I find myself at a fork in the road. Its a minor fork, in the grander scheme of things. This blog has no readers, only a handful of views from a post I did a month ago that I linked back to A voice for Men, and nothing more.
I could always just quit. Five or so months worth of effort for zero return, and I risk the Sunk Cost fallacy by continuing. In fact, that's why my posting fell off almost entirely... that and the stress of events in my life. I am not dealing well with circumstances, frankly, and its embarrassing.
The fork would be: do I continue exhaustive analysis of TNG episodes, one after another, or do I just watch the show keeping my opinions to myself. I suppose there is a very slim chance that a collection of nerdlinger exhaustive, petty analysis may one day be my sole claim to fame, my mark upon the ephemera of the internet, though I risk drowning the other purposes of this site.
To be honest, I've gone some half dozen episodes past the last review, though I only have one in the queue currently. I could ignore the episodes I didn't review, I could put micro-reviews up, just to have them... or I can go back and torment myself again with objectively bad television that is much beloved and defended by the fans so that I can speak authoritatively about what I see.
On the topic of television, I have been watching Agents of SHIELD lately. Well, I watched the first three episodes. I'm not sure I have the endurance to go on, though I enjoyed Agent Coulson in the movies.
Rather than exhaustively review what I've seen, let me point out three specific problems, one per episode, on a theme..
In the first episode a very sympathetic victim/villain character gives a very emotional rant about the evils of capitalism, tugging all the heart strings about how terrible his financial situation is because the gulf between the exploitive haves and the exploited have nots.... because superheroes!
It is, frankly, a rather bizarre twist on the usual anti-capitalist screed (from a well paid, and reasonably well known, character actor, who I am sure did not volunteer his time and talent for the good of the people...), written by very well paid writers (as writers tend to go)... its offensive because it is obvious that this isn't meant to be taken as the misguided ramblings of a delusional man, but a truly heartfelt plea about a broken system.
Also: Incoherent, which I believe is merely an accident of poor writing.
Dismissable, I suppose.
Episode two: Shield enters Peru to recover an artifact that turns out to be, essentially, an old, lost Peruvian Super-weapon made after world war two (when 'Murica! had the bomb) with tesseract power supply technology (Lolwut!). Peru lays claim to their missing super weapon (um... its a laser beam. Powerful-ish, but hardly a doomsday device), and Shield basically squashes their sovereignty like a cockroach. This is played as the right take, and the Peruvians become murderous scumbags of trying to prevent the theft of their countries property. Also: somehow the Tesseract is 'powered by pure evil'. I must have missed that in the movies. I love how, essentially, a power generator is somehow 'pure evil' because bad guys used it for bad guy ends. (yes, I know it is actually a Cosmic Gem, which means it somehow represents one tenth (eighth?) of the sum of the Universe or something... but SHIELD doesn't know that. They still think its a glow-y (sorry for the hypen, stupid spell checker!) box that can power teleport devices and shit.)
Episode Three: The bad guy uses some sort of super rare graviton element to kidnap-rescue a top physicist from SHIELD 'protection' (which does, admittedly, seem more than a little jail like). We know he's a bad guy because he owns mining companies who, and I quote 'Rapes the earth for wealth'.
Question, you watcher of Television and surfer of Internets: Do you, or do you not use electronic devices to pursue these entertainments? Did you know all electronic devices have metal in them as vital components? Did you know that metal is really just a fancy rock, dug out of the ground? Did you know, for example, that no amount of digging rocks out of the ground actually does a single bit of harm to 'Earth'? Much less 'Rape'?
Frankly, I'm used to message and propaganda in my entertainment. You can't avoid it, from the nigh universal portrayal of fathers as sex obsessed morons who have to be 'learned something' by their much smarter wives and children, to whatever the fuck the message of Jersey Shore is (something about gym, tan and laundry?). But this is hitting it more than a little hard. This is harder than Captain America comics calling Tea Partiers 'Nazi enemies of the state', and that's saying something. Its heavily muddled, misguided and frankly, more than a little evil and it comes at you like a crashing helicarrier on a mission from god.
I expect that if I make it to episode four I might punch out my computer monitor in rage at the naked, and frankly stupid, pandering moralizing.
So... I'll probably review them once i've made my merry way through The Next Generation.
And for the die hard trekkies/trekkers: no, I won't be doing the same for DS9, because I'd rather watch the superior Babylon 5 they ripped off to make it, and I won't be doing it for Voyager unless someone pays me... per episode. I only sacrifice parts of my soul for money.
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