River Song and Lois Lane; Don't Call Them Cougars. They Might Hurt You.

With less than one month until the return of Doctor Who (eee!) a new trailer was released today. 



There's a lot of awesomeness right there, but mostly there's River Song.  Because River Song is amazing.  (If you don't like River Song, feel free to tell me why.  Try not to base it on Rose Tyler, though, because then I will pay absolutely no attention to you.)

River Song isn't just amazing because of her innate bad-assery, intelligence, and beauty.  River Song is amazing because she's being played by a forty-seven year old actress, in an action-heavy part, against a twenty-eight year old actor.  In a love story.

Over the weekend, there was a lot of buzz around the decision to cast Amy Adams as Lois Lane, because she's thirty-six, and Henry Cavill is twenty-seven.  The questions about whether she's too old are ridiculous, but keep coming.  Mostly from big media outlets.  And then the counter-voices mention that the classic Lois/Supes combo of Kidder/Reeves involved an older Lois. 

There's a lot of talk these days of fanboys and what they can and can't handle, what they will and won't freak out about, and what studios will and won't do to please them (and whether they should). 

I'm not saying there's 100% overlap between Doctor Who fans and Superman fans.  And, sure, the Doctor is a 900 (ish) year old Time Lord who could regenerate into the body of a seventy year old man (though that doesn't seem to be the way the BBC is going, does it?).  But we all know looks count, and we all know plenty of us have fandom overlaps.

I think maybe the media outlets who keep perpetuating this age thing should look around various fandoms.  The people who care about the age aren't the hardcore fans.  Because we know better.

I Am Definitely Not Spartacus

Over the last month or so, I've been watching Starz' (Starz's?) version of Spartacus, which is streaming on Netflix.  I was resistant at first.  I'm not sure why there was resistance.  It's set in ancient Rome, an era I like, it's about fighting, an activity I like, it stars Xena (er, Lucy Lawless) and half the supporting cast of various episodes of Xena and Hercules, and I was told "it's a lot like 300".

Eventually, when I saw it streaming on Netflix and I was in between video game moods (I had beaten Mass Effect 2 for the fifth time and was getting stuck in a lot of subway tunnels in Fallout 3) I gave it a shot.  (Also I found out Erin Cummings was in it.)

Woo boy.

Spartacus is sort of like 300 if they add in sex and Rome and the word "cock".  A lot of the word cock.  Mostly referring to Jupiter's.  I can understand the comparison; stylistically it's very similar.  There's a lot of CGI backgrounds (some better than others), muscley dudes wearing very little clothing, and lots of fighting.

Also Peter Mensah.

Doctore.  Also the Persian dude that gets kicked into a well by Leonidas.

But there are a lot of differences also, and (blasphemy!) I sort of ended up liking Spartacus, overall, more than I liked 300.  I think it benefits from the serialized nature of television in that it can tell a whole bunch of stories beyond just "buff dudes fight, blood, die!" (though the 300 movie fleshed out Gorgo's story from the comic, it was still pretty basic).  

And that's where I stop comparing them, because Spartacus stands on its own.  Despite the subtitle, it's about more than just Killing And Stuff.  There's a lot of intrigue and weaving and interweaving of storylines, which is something I like.  So props to the writers on that.

The acting's not half-bad, either.  

I went into the show knowing that the lead, Andy Whitfield, wouldn't be continuing after s1 due to illness.  So I tried not to get too attached.  But the dude was so damn good.  I'm giving Liam McIntyre a chance (he's a very charming, if not active, twitterer @Liam_J_McIntyre), but he's got a really large set of sandals to fill.  Or boots, depending on the scene. 

Andy Whitfield: Spartacus I

By now you can probably tell how they dress in this show. 

Anyway, Whitfield brought a lot of depth to Spartacus that I wasn't expecting.  He wasn't just sad, frustrated, smart, or arrogant. He was all of those things.  And he evolved.  I've written before of my love of character development, and Spartacus did well with it.

I think the most interesting character was the one I hated the most at first: Crixus.  Crixus is the Alpha of the Gladiator pack, and is a big arrogant ass of assiness.  For a little while.  But by the end of the first season, I was actually sort of rooting for him to make the right decision (granted, history sort of spoiled me by being, well, historical... but still!).

And then there were the villains, Batiatus and Lucretia, played soooo well by John Hannah and Lucy Lawless.  Lucretia especially.  Being a woman in Roman times wasn't exactly the best situation, and Lucretia is basically one rung above a slave in the social construct, being the wife of a Plebian (not that they ever use the word).  She is a master manipulator who, even when you think she's out-maneuvered, will somehow have gotten her enemy into a corner.

Well, until the end.  (But that's history, so no one yell at me for spoiling.)

And after the spectacular end, we got a prequel.  The six-part miniseries Gods of the Arena, which just finished up last week and managed to be nearly as awesome as the first season, with less episodes and no Spartacus.  (It did have Jaime Murray, though.  So there's that.)  It rested heavily on the shoulders of John Hannah and Lucy Lawless, but they totally delivered.  Someone give Lucy Lawless an Emmy or something, because Lucretia has become one of those most interesting, nuanced female roles on television.  So give the writers an Emmy or something, too.  And the relationship between Batiatus and Lucretia is really... strangely wonderful.  They really love each other, they just happen to be twisted by their circumstances.

As you can tell, somewhere between the "this show is gonna suck" mentality I went into, and my annoyance that Netflix didn't have the finale of Gods of the Arena  until daaaaaaaaaays after it aired, I got hooked on the show.  I think it's because beneath all that blood, sand, sex (props again to them for having full-frontal male nudity to go along with the female nudity, because most "daring" shows don't give it the equal treatment) and cock-talk, there's actually a pretty deep show about class divides, social mobility, freedom, and the way human beings relate to each other.

The sex and violence are just sort of... red herrings.  Pretty red herrings (yes, even the violence, because martial arts are neat), but not the point of the show. 

By the way, the violence is violent.  I'm not going to suggest this show to the faint of heart, even though sometimes it can be comic-style over-the-top violence.  'Cause sometimes it's not.  And even the over-the-top stuff can be fairly graphic.  So if you can't handle violence, don't watch the show.

And if you can't handle the sex, grow up.  (Ahem.)

There's too much science in my fiction!

This isn't actually a post about comic books, technically, but I thought it was worth writing out. A lot of comic fans (this is a totally scientific estimation based entirely on my own opinions and experiences, and should therefore be completely respected and not argued with) seem to like science fiction, too. There's a lot of overlap, after all. Did you know Superman is an alien? Truth. And that the X-Men are genetic mutants? Seriously. That's, like. Science.

The real beauty of science fiction is that it tells universal (hah!) stories through a medium that makes it easier to, I don't know, deal with the infinite. Or our relationship to technology. Or each other.

So, long story short: I watched Virtuality yesterday (it's streaming on Hulu.com). This is straight up sci-fi (not to be confused with SyFy, which is just confusing): it's a bunch of brilliant people on a deep-space mission to save the planet. Classic. This isn't Fringe sci-fi (or The X-Files sci-fi, which is Fringe sci-fi's gender-neutral parent) or LOST sci-fi, or even Pushing Daisies sci-fi. This is outer space. And science. And, oh yeah. Cameras.

I hear it tanked.

That's sort of a shame. I like having straight sci-fi. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the police procedurals or dramas set in modern times that just have Wierd Stuff Happening. But I dig outer space. I like technobabble. I like wondering wtf is wrong with these smart people going into airlocks without their helmets, or how anyone in the future can seriously say that VR doesn't count as real, so raping that twenty-four year old girl is just, you know.

Fantasy.

Yeah, so everyone else got shot or pushed off a cliff or knocked into a reef; very impersonal, if brutal deaths. But the youngest crew member that's also a woman got tied up and raped. Collective WTF time. Meanwhile the straight couples (even the filanderers) are all over each other, but the gay guys mostly hug.

I think I went off on a "the representation of violence against women, women in general, and homosexuality in this show sort of sucks" tangent.

The funny thing is that for as much as I love straight sci-fi in books (though most of the sci-fi I've read in the past few years has been cyberpunk, steampunk, or vampirepunk) and tv that go into the future or outer space or both, in my comics I'd rather see them on Earth. I haaaaaaaaate how outerspacey things can get. One of the reasons I enjoyed Singer's X-Men adaptation (and one of the reasons I think it did so well) is that it really just... stuck with Earth. Granted, they sort of screwed that up with the Phoenix saga, but... that wasn't Singer, and it was still better than a giant space bird (THE GREAT BIRD OF THE GALAXY IS RODDENBERRY, AND DON'T YOU FORGET IT) that has wreaked havoc on the characters for thirty years. Giant. Space. Bird.

This, by the way, is why I'm sort of down on the whole New Krypton storyline happening throughout the Super-titles. Hey, look, I wrote about comics!

Seriously, though, I'm not sure why I prefer my comics to be Earthbound. Or at least Humanbound. Maybe because I feel that writers use the medium - which allows for pretty much anything - to push the boundaries visually and the reason I'm reading is to relate to characters and find analogies to my own life. And also good stories. Alienness does not make a good story.

Sort of like just having lots of cool tech and a neat out space idea doesn't necessarily make a good story. Which is probably why we won't be seeing any more Virtuality, and why Firefly and Battlestar Galactica were so damn good. It didn't matter that they were in space or in the future, it just mattered that good stories were told. Virtuality had an okay story, and maybe it was hurt by the fact that it should have been a pilot (seriously, the most interesting thing happened in the last minute) as opposed to a stand-alone. But still. If you've got 127 minutes of fiction, I shouldn't think 126 of it is throwaway.

Also I don't get why the Captain couldn't speak with his natural accent (Danish) when the Brits could.

Sometimes the future just makes no sense. Sure can't wait for it, though.