Review: Batman: The Telltale Series - E.01 "Realm of Shadows"

Telltale Games has long since established themselves as some of the most savvy storytellers in video games, turning their simple point and click  "choose your own licensed property adventure" format into a fount for memorable moments and iconic characters all their own. It's a strength that came from taking familiar popular properties and putting effort into genuinely expanding them with their own signature, entering into franchises like The Walking Dead and Borderlands and creating installments that not only could stand as tall as their source material, but in some cases stand even taller. Having been handed the keys to the Batmobile by DC however, Telltale struck a tricky bargain, both getting to profit from one of the easiest to sell heroes in comics, but also tackling their oldest franchise to date, standing up to over 75 years of preexisting history and storytelling. Telling new stories in the vast unexplored decaying landscape of Robert Kirkman's zombie apocalypse is somewhat easier than in the confines of the well walked/glided/grappled streets of Gotham City. What could Telltale bring fresh to the Dark Knight's table that decades of films, television, and comics hadn't already? To be honest, not a whole hell of a lot, but that doesn't keep the opening chapter of their latest series from being a likable and engaging bit of interactive fiction. The first and biggest problem, one that serves as both as an assistant and a hobbler, is once again we're getting a Batman Universe prequel. Batman is already Batman, but like Arkham: Origins, Zero Year, The Long Halloween, and more than one Batman animated series, we're being treated to yet another take of how the relationships that form the world of the Dark Knight took form. That means pre-acid Harvey Dent, flirtatious first brushes with Catwoman, and trust issues with this Gordon fellow. In one way, it serves an obvious storytelling purpose, making the story widely accessible to casual Batman readers as well as having built in arcs for characters as they wind their inevitable way down established hero or villiandom. In another breath however, there's the problem of this being exceedingly well tread ground, making a lot of the storytelling feel rote and laid out, like sucking in a bit of stale air while in an old attic. I'll return to this subject later.

The game exists in its own universe, made up of bits and takes from other Batman media. Telltale's Batman is younger, and in some cases lighter depending on choices, Troy Baker letting Bruce Wayne joke, sulk, and confide with uncharacteristic, but not unwelcome, freedom. Alfred's appearance seems to take inspiration from Micheal Gough's portrayal of the character from the Uslan produced films, one of the more tiresome portrayals in the game so far, less familiar fatherly wit and more a source of unending faux-poetic trailer bait monologue lectures. Carmine Falcone makes a plot-centric appearance, more the blunt arrogant Brooklyn thug Tom Wilkinson portrayed in Nolan's Batman Begins than the refined Italian-immigrant patriarch of Jeph Loeb. Even a brief Oswald Cobblepot appearance has a taller, lankier, younger design that suggests the Gotham portrayal of the character, though the comparisons end at superficial dimensions. Overall, it's a familiar feeling universe, if one that doesn't feel like it truly has its own personal identity.

The story is simple enough, with Bruce Wayne getting involved in politics to help his friend Harvey Dent in his bid for mayor, putting his public identity in the crosshairs of the incumbent mayor and invested crime families. While some might complain that the burden of the story is largely on the shoulders of Wayne and the politics rather than Batman, I actually found this a welcome change, as the action sequences here are serviceable but obviously an inferior experience to already available roleplaying in Rocksteady's Arkham line. Playacting as Batman in Bruce Wayne situations provided more interest to me, trying to play that fine line between intelligent strategist and immovable bastion of justice in Telltale's morally complex choice system providing my favorite moments.

There is a rub, obviously and it connects to both some of their recent, less successful, brushes with licensed properties as well as the prequel setting. Lately, Telltale has found themselves in some critical missteps with their Game of Thrones and Walking Dead: Michonne spin-off, less well received than their established critical darlings. In both cases, the games changed focus from original characters set in large, unexplored licensed universes to representing characters that already existed and whose stories continued past the setting of the game. With The Walking Dead and Tales from the Borderlands, the player was given responsibility for new characters, ones whose stories might cross paths with established figures from the franchises, but whose fates were undecided and permeable to change. When I play Borderlands, I play with the knowledge that characters I like, like Sasha, aren't bound by any outside narrative, and my choices might result in their early death if I'm not careful. It's a new story and I'm engaged by not knowing what comes next.

Batman, by setting itself as a prequel to a familiar world, albeit its own version, sets a lot of these stories up to have endings I already know by heart. To quote another critic, characters like Harvey Dent have "future reputations that precede them." Why should I worry about coddling this character's feelings when I know he's inexorably headed for archvilliany? What motivation do I have to pretending that Oswald Cobblepot might be a good bloke when his path is set by his very name? Not to mention the practical immortality these characters are likely to enjoy through whatever dramatic tussle comes in the future, nobody I recognize the name of is likely to bite a bullet anytime soon. It leaves you feeling less like you have real agency in the story and more like you are just finishing Bruce Wayne's sentences, waiting for those big iconic moments of transformation to simply arrive.

Setting this story in an already established Batman universe could have remedied this, creating original antagonists for Batman and Fam to confront. Or perhaps even more creatively, Telltale could have really established their pocket universe as one with consequences and unique direction by proving their story wasn't going to run precisely by the rules. What if they had killed Harvey Dent in the first episode? Or Jim Gordon? Saying that this is a prequel to Batman's legend, but one that these new creators will determine the shape of, not established history. There are no great surprises in the first installment of Telltale's Batman, serving more as a decently polished, well acted, Batman story that caters to fans but doesn't offer them something new.

Despite these criticisms, I very rarely found myself bored, appreciating the decent writing and traditionally strong voice acting. As per usual with the more recent games, the elements outside of quick time events and dialogue trees are conceptually imaginative but ultimately feel more like padding, not really providing many options or challenges. New features of gameplay options have been added, allowing online audiences to vote on choices the player should choose in real time, primarily for the benefit of streamers and Let's Players, but not providing much of an added value for the individual consumer.

If you've enjoyed Telltale's output in the past, Batman is a likable play, if not one of the stronger installment's I've played of theirs. There's no immediate and addicting hook like the end of the first The Wolf Among Us episode had, or the thrilling and hilarious burgeoning adventure of Tales from the Borderlands initial entry. I may actually have a hard time remembering off the top of my head what exactly happened in this premier episode by the time the next installment is released. But even as a decently well-read Batman fan, I could enjoy this game despite the familiarity. It may play it safe, but they are still good storytellers and do the best with the limitations they impose (or had imposed). It may be well worn, but I'm still looking forward to the rest of this story, familiar as it may be.

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Batman: The Telltale Series - E.01 "Realm of Shadows" Developer: Telltale Games Price: $4.99 Platforms: Steam, X-Box 360, X-Box One, PS3, PS4

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Review: Pear Cider & Cigarettes

I was lucky to go into Vimeo's second original film blind. I remember seeing some of my animation industry friends sharing the Kickstarter link for the short when it was live, even thinking of dropping a few bucks in myself though I eventually wouldn't. All I remembered was the aesthetic: glossy, digital, and glowing with hot electronic colors. From the outside, it gives the impression it might be some sort of disco throwback noir, the title and style suggesting something sexy and crime themed. The truth is, the short is less of a freshly waxed sports car and more a quiet reflective conversation in a corner booth in a nearly empty bar. The story, apparently at least somewhat autobiographical from the life of animator/graphic novelist Robert Valley, unfolds slowly as a somber portrait of rocky friendship and the incredible toll life leans on the living, carefully revealing itself all while framed with peerless aesthetic clarity.

Narrated from Valley's perspective, the short film concerns the life and early death of his friend Techno, a vibrant but self-destructive young man whose life of excitement is quickly and irreparably paralyzed by his devastated health and spiritual isolation. Valley's guide is one of regularly wounded affection, sacrificing for his friend but unable to avoid being a witness and recorder of Techno's eventually fatal personal flaws. While Techno's life of adventurous and bacchanalian excess is explored, the story suddenly and wisely cuts it short, giving you a picture of his electric peak before quickly pulling the rug out for a grueling look at his sudden but excruciatingly elongated decline. It's not a portrait of a party lifestyle and its consequences as the bow on the end of the narrative, it's the story of a man who loved life in a way that killed him as well as the other man who was held prisoner by friendship to watch him die.

Something I was unaware of when I agreed to review the short was that I was already quite familiar with Robert Valley as an artist, being the primary contributor to the character designs on the underrated and short-lived animated series Tron: Uprising. Valley's singular style is immediately apparent in his work, his figures designed with angular and exaggerated anatomy, at times equally grotesque as it is expressive caricature. In Pear Cider and Cigarettes, Valley is able to be even more free and stylized, adapting the pages of the graphic novel the short is based on with a look that comes off contradictively as both naturalistically gestural and glossily digital at the same time, using the book as storyboards for the art. One thing the viewer might notice is the short actually works more like a motion comic than a true animated film much of the time, with most shots being very subtly animated still images, full frame by frame animation shots being rare. While this might be seen as a handicap to the short, it never once took away from the film despite noticing this. The slight animation techniques used being expressive enough and intelligently utilized that it gives the "still images" more dimension and character than some fully animated flash cartoons. Valley's detail fleshing out the world and the careful attention to gesture delivered by the animation team sets the storytelling style beyond reproach, rich with surprise.

The audiowork rounds it out perfectly, with what looks like a very expensive catalog of licensed music to accompany the original contributions by Robert Trujillo. Smoky jazzy tracks from groups as disparate as Pink Floyd and Nightmares on Wax color the quiet rumble of the noir like narration, soothing and intimate, bringing you close to tell you previously unspoken secrets.

While a tough story to hear (and for Valley, I'd imagine, a tough story to tell), the short is a sad story, not a depressing one. There's a note of inevitability in Techno's eventual downfall and even his library of personal crimes along the way. A sense that for him, it would always end up this way somehow, a consequence of finding fulfillment in reckless and often selfish behavior. You don't hate him, even though you blame him. You don't mourn him, even though you feel the emptiness of his passing. While unflinching and presenting more flaws than admirable traits, Valley has crafted a beautiful, deeply felt tribute to his friend. One that invites you in to understand his friendship in a way that makes you feel his connection while only communicating in simple abstractions why he stayed so loyal to someone who only seemed to sacrifice when it was made biologically inescapable. It may have slick stylings, but the storytelling here results in one of the most real and grounded human stories I've experienced in quite a while.

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Pear Cider & Cigarettes Creator: Robert Valley Price: $4.99 (Rent), $8.99 (Buy) Available Here!

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Review: Star Trek Beyond

I watched a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic documentary two years ago, about the Brony phenomenon. I'd seen one episode of the show and couldn't maintain interest, but I wanted to understand where the passionate love from adult men for the program came from. It wasn't a matter of judgment, but simply that the fandom seemed a genuine anomaly, fascinating in its own right in how it aggressively broke free of the strict gender demographic segregation of all ages media. The documentary didn't clear much up, but it did leave one impression on me. Repeatedly, one of the primary defenses of the show from the fans themselves was My Little Pony's morals. Men in their late teens and early twenties talked about how meaningful and powerful the show was for communicating life lessons like "being honest with your friends is good" and "be yourself." If anything the documentary left me more confused, making me wonder what cultural famine left adults feeling spiritually fulfilled and morally educated by these grade school morality tales. Boys loving something pink isn't bewildering to me. Finding "don't judge a book by its cover" deep when you're drinking age, is. This brings us to another cultural phenomenon, one that inspired bewilderment in its own age and helped establish the modern face of fandom as we know it. I'll proudly admit that as a young man, Star Trek was an important part of my moral education. Yes, after I just insulted thousands of young men for gaining self-empowerment from a show about cartoon horses I just claimed I was made a more complete person by a show about people shooting lasers in front of cardboard backdrops. However, I will go to task for the philosophical sophistication of The Next Generation any day. From the obvious examples like "The Measure of a Man" which hinged the drama on answering the question whether or not an artificial intelligence can be considered alive, to the less referenced like "Silicon Avatar," where arguments are made to the defense of the right to life of an intelligent entity of incredible destructive power. Not every episode was so philosophically arch, or particularly subtle, but before we had Star Treks where crew members had to decontaminate by stripping to their underwear and rubbing each other with lube (or pick your episode of Voyager where Star Trek died) it was a franchise that built its reputation on its championing of humankind, the value of life, and the constant strive to improve ourselves as individuals and a collective species.

That Star Trek is gone now, but that's not news. This intro isn't to bemoan the tragedy (genuine that it is) that Star Trek has become Mission Impossible in space. Star Trek '09 was that, and I enjoyed the movie immensely, despite its howling plot holes and crass bastardization of a once meaningful franchise. Because it was fun. Because it had personality and a sense of humor. It was still a hollow shell, but Star Trek as a property had been dead for years, seeing it strung up with 'splosions and women in their underwear wasn't as offensive as it might have been at one time. Until Into Darkness came along. Ugly, mean-spirited, and shitting on Roddenberry's spacebound ashes, Into Darkness was one of the worst experiences I've had in a theater this last decade. I actually started writing on this site because of a positive review someone wrote here that inspired me to throw my own misanthropic hat into the critical slurry. Like Man of Steel (and even more fittingly, Batman Vs. Superman), the outrage wasn't entirely ignored, and this year's Star Trek Beyond was championed by the producers, screenwriters, and cast as a return to form for Star Trek. It's about exploration. It's about teamwork. It's about adventure. Simon Pegg was screenwriting. We're sorry. We're so begrudgingly sorry for Into Darkness. Please forgive us with your money.

This was the intro to the review. It's longer than some entire reviews I've written. It's this long because I need you to understand. I need you to understand how a man who claims The Phantom Menace was deeply upsetting to him, helped kill Star Trek even deader than it already was. It's because of promises like saying your bringing Star Trek back to its roots. Nobody should have believed it, and I certainly didn't. It's directed by someone whose major claim to fame is making the Fast and the Furious films popular again; it's not going to be real Star Trek. That's not the problem. The problem is having a seemingly smart talented screenwriter say that, and then deliver us My Little Pony.

This is a more hopeful Star Trek. Gone is the post 9-11 grey Rainbow Six: Galaxy vibe. The score by the exceptionally talented Micheal Giacchino (as forgettable as it is this time around) is more upbeat and makes more intentional nods to the original series. The movie doesn't end with the Enterprise crew wearing pseudo-Nazi uniforms this time. However, the moral sophistication they try to introduce is laughably childish. While Into Darkness even briefly toyed with debating the morality of executing criminals without trial, the beating moral heart of Star Trek Beyond is "war bad, peace gud." The cast awkwardly and horribly crams bland meaningless maxims about togetherness and unity between the endless babbling technoexposition, making them sound more like a lame cult than morally informed citizens of humanity. The villain retorts in his asthmatic rumble with contrary statements that have all of the intellectual challenge and subtly of a Care Bears villain. Star Trek Beyond isn't worse than Star Trek Into Darkness. The one saving grace of the film is Darkness made a goal out of spraying cookie shits all over one of the best entries in cinematic Star Trek, while this one tells its own story, meaning they only get to ruin their own work. What Beyond is, however, is more pathetic. I was ready to give this film a chance. I even liked a lot of what it started with. What I got was another confirmation that trailers do in fact tell you everything you need to know about blockbusters today. Trust your instincts, nobody is even trying anymore.

All of the good things about the movie fit in the first 30 minutes. Immediately, Star Trek Beyond does some smart things. It jumps right into the characters without obnoxious ostentatious buildup. The characters don't get their own dramatic introduction, there isn't a big reveal of the Enterprise. Instead, Beyond throws you into the story like you'd never left it. I imagine the thinking was to recreate the feeling of coming back to the next episode of a television show, just another chapter without the unnecessary wonderment at seeing these characters together again. It's a welcome choice that felt smarter than the dumb "Raiders of Twizzler Planet" opening Darkness stared with. The characters are introspective but not so far as to be broody. Leonard Nimoy's death is referenced in a way that could have been very interesting, as in-universe Old Spock dies as well, making Young Spock reflect on the meaning of the time he has left. It's a great idea. That's what I'm doing here. Listing the few great ideas.

My favorite idea, that could have resulted in a great adventure movie, is the splitting up of the crew. After the big plot centric disaster, the crew is divided into pairs, allowing for much more screen-time and a split focus, giving everyone moments and things to do (except Uhura, who once again is relegated to looking distraught at things). Breaking up the bromance of Kirk and Spock, the oft ignored Leonard McCoy gets to hang out with the green blooded bastard, playing the Odd Couple in space the original show cast them as. Scotty gets to hang out with a new playmate, a "badass" lady alien wearing makeup seemingly plagiarized from the Morlocks in that terrible Guy Pearce version of The Time Machine. Kirk and Chekov team up to essentially... eh, it doesn't result in much. It's a pity The Green Room couldn't have premiered after this so it could have definitively been Anton Yelchin's farewell picture, as he's easily the most wasted member of the cast this time around. Star Trek Beyond does what the X-Men franchise always needed to do, have the balls to tell stories with characters that aren't the go-to leads. Seeing Spock and McCoy have their own mini adventure was nice, and when the crew reforms they still all have their own dynamics with each other (except Sulu, because he was paired with Uhura, which again, was only there to look really, really upset at stuff). Great. Great. This is good screenwriting and I am happy to see it in play. Except it's got no charisma. I laughed twice during this movie, and smiled once, and this film is front loaded with jokes. Problem is, the jokes are all stale fill in the blank adventure comedy humor. For coming from the co-writer of probably the perfect comedy film since the turn of the millennium, Hot Fuzz, Simon Pegg's script is loaded with the most obvious rote one-liners you can think of, practically a checklist of comedy clichés. I'd love to blame Justin Lin, who clearly doesn't have a great handle on managing performances in the movie, lacking a certain energy that J.J. Abrams milked out of the talented ensemble, but these actors and this director had almost nothing to work with.

Keep in mind, we just finished covering the parts of the film I actually enjoyed. Now lets take the turn.

I'm going to be an asshole and start the synopsis here, but that's only because proper context is required when discussing the utter desolation that is the climax of this film. While on their three-year mission into deep space, Kirk and crew stop by a futuristic new Starbase that proves that people still aren't done being amazed by the folding city visual from Inception. They intercept a survivor from a space disaster, apparently a ship marooned on a planet hidden in an impenetrable nebula, nebula in this film being a word that describes an asteroid field, because Beyond had to find some way to top the "cold fusion being cold" gaffe that Into Darkness gave us. The Enterprise being the only ship capable of penetrating the rocky mess, they find a trap waiting for them, a swarm of tiny ships that tear the Enterprise to shreds. The leader of this force is our villain, Durian Luther, who tries really hard to be memorable, intimidating, and ruthless, but instead gets a chair next to General Grievous and Balem Abrasax as high kings of worthless sci-fi villainy. The Enterprise destroyed, the crew has to band together to keep Durian Luther from using an extremely hackneyed and shockingly meaningless MacGuffin from destroying the universe... maybe.

It's something that doesn't strike you till the end, that every tiny detail in the movie is set up for an annoying payoff later, and the really big things you expect to be elaborated in more detail are left vague for some reason. There's a lot of little touches in the movie, moments that feel like world-building, but eventually every single one of those will come back to irritatingly result in a twist or action moment. Scotty's little mascot friend's acid spitting head-cold joke? The crew will use it to break out of prison. That video playing in the abandoned Starfleet craft? Will result in some inspiringly ill-conceived Keyzer Soyzeying of the main villain. Even fucking Morlock Babe's affinity for anachronistic 90's hip hop? Will result in the most stunning and horrifying moment of schlock in Star Trek history since a 57-year-old Nichelle Nichols did a sexy belly dance to distract some horny alien guards in The Final Frontier. I honestly couldn't believe what I was seeing. There are no words. Meanwhile, huge ideas are left completely unexplained. A character's physical transformation, key to the plot, is left without explanation. The MacGuffin, which has a long convoluted history of ownership, is never given a rational explanation for the transition of ownership, or character's arbitrary knowledge of it. The little stuff is given too much importance, and the big stuff is completely ignored.

Finally, all the way at the bottom, the action sucks. Justin Lin, the guy who helped make the Fast and the Furious franchise not only successful again but financially capable of competing with Marvel superheroes, doesn't direct a single competent action sequence in all of this movie. Scenes are either hideously close up with Paul Greengrass shaky-cam, shrouded in inky darkness, or both. Like the Fast and the Furious, a couple dozen entirely fatal things happen to our leads with no physical repercussions, making them insultingly impervious to injury and tension. Most criminally, however, the action has no architecture. Even when fully lit, the action sequences are a messy blur of poorly directed and edited chaos, with characters blipping in and out of locations without any relationship to environments or each other. Contrast this to The Nice Guys, which came out earlier this year, a film that put a strong stamp on how modern action should be directed. The movie featured head-spinningly complex and multilayered action scenes, but through precise staging, attention to architecture, and clearly communicated character motivations, you could follow every beat perfectly. It's a relic from another era of action film-making, this thing called competence.

The film ends (no spoilers) with a toast to "absent friends." It's a callback, of course. Originally, it was made by Kirk, marking the passing of Spock in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. It was a nice somber moment, given weight by the beloved status of the departed character. It was reprised by the character of Jean-Luc Picard, mourning the death of Data in Star Trek: Nemesis, itself a reference, made somewhat awkward by Data's uninspired demise being compared to Spock's iconic death in Wrath of Khan. Finally, here in Beyond, it is broadly used to commemorate the deaths of hundreds of nameless background crew members of the Enterprise, only one of which had a name and plot function, and who ultimately serve as little but tributes to action scene carnage. Even compared to Nemesis, considered to be one of the worst Star Trek films, this has little dramatic weight. For all of its preaching and lecturing of the value of teamwork and crews being a family, ultimately the only characters we're told to care about dying are the ones who get their name on the poster. Sulu's new husband isn't just in the film as a marker of the changing face of diversity, but so we can stick a face in the crowd of fleeing citizens of Starfleet that we can pretend we care about. Ultimately, that's what always gave Star Trek its heart, the love of life. Exploration in Star Trek itself was always centered around life. You didn't see many episodes about geological surveys or measuring nebula (the non-asteroid kind), it was about other civilizations, the multifaceted, complicated, strangeness of life in all its expressions. In Beyond, life is a plot device, to be preserved only for its utility of dramatic tension. For all those promises of a new era of Star Trek, it's all the more disappointing to see a supposed attempt result in so little. The franchise as a franchise will continue on to a fourth entry, audiences apparently will respond well to x-treme dirtbike stunts in Star Trek films, but the soul is, and will likely remain, as dead as Morn.

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Star Trek Beyond

Director: Justin Lin Writer: Simon Pegg, Doug Jung Run Time: 122 Minutes

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Video Game High School: S3:E6 – The N64

The Barnstormers have won. The days tick by as VGHS is slowly dismantled to make room for a new strip mall. All hope for the school rests on one last-ditch plan to wrest ownership back into proper hands and save VGHS.

Which would be great if someone could think of one.

After the cliffhanger of the last episode I wondered what loophole or contrivance the writers would invent to put the contract of the school up for grabs. The answer is, it isn't. VGHS is closing and Ki Swan's maneuver to pit the FPS teams of VGHS against Napalm Energy Drink High School is just to allow the gang to play one last game together before they go their separate ways. There are no stakes, no prize, just competition and the pride and joy of play.

Still, the match is no small affair. Having slowly built up the scale of the FPS sequences from the first episode throughout the show, 'VGHS' needed an end cap bigger than the rest. How does 32 players on 32 sound? Yep, pretty much every student that's ever gotten a line of dialogue in VGHS suits up for this big finale, a surprisingly effective thrill to see, as most of the VGHS cliques rarely cross paths in the show. It also results in giving everyone a Big Bad to tackle, resulting in some pretty satisfying confrontations after a whole season of getting kicked around.

Despite being a series finale, this episode was surprisingly light on character moments. Most of the episode is the climatic match, a rip-snorting blend of choreographed violence, slapstick humor, and emptying out whatever money was left in the budget for pyrotechnics and assault vehicles. It's as big as you could hope, both tense and cathartic.

As expected, we also get the resolution of The Law's arc, facing off against the Bieber-esque Neo Law. It isn't quite what I expected, but it does wrap the character up in a neat little bow. Season Three had been the weakest season for The Law yet, but seeing as how it wasn't about him it was good that the writers didn't bring him back to completely derail the show in the final moments.

As for the very end, it's fitting but abrupt (suspiciously so if you ask me, but I digress). When we do cut to black for the last time I was honestly surprised and kind of flabbergasted about the note they decided to end it on. There are so many things you expect to see upon the resolution of a story like this, and we get almost none of them. It's not by any means a bad ending, just one that seemed like bits were missing and plot threads left unresolved. It's a finale that both ramps things up to appropriately epic levels but then also flips off the light switch before it feels quite done.

As implied, I have read a little into what this could mean, but that kind of speculation is unfair after this kind of conclusion. At the same time, I also did consider what this ending could have meant if this truly is the last we'll see of 'VGHS' and how it relates to the story they told this year. While he never felt like the protagonist this season, the story of VGHS has always been Brian's, a coming of age about the trials and responsibilities that come with growing maturity and duty. The ending is a bit bittersweet maybe because accepting certain consequences to help people you care about is the hardest and last big lesson Brian needed to learn. It's not a tragic ending, just maybe a more complex and honest one, and one that seems to have been foreshadowed in an earlier piece of dialogue.

In thinking about the show and reflecting on its quality, something became rather clear. The show was made with effort, sure, but effort is easy. If anything, effort is the bare minimum anyone should put into anything. The reward for effort is you end up making something admirable. 'VHGS' on the other hand pushed well beyond admirable. Rocket Jump and their creative team took a Youtube fanbase, experience shooting action sequences on a budget, and a cast of not-particularly famous actors and built a world of characters that you felt you could care about and be affected by. There's a certain richness required in creation to extract that kind of effect, where you can go all over the emotional spectrum and never feel like you are over extending. The cast is a spectacular ensemble, the writers wield extraordinary command, and the direction trumps their wealthier contemporaries. That kind of quality is a product of love and care, a skimpy resource these days which makes it all the more precious. To think of where VGHS started to where this season ended on is kind of mind-blowing, a creative journey I feel grateful to have witnessed.

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Score: 4/5

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seeWJSCqj4c

Video Game High School: S3:E5 – Being a Teen is Hard, I Guess

It's nice to laugh again.

After getting an emotional smackdown in two back-to-back soul rockers, the kids are back at VGHS, facing their challenges head-on...ish.

After Ted's monumental confrontation with loss and the harsh reality of his relationship with his father he seems genuinely rejuvenated. However, war is brewing amongst the racers and Ted isn't sure of his place among them anymore. Meanwhile, despite a slight bridging of the gap during the dark days at the Swan house, Jenny and Brian haven't healed their breakup and continue to be on uncomfortable terms. Ki seems to be the furthest spun out of the gang, experimenting with a newfound nihilism and a vaguely gothy new fashion style. Meanwhile, a storm is brewing. A Barnstorm...er. Damn, I thought I had that one made.

Also, noticeable lack of Law. Painfully noticeable.

If I didn't know how they'd transition out of Episode Three's fallout I definitely couldn't figure out how they'd segue out of the literal tears for a loveless childhood that we ended Episode Four on. Well, they transitioned. I wouldn't say it's always graceful, but with two episodes left it was going to be hard to rev things back up for the conclusion to...well...the whole show. Frankly, it feels more like a season premiere than a penultimate episode, but it did its job admirably, and in some places even wonderfully.

And like I said, it's nice after all the pain to laugh again. This was a funny episode, with a lot of big laughs and a generally lighter tone. Even the more serious moments are treated with a bit more humor, letting characters feel and be vulnerable in front of each other without trying to challenge the previous two episodes depths.

The tonal shift isn't perfect, and feels kind of like a splashing cold water in the audience's face to shake them out of the funk of sad; effective but not comfortable. Ted's subplot with the Drift Racers was probably the weakest element. While I like the Drift characters, I've never been fully engaged by that part of 'VGHS's world. Their rivalries and power struggles always felt extremely B-plot to the other more interesting stories. This episode is no exception, exacerbated by the darkness of the previous episode and the absence of a transition between where we ended and how we find Ted now. I sort of get Ted's conflict with the Drift King is akin to confronting the same kind of thoughtless asshole his father was, but only picked up on it by retroactively examining the story rather then reading that in the heat of the moment. Also, of all of the action sequences in the show I've never cared for how Rocket Jump films the driving segments, and watching them tends to be a pretty passive experience for me. Furthermore, Ted's pre-mourning arc still seems unaddressed. He was an asshole who hurt some people and is kind of absent for Ki again here. It's understandable if it isn't brought up again due to time, but a bit of a sticky point for me in the episode.

The other characters fare better. Jenny and Brian are broken up but are also still in love, so we need a whole episode for them to figure this out and realize what they mean to each other. I don't mean this in a condescending way, because it results in much of the episode's best stuff. Teenage angst requires parental figures be consulted. Jenny has to open up to her emotionally estranged mom, who knows how to coach but is adorably broken at affection. I've never been a big fan of Cynthia Watros as Mary Matrix (even though the familial likeness has always been extremely striking) but she has one of her best moments of the show here, a well written scene that helps wrap up her arc nicely. Apparently no teenager has healthy parental relationships, so Brian has to play son with Dean Calhoun. Said it before, I'll say it again: the show could just be them. Dean Calhoun and Brian: Teen Janitor, Thursdays at 8. The scene is great, meaningful, and hilarious. Does anyone have Harley Morenstein's home address so I can send him a thank-you sandwich? Or you know, a gift card for a sandwich. Whatever works.

Ki's transformation is probably the most appropriate and actually follows through with her season's arc. Shane Pizza crushed her faith and the gang's recent brush with mortality didn't help her feel any more secure. It's fun to watch Porterfield play against Ki's chipper Stepford Bureaucrat in favor of some indulgent pessimism and black eyeliner. Ki's picture of what public displays of meaninglessness look like is some of the funniest stuff in the episode and results in not only a conclusion to a part of her arc but also a pretty touching tribute to what video games can represent to the people who play them.

While not the strongest episode this year, it really only suffers in comparison to everything else that has been done in a season I don't think any of us were expecting. I laughed a lot, and our Big Bads finally get to flex their Bigness and Badness, setting us up for a conclusion that I can't really say I can predict the shape of. It's all very exciting.

All I know is there'd better be some Law in it.

Score: 3/5

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuY22f8y4ws

Video Game High School: S3:E4 – Video Game Home School

After the destructive last episode, the big question was how do you follow up and address the wreckage? The answer is...

Jesus.

We're on Episode 4 of 6 right? When do we get to catharsis?

Ki Swan has moved home after her self-inflicted personal humiliation, avoiding her friends and the questions of her parents, deep in denial. She even built herself a laugh track robot that turns conversations into an impromptu sitcom parody. Brian, Ted, and Jenny all show up to the house and are ambushed by Ki's parents, wrangled into a 'Couples Therapy' board game. Everyone is on their hammiest behavior, cracking weak jokes followed by canned laughter. It's terrible, and felt like an awkward inappropriate way to address the bleak conclusion of Episode 3. Then, midway through the game, someone receives a phone call. The laugh track robot is turned off. There has been an accident.

If you didn't think life could get any worse for the VGHS gang, it can and it does. What follows is an emotionally brutal follow up to an emotionally brutal episode. Everyone wanders around hollowly, trying their best to show support or handle their own reactions. It's red eyes, awkward silences, and horrible social blunders wall to wall. There are little touches of detail that are really uncomfortable for anyone who has ever experienced a close personal loss. It's not funny. Sometimes it's damn hard to watch.

Honestly, nothing in the rest of 'VGHS's catalog ever hinted towards episodes like this. Remembering back to Season Two it feels kind of quaint considering what has been attempted in the third season. I remember thinking the episode where Jenny had to write a nice speech about her abusively emotionally distant mother was going to be the dramatic peak of the show. Now, midway through this episode we have one of the best television format portraits of mourning since 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 'The Body'. I'm baffled as to where the team was hiding away all of this talent for straight-faced drama.

I won't spoil with specifics, but the performer who plays the griever in question nails it. The performance is frankly incredible, doing a lot with a little, never devolving into cliched gestures of grief and beyond what I could have expected from them. The other actors do amazing jobs as well, their roles reduced considerably to allow for the central story, but even when the camera isn't focused on them they exacerbate the sense of helpless sadness. Episodes like this show exactly how strong this ensemble really is; with no weak links the emotional tone is painful. A specific nod to John Ennis for reprising his role as Ken Swan, Ki's father who first appeared in Season Two's “Double XP Weekend”. I liked his performance in that episode and in this return he is the glue that helps tie the episode together and a welcome expansion of his already likeable character.

This Season has just been on a constant climb, inarguably the best season regardless of the coming conclusion. This creative team is uncommonly talented. Somehow they've pulled a TARDIS and fit a television season's worths amount of conflict and plot development into 4 episodes, about 40 minutes a piece without it ever feeling cramped or forced. How the hell did they do that? 'VGHS' is a world now, and will be missed after the final episode plays, now more than ever, leaving us just with the hope that a 'VGU' is a possibility in the foreseeable future. And if it doesn't happen? Well, I'll have to watch this cast and crew's future projects with great interest, because 'VGHS' was a unique platform for them to show us exactly what they are capable of, which is to say, a fucking lot. That said, could we get a happy ending please? I don't think I can take another episode like this.

Score: 5/5

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9skaRCdcphc

Video Game High School: S3:E3 – Map to Sex Town

Last week on 'VGHS', we saw how the pressures of the new season's challenges were affecting the lives of our characters. This week, those pressures cracked them.

It's go time at VGHS. Election day has arrived and Ki Swan has to use all of her brilliant mind to combat Shane Pizza's bottomless supply of money and cynicism. Ted, locked in detention for his prom night brush with delinquency, finds his recent ploy of political corruption to support his girlfriend has backfired tragically. If Election Day wasn't tough enough, VGHS goes toe-to-toe with Napalm Energy Drink high school in a match that could make or break Jenny Matrix's career, but could have severe consequences on her future relationship with Brian. Brian misreads her anxiety to mean something very different, and is suddenly struck with...performance issues.

Also, The Law is finished. Long Live the Law.

Yes, everybody loses something in this episode. In television terms this is the 'Ozymandias' of VGHS. Dramatically, in any show, you expect things at some point to fall apart. You know a show really has you by the balls however when those things fall apart and it hurts. The episode is very funny, there is some great comedy here, but it's not what lingers with you after the credits roll.

This episode features the best action of the season so far, and maybe the best of the series. Napalm Energy vs. VGHS is as epic as you'd expect, featuring kinetic camera work and some wonderfully creative staging and pacing. The build-up was worth it and fans of the FPS scenes of the series will get spoiled.

On the cast side of things, it's all around series peaks, most notably for the two lead actresses. Johanna Braddy is raw here. There's just not much to say. It's the best performance she's put out the whole show, and considering how dominant of a force she's been since midway through Season Two that is saying an enormous amount. On a similar note, after taking somewhat of a dramatic back seat the last two episodes Ellary Porterfield also puts out an amazing series best performance here. Ki Swann's empathetic tactician is put to the ultimate test, being faced by the pure soullessness of an unfair world that is run by power not moral will, and Porterfield shows the cracks in Ki's mechanical facade with devastating effect. She's always been a powerful actress on the show, but for the most part her talents of expression have been utilized comedically. Here, she's brutal, taking the scripts turns for her character and tightening the screws with little touches.

Further credit to Bryan Forrest and Chase Williamson for finally elevating the Barnstormer brothers to proper Big Bad heights. I liked Shane Pizza and was more or less ambivalent to Ashley Barnstormer, never finding either particularly compelling as villains; comfortably douchey but without any real consequence. However, in this episode they finally mature into the evil we've been waiting to hate, from Shane's blasé dismantling of Ki's sense of right and wrong to Ashley's conniving in-game hostage role, they feel dangerous now and comeuppance is anxiously anticipated. Furthermore, Nathan Kress as Law 2.0 is excellently built up, setting up pretty huge expectations for the future rematch.

If I had one criticism of the season so far it'd be the Law's arc. The resolution of his story in Season Two I found a bit unfortunate after his epic crawl up from the spiritual void; flipping to the bad guys team was a neat joke and all, but it felt like it undermined some otherwise great storytelling for a laugh. I thought maybe this season would validate the decision with creative foresight, but here we just get The Law kicked back down the ladder, in surprisingly violent fashion. It just hasn't paid off so far. Then again, considering Neo-Law it's more than likely I'll be eating those words by season end.

I think what is most surprising is how simple this story really is. 'VGHS' Season Three isn't inherently more dense or complex than any other season. The conflicts are familiar, their resolutions from a structure perspective are far from unexpected. Read a plot synopsis of this episode and it'll sound pretty much like any given high-school drama show with an 8-bit paint job. And that just shows how much of an amazing ensemble project this show really is. A scene late in the episode that should have just been a go-to screenwriting 101 moment had me anxious and stunned when the obvious resolution occurred. Divides between characters that were dramatic inevitabilities before the third season was even written felt uncomfortably immediate and fresh. If you have been invested in the show so far, the last twenty minutes of this episode will make you its bitch, and I'm not ashamed to say I welled up a little at one moment. Take a step back and it's a stock high-school show that swaps out it's parts with video game references. Step inside and it's a piece of storytelling craftsmanship that is a product of cast, crew, and creative team working together to make something peerless.

And these guys made me care about a damn fictional virtual pet. How the fuck did they do that?

Score: 5/5

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V-j9Yo3eKI

Video Game High School: S3:E2 - Nobody Cool Goes to Prom

In the previous two seasons of their high-school comedy series, 'VGHS' has never done a prom episode. So how do they tackle it in their third and final season? By having none of their characters go to prom. Having established the current conflicts in the premiere, the second episode surprisingly jumps into anthology style. While it seems to just be an opportunity to goof off and indulge in roleplay, it actually does a better job of setting up what the characters are personally going through then the previous episode. From genre parody to a literal exploration of the unconscious, the episode is reminiscent of the delicate balance Dan Harmon and crew found on 'Community', staging a cartoon and then unexpectedly having it reveal the human fears of our characters.

As I mentioned, the episode is laid out in anthology style, complete with title cards. The stories somewhat interconnect, but unlike what I expected there isn't a 'Go' style woven narrative here. Events you expect to get callbacks are dismissed, giving each story a freedom to breathe completely on their own, making an experience that feels much larger and longer than its actual efficient 42 minute runtime. The first story involves Ki Swan investigating the kidnapping of Brian's cat Cheeto, allowing for a VGHS parody of noir storytelling, complete with hard-boiled narration, red herrings, and foot chases. In the second, Jenny Matrix is too sick to prom it up, spending the entire episode in bed, giving us a literal fever dream look into her psyche. Brian, left stag on the night of the prom and still hurt over his seemingly unsalvageable break with Ted, finds himself going to a frat party held by Games Dean's older brother. Finally, Ted is reluctantly made the wheelman for his drift buddies, resulting in...well...the unexpected.

It's a dark episode, it's a funny episode, and it's an insightful episode. There is respect here for characters and for the story that the RocketJump team is trying to tell. Yeah, it's a show that knows people squee when you slip a 'Toejam and Earl' reference in there, but by this point of 'VGHS' the video game element seems secondary to the damn good high-school comedy/drama it's become.

Everyone here is on their A-game, and the whole cast gets to have fun without it ever feeling like it's selfish or unwarranted. I'm tired of praising Johanna Braddy, she's too consistently good to review. Her segment is the shortest but easily leaves the longest impression. Josh Blaylock brings back the awkward and shares a wonderful scene with Harley Morenstein that practically demands a series just about Brian and Dean Calhoun. Ellary Porterfield gets to do what she does best, facial and gesture comedy, emphasized by the amount of acting she does silently during her segment's narration. Finally, Jimmy Wong gets his crowning moment, putting out his best performance of the show so far. Ech. You know your ensemble is shooting on all cylinders when a review is more like a damn list because everybody needs to get name checked for excellence. Benji Dolly's butt slide was amazing. Okay, now I'm done.

This is arguably the best single episode 'VGHS' has so far. It is indulgent yet ties everything into how the characters are currently feeling and hurting as to make it feel not only natural but indivisible from the jokey premises each story originates from. It's great storytelling and makes me proud to be a fan.

Score: 4/5

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTaYZACa0Ks

Video Game High School: S3:E1 - OMGWTFPS?!

After a massive IndieGoGo and a year long wait, Rocket Jump's VGHS is finally back and it feels like we never left. No really, this episode picks up right in the middle of last season's conflicts.

Yup, if you aren't already onboard with the Internet's best video game themed web series then this is not the place to jump in. The show, focusing on a special school where the students spend all day honing their skills as pro-gamers is in its climactic final season. Kicking off with the traditional re-upping of the ante with special effects, character twists, and oh so many celebrity cameos, the premiere episode is a head-spinning dash even for the initiated. Still, with the first two Seasons on Netflix, DVD, and YouTube you aren't given much of an excuse not to catch up quick.

So where were we? In the end of last season, Brian D. got a girlfriend, but lost a best friend, the big cliffhanger being Ted moving out without a word. The Law, 'redeemed' by crawling out of his burrito stained hole of self pity didn't make the anticipated conversion to the side of good and instead immediately went to work for the bad guys, Napalm Energy Drink High School. Ki Swan announced her candidacy for School President, opposing the shameless RTS douche Shane Pizza. And that's pretty much where we start, right in the thick of it.

As you can see, that's a lot of plotlines to juggle, and like last season the premier episode does take a bit to get warmed up. I can't say it's a particularly funny episode, more clever than featuring a lot of great laugh out loud moments, but not all of it is supposed to be either, featuring some surprising twists that certainly confounded my expectations and went dark fast. There's also a noticeable Law shaped hole for most of the episode, popping in to say hi but largely left to wait in the wings for what is to come. This was probably necessary, as the episode is extremely dense, but they did admirably find time for seemingly less than integral subplot for Jenny Matrix involving a TV interview from hell. While not moving the plot forward much, Johanna Braddy reenforces Jenny as one of the most relatable and human characters of the series and gives the episode most of its funnier moments. All in all, this episode was about laying groundwork for a big end for VGHS, which for this installment means beefing up bigger and tougher conflicts to overcome.

Now, as frequently reminded during my YouTube viewing, the entire third season is available for download right now from Rocket Jump's website. This was a choice I found a little disappointing. Not an opposition to kicking these guys some well deserved cash for this professional product, especially when the price was extremely reasonable, but rather because this new trend of providing new content to binge watchers like on Netflix and Amazon seems to lessen the specialness of the prolonged event of a series season. Because of this, I'll be reviewing 'VGHS: Season Three' as it's released on YouTube out of personal preference, but if you'd prefer to take it all in at once or knock it out over the weekend, $14.99 is very fair for this quality of content.

This season looks to raise Rocket Jump's already high ambitions even higher, and I'm looking forward to the trip. It'll be sad to see VGHS go, but I'm sure they'll make it one hell of a farewell.

Score: 3/5

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhiRE2hfFJc

Community 2009 – 2014

I saw it out of the corner of my eye in my Facebook news feed. I'd already clicked away so I had to click back in my browser. There was a sense of anticipation and unease waiting for the page to load up, it was renewal season for the networks and it had been quite the slaughterhouse as channel after channel dumped the useless trash they'd been accumulating in bulk the last year. Now, the verdict had come in on 'Community'. A few seconds to load, but I already knew what the answer would be.

After five years and four wonderful seasons, 'Community' was finally ended by NBC.

Predictably, certain portions of the Internet exploded in GIF expressed outrage, grief, and misery. A brief scroll through Tumblr could garner eyefuls of death threats to NBC execs, shell-shocked loss, and perhaps one too many uses of Troy Barnes' “my emotions” image. I had to admit, my own reaction was complex, but I couldn't quite relate to the sheer outpouring of exaggerated remorse. It wasn't quite as deafening a sensation as when I got the news that 'Symbionic Titan' had been axed by Cartoon Network, or even the disappointing but predictable news that 'Dollhouse' wasn't going to continue past its second season. Maybe I'd been let down by television networks too many times before, or perhaps it was related to an overall diminished enthusiasm for geeking out that had grown lately. Part of me suspected I'd already gotten that pain out of my system when Dan Harmon was dumped as showrunner for Season Four, a fate worse than cancellation at the time. But it was something else, something unusually peaceful feeling, as one of the best television shows of this generation finally met its demise. Victorious somehow.

It's pretty strange to consider how such a show, with a dedicated fanbase and a bizarrely intricate mythology, could grow out of a pretty humble pilot about a jerk trying to scheme his way into the pants of a pretty blond woman in a community college Spanish class. I remember, like so many things I end up loving, being resistant and annoyed at the aggressive and simplistic ad campaign. People kept telling me it was a sure bet thanks to someone named Joel McHale, but up to that point I'd never watched 'The Soup' and the two jokes they played over and over between '30 Rock' and 'The Office' did little to sell itself. The pilot was pretty awkward, the fast paced delivery could often go right over your head if you didn't pay attention and the cast, while mostly experienced performers by that point, were largely obscure save for the distractingly famous Chevy Chase.

As the show progressed however the ensemble found their rhythm and the cast of characters began to grow beyond their handy default stereotypes, evolving in ways that weren't planned ahead of time. Self-absorbed jock Troy Barnes became affected by YouTube comedian Donald Glover's talent for improvisation and became the geeky heterosexual life mate of Danny Pudi's Abed Nadir. Britta Perry, the aforementioned sexual target of protagonist Jeff Winger, eventually outlived her usefulness as an unobtainable object of desire, as the web of romantic connections between the characters quickly and permanently went out of control (a wealth of material for Tumblr dwelling shippers). Her character stagnated and then blossomed as a tragic emotionally desperate magnet for abuse, Gillian Jacobs helping to transform her into a frequent episode MVP.

If anything was show-runner and creator Dan Harmon's greatest power, that secret ingredient that made the show not only endearing but often shockingly good, was the ability to take these rather one-dimensional characters as they were set up and over time strip away them to their deepest insecurities and raw vulnerable cores. This trait was best expressed in the character of Jeff Winger himself, portrayed by Joel McHale, a ruthless, conniving manipulator devoid of anything other than narcissistic self-interest. It was with Jeff, time and time again we cracked open the cool self-composed shell of sarcasm and disinterest to find haunting loneliness, often more real than the heightened reality dramas other networks provided. Out of all of the actors, McHale always struck me as the most personally invested in the show, plugging it aggressively on his own show on E!, referring to it as the role of a lifetime. As much noise is made about episodes featuring lovingly choreographed paintball fights, trippy explorations of parallel universes, and animated stories featuring the GI Joes, 'Community' was never truly 'about' it's post-modern post-meta love for deconstruction genre and narrative. It was about providing characters with a humanity that is intensely and amazingly rare in storytelling today.

However, as easy as the cast and crew made turning out consistently surprising television look, production was, of course, famously difficult. Harmon, creatively protective and an often undiplomatically blunt speaker, had to fight every step of the way for his underdog program, and by extension, the fans. Harmon's commentary on the show are peppered with tough heartbreaking stories of battles with execs over geeky but monumental episodes like 'Advanced Dungeons and Dragons' or combating the seasoned boredom of Chevy Chase, who seemed to dislike the show, apparently unaware of the slender bump in credibility it had given his otherwise stagnant and embarrassing millennial career. I probably over-champion Harmon, who also sounds like he could be quite the bastard when he felt slighted and often lacked necessary professional graces (the replacement writing staff for Season Four were apparently disheartened to hear him refer to it like 'watching your family get raped on a beach'). Despite his faults however, his struggles with the network felt genuine and 'Community' felt like something that did need that protection. It didn't excuse events like his indefensible lashing out against Chase and his family after Chase's ambivalence towards his job finally went too far, but in an age of creative pandering and focus group content creation it felt rewarding, even revolutionary, to witness his fight for a creative effort that rewarded us so many times during its life. Of course, Dan Harmon was fired as show-runner, in a bizarre move by NBC considering that that show had seemed to be on the cancellation block for three years already. I've watched every episode of the show except for any of Season Four. It felt like a betrayal at the creative level worse than Fox's bungling of the 'Firefly' premiere, and from what I've heard from my friends who watched it I didn't miss much. At the time it would have been better for the network to finally pull the plug.

However, in what was to me the show's ultimate victory, Dan Harmon was reinstated as show runner for one last wonderful season. We returned to Dungeons and Dragons, witness Jeff kick Cobra Commander in the face, receive an un-regiftable final present from Pierce Hawthorne, and finally, 'save' Greendale. The finale was victorious, a thinly veiled confrontation with the show's omnipresent detractors, celebrating all of the uncontrolled strangeness we'd come to love from the Little Show that Could. There was even a pretty pointed and cynically hilarious nod to the show's probable cancellation in the final few moments, evidence that Dan Harmon most likely knew that renewal this time was probably too unlikely to rely on. In the end, NBC 'won', if we want to romanticize it than more than just an inevitable profit/cost analysis decision. Can we blame them? For Season Four I say, yes, what a horrible thing to do. But for getting to Season Five you could almost give them a very grudging and very mild bit of credit for giving the show a previously unthinkable run, especially considering the uncommonly rocky production and Harmon's badger-like tenacity.

But that's where my sense of peace comes in. A kind of melancholy bemusement, far from the red-eyed fans who I do have considerable sympathy for. It's because honestly, we won. The fans, the cast, the crew, the writers, and Harmon himself. 'Community' was born in the wrong time. It was weird, it was smart, it was emotionally honest, and it never risked that to make itself easier to renew. Hell, there probably wasn't a right time for the show to be born, because it was largely made for people who felt as strange and often small as the characters in the show. It made a platform where a character with Aspergers would become a hero, just as the disorder was beginning to enter the national discussion. It presented story-lines about suicide and loneliness in a way that seemed to understand the private storms those issues wage. It championed other shows, even contributing to 'Cougar Town's own migration to another network after cancellation. Sure, it was just a TV show, but it was a TV show genuinely made for a small group of people who remember or currently relate to that feeling of being that outsider, instead of bluntly mocking them like so many other geek programs seem to do. It was a show that was excited about what you were excited about, strange in the way you were strange. In this way I understand this outrage so many of my fellow geeks are feeling even if I don't experience it myself.

Because we won. We won four times. Four glorious paintball splattered, trampoline elevated, Levar Burton obsessed, Keith David narrated, Troy-and-Abed-in-the-Morninged times. That's more than the law of network television almost ever allows, and I treasure that.

Instead burning down NBC, instead I'd like to just say:

Thank you, Joel McHale, Danny Pudi, Donald Glover, Yvette Nicole-Brown, Allison Brie, Gillian Jacobs, Jim Rash, Ken Jeong, Chevy Chase, Jonathan Banks, John Oliver, Dino Stamatopoulos, Richard Erdman, Charley Koontz, Erik Charles Nielsen, Luke Youngblood, John Goodman, Crystal the Monkey, the writers, directors...

…and most of all Dan Harmon.

This was a special show to me and one of the only reasons to turn on a television. I'm tearing up a little, that's how grateful I am. Thank you.

We are getting a movie though, right?

Why We're Not Ready for Wonder Woman

The news that Gal Gadot was cast as Wonder Woman broke under the predictable scrutiny of the comic community this week, with geeks quickly scurrying to tag, list, and authorize the lovely dark-eyed Israeli actress's various body parts as acceptable as the avatar of the Amazonian princess. Overwhelming a great deal of criticism was focused on her frame, slender and runway model ready, with the word 'petite' becoming the consensus adjective for why she was questionably right for the part. But amongst the clamor, the accusations of anti-women casting, and quick IMDBing of Gadot's filmography, my reaction was a bit more simple. My first thought was 'oh no, there's going to be a Wonder Woman in Man of Steel 2'.

It's a dreadful choice that may have far-reaching consequences in the future of comic media. I'd hoped that Snyder and Nolan would be comfortable with dragging the Dark Knight into their cold mirthless muck, leaving Wonder Woman as a post credits tease for the inevitable Justice League film that is building up (wait, is it even still 'Man of Steel 2'?). It would leave Wonder Woman's film debut until after the (somewhat unlikely) female Captain Marvel movie that Disney has been kicking around. However, it looks like DC, out of sheer desperation from their embarrassing cinematic choices thus far, decided to beat Marvel to the first significant female superhero of the modern movie age, and that is a very bad thing.

Let's start with some geek bubble bursting; it doesn't matter who they cast as Wonder Woman physically. That said I understand the hesitation when considering Ms. Gadot, as I've always been in the Frank Cho/Adam Hughes camp of depicting Wonder Woman as athletic and firmly built, more Lolo Jones than Megan Fox. However, this year saw a spectacular performance from Ellen Page in the game 'Beyond: Two Souls' that saw the 5' 1” actress believably become an itty-bitty combat machine, a genuine and complex performance that came packaged with the capability to deliver crushing ass-whoopings.  I am unfamiliar with Gadot's career; maybe she's a dreadfully mundane actress, but I'm assuming most of my fellow nerds are as ignorant of her credentials as I am and judging her ability to play Diana based on whether the length of her toes is Amazonian enough for them. No, the one name that stands between me and this choice is Zack Snyder.

It's important to reinforce why the decision to depict Wonder Woman in film is important. This year at Charlotte Heroes Convention I helped staff the Pross Comics booth, where along with selling the studio's books we sold prints based on Marvel and DC characters drawn by the Pross team. Heroes Con is a family friendly show, so we had a lot of kids coming by, wide-eyed at the brightly colored offerings of Iron Man, Thor, and the Ninja Turtles. We also had little girls, and it became obvious very quickly the pattern of the prints they were interested in. Black Widow, Zatanna, characters that had recently been featured in movies or cartoon TV shows. That little girls would be interested in Natasha Romanov, rather nondescript with her generic black jumpsuit and firearms in place of superpowers, shows their primary method of absorbing comic culture is films and TV rather than comics, and that with the major deficit of women to pick from, anyone that shows up on the big screen will do. The trip was deeply educational and more than a little disheartening.

Now picture that the man responsible for the first major addition to that canon of heroes for these young girls is Zack Snyder.

Zack Snyder is arguably worse in his portrayal of female characters than Micheal 'let's-say-bitch-in-a-kid's-film' Bay, though arguably out of flat ignorance rather than Bay's adolescent misogyny. '300' was the first film he had a hand in writing as well as directing, featuring the proud queen of the Spartans making a deal with a sleazy corrupt politician by allowing him to anally rape her, which he sadistically promised she would 'not enjoy'. Adding tasteful insult to injury, the politician reigns on his promise, meaning the anal rape trade didn't even contribute to the story, only an amateurish attempt to solidify the moustache twirling villainy of the character. Furthermore, it wasn't in the original comic, during the scripting process they had to go out of their way to make the queen's storyline happen, an unnecessary addition that undermined any virtues of the expanded female role by pointlessly debasing her. Forget that '300' was the Axe Body Spray commercial of comic book movies, the queen's arc was the foremost element that left me annoyed at its widespread acclaim amongst geeks.

Snyder had no hand in writing 'Watchmen', though it also notably featured a significant plot point involving rape or an attempted rape. However, he did write the spectacular failure 'Sucker Punch', which beyond being generally abysmal  also featured a hilariously inept attempt at writing a pro-women superhero movie while actually creating the opposite. If you're lucky enough to have not seen it, basically an innocent girl is committed to a criminal insane asylum for woman, where pervy wealthy men treat it as some kind of brothel/strip club, though it's never explicitly explained. To escape the asylum the lead character Baby Doll (yup) goes into a sort of hallucinogenic trance when she dances for the men, entering a fantasy world where she and her fellow prisoners wear 'Sexy Halloween' costumes and fight steam punk soldiers and robot samurai. Beyond the kinky fetishized action that was clearly designed with a male audience in mind, the insane asylum treats gender politics with the subtly of 'I Spit On Your Grave', where women are delicate flowers abused by leering sweaty sexual monsters and transformed to commit violence as an evolution from 'feminine helplessness'. Confusing, uneducated, and startlingly in it's contradiction,  'Sucker Punch' was so frustratingly incompetent in its approach to gender I had to eventually succumb to the wisdom of Bill Hick's wonderful review for Verhoven's 'Basic Instinct': “Don't get caught up in that fevered hype phoney fucking debate about that piece of shit movie. "Is it too sexist? And what about the movies, are they becoming too …" You're just confused, you've forgotten how to judge correctly. Take a deep breath … look at it again. "Oh, it's a piece of shit!"

I'd complain about the female characters in 'Man of Steel' as well, but that's part of a bigger problem with Hollywood's complete inability to handle women in superhero films. I personally loved 'Iron Man 3', and until it's overblown under-thought finale it actually ranked higher for me than 'The Avengers', but another significant disappointment for me was the treatment of Pepper Potts. More so than any of the previous two films we see Pepper as a potentially independent character. I actually was surprised when Pepper and Dr. Maya Hansen had a couple of conversations together, alone, motivating a part of the plot absent male characters. It was so alien feeling. Women! Advancing plot! In a superhero movie! Novel! It felt great, but of course it had to be ruined by plotlessly killing Maya and turning Pepper into a generic girlfriend hostage. Scratch that. The script actually refers to her as a trophy. In the last few minutes Pepper has her much-complained-about Extremis fight scene, where she is briefly turned into redheaded NinjaHulk, but in terms of empowerment it felt like a clichéd band-aid for a film that explicitly sold out its female characters, more condescending than genuine. Even Pepper immediately wants to get rid of her new superpowers, because heaven knows we wouldn't want to lose her damsel capability.

Ironically, one of the few people to get female characters right in superhero movies was a man denied the chance to make a Wonder Woman movie, Joss Whedon. In 'The Avengers' he gave Black Widow arguably more to do than Captain America, featuring asides about her phobia of the Hulk and the haunting 'red ledger' over her past. It wasn't a statement, Whedon just treated her as an equal member of the team and figured out how she fit into the narrative, utilizing her strengths and making her actions relevant to the plot. Shocking that this basic example of elementary screenwriting is one of the closest things I have as a shining example of writing for women in superhero film.

The landscape is starting to shift however. Disney ordered unnecessary additional scenes featuring Loki to be shot for 'Thor: The Dark World', presumably after realizing the significant enthusiastic female fanbase the character had. As I mentioned before, Captain Marvel is Marvel Studio's big idea for their first female lead film, one I sincerely hope they jump onboard. This year has been equally important to the visibility of female geeks, both as fans and creators, from attacking the Fake Geek Girl stereotype to challenges of industry leaders on the grounds of industry sexism. A new generation is being aggressively fought for on the convention and publisher floor, one that has a healthier, more inclusive relationship with the women that are both their fans and clientele.

And now the most iconic female superhero in our history is getting her first ever cinematic appearance at the hands of Zack Snyder.

Who knows, maybe he'll mess up and make a good movie by accident. Or maybe Christopher Nolan will exert his quiet British influence; I mean he was perceptive enough to realize that Anne Hathaway would make a pretty good Catwoman. But despite it being nearly 2014 we still have to cross our fingers and toes to get chances at big steps for female characters in mainstream geek fiction. Depictions of comic characters in film matter, not because it validates geek adults and our hours spent updating Wikipedia on the history of the West Coast Avengers, but because it serves as a touchstone for up and coming adolescent geeks who the books have gotten too complex and too plainly adult for them to relate to. I want a Wonder Woman I can feel proud to see those little girls gazing at reverently at cons, not a scantily clad mechanism of sexual strife for the newly minted Supercouple. The appropriateness of the new Wonder Woman has nothing to do with her waistline and everything to do with the person entrusted to create a potential model for movie super-heroines for the next ten years.

We aren't ready for Wonder Woman. Not like this. We apparently don't have the respect, a clear picture of our responsibility, or the pedigree of creators to tackle the simple task of bringing her to the big screen unmangled. This isn't an excuse to dismiss female characters to the TBD future, rather it should serve as incentive to us, the geeks who feel passionate and responsible for the quality of our culture to find some way to turn this into an ultimatum.

This needs to change. Now.

Comic Bastards Toolbox: Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

If you told me back in 2009 that the Marvel Cinematic Universe would eventually spawn a weekly television show about S.H.I.E.L.D.  produced by Joss 'R.I.P. Firefly' Whedon, I would have probably thrown myself out of a window from sheer excitement. It's the kind of thing geeks love to pitch to each other as dream hypotheticals, like Patton Oswalt's 'Parks and Recreation' Star Wars synopsis, just spitballing impossibilities after discussing the real world disappointments gets too boring. With the announcement of a Luke Cage and Iron Fist miniseries on Netflix, it seems that post-'The Avengers' Marvel has finally realized the financial value of just realizing the forum chatter wet-dreams of the convention crowd, but after what we've seen of 'Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.' the initial reaction will probably be tempered a few steps back from window-leaping this time.

While not a Jar-Jar magnitude misstep, 'Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.' is a significant disappointment both for the generally good Marvel Cinematic Universe and the artistic catalog of Joss Whedon. Its quality can be summed up quite easily with a question: if this show had nothing to do with Marvel, would anybody watch? I'd imagine most people hanging in there are like me, either hoping for content hints about 'Avengers: Age of Ultron' or have to stay in the 'Coulson: LMD or Ghost' pool at work, but outside of that the personality deficit is remarkable and features plots so UPN in freshness that 'Arrow' wouldn't touch them.

However, I don't think the show is broken, and thanks to movie tie- ins and the stubbornness of geeks to never stop watching anything it still has legs enough to hobble back to the realm of entertainment, and even fulfill the considerable potential of the premise. Humble suggestions below.

Moral Consequence and the Whedon Suspicion of Authority

When people think Whedon they probably think of overly-ornate quip pong, TV cancellation, and how Eliza Dushku and Sarah Michelle Gellar look in leather pants. However, as a creator Whedon has one of the clearest moral sensibilities of the writers working in pop-sci-fi today. His feminist ideals are an obvious example, but underpinnings of a basic mistrust of authority and the necessity of individuality runs throughout his works. One of the strongest examples of this was 'Firefly', a theme strengthened and given a central position in the follow-up 'Serenity'. From River Tam to the Reavers, many of the central conflicts of the show came from the government trying to 'improve' humanity, striving for peace through pacification but only creating horror. By contrast, we see the humanity that Whedon praises, free but flawed, with incredible capacity for both viciousness and compassion. However, 'Firefly' was Whedon's argument for the individual to be able to determine their own path, and challenged the structures that didn't trust us to make those calls for ourselves. Whedon's engaging, cancelled, and now largely unjustly forgotten 'Dollhouse' was able to run a tight line of ambiguity, presenting the inhuman business of human trafficking and exploring the folds and justifications of those involved.

Even 'Dr. Horrible' featured a protagonist who sought to be evil, but was really just an idealist frustrated by the stranglehold that powers-that-be have on change. Taking it home with 'The Avengers', the central story arc was initially our heroes uncovering that Nick Fury was maybe being less than truthful (shocker) in his intentions, revealing some pretty unpleasant secrets before he handily distracted them with some bloody playing cards. Even Whedon has admitted that the Hulk's movie-stealing 'puny god' scene had a bit of cheeky atheism peeking out, the ultimate form of authority questioning.

So imagine my disappointment when 'S.H.I.E.L.D.' Episode 5 gave us a scenario where Skye, ex-Wikileaks-esque hacker turned semi-Agent, defended her extrajudicial imprisonment to her indignant boyfriend on the grounds that 'S.H.I.E.L.D.' “doesn't have time” for habeas corpus.

This was shocking to me. Forget the rest of the largely awful episode, from the painful overacting from Ruth Negga to the power-corrupts plot featuring all of the subtly of a Doritos Loco Taco, this single sentence from Skye nearly made me rage quit the show entirely. In a year where public awareness of our government's abuses of surveillance has reached a new summit, a show dismissively depicting Edward Snowden archetypes as shallow self-absorbed hipsters who fail to see the bigger picture was infuriating; for it to come from a Whedon show was crushingly disheartening.

I'm not arguing that 'Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D' needs to be all-in for the Anonymous crowd, considering who it has as protagonists that wouldn't make a lot of sense dramatically, but 'Dollhouse' played the 'Battlestar Galactica' line of ethical ambiguity, making the audience question their own hard-earned point of view by giving conflicts real complexity and moral imperative. After the first episode I took to Facebook, praising my incorrect assertion of  'S.H.I.E.L.D's unique platform for talking about our age of surveillance and invasionary government practice, portraying Coulson as one of Whedon's dreaded authority figures only with an unshakable moral core that has to wrestle a world and a job full of grey. 'Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D' still has the ability to be that show, but first it has to present some real moral dilemmas for the cast, not just the thumbs-up/thumbs-down attitude of 'CSI: Miami' simplicity. 'The Avengers' almost did it. 'Captain America: The Winter Soldier' looks like it might do it. And 'Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D' has a chance every week to do it. Sure, they have to probably fight through the House of Mouse, but if Whedon can bring a fraction of his moral energy back then he'll also restore a sense of drama to the currently tepid program.

Read Warren Ellis' “Secret Avengers” and Find a Sense of Awe

In the last scene of the 'S.H.I.E.L.D' pilot, Skye and Coulson climbed into his signature 62' Chevrolet Corvette Lola, and with a shot reminiscent of the end of 'Back to the Future', flew it off into the sky. It was a goofy moment, but full of promise of adventure and a sense that they understood the 'anything-could-happen' nature of what the show could be with all of the Marvel Universe at their fingertips. Lola seemed to symbolize that explorative whimsy, which is fitting since from that moment on the car has remained firmly parked in the hanger.

The reason I bring it up is it reminded me of Warren Ellis' brief run on 'Secret Avengers' in 2010, back when The Heroic Age was the Marvel Now of 'what's actually changed?'. Specifically, I remember Issue #16, “Subland Empire”, where the team found an abandoned underground city beneath Cincinnati containing an old time machine intended for use as a weapon of mass destruction. Since the city was Cold War era super-science the team found a Russian built atomic convertible, very much in the same candy-apple red retro aesthetic as Coulson's Lola. It was such a neat little aside in the overall story, a bunch of superheroes tooling around a cavernous concrete ghost-town in a nuclear powered roadster, wonderfully weird and communicating the same mysterious sense of secret history that Ellis' 'Planetary' specialized in.

Let's examine some similarities between series for a moment. Both feature an episodic exploration of the Marvel Universe, with a top-secret crew getting mixed up in the strange world of super-science and arcane magic that exists just out of reach of the 24 hour news cycle. A lot of people complain about the episode-by-episode nature of 'Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D', wishing they'd go for the serialized long-form arcs that shows like 'Arrow' utilize. However, this isn't really the problem with 'S.H.I.E.L.D's approach; it's that nothing they investigate is interesting. 'S.H.I.E.L.D' shares a lot in common with 'Fringe', a show I quit watching during Season Two after the super-science started to feel like flabby rehashing of 'The X-Files' episodes. In terms of creativity however, 'S.H.I.E.L.D' makes 'Fringe' feel like Phillip Jose Farmer; Mystery of the Week comes with exciting sounding descriptions like an electrically transmitted virus or a World War II era energy device found in South America, but are revealed to just be a hook-phrases to justify tiresomely old-hat plots. Decades of Marvel history to pull from and the best episode to date has all the working parts of one of 'Alias's weaker episodes.

For all of the extraordinarily pretty and expensive looking set pieces, like last week's impromptu skydive, the shoddy creativity around the central super-science makes the show frequently feel oddly cheap.  This even extends to the acceptable Whedon-directed pilot, where the central mystery was built around an arm-piece that looked like a discarded Power Rangers prop and reminding you 'Iron Man 3' came out earlier that year. Think about the stage 'S.H.I.E.L.D' is set on! The world has suddenly become aware that they are not alone in the universe, in literally more ways than one. The world powers are struggling to cobble together their own responses to the eyebrow raising number of People of Mass Destruction that are Americans, utilizing technology that even S.H.I.E.L.D doesn't fully understand. World War II was fought with weapons powered by magic, brilliant minds left discarded technology in their wake as they secretly changed the world, gods and extraterrestrials have walked the same earth. 'Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D' has a free ticket to be as weird, wonderful, and imaginative as they'd like. The Avengers don't even have clearance to the stuff that our protagonists have, so why does it feel like they're investigating the dishwater of the Marvel U? Have the S.H.I.E.L.D crew take on some startup guys making some backroom Iron Man knockoff suits from Internet plans, or a Taiwanese Gamma lab trying to replicate the Hulk formula in test gorillas. Red Skull inspired neo-Nazis, extraterrestrial refugee families, hell, even just a drunk Asgardian that got lost.

In the end it comes down to a lack of any sense of awe, both for the characters and for us as an audience. Remember, our leads are supposed to be in the frontier, exploring the brand new world that has unfolded since New York. However I don't get that vibe from them, no sense of fear, elation, and curiosity. Every mystery warrants an initial 'hey, cool' before it's straight to easily solving the problem. Watching Fitz and Simmons work on a problem is like watching a video buffer; you know it's going to happen and then the story will just resolve. It needs to feel as new to them as it does to us; we need to see their anxieties, their fuck-ups that awe of true discovery. We need that long car ride through the abandoned supervillian city under Cincinnati, on the hunt for a half-century old-time machine. I can get my airplane hijackings in bad Liam Neeson movies, but there's only one Marvel U. Explore it.

Being a Spy is Scary

I mentioned 'Alias' before, and there are really not a lot of similarities between it and 'S.H.I.E.L.D', but it had what 'S.H.I.E.L.D' sorely lacks and that's any sense of danger. The world of 'Alias' was a scary place, where death, harrowing torture scenes, and disturbing revelations were the currency of drama. It was a spy vs. spy show, of mazes inside mazes, and where every mission had real urgent consequence. Meanwhile, on 'S.H.I.E.L.D' I can count on a single finger the number of times I've felt like any of the characters were in actual danger. A major contributor to this feeling is the professional laxness about S.H.I.E.L.D as an organization  in general, something that's actually  been expanding for  a while.

The central arc of Skye in the show is that she's in training to be an agent, because...I don't know...they hand that stuff out to anyone? Not only was she quite recently working to undermine S.H.I.E.L.D's daily operations, but what is it about her that makes her Agent material? She's goofy, has no ability to defend herself, and has so far been thrown real softballs as situations to prove herself. It feels like offering to train someone to play in Major League Baseball because you were stuck with them in the dugout. In the Marvel Short 'Item 47' two jokey bank robbers are offered consulting positions in S.H.I.E.L.D as a way of getting out of killing them. Even under the watchful eyepatch of Nick Fury it's apparently worth the risk to play Galaga on the bridge of the helicarrier. Some of that's okay (Galaga earned a laugh from everyone I think) but the across the board Summer Camp vibe of S.H.I.E.L.D and their operation really takes the badass level down to 'Get Smart' scale.

'S.H.I.E.L.D' is downright cutesy, making missions feel like rough and tumble field trips, making the end result less engaging and even frivolous. Cute isn't the death sentence, 'Firefly' has a big following in the cute department, but tempered it with a universe full of killers, rapists, and torturers that had to be survived with a smile. 'Buffy' was set in high school but knew just the right amount of horror and violence to put the heroes through to give it a dark edginess at the corners. 'S.H.I.E.L.D' feels like Disney knows kids could be watching and tamps things back to TV-PG, save for the occasional incineration by Chinese pyromancer. 'S.H.I.E.L.D' needs to feel free to get a little scary, make an episode feel like it's loaded with some genuine risk, or else we'll be stuck with Fitz asking opinions of which plaid shirt he should wear today. -- Do I expect 'S.H.I.E.L.D' to make changes? Not really. The show is so out of character for Whedon that I have to expect that there's quite a bit of studio meddling to blame for what we've received. That said, 'S.H.I.E.L.D' isn't entirely broken either. The most recent episode 'F.Z.Z.T.' actually did a good job pretending Simmons was at actual risk, and the scenes featuring Coulson one-on-oneing with a terminal firefighter and Melinda May were well acted and heartfelt.

What we have however is a show with infinite potential afraid to take any kind of risk, leaving the show feeling prepackaged and artificial. Admittedly, it's not that largely less brave than the rest of the Marvel Cinematic catalog, which plays it safe 90% of the time whether the fanbase wants to admit it or not, but it doesn't have the iconic superhero imagery, epic effects budgets, or Hollywood stars to make up for the thick padded kid gloves. 'S.H.I.E.L.D' is already a risk, so take risks with it. It's not like audiences can't take it; I'm still shocked by the wide appeal extremely violent programs like 'The Walking Dead' and 'Breaking Bad' found with the US Weekly crowd. And while splatter won't make 'S.H.I.E.L.D' better, it's got to have some sort of dramatic teeth to make us care what happens next, because people won't hang on much longer if finding out what makes Tahiti so magical is all they've got.

Speaking of Coulson being dead, maybe the fix is simpler than all that. You could just crash the plane, leaving Coulson the only one alive because he's a robot, forcing them to recast the rest of the team. Just saying...

My Top Rack – Kristy Cotton

There's something I just can't explain about my love for horror movie Last Girls. There's nothing blatantly obvious like there is with the James Bond archetype that I can pin the psychological attraction to, that makes even relatively obscure Last Girls stand out in my memory. There's something mythic about them to me, that transcending from victimhood to conqueror of the Unstoppable Unknown. While most people dismiss it as a cheap copy of the original, this personal romanticism is why 'Scream 2' is one of my favorite horror films. In its greatest scene it tapped a literal expression of this interpretation, when Sydney Prescott's drama teacher connects with the traumatized college student by comparing her to the Greek prophet Cassandra. Their stories are also great equalizers, because the heroine either can't or doesn't rely on her male Knight in Shining Armor, because as it turns out, regardless of gender, people are equally susceptible to machetes. From Ellen Ripley to Bridgette Fitzgereld, the maiden descends into a hell only to emerge with the devil's head. However, in the case of Kirsty Cotton, the descent into hell is somewhat more literal. The mistake the uninitiated make when approaching the 'Hellraiser' franchise is assuming it's traditional horror and that Pinhead is somehow an iconic slasher in the vein of Freddy Kruger and the Djinn from 'Wishmaster'. Rather, 'Hellraiser' is a modern fairy-tale and like the best fairy-tales is about the nightmares that occur when the world of the mundane and of the magical rub up against each other. There is no Judeo-Christian Hell in the series, and Pinhead is not a killer; he is an artist who sees our reluctance to suffer unspeakable torture to simply be a lack of imagination.

And Kirsty Cotton, the series' original protagonist portrayed by the lovely Ashley Lawrence, is indeed a fairy-tale heroine. When we first meet her, she is a loving daughter to her father, only barely tolerating the presence of an Evil Stepmother, a classically bitter and unfaithful woman. When her father's disreputable brother's experiment with magic of the purest evil bring attention to the inter-dimensional Cenobites, it's up to Kirsty to try to protect her family. There's no killing a Cenobite, so Kirsty does what any good fairy-tale heroine would do and tries to make a deal with them, making desperate lies and promises to keep herself out of the clutches of unfathomable torment. Even when she uses the Lament Configuration to banish the Cenobites back to their realm we're left with the promise that they still lurk in their own space, a horror of infinite patience waiting just outside the cusp of our own reality.

While Kirsty was a memorable character in the first film, she really came to her own in the sequel when she would venture into the Cenobite's world, The Labyrinth, lured by her evil uncle. Again Kirsty is shown to be a shrewd quick thinking heroine, using the rules of the magical world to survive, culminating in the most memorable and amazingly revolting scene of the film where Kirsty uses her dead stepmother's flayed skin as a disguise to rescue her mute friend Tiffany. Let Tim Burton and Rupert Sanders dress their fairy-tale heroines in artificially PC suits of armor, Barker dressed his in the flesh of their enemies.

Unfortunately “Hellbound: Hellraiser II” was the end of Clive Barker's involvement in the film franchise, as well as Kirsty's. While a canonical continuation of “Hellbound”, “Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth” only featured actress Ashley Lawrence in a tiny cameo. Cotton would later return in 2002's direct-to-video 'Hellraiser: Hellseeker', the sixth entry in the franchise, in which she is revealed in a twist ending to be a jealous unrepentant murderer. It served as an end to my continuing interest in the series.

Of course it all comes back to comics as Clive Barker would return to writing the world for Boom! Comics and bringing its long-suffering heroine back with it, creating an arc that would have Kirsty take Pinhead's place, transforming into a cenobite and assuming the mantle of the Pope of Hell.

While Ellen Ripley and Sidney Prescott will always be my favorite female horror survivors, Kirsty Cotton easily stands in their ranks. If we want to talk mythic, she challenged and cheated the Gods of Pain. She fails to qualify as a victim, surpassed being a simple survivor, and became a mortal force to be reckoned with; a fairy-tale heroine in a world with modern teeth.

(You can read the continuing exploits of Kirsty Cotton and the Cenobite's in Boom! Comics' “Clive Barker's Hellraiser: The Dark Watch”, released this past Wednesday.)

Review: Bravest Warriors – S2:E1 – Aeon Worm

Cartoon Hangover, a YouTube channel operated by Frederator Studios, has been producing some of the best free webcontent available, empowering artists to release professional grade animated shows that don't have the generic appeal to survive the bleak commercial wasteland of television. Instead, web audiences have been blessed with a wide variety of free vibrant animated programming, from 'Rocket Dog' to their recent cult hit 'Bee and Puppycat'. However, their longest running achievement is 'Bravest Warriors', imagined by 'Adventure Time' creator Pendalton Ward, a show whose popularity has leapt from YouTube to the convention floor. On October 17th, 'Bravest Warriors' made their triumphant return for Season Two, immediately picking up after the surprisingly foreboding finale in the new episode “Aeon Worm”. Beth Tezuka is mysteriously drawn to enter the grotesque worm door that leads to the See-Through Zone, accompanied by her pet, Paralyzed Horse. While warned of the danger, Beth presses onward, determined to find her father, lost in the alternate dimension.

Despite its tendency for non-sequitur, 'Bravest Warriors' has shown interest in telling actual ongoing stories in their mostly randomly generated universe, last season most apparent in Chris's interactions with his future self. While seeming to set up an enormous amount in the strange and mysterious ending to Season One, 'Aeon Worm' actually wraps up nearly all of the dangling questions in a tidy 6 ½ minutes. Most of the time this kind of storytelling is attempted it can end up feeling rushed or unsatisfying, but amazingly 'Aeon Worm' actually delivers and doing so with the most epic storytelling they've attempted so far. The obvious benefit for the creative staff is it frees them up to return to their self-contained storytelling that Season One largely consisted of, but with added twist involvement of a new character that could end up having a long-term impact on the arc.

Since the episodes are less than ten minutes long it's hard to review without getting spoilery, but suffice to say the animation and design on this episode was particularly stellar. The voice acting was also of its usual wonderful quality, with the added benefit of Victor Caroli's guest performance as Paralyzed Horse. A nod should also be given to the great composing on the episode, in places as being vaguely reminiscent of the score for Liquid Television's 'Aeon Flux'.

“Bravest Warriors” Season Two more than meets expectations with the premiere, one of their best episodes ever, and sets things up nicely for adventures to come. With fans embracing Cartoon Hangover productions and the added buzz from the 'Bee and Puppycat' Kickstarter, it's been a good year for Frederator Studios and hopefully a sign of the audience base expanding as 2014 draws near.

Score: 4/5

Creator: Pendalton Ward Writers: Breehn Burns, Jason Johnson Director: Breehn Burns Available on Cartoon Hangover’s YouTube channel

Video Game High School – Season 2: Episode 6

The season closes with a bang as VGHS bows for the year, promising after the credits that a third season is indeed on the way after a well-earned siesta. From the opening moments everything you wanted to see this year happens; Brian and Jenny kick FPS ass, Ted gets to drift, and Ki gets a full-fledged martial arts throw down. Despite the action, the real drama this Season has been in the real world, and the finale is no different with emotionally heated theatrics that will have ongoing consequences well into next year. It's all on the line for VGHS FPS as the game that could end the team's season looms on the horizon, but Jenny faces an unforeseen complication when Brian blurts out the 'L' word (Zip it 'Scott Pilgrim' fans) and she doesn't know how to respond. Not only that but the recently exonerated Law is back on the team, unpredictable and out of practice. Meanwhile, Ted finds his friendship hasn't fully healed from Brian's painful blow-out in the previous episode and channels his frustration into the illicit gambling races put on by his drift team. Ki is feeling despondent as well as her passion for her RA position begins to weaken to boredom. When a chance encounter with an eccentric champion of fighter games interrupts her day she finds herself forced to face the demon of her own spiritual lethargy.

Again, the stakes really come from the relationships this year as Brian and Jenny's comes to a critical head, and again Johanna Braddy and Josh Blaylock do a wonderful job making their onscreen romance (married in real life) genuine and believable. Special credit goes to Braddy who again gets to delve emotionally into her character during a confrontation with her onscreen mom, securing Jenny as the most fully developed character on the show. The FPS action is tightly shot and features some of the best of Rocket Jump's signature imaginative gunplay choreography this year, punchy and creative.

Ki's action sequence is similarly fun, one of the rare non-FPS action set pieces in the show, and concludes with the start of a conflict of great promise for Season Three involving Shane Pizza's machinations. Ellary Porterfield has been one of the season's greatest standouts and her end of season set up only suggests her participation will be even more fun when the show returns.

Of course Ted's strained relationship with Brian is an important emotional focus of the episode, giving him material more serious than has been written for the character in the past. Ted, despite the wonderful efforts of Jimmy Wong and the Drift actors, has been a bit of the weak link in the writing this season as his solo stories seemed stuck in place with even his drift action in the finale feeling very similar to the challenges he's faced all year. Still, even with all of the high-octane gunfire, revelations, and betrayals the dramatic crisis of Ted and Brian's friendship is what left the fan's talking and more than anything else this episode set up the most interesting shift in dynamic for Season Three, maybe exactly what Ted needs to really evolve.

As anticipated the finale showed The Law's dramatic return to 'Field of Fire', sharing a team with his rival and ex-girlfriend. Alas, to keep the episode intimate between Brian and Jenny, his participation was funny but startlingly brief, but a bizarre scene featuring The Law regaining his powers with some 'Fruit Ninja'esque carnage was worth the season long wait. The surprise conclusion of his arc also comes off as a slight disappointment considering my hopes for his character, but with the writing staff's ability to surprise me with The Law's antics even his new direction should be a blast.

Looking over this season it's remarkable how much Rocket Jump Studios improved in all departments, taking one of the finest examples of free web media and making it more dramatically mature, technically proficient, and excellently performed. However, beyond their proficiency for making great entertainment I think 'VGHS' represents something even more.

Some media is created from a place of passion for a subject, and if the media is well made it can communicate to its audience in a way that makes them understand that passion on an emotional level even if they were uneducated or apathetic to the subject beforehand. The way 'Exit Through the Gift Shop' made me feel about street art, and 'Ratatouille' made me feel about fine food, 'Video Game High School' makes me feel the passion for video-games.

Now one might argue it isn't hard to drive someone to play video-games, but in my case I was a very casual gamer. Besides the occasional 'Smash Bros.' and 'Halo' with friends I'd play about one video-game a year, and usually only in a franchise I had a previous love for like 'Final Fantasy' and 'Mass Effect'. When I finished the first season of 'VGHS' I became inspired to develop more of a relationship with the gamer arm of geek culture, listening to Let's Players while I did my comic work and finally installing Steam on my computer and getting involved in 'Team Fortress 2' online. A lot of my affection for 'VGHS' stems from this, that Freddie Wong and crew could create something that instilled a greater appreciation for geekdom, something very valuable in a time when quite a bit of comics and film seem designed to blacken and crush my love for the mediums. That goes beyond making great media and is something I'm genuinely grateful for.

Continue?

Hell yes.

Score: 4/5

Directors: Matthew Arnold & Freddie Wong

Writers: Matthew Arnold, Will Campos & Brian Firenzi

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Video Game High School - Season 2: Episode 5

Happy Holidays (quite literally plural) from VGHS!  This week the campus celebrated L33tmas, a student created holiday to combat Dean Calhoun's grinchyness that combines every imaginable annual celebration into one giant Frankenholiday. Of course the holidays take a toll on stress levels, and the already frazzled Brian D. finds himself pushed to the emotional brink. Meanwhile, everyone's favorite Power Rangers-esque cybernetic television personality Shot Bot finds himself facing decommissioning by the network due to low ratings and is forced to go full-on Johnny Five; on a mission to sniff out a scoop that will save his career. And scoops there are to be had at VGHS, where The Law fights alone to recover his reputation and dignity from the douchey machinations of Shane Pizza. With only one episode left this year the season arc reveals itself to have been The Law's and his gradual sub-plot path to redemption. Episode Five marks the most Law dense episode yet, setting up a Law heavy finale that finally puts him back in FPS competition. A lot of the fun this from the episode is derived from this half, from the wonderfully inspired strangeness of the Shot Bot centric cold open to The Law's new obsession with his graphically displayed milky white thigh muscles. In addition to the fun this section also does a good job setting up the finale dramatically, giving him stakes in the events of the next episode that the main cast currently lack. In retrospect the writers did a fine job compiling The Law's goofy sub-plot antics into the narrative spine of the Season and making the end of his journey back into the game that much more fun to anticipate.

Brian's story, that comprises the other half of the episode, finds his level of stress endurance finally broken, leading to a blowout that puts his friendships in jeopardy. As demonstrated frequently this season, the cast and crew have a real ability at contrasting their goofy comedy with surprisingly effective drama. While not too largely different Brian's trials from Episode Two, his climactic blowout actually carries some sting, and it's subtly implied that all isn't entirely forgiven with one of his friends heading into the finale.

As usual, a lot of the fun of 'VGHS' is derived from the level of detail applied to the world and L33tmas gave the set and costume designers a playground to run around in. If one didn't already feel inspired to give the episodes multiple viewings, this one certainly makes it a necessity to catch all of the inspired work put into the hybrid holiday background gags.

It's bittersweet moving into the final episode of the year, premiering this Friday, but it was recently revealed that in the timeline of the show Season One was Brian's first week at school, and Season Two is only the first half of his first year. This means that there is definitely a planned Season Three on the way, but also that the fine creators at Rocket Jump have many more stories they want to tell in the VGHS world. That as fun and creative as this season has been, it's only a drop in a big 8-Bit pool of ideas waiting to happen. That my friends, is the best L33tmas gift we could wish for.

Score: 4/5

Directors: Matthew Arnold & Freddie Wong

Writers: Matthew Arnold, Will Campos & Brian Firenzi

Watch it here!

Video Game High School - Season 2: Episide 4

After a first half exploring new territory, we begin the first episode of the second half of 'VGHS' Season Two with a welcome return to old favorites. FPS action is back, with the most run-and-gun action content since the pilot. We also see the return of two furry friends from Season One, Brian's cat Cheeto and The Law's fake mustache. Let's get to it shall we? Brian D. and Jenny Matrix have begun their covert relationship in earnest, scheduling closet dates between training. However, while Jenny seems comfortable, the pressure of their mutual risk is affecting Brian's ability in-game. Meanwhile, tired of being the perpetual n00b amongst his peers Ted Wong risks his life, sanity, and wetting himself by taking on the ultimate drift trial: being locked inside a banned Japanese arcade drift game until he can beat it. Ki finds herself challenged by her own strict RA rule system when Brian's cat Cheeto comes to crash in the dorm, a violation of her own code that unleashes a roiling anarchy amongst her fellow dormmates and the trollish wrath of Shane Pizza.

After two episodes of training it was nice to get back to actual FPS action, and the episode contains some great choreography that again transforms geeky anxious Brian into a frag snagging badass. While these scenes have yet to recapture the stakes and excitement of Season One's battles with The Law, the Rocket Jump crew display their strong command of low-budget action filmmaking, milking their paltry million to deliver more bullet spitting thrills then the recent 'Die Hard's could muster with ninety-two. Brian's stress-related in-game impotence storyline felt a little more predictable than usual, but the wonderfully unpredictable conclusion to his problem was signature moment of 'VGHS' brilliance.

Per usual this season, Ki's plotline shines brightest as she is faced again with a challenge of her authority vs. her friends. While not a very complex adventure, Ellary Porterfield gives all of Ki's rollercoaster of emotions the herky-jerky craziness it needed to be fun. While I've been really wanting Ted to breakout and really have a sense of destiny, his story fell a little short again, not quite the showcase of stunt driving it seemed set to be. That said, the bully car plot was a surprising and funny touch, and an appropriate answer to Ted's childlike spirit.

Meanwhile, shades of the finale start to appear, as The Law's aimbot cheating is revealed to actually be a frame orchestrated by RTS douche Shane Pizza. Originally the revelation in the premiere of The Law as a cheat struck me as mildly disappointing, since I preferred the idea of him as being an unhinged FPS god instead of a total fraud; instead this uncovered conspiracy both sets up Shane's position as a nemesis for the finale as well as the inevitable Second Coming of The Law. Let's just hope it means plenty more fake mustaches.

While not my favorite episode this season, Episode Four has plenty of what I love about 'VGHS'. , Cats riding RC cars, John Woo-esque arial gunplay, Drift King's giant quill pen. Even when things feel a little too familiar the creativity on display in inspiring and still surprises in the best ways. Just count me as excited to see how this all turns out in the end.

Score: 3/5

Directors: Matthew Arnold & Freddie Wong

Writers: Matthew Arnold, Will Campos & Brian Firenzi

Watch It Here!

Video Game High School - Season 2: Episode 3

It's Parents Day at VGHS, and as expected nobody is having an easy time of it. Jenny finds herself unwillingly drafted to give an introductory speech for her cold emotionally unsupportive mother's 'Parent of the Year' award, Ki finds herself having to make a case for her continued enrollment to her bureaucratic father, and Ted...well, Ted's situation made me laugh harder than any other moment in the show's run. Meanwhile, The Law finds himself immersed in Ki's new video game based on Brian D's  trials from season one, which leads to catharsis, perhaps for the wrong reasons. Episode Three marks the halfway point for Season Two and delivers up the best developed character study of the show's run. It's a common tool in the screenwriter playbook to use parents as a way of easily delivering exposition and 'ah-ha' moments about a lead character, but the use of the trope here is more sensitive than you'd think. Ki's dad is the cliché you'd expect; bow-tie, academic, Von Trapp structure, but he shares a genuine paternal chemistry with Ki's Porterfield and is given space to be more than a cartoon. Also, since we've already met Ted and Brian's parents they get to play support staff to the main story, preventing the episode from becoming too top-heavy with character screen time.

In a first for the show, the main plot is given to Jenny, who finds herself emotionally tested by the seemingly simple task of writing about her mother. Johanna Braddy gets to play with some of the more emotionally heavy material 'VGHS' has attempted and sells it wonderfully, the show finding a natural point to push Jenny and Brian's relationship to a head. It was a risky but necessary choice to play Jenny and Mary's harsh bond straight, one which I almost thought the team was going to bungle with an unearned happy ending, but at the last-minute a wise knife-twist is delivered proving a trust in the characters by the writers that's authentic and refreshing. I can say for the first time this season that I'm actually interested in Mary Matrix's role, if only for how Jenny's relationship with her will pan out in the end.

Meanwhile, Gollum-like laundry pile dweller The Law hijacks a copy of Ki's pixelated playable adaptation of Season One and finds himself in the virtual shoes of the kid he harassed an entire semester; The Law is getting bullied by himself. It's a clever way to deliver a turning point for our demoralized nemesis, but his revelation isn't quite what one might expect leaving us again with the great motivating question of 'what is The Law going to do next?'.

For the third episode in a row 'VGHS' keeps shedding the webby feel of Season One for more narrative quality and character depth. While so far lacking the overarching structure that the previous season benefited from, it's a real joy to watch the show trust it's characters enough to let them take the weight of the second season, rather than tacking them to an anted up repetition of the former. Having crossed the threshold into the final stretch we'll no doubt start to see the beginnings of the big challenges facing Brian D. and crew in the finale, but for now it's satisfying to see Rocket Jump's ambition for more than just bigger action pay off.

Watch The Episode Here!

Play Ki's Video Game Here!

Video Game High School - Season 2: Episode Two

Out of both seasons, Episode Two of 'VGHS' Season Two may be the most complete single episode Rocket Jump Studios has ever produced. It's actually quite remarkable how much is fit into the zippy 30 minutes, establishing direction, expanding the world, and delivering their signature special-effects laden action. Oh, and of course there is the Return of the Law. As expected, life gets tougher for Brian D., now training in the high stakes world of competitive FPS, which doesn't just mean keyboard time but also a strict diet and exercise regimen. If that wasn't bad enough, The Law's public disgrace has revoked the program that gave Brian his scholarship, leaving him no other option than to perform work-study as a janitor. What once was no time for love has now also become no time for food or sleep either. Ted still finds himself struggling in drift class but is given a chance to prove himself by raiding soda for the team fridge in a 'Metal Gear Solid' themed ninja mission. However, his plan is thwarted by The Duchess, leader of a ruffian gang of Kart racers that are the arch-rivals of the Drifters, leading to a virtual confrontation. Free from Rhythm Gaming, Ki finds herself adrift, unable to break into her desired RTS class, and is by chance tapped to replace Ted as the RA for her floor. With her proper sensibilities and obsessive-compulsive personality it seems like a good fit until she finds herself the target of The Law's wrath.

The great potential of 'VGHS' was the opportunity to define a world built around the various flavors of video game genre, exploring and parodying game culture in specific and creative fashion. Staying close to their central theme, Season One rarely strayed far from the world of FPS, with only occasional nods to other genres. With Season Two's expanded scale and budget, the goal is clearly to stretch the world's legs out, and Episode Two gives us both a peek into VGHS's RTS class and a climactic live-action battle in an asphalt Mario Kart game. While it's not clear if The Duchess and her Kart racers will play a larger role later in the season, Ki's antagonist Shane Pizza (“The name's not dumb.”) and his snobby prep school RTS class are a welcome new shade of the student body and one that I look forward to spending more time with.

Meanwhile, The Law has returned, and despite his seemingly confident persona in front of the Courts, the Big Bad has self-imploded. It turns out his supernatural powers of intimidation and evil from Season One go both ways as he devolves into a malicious childish mess of burrito juice and failure. Brian Firenze is a human special-effect but is incredibly matched by Ellary Porterfield's Ki, who is quickly becoming the breakout star of Season Two. While clearly The Law's renaissance is coming, for now it's enough to bask in the glory of his new lows.

Rocket Jump Studios is known for their live-action visualization of game tropes from their long running YouTube channel and the experience is put to good use during the Kart Racing, including some nice sound design and cleverly mashed theme music. There's a certain kinetic quality to the comedy that actually feels reminiscent of 'Spaced', filling the runtime with strange and memorable color like The Law's internal perception of a world against him and Brian's food deprived in-game hallucination. While Brian and Ted's stories are predictably familiar, this energetic creativity gives even the most transparent tropes style and surprise.

'VGHS' steps it up for the second episode, delivering big developed entertainment. With the pacing and streamlined storytelling everything feels more assured, perhaps a sign that Rocket Jump is starting to get more confident as storytellers. And maybe maturity is a strange word to apply to something containing this many fart noises, but it does mean that an already great product is getting even better. Game on folks.

Score: 4/5

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Video Game High School Season 2: Episode One “The Date”

'Video Game High School' Season One was one of my favorite media moments of 2012, a confident and specialized web series that proved that independent internet creators were finally ready to create professional-grade content that could compete with mainstream television while still retaining its nerdy 4-Chan bred roots. After a successful large-scale Kickstarter drive, everything about Season Two is designed to expand, from its million-dollar plus budget to its extra hour of run-time. With the remaining installments to be released over the next few weeks, the first half-hour went live this Friday. Did Rocket Jump Studios' ambition pay off? The premiere starts surprisingly abruptly, with no expository recap for those who didn't do the assigned homework of watching Season One. Brian D. and gang's life hasn't skipped a beat since the dramatic defeat of The Law, back to the debatably mundane day-to-day of school routine at VGHS. Things seem to be looking up for Brian, who has both The Law out of his life and Jenny Matrix becoming a bigger part of it. Ted Wong is where he belongs in Drift class but finds his scatter-brained personality interfering with his studies. Ki Swan's problems seem to be the most abnormal, being targeted by her professor, who punishes her compulsive academic nature by not assigning her homework. Life for Brian is complicated by the appearance of Jenny's mom as the new FPS coach, putting new stresses on his burgeoning relationship.

Immediately the polished edges and scale of the budget is made apparent, with extensive CGI, more varied locations, and a new traditional title sequence, complete with video montage and theme song. The extended runtime also grants a more balanced approach to the characters, with Ted and Ki getting bumped up from their subplots in Season One to a more featured role.

In Ki's case this is definitely appreciated, as her character felt severely underwritten in Season One, with her arc largely being just a feature of Ted's. I'm excited to see Ellary Porterfield get more time to expand Ki, but her torment at the hands of Professor Freddie Wong seems to be quickly and tidily resolved in the first episode leaving the nature of her season arc a mystery. This similarly goes for Ted, as his story in the pilot seems largely self-contained; relying heavily on the great comedic chemistry he shares with Rocky Collins. Ellary is particularly fun to watch play tightly compressed manic, but both Ki and Ted will apparently have to wait till the next episode to begin their season long arcs.

Brian by comparison gets a bit more of an introductory chapter, focusing on his awkward wooing of the largely comfortably wooed Jenny. Josh Blaycock and Johanna Braddy both sell the relationship well, and the script does a good job of balancing stress and affection in a way that doesn't feel like the plot-centric obstacles are forced or artificial. Suffice to say this pair of Power Star-crossed lovers won't find love any easier than in Season One, but rather than the eye-rolling chore that thwarting the obvious couple tends to be, the cast and crew seem to apply the intelligence required to make the bumpy romance engaging.

At the center of it all, VGHS's reputation is on the line as The Law is found guilty of the virtual equivalent of doping, invalidating his considerable gaming record and by extension the school's. Enter Mary Matrix, Jenny's tough-as-nails mom and new VGHS FPS coach. Obviously set to be a major focus for the rest of the school year, it's difficult to get a bead on Cynthia Watros's Mary, besides the obvious tension she brings to Jenny's life. Instead of coming off as intimidating or edgy, Watros often just looks strangely, almost painfully, exhausted. It's hard to gauge her role going forward as we can't tell yet if she is an antagonist or a curmudgeony ally.  All I know is I hope Zachary Levi isn't so busy that he can't pop in for a quick hello at some point. FPS ain't the same without Ace.

The action has expanded potential with the new budget, shown off dramatically in the sniper-centric match at the end of the episode. Gone is the single faux-Iraq location from Season One; enter Forest Zone complete with CGI tank. Being considerably more ambitious, the effects show their edges a bit more than Season One, but the new range of possibilities is a welcome extension, especially necessary early on when a Big Bad has yet to be identified.

The episode ends on a nice tease of next episode goodies, but it's hard to say what we actually know going forward. For a premiere “The Date” is all but self-contained save for Brian and Jenny's arc, but still sets the tone and flexes its muscles appropriately to show off the new grander scope. While perhaps a bit clumsy in setting up the new season's narrative, it's undoubtedly good to be back at VGHS. Grab a can of pizza and enjoy.

Watch Here!

Score: 3/4