Legion of Super Heroes: Dark Victory, Pt. 2

And here it is, the last of my Legion of Super-heroes episode reviews.

When we last left Brainiac Five, he was evil and had set a course for Colu. But he's clearly not all bad. En Route to Colu, he swings by Thanagar, where the ridiculous bird people give him a hard time. They're unintentionally ridiculous. Or perhaps intentionally ridiculous. I can't even tell.

"You are violating Thanagarian airspace. State your intentions or face our terrible wrath!"

The Thanagarian leader milks the giant cow and informs Brainy that he has grossly underestimated Thanagarian might, but Brainy fucks them up like the jobbers they are and digitizes the lot of them.

The Legion warns the Coluans about Brainy, but the Coluans brush them off and end the transmission. Lightning Lad sets a course Colu, but he says "But we won't beat him there. Not unless this cruiser can travel faster than...Superman." And then he stops when he realizes what he said.

Cosmic Boy breaks the silence by saying, "We should say our goodbyes now. With what's coming, we might not have another chance."

This is nicely done scene. The Legion grieves in silence, and those who can offer comfort do so. The coffin holding Superman rolls out.

I particularly like it when Blok puts his arm around Shrinking Violet and when we see Duo Damsel comforting herself. Then it is blasted from the Cruiser into a nearby star.

Brainy is intercepted by the Coluans, who seemingly overcome him, imprison him and begin the process of reprogramming him. Spoilers! It doesn't work.

Meanwhile, Superman X is in his quarters. Timber Wolf enters, and informs him that he missed the service. Kell just says, "I can't believe he's gone."

Timber Wolf: Hey, we'll get through this together. We're all taking the loss of Superman hard.
Superman X: Superman? I'm talking about Imperiex!

I thought that was a cool  exchange, and I actually didn't see it coming the first time. X says that his life's purpose has been taken from him and he feels so useless. Instead of confirming that he is useless, Timber Wolf gives him a tough love pep talk and tells him that Brainy's still on the loose and they'd better stop him. X says it's useless, that he's seen the future and Brainy wins. He then smacks Brin around a bit (yay!) and stomps off. Before he can leave the room, however, he feels Superman's awareness and realizes that he's still alive.

Meanwhile, Brainy is in his Hannibal Lecter restraints.

"Hello, Clarice."

The Head Coluan Lady says that he's resisting programming and that if he doesn't open himself up, they'll just delete him. Now, I personally, am not a twelfth level intelligence, but that seems like the smart way to go about it. Don't dick around with him, just overwrite him with zeroes and ones. Maybe there was something about him that they wished to preserve, so that was a last resort, but it seems like this dialogue was written by a person who didn't really know anything about computers.

Anyways, rather than reprogramming him, he reprograms them! Oh! Shocker!

Meanwhile, X dives into the sun and pulls Superman out. Then the Legion gives Superman a blood transfusion, so that he'll inherit X's immunity to Kryptonite, which is really a useful enough precaution that they should have done it proactively.

Brainy and his army of Coluans show up and try to digitize the ship, only to fail. Cosmic Boy tells him that Computo showed them how to prevent digitization.

There's a big fight. Brainy merges the assembled Coluans into the body for a super-sized robot and makes skullship into the head.

"And I'll form...the head!"

If that's not enough, he figures out how to bypass the anti-digitization devices they're wearing and starts picking them off one by one.

Superman asks Saturn Girl to project him into Brainy's mind. X tags along too and once there, they see that the original Brainiac is in charge and that Brainiac 5 has gone to pieces.

No disassemble! Number Five is alive!

Inside Brainy's mind, Brainiac is kicking the Legion's ass. Outside, he's also kicking their ass.

No, not Tyroc!

Superman and Superman X are overcome by Brainiac, so Saturn Girl combines them into one body. Here's a picture, because he looks kind of neat.

Sun boy tears up Brainy, but then Brainiac takes control of Lightning Lad's robot arm, saying, "I created that cannon." No you didn't. You installed it. When Lightning Lad wakes up in the Shrinking Violet even rattles off some ad copy for it. ("It's the cybernetic 4000. With models coming in both left and right, it fires explosive charges, lasers, and of course, lightning. All powered and amplified by your own bio-electric energy..") I put a new video card in my computer last week, but I'm not telling people that I fucking created it, jackass.

Inside Brainy's mind, the Superman and Brainiac 1 yell cliches at each other until Brainiac kicks his ass for the final time. But Brainiac 5 has reassembled himself and strikes down his ancestor. This hits the reset button over in the real world, and, inexplicably, turns Brainy into a biological organism. Even by the standards of this episode, that just makes no sense, and came completely out of nowhere.

Brainiac 5: His love is real. But he is not.

We end with a pep talk and Brainy leaving the Legion. Superman X opens a gateway back to the future, and the white Triplicate Girl returns from his time portal.

Superman X is sworn in as a for real Legionnaire, and the last scene is Brainiac reforming himself out of the wreckage, proclaiming to no one in particular, "Evil does not die. It evolves."

And thus ends the series. The first season was great, the second had its moments, but was ultimately disappointing, but I do like that they were moving towards a more serial method of storytelling and would have liked to see things explored further in a third season. The first season two parter worked as individual episodes, but this not as much. The Legion Abstract said it best "It's also an odd way to end a series. I'm sure that when the writers mapped out the season they didn't know it would be the last, so what can you do, but I'd like the Legion's final villain to be someone other than my favourite superhero." My thoughts exactly.

"I love you." "I know."

Freelancing has improved my work ethic. I try to get in eight solid hours work a day now that I'm working out of a home office. That means waking up, checking yesterday's work, taking a break for breakfast and the morning routine, getting Lily on the bus, working solid for another five hours, then picking her up and squeezing in what I can in the couple hours before Jen gets home.

Last week, Lily was doing some coloring and I thought that would give me a chance to get a little work done. But, five minutes in, she approached me with her picture in hand and asked if I wanted to help. I told her that she was doing a nice job and she should keep at it, but she protested, telling me that this was a picture for mommy and it would mean more if it came from both of us. How could I say no to that?

So we were coloring it, each of us working on another piece of the picture, and Lily was so serious, with her tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth, concentrating like this was the most important thing in the world. And she reminds me so much of Jen in times like this, and when I said, "I love you," she replied, "I love you too, daddy," without putting the crayon down.

It's the way that she said it that gets me. It was absently, but with the absolute understanding that I love her and that's how things are and how things should be. I love her, she loves me back.

Roger Zelazny Casting Call: Jasra

I spend a lot of time complaining about the Merlin books, but even I have to admit it did give us a number of memorable characters. Take the first time we meet Jasra in Trumps of Doom. She's trumping into Victor Melman's apartment because Merlin, pretending to be Melman had answered the phone and pretended to be wounded. After he hangs up, Merlin observes, "I cradled the phone and smiled. I thought it very well played. I'd a feeling I'd taken her in completely."

An instant later she was there-tall, russet-haired, darkeyed, holding what looked like a .38 automatic.

The ashtray hit her in the stomach and she doubled forward with a gasp.

I was there before she could straighten.

I jerked the gun out of her hand and threw it across the room. Then I seized both her wrists, spun her around and seated her hard in the nearest chair. In her left hand she still held a Trump. I snatched ~ it away. It was a representation of this apartment, and it was done in the same style as the Tree and the cards in my pocket.

"Who are you?" I snarled.

"Jasra," she spat back, "dead man!"

She opened her mouth wide and her head fell forward. I felt the moist touch of her lips upon the back of my left forearm, which still held her own right wrist against the chair's arm. Seconds later I felt an excruciating pain there. It was not a bite, but rather felt as if a fiery nail had been driven into my flesh.

Perhaps our first indication that Merlin is not as smart as he thinks he is. I like Jasra. What's not to like? She spent of bunch of time trying to murder Merlin. I can't imagine a more worthwhile pursuit. In fact, my biggest complaint about her hobby is that she wasn't very good at it.

She's fun to read about, and she has real depth. There's a core to Jasra, and it's a testament to Zelazny's skill that she's capable of getting across that same core personality, but emphasizing different aspects to it as she enters into new situations.

We get this description of her in Knight of Shadows:

She had on a low over-one-shoulder (the left) white dress, fastened at the shoulder with a diamond pin, and she wore a tiara, also of diamonds, which seemed almost to be radiating in the infrared range amidst her bright hair.  She was smiling, and she smelled good, too. Involuntarily I felt myself standing straighter, and I glanced at my fingernails to be certain they were clean.

That's the same woman that was in Victor Melman's apartment, but she's presenting herself differently. It doesn't come across as a mask as much as it does a complicated character deciding on which facet of her personality is most appropriate for her environment.

She's the schemer, the assassin, the master, the apprentice, Brand's wife, and Dara's maid. All that, and Luke's hot mom too.

I think the person I see in the role is Francesca Annis.

Annis herself was schooled in a convent and trained as a ballet dancer and she's probably best known for playing Jessica in the 1984 movie adaptation of Dune, where she was the hot mom to a superhuman youth. She mixes poise, sensuality and menace, and is capable of switching between them effortlessly. I think she'd make a fine Jasra.

Top o' the mornin' to ya

There's a definite hierarchy to holidays. The top tier is Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter. The big ones. You don't have to go to work, and you still get paid but the Post Office doesn't deliver any mail. Right behind those are Halloween, Valentine's Day, Father's Day, important celebrations, to be sure, but not the kind of thing a kid gets herself worked up about weeks in advance. Beyond those are the holidays-in-name-only that I got off when I worked for the County, Flag Day, Arbor Day, St Swithin's Day, etc.

By all rights, Saint Patrick's Day belongs in the bottom tier, but Lily promoted it right to the top. I don't know what it is, but she's been asking about it for weeks. She woke up, wished us a "Top o' the mornin'!" and was generally as excited about it as every conversation since Valentine's Day had led us to believe.

I liked Gaelic Culture a lot when I was growing up, and I've found a lot of geeks do. It's different enough to be exotic, but not so much to be inaccessible. Part of was my lifelong interest in mythology and another part of it is my love of the works of Roger Zelazny, who drew on the myths to write some of his best known books.

(Another component is that I really like the color green. Not that I wear it all the time or anything, but I like seeing it around. It's just kind of a low level of happiness. It's kind of like baseball for me. I never really followed baseball, but I lived in Philly for a while and still have a level of goodwill towards the Phillies. I still listen to the Philadelphia NPR station and they would report the scores for the previous night's games during my morning commute and it would make me vaguely happy if I heard the Phillies won. Seeing people in green is like that. Just a small amount of happiness, but the cumulative effect is pretty impressive on Saint Patrick's Day.)

On Saturday, we went to Bethlehem's second annual Parade of Shamrocks.  We got there early and I took a couple pictures of Lily, but she's going through a phase where she either turns away or makes a face whenever she notices a camera on her. It's like photographing Bart Simpson.

If you're thinking, "It looks like she's pooping," that's not an accident. She described this as her "pooping face" and this picture is definitely coming out on prom night.

The parade itself was a bit underwhelming. There were just a bunch of things that didn't seem to belong in a Saint Patrick's Day parade. I can almost forgive the three dozen or so cars plugging Kelly's used cars, because there's at least the nominal connection between Kelly (Green) and Saint Patrick's Day, but random people walking their dogs? What was that about?! And they weren't even Irish Setters.

And, yeah, local businesses are an important part of padding out a local parade, but when a segment concludes with a car plugging fire extinguisher training and a garbage truck, I think it's safe to say that your Saint Patrick's Day parade has lost sight of the reason for the season.

Those are my sneakers in the picture, and and they're as Irish as anything else in the shot.

Lily liked it, though and we stopped for some shamrock shakes, so I call the day a success!

That was our Saturday. On Sunday, I spent a couple hours helping my elderly grandmother with her shopping. She told a bunch of boring stories and complained about everything. It's probably what this blog sounds like if you read it out loud.

A picture of me!

If you were wondering what I looked like and happened to be unsatisfied with a picture at the bottom of the page from two years ago.

I like this picture because I happened to put on this t-shirt yesterday, completely forgetting that the date was 3/14.

Last week, I spent ten minutes trying to explain the concept of pi to Lily before I realized how ridiculous that was. Now she's counting "One, two, three, pi, four," and I'm going to be the one explaining this to her teacher.