasi-social behaviour" insofar as that I am not really working in opposition to society; I'm more making a mockery of it and bending it to my own twisted whims. 

So it came to be that within my social circles I reluctantly became a "zombie guy," though not as hardcore a fan as I have witnessed.  What it boils down to is a bunch of zombie movies, a few books (The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks is a good place to start) some zombie video and board games, and the beginnings of a collection of zombie graphic novels.  The first part of my zombie graphic novel collection was Marvel Zombies, which might technically be a trade paperback.  I don't know, I don't follow comics that much nor do I really give a shit.  I quickly added Marvel Zombies 2, not because the first volume had been particularly engaging or well-written; I just thought it was cool to see zombie superheroes.  The artwork was pretty kick-ass, but the whole idea of intelligent zombies really detracted from the whole idea of zombies and their cultural sigificance.  Zombies were supposed to be this mindless force of (un)nature that represented our ultimate fear of death.  Marvel Zombies was only really enjoyable in a visceral way.  No thinking required.

After countless times watching DAWN OF THE DEAD (The original.  Sorry, Zack Snyder), playing Zombies! and Last Night on Earth with some buddies in person and killing hordes of zombies in Left 4 Dead (one of the best games ever?) online I was serendipitously introduced to a key piece of zombie lore.  This came in the form of a comic called The Walking Dead.  This seemed especially fateful to me because the phrase "I feel like the walking dead" was something I had scribbled in the margins of countless notebooks during the course of writing a (as yet unpublished) novel.  It had almost become a mantra for me after a bad day or during a serious case of writer's block, and so hearing that it had become the title of a comic book -about zombies, no less- I got this chill down my spine like when I was younger and discovered free internet porn (followed closely by the disappointment in finding so much cock in supposedly heterosexual porn).  It was meant to be in some way. 

Because I was not a hardcore comic book collector I didn't feel it necessary to track down each individual comic.  At the Fan Expo in Toronto last August I picked up the first two volumes of the soft cover trade paperback editions of The Walking Dead.  I also picked up many deposits for the spank bank and left sporting a massive hard on.  I don't know what it is about chicks dressed in superhero costumes, but it's fucking hot (note to my wife).  As soon as I got home I immediately and feverishly read through the entire first volume Days Gone Bye.  It wasn't necessarily the best piece of literature I had ever read, but it was a serial comic book specifically about survivors fighting off zombies.  While I wasn't blown away by the narrative structure, it was solidly written, and consistent in the pacing, themes, and gruesome deaths.  I thought at first I might be put off by the fact that the comic was in black and white as I took it as a sign of laziness on the part of the illustrators ("You're just a tracer."  "I'll trace a chalk line around your dead fucking body, you fuck!") but what I later realized was that it was a conscious choice to illustrate the starkness of the world the survivors faced and to tie into the theme of morality that permeates every issue.  At first the characters are in shock and see the world in only black and white terms: survive or die.  As the narrative progresses they begin to realize that nothing was ever "black or white" and the world which although destroyed had in some ways seemed simpler was anything but.  I became a fan and started adding more volumes to my collection, as you should as well.

I believe that by this point in time AMC had already produced and aired several episodes of their television adaptation of Robert Kirkman's hugely successful comic book which I can only assume has already made him rich enough to build a full scale replica of Godzilla complete with fully functioning genitalia (for whatever twisted purposes we can only guess at).  I suppose it also bears mentioning at this point that the same man responsible for the mediocre Marvel Zombies was now the creator of a zombie empire that rivaled that of zombie master George A. Romero.  I suppose the nature of this achievement is relative to whether or not one believes Romero has at this point made more shit than quality goods.  I'm sort of on the fence about this myself.  Despite his own army of zombie-like fans apparently blinded by some intergalactic radiation into thinking he's some kind of master filmmaker I'm not sure whether Romero is extremely lucky or a total genius with some serious missteps (ie. LAND OF THE DEAD and SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD.  DIARY OF THE DEAD was pretty good actually).  Zombie fans around the world will forever be in debt to Romero for basically creating not only an entire genre of movies, but also of creating the modern-day idiom of the zombie.  But honestly, The Walking Dead blows the brains out of a lot of Romero's recent stuff and most zombie texts (literature/movies/songs/video games) out there today.

The thing that sets The Walking Dead apart from so many other zombie tales is how incredibly densely layered it is and the fact that it is so character driven.  It's the focus on the human relationships as opposed to just a bunch of gory deaths that makes The Walking Dead such a worthwhile and engaging read, although I will be the first to admit (willingly vocalize?) that it is not the best piece of literature I have ever read and I have found myself frustrated with the comic version at times.  One thing that really started to bug me was what I refer to as the SIX FEET UNDER Syndrome where for some reason the writers or directors or producers or creators or whatever take characters that I might have begun to empathize with and for some reason do everything in their power to subsequently make me hate those characters.  The main character in The Walking Dead -one Rick Grimes, a cop leading a group of survivors- started off as such a sympathetic character and now he's turning into kind of a dick.  I don't know if it's to illustrate the effects such stress has on the average human being, but it's really fucking annoying when I'm trying to like your shit so I don't feel like I've wasted all my time up to this point enjoying something that somebody else now wants to wipe their asses with.  All my ranting aside, I'm still a fan (though I'm pretty sure Robert Kirkman legally owes me a hand job from his wife and/or girlfriend while she eats a bucketful of raw cow tongues which is to be recorded on web cam and posted on the internet as a pixalized mess).

Now when I finally got around to watching AMC's television adaptation of The Walking Dead it had already been out long enough to have a lot of nerds with no real life post reviews on their blogs (...) so I heard a lot of feedback and most of it was... mixed.  I'd heard a lot of good and a lot of bad and a lot of consensus that after the first episode it was all downhill, which seemed like something a douchebag would say (like that Bowflex douche: "I gave all of my fat clothes to my fat friends").  A kind of backhanded compliment.  I didn't let it get to me, though.  I had hope that a solid concept handled by the same guys that produced Mad Men had to be at least palatable and at most solid, boner-inducing gold.

So now I come to the actual point of this article which is actually My review of The Walking Dead Season 1.  Before I come to my final verdict I have to make a few provisos for anybody who hasn't seen it yet.  If you have never read any of the comics or trade paperbacks you will love this show.  If you have read Robert Kirkman's original source material then you will either love it or hate it with a white hot fiery hate.

The uninatiated will love the walking dead because it is simply great television.  It is human drama and character driven narrative at its (almost) finest.  Add to the fact that it is packaged in the context of zombie folklore with amazing zombie make-up and some crazy-ass murder death killing for the kids, and you have a great, immersive experience.  To fans of the original comic series, AMC's The Walking Dead will either be A) An adaptation that stays faithful to the tone and intent of the original comic series and a really amazing on-screen interpretation of the characters you have been following the lives of for so long or B) A travesty of an adaptation that strays from the original in unforgivable ways and that should be cancelled immediately and whose creators should be castrated and fed to mutant sharks while their loved ones watch the feeding frenzy.

As for me, I fucking loved the first season of The Walking Dead.  There has been such a drought of great zombie movies in recent years (with the notable exceptions of SHAUN OF THE DEAD and ZOMBIELAND) and luckily like a porn star dying of thirst and suddenly finding herself in a roomful of ripe, juicy cocks I would get a good drink to sate my thirst.  I know that The Walking Dead is a TV show and not a movie, but with such a high production value, solid writing, and grade-A acting, I think you'd have to be an unamitated corpse not to enjoy it and not to see that it is far superior than most Hollywood grade zombie flicks.  If anything the show is actually an improvement on the comic books, and rest assured it does not peak in the first episode.  I think if you are a zombie movie fan and don't have a giant stick up your ass (Robert Kirkman himself was heavily involved with the small screen adaptation) then you'll love the hell out of this show.  And if you're a fan of the original comic series, then I personally can't see how you couldn't love this.  There are iconic scenes and locations from the original comic that are so painstakingly and lovingly recreated it feels as if the producers did everything short of sucking the dicks of existing fans to ensure a smooth transition from the page to the screen.  And the stories they did add and the changes they did make were -in my mind- absolutely correct.  One major thing die hard fans might notice is the elongation of the subplot involving Rick, his best friend Shane and Rick's wife Lori who thought Rick was dead and fled with Shane.  Even without saying anything you can pretty much surmise that there is a love triangle.  What you might not surmise is that in the comics this is dealt with pretty early on (with Shane's timely death.  SPOILER ALERT) and in the show this subplot is wisely expanded.

The calibre of the acting is top notch.  The main character Rick Grimes is portrayed by Andrew Lincoln, who I never really considered before, but in The Walking Dead he reminds me of a young(er) Vigo Mortenson.  The dude is absolutely fantastic in this show, and should definitely be nominated for one of those awards at those meaningless awards shows where celebrities pat each other on the back and hosts who are actually funny and insightful are derided by morons for being mean-spirited and inappropriate, when really Ricky Gervais should be given a fucking medal for his hosting skills.  Motherfuckers.  The rest of the cast is great too, though the only others I really recognized were Laurie Holden and Jeffrey DeMunn who play Andrea and Dale respectively from the comic book.  A few other actors you might recognize who lent their star power to this endeavour are Norman Reedus and Michael Rooker who portray brothers who weren't in the comics.  They are worth noting because you might recognize these dudes, and they do a great job.

The other thing to note is how uncannily well-matched the main cast is to their comic counterparts.  Andrew Lincoln is pretty near a dead ringer for Frank Grimes, but the really uncanny match is Steven Yeun who is the living incarnation of Glen from the comics.  Seeing him on the screen made me jump out of my seat to go and grab one of my Walking Dead books to hold against the screen to compare them.

Bottom line, The Walking Dead Season 1 is a must have for anybody who A) Loves good TV or B) Loves zombie cinema.  If I had any knowledge of computers beyond word processing, now would be the time where I would display my hilarious Venn diagram to illustrate my point.  It is a complex tale about what it means to be human.  It's about the shifting perception of right and wrong and what happens when those preconceived notions are put to the test.  It's about the lengths people will go through to survive despite having no real reason to go on except for the dim hope that humanity might have a future.  It's about the emotional consequences of fucking your best friend's wife thinking he was dead after you left him in the hospital during a zombie uprising.  Plus, there's some pretty fucking cool zombie eatings.  The Walking Dead is a must have DVD/BluRay and and one of the easiest 9/10's I've ever given.                

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Show

As experiments in human physical endurance when dealing with severe sleep deprivation my wife and like to engage in what we term as Power Watchings (we don't actually call them that, I actually just made that up) - that is we start watching a show, begin to enjoy it, then just watch the shit out of it.  I mean, just watch it to death until all hours of the morning and jeaporadize both our proffessional relationships and personal health just to "watch one more episode" of our newest favourite show.  This only works, however, if you have access to multiple seasons of a show via DVD or BluRay, Netflix, or some other (a-hem, Ryebone) means of pirating acquiring digital media outside the bounds of the law in the strictest sense.  It's really a grey area.  Well not really.  Pirates are cool and therefore the act of pirating is cool which means that Henry Winkler does it which means its OK for me.  In our latest case Netflix was the purveyer of our drug, and a powerful drug it was. 
 Mad Men has been occupying a prominent place in the public consciousness for the past couple of years.  During the summer months when I spend some more time at home I end up watching Live With Regis and Kelly and Regis is totally into Mad Men almost as much as he is into wearing bad ties.  (As a side note to Regis: learn to relax a little.  You always seem to be yelling for no reason and it scares me just a little bit.)  Then there was a recent Simpsons Halloween special I caught at a friend's house and at the time I had have explained to me that a silhouette of Homer Simpon slowly falling amidst an abstractly drawn skyline was actually a reference to Mad Men.  I was starting to feel a little left out and fairly hungry. 

So one cold night in January when the kids were shipped off to bed my wife and I made some poporn and watched the first episode of Mad Men.  And we were immediately hooked.  Watching that first episode I got that same feeling I got watching Deadwood or Rescue Me or The Sopranos for the first time.  Even though it wasn't an HBOor FX show and didn't actually have swearing or nudity what it did have was excellent writing and a great cast and almost-nudity (hurray for tassles!).  It's far too complicated to sum up here but Mad Men basically follows the life of Don Draper (Jon Hamm), an ad executive (well, creative director) at a little firm called Sterling Cooper and his home and work life.  Mad Men is unique from other period shows like Deadwood or Rome, however, in that its focus really isn't so much on depicting life in that particular period , but in emphasizing the differences between that period and our own.  And that, to me, is really at least half of the enterainment value of the show.

Right out of the gates one of the key aspects of the show is battered into your skull.  Gender roles and how men and women relate to each other is just driven home again, and again, and again like Ron Jeremy pounding some tender, young ass hole with his giagantic meat wand.  It sometimes seems like the whole goal of the show is to show us the differences in gender roles in the 60's and gender roles today.  And the assumed reaction from the audience is "Holy shit, I can't believe it used to be like that," which, of course, is my first reaction.  I can only really speak from my experience as a white male (Apparently past lives aren't yet recognized in a court of law.  Crazy, I know.) and to me how women especially are treated in the show (and presumably in the real 60's as well) seems very foreign.  I understand how we tend to fill the roles that society creates for us and that even today some people might still percieve minor inequalities, but even the staunchest feminist has to admit how drastically social scripts have changed in the last fifty years.  If even half of what Mad Men presents is factual, well, holy shit, man.  I mean, the women at home are relegated to cooks, cleaners and childrearers whose secondary function is to look good at social functons and occaisionally recieve her husband's sperm in whatever oriface he sees fit to deposit it in. 

In fact the whole institution of marriage is front and centre as the only woman on the block who has been divorced (gasp!) is seen as some kind of otherworldy creature or at least as some kind of social deviant.  Marriage is depicted in the show as basically an entire support system for the husband as he basically gets to come home, eat his dinner, have a drink, fuck his wife, have a cigarette then fall asleep only to awake in the morning to freshly cleaned and pressed clothes, dressed and fed kids, a hot breakfast and a kiss on the cheek as he heads out the door again.  The women at work don't have it much better.  The audience is constantly being reminded that the only jobs most women could get were as secretaries or maybe as a sales associate at a department store or as the mistress of a rich, married guy.  The exception, of course, is Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) who works her way up from secretary to slightly more attractive copywriter who represents the slowly changing attitudes towards women and the rising feminist movement of the time. 

With the constant reminders about gender roles comes the constant sexual encounters between the married Draper and various women, and indeed between virtually all the married male characters in the show and random secretaries, au pairs and struggling artists.  This purpose of showing (but not showing) gratutitous amounts of sex is A) because it's entertaining to watch and/or imagine people having sex and that sells B) to once again emphasize changing views on sex and marriage C) to give us a brief glimpse of the sexual revolution in the 60's and D) to show differences in what body types were desirable in the 60's and E) to frustrate legions of male fans by not showing January Jones naked.  God bless you HBO for the bounty we always recieve from you.

And when we're not being slapped in the face with differences in gender roles it's some other cultural differece that's being rammed down our throats.  There's the flippant attitude towards drinking -at home, at work, morning, noon, night, sitting, standing, at your kid's birthday party, driving (A whole new generation now has a better understanding of what "One for the road" actually means) waiting in the waiting room for your baby to be born while your wife goes through the delivery alone, or during some kind of strange beatnik performing art bullshit.  The attitude in smoking is both explicitely (one of Sterling Cooper's biggest clients is Lucky Strike, a cigarette company) and implicitely (everybody's smoking all the time, even the gynaecologist during a pelvic exam) emphasized in practically every episode.  Littering is taken for granted, you were allowed to hit your kids, and when they made a mess you could just get your wife to clean it up while you got your ten-year-old to mix you another cocktail. 

All these differences between society in the 60's and today are so much the forefront of the show, that at times they overshadow the characters or the plot.  But I fucking love it.  I eat that shit up.  It's so fascinating and entertaining to me to go watch Mad Men and go "Holy shit, I can't believe it used to be like," or "Holy shit I can't believe they actually thought like that," or "Holy shit Christina Hendricks has a great ass that you could just get lost in for days."  To me all those "Holy shit" moments are at least if not more entertaining than the plot and the character developments and the dramatic reveals.  What's more fascinating to me than Don Draper's secret past (which is very intriguing and engaging, don't get me wrong) is how Don Draper is (mostly) a man of his time.  What's crazy is that this character is from around the same time period of my grandparents, so I keep imagining a younger, more attractive version of my grandfather (he was a good looking guy back in the day) hanging out with Draper, drinking excessively and slapping the waitress's ass.  And I begin to wonder how much of these social scripts my grandparents went through time and time again.  The answer is probably all of them.     

And then it hits me.  We aren't men and women.  We are men and women of our time.  Which kind of makes me worried.  It's amusing to me to watch Mad Men and laugh at how silly their views on smoking were or how much fun they seemed to have as they drove their Cadillacs while sipping glasses of finely-aged scotch, or shake my head at their narrow views on homosexuality or their treatment of black people.  But then I take pause.  And what I think about then is how future generations will view us and how we will be depicted in their TV shows.  And then all of the sudden watching Mad Men makes me a little bit sad.  But this isn't a bad thing. 




And now for your viewing pleasure:

Cleveland Show - WTF?

Ok, I was a huge fan of Family Guy, and I still am a fan, though not as hardcore due to the dropping quality.  But just like The Simpsons there are still some funny gags and even some entire episodes I really dig.  I tried watching Amercian Dad out of respect for Seth MacFarlane and the quality he put out but I found it really dificult to watch except for the Patrick Stewart parts.  And then when I heard that Cleveland, one of the characters from Family Guy was getting his own show I thought the same thing most of you thought: somehow MacFarlane is making a fuckload of cash from this deal.  I can appreciate that and I bear him no ill-will.  And I know this probably sounds sarcastic (but for once it's not) but if I was in the same position to whore out my intellectual property with no regards to quality or artistic integrity.  And really "artisitic integrity" is just a bullshit term coined by the popular media to try and keep the working class oppressed by giving them the illusion of some kind of moral superiority.  But all of that still doesn't mean I have to like Seth MacFarlane's shitfest of a show.

I mean what a horribly unfunny show.  Cleveland was pretty much a one-note joke, a sort of straight man to Peter Griffin's shenanigans, but it was a one-note joke that worked.  I watched the pilot of The Cleveland Show but it was so fucking terrible I could barely make it through without putting my remote control in a sack weighed down with rocks and throwing it into the nearby lake and smashing the front of the TV so I couldn't change the channel.  Even then I had to keep from gouging my own eyes out and bursting my eardrums with a nearby pencil.  But, in the interest of fairness and open-minded dialogue (Hurray internet!) I decided to watch another episode this past Sunday.  Boy was I not surprised and a little disappointed when it turned out to still be shit.  Not only did they take one of the least interesting characters from Family Guy, but they seemed to have completely changed him.  Now Cleveland is a lot more similar to Peter Griffin, pulling the same old shit of big-fat-guy-with-a-much-hotter-wife-does-something-stupid-then-has-to-make-up-for-it routine which has already been perfected/done to death by both The Simpsons and Family Guy. 

The big problem is that with The Cleveland Show they seem to want to recreate the success of Family Guy by trying to directly immitate and plagiarise it.  This would be OK if it actually worked, but unfortunately you can't just take the same formula, apply it to another situation, grab your balls and hope it all turns out OK.  Sometimes it's not just having all the right elements (which The Cleveland Show definitley does NOT have) but also a matter of being in the right place at the right time.  The Simpsons and Futurama and Family Guy are put together by talented teams of writers and artists, but there was some other unquantifiable element that made them more than the sum of their parts.  I'm not sure what that element is (let's call it Zaz!) but I know for a fact that The Cleveland Show doesn't have it.

So to sum it all up, The Cleveland Show is a pile of dog shit and Mila Kunis is still hot as hell.  I know that's a pretty loose tie-in, but her smoking body helps in part to wash the taste of shit from my eyes.  My verdict: The Cleveland Show is a crime against humanity and should be banned except in times of war when it should be shown to captured soldiers to torture them for information for information.  I guarantee that if the US government just set up a bunch of giant screens in Afghanistan and Iraq and blared The Cleveland Show at full volume day and night the "war on terror" (AKA "war for more oil") would be over within the week.

There, that should help ease the pain...