Steven Harper Piziks

I've been watching LONE STAR 911 because it has a gay couple in it. The show is . . . outrageously cheesy.  You could make mac and cheese for an entire cub scout troop out of this show.  The medical "procedures" are laughable.  And somehow, the paramedics always have to McGyver something up (because the equipment failed, or because it's snowing, or because of some other improbable event).

Then there's this season . . .

A snowstorm has whipped through Austin, you see, and the city is DEVASTATED. I mean, FLATTENED. Beneath the snow and ice and cold temperatures.  It's just a horror!

And I'm laughing.

A whole pile of drama comes up when a building collapses "under the weight of the snow." Except the snow, as we can clearly see, is maybe half an inch thick.  Apparently, Texans can't build a building that can handle any extra weight on the roof.  One wonders how it stood up to flocks of pigeons over the years.

We have an injured man who flees a cabin in the woods, and the two people he leaves behind wonder how on earth they'll find him, despite the fresh snow surrounding the cabin that would leave tracks a child could follow.  Apparently Texans are stupid.

The city is brought to its knees by the storm, and the newscasters on the show talk continuously about the horrific levels of snow that have fallen, but in all the shots, there's barely a dusting on the ground.  Apparently Texans are blithering scaredy-cats, terrified of a few snow flakes.

And then there's this one storyline . . .

A boy of maybe twelve is home alone during the storm. Through the window he can see the neighborhood kids having a snowball fight, and he longs to join them.  His mother on the phone admonishes him not to go outside because "you know what cold air does to your asthma."  In the end, he goes outside anyway, only to find the snowball fight is over and everyone is cold and going back in. Still, he goes down to a local body of water (a river? a lake?) and pretends to play hockey by himself, sliding here and there on the ice. The ice breaks and dumps him into the water. The water carries him away from the hole, so now he's trapped underneath it.  Some time later, an elderly couple are out and about, rescuing half-frozen turtles. The man sees the boy's face below the ice.  The boy screams all the air out of his lungs when he sees the old man.  Horrified, the couple tries to call 911, but they can't get a signal because the snow took out all the cell towers, so they hurry off to find a house with a landline and call 911 from there. But there are no fire trucks available, so the dispatcher sends an ambulance, the only rescue vehicle she can find.  The paramedics arrive on the scene and, to their terror, slide three feet when they try to stop. They have no real ice rescue equipment, so they McGyver up some rope by tying sheets together and one of the paramedics crawls out onto the ice with a laryngoscope, which he uses to chop through the ice right above the kid's nose.  The ice, however, is three or four inches thick, and it takes quite some time for him to break through.

By now, the kid has been under the ice, by my estimation, for at least two hours, probably three.  He's had no air in his lungs for most of that time.

The adventurous paramedic breaks through the ice, but it creates a huge hole and he ends up plunging into the water himself. Somehow, he manages to grab the kid, and the rest of the team haul on the sheet rope (which miraculously doesn't break) and slowly, achingly, pull the pair out and slide them to the shore.  The paramedics rush the boy back to the ambulance, but it has somehow, all by itself, slid off the road and is sitting at a cockeyed angle. Oh no! The ambulance is useless!  So they put the kid in the old couple's car with the heater on and, using an ECMO machine from the ambulance, manage to resuscitate the kid while the paramedic who fell into the hole sits to one side blowing on his fingers to warm himself.

Oh, man.  I'm laughing throughout.

--Everyone who's dealt with asthma knows that cold air is GOOD for asthma. The mom should have TOLD the boy to play outside.

--Before the storm blows in, Austin is enjoying mild, sunny weather.  Everyone is walking around in spring jackets. In other words, the temperature was clearly well above freezing. And yet, within a couple hours of the snowstorm hitting, THE LAKE FREEZES OVER. No. Just no. There wouldn't even be a hint of ice on a lake or river until we had a couple-three days of cold weather, and it would be a couple-three WEEKS before anyone could step on the ice without it breaking immediately.

--And even if you can accept the flash-frozen lake, how is it that the ice was so thin it broke under the boy's weight, but the paramedic had to chop through several inches of it?  If he had to chop through that much, the ice shouldn't have broken in the first place.

--The boy screams all the air out of his lungs, but still bobs near the surface under the ice.  If he had released all his air, he would sink.

--The ambulance has enough sheets to create a rope thirty or forty feet long?  That's a lot of sheets!

--The ambulance is parked on a level surface, but somehow, entirely by itself, slides off the road. How does that work?

--The paramedic who fell into the lake sits in front a car heater, blowing on his fingers, and this is sufficient to warm him up. My! What a hero, able to overcome hypothermia in a single bound!

--The absolute maximum anyone spent under ice and lived to tell about it is two hours, and it took paramedics over an hour and a half of work on him to get a pulse.  This boy was under the ice for much longer than that, and he was awake and talking within five minutes of being put on an ECMO machine. Huh.

--When the boy originally goes outside, he leaves his asthma inhaler behind, and the show makes a big deal of it. Clearly, the inhaler will be important later! But . . . nope! No mention of it is made again. As it happens, the kid being asthmatic never even comes up later. He didn't need to be asthmatic at all, really. The writers could have just had him go outside to play by himself.

The whole thing is farcically bad. It makes Texans look like a bunch of blithering idiots who are flattened and frightened by a half inch of snow. Everyone in the show runs around screaming their heads off about the awful, scary weather while tromping around in snow that doesn't even reach the tops of their shoes! 

The show is being unintentionally funny--the worst kind of humor.

A few years ago, Archie Comics unveiled with fanfare Kevin Keller, the first gay character in their comics universe.  There was some backlash, but overall the character proved enormously popular.  So popular, in fact, that he was given his own comic book.  Take that, right wing freakazoids!

So naturally, Archie Comics' very popular character was given a slot on CW's RIVERDALE.  And I've been watching.

First, I'm glad to see Kevin is there.  A gay teen with a major role.  Cool!  And he has a dating life.  Also cool.

However, on a show filled with hyper-masculine male characters (even the morose, artistic Jughead is a boy's boy), Kevin is the feminine gay guy.  He dresses overly stylishly, the actor's lipstick and rouge are redder than the other males' on the show, his hair is heavily moussed and overly styled (instead of artfully tousled, like every other teen male on the show), and he speaks half a hair below the "you GO girl!" register.  And he's the Gay Best Friend of one of the female leads.  Although we've only had two episodes to work with, we've seen no hobbies, no family, no background, no nothing for Kevin.  He exists pretty much to give Betty someone to talk to.  In other words, he's a stereotype.

On the other hand, we have Moose.

In the comics, Moose was a big blond bully who in the early days beat Archie up for his lunch money.  Over time, Moose evolved into a big lunk with a secret big heart.  The bully thing faded and he and Archie became friends.

On the show, Moose has a sort-of girlfriend, but the real object of his affections is Kevin.  He pursues Kevin with a fair amount of single-mindedness, in fact.  Kevin, however, isn't so sure about this.  Kevin finds Moose attractive, but Moose insists he just wants a . . . physical relationship, no strings, no emotion.  "I'm straight," Moose stoutly maintains.  Kevin refuses to believe this. He thinks Moose is gay, but he doesn't want to get involved with someone who can't admit he likes guys.

Moose himself is as hyper-masculinized as the other males on the show.*  We also don't have the neutered-gay-boy problem I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog, which is great.  I'm interested in seeing how this plays out.


*I'd prefer that NONE of the males were hyper-masculine, really, and instead represented more realistic teenagers.  However, if we're going to have a show filled with chiseled everything, I'd rather not have the gay character be the only one standing out as different in that regard.

I watched the first episode of LUKE CAGE.  I found it . . . intriguing.  But slow.  Very slow.

DAREDEVIL and JESSICA JONES hit the ground sprinting.  CAGE's first episode starts with a long, loooooong conversation in a barber shop, and another conversation in a club, and another conversation in a laundry room, and . . .

You get the idea.

I was about ready to dump it when things finally started heating up.  The heating up started with a new trope that's already worn thin: the scene of unimaginable violence set to inappropriately cheery music.  However, the story started to come together by this point and I kept watching to the end.

My thoughts:

There were no white faces in the first half of the show, and when we did see white faces later, they were background characters.  The entire cast is black, Hispanic, or Asian.  The show doesn't shy away from minority issues, either, like whether or not the N word is acceptable within the black community, and minority-on-minority violence.

We have some interesting music choices, from Harlem jazz to disco-esque to soft porn percussion, all of them influenced by black movie music of the 70s, when the Power Man (Nicholas Cage) comic book first came out.

The episode spends most of its time exploring Harlem and setting up character arcs.

Overall, it was slower than I would have liked, but I'm willing to watch a little more to see if it gets better.

Look, I like superhero movies and TV shows.  I'm willing to go along with a lot of impossible stuff and write it off as comic book "science" or just fun.  But you can only take so much.

You can have an impossible universe, but you still need to follow a FEW rules, and your smart people can't. Be. Idiots.

I've been following THE FLASH, but I'm probably going to drop it soon. Why?  Idiot plots.  An idiot plot is a story that depends on the main characters acting like idiots, and the whole thing falls apart if anyone acts with basic intelligence. Yes, everyone does stupid or foolish things now and then, but to qualify as an idiot plot, the people need to do stuff that doesn't even qualify as the "what was I thinking?" kind of idiocy.

Case in point is the latest FLASH episode "Out of Time."  Lots of spoilers follow, and I'm assuming you've seen the episode.

Early in, Barry Allen and Joe West are sitting in Joe's car when Mark Madron (who they work very hard not to call the Weather Wizard) pulls up behind them in his truck.  Madron conjures up a thundercloud and destroys Joe's car with a bolt of lightning.  Fortunately, Barry is so fast that he notices the lightning bolt when it's halfway to the car and he spirits both him and Joe to safety nan-seconds before the lightning strikes.  Neither of them is hurt.  And yet it doesn't occur to Barry to sprint after the Madron in his nice, slow truck and grab him?  But if Barry catches Madron now, the episode ends, so Barry has to be an idiot.

Later, Madron, still intent on killing Joe, shows up at the police station.  (Here, the villain is being an idiot for doing this in a roomful of cops, but we'll give him a sort-of pass on the assumption that Madron figures his powers make him immune to anything the police might do to stop him.)  Barry shows up just in time to stop Madron from killing Joe, but the police chief is badly injured.  Barry has to rush the chief to the hospital while Madron just strolls away.  Barry is so fast, he zips the chief to the hospital in a couple seconds, but he can't get back to the station in time to catch up to Madron?  Or, better yet, he can't spend half a second to punch Madron out and THEN rush the chief to the hospital?  Half a second won't make a difference.  But of course, Madron has to get away or the episode will be really short.  Idiot plot.

In both cases above, the writers could have easily have had Barry fight Madron, but given Madron the ability to neutralize Barry's speed.  They showed Madron create a force field out of air--a great way to stop a speedster.  WHAM!  Barry runs into it, and Madron gets away.  They've also shown Madron with the ability to create ice.  Madron creates an ice slick which flummoxes Barry just long enough for Madron to exit.  There!  No one has to be an idiot.

But the writers aren't content with just Barry being an idiot.  Joe has to be an idiot, too.  Joe says he's going after Madron alone, and that Barry can't go with him because Joe doesn't want anyone else to be endangered.  And BARRY AGREES WITH THIS.

Let's look at this again.  Joe, an ordinary guy with no powers, is going to square off with a supervillain . . . by himself . . . and he doesn't want his superhero foster son to come along because he's afraid the SUPERHERO will get hurt?  And the superhero agrees to this?  Now they've passed the idiot event horizon.

The conversation should have gone the other way around.  Barry should have told Joe to stay out of it because Joe has no powers.  Joe, not wanting this young punk of a kid to deal with Joe's own problems and overconfident that he can handle this Madron guy anyway, goes after Madron and gets himself kidnapped.  Joe's idiocy is actually believable.

And then we have the big reveal--Barry is on the beach with Iris and he tells her he's the Flash.  He does this by changing from civvies into his costume in a small tornado.  In public.  With lots of other people walking around them.  You can see them in the background, in fact.  What the heck?  Idiot.

The last part I had trouble with is something the show may have gotten themselves out of.  The police chief, who is gay, is so badly injured in the fight with Madron that he'll probably never walk again.  Whether or not he'll be able to continue as chief is up in the air.  And then Cisco figures out the true identity of Professor Wells, so Wells kills Cisco.

So the show has these two minority characters: a gay man and an Hispanic man.  And in one episode, they cripple the first and kill off the second.  No straight white people were injured or killed in the filming of this episode.  Fuck you, guys.

However, they sent Barry back in time a few days at the very end of the episode, which may mean they intend to undo these problem.  We'll see if the fuck you stands.

And none of this excuses the characters--and the writers--acting like idiots.