Ghost Rider and Agents of SHIELD

So, if you haven't become aware yet, the current season of Agents of SHIELD features an iteration of the comic book character Ghost Rider.

For those not familiar with the Marvel Universe, Ghost Rider is in some ways like the Marvel version of the Green Lantern: he's had multiple iterations (different fictional people are "the Ghost Rider") each with different powers. Traditionally, he's a guy with a flaming skull for a head on a motorcycle, because he made a deal with the devil and now hunts evil for eternity or something similar.

However, recently Marvel moved him to being a guy with a flaming skull for a head in a muscle car because he died during street racing and is possessed by the ghost of his serial killer uncle, whose evil inclination he defies to be a vigilante.

As you can see from the trailer, the newest version of Ghost Rider is the one we're seeing in Agents of SHIELD.

I welcome the appearance of Ghost Rider, because I've been finding Agents of SHIELD becoming more and more stale.

To explain this I need to spoil some things. If you don't like spoilers, you should stop now. Below the horizontal line/blogger break I will spoil three seasons each of Agents of SHIELD and The Blacklist, as well as the ending to the Kurt Russell/James Spader film Stargate and probably some other things too because I'm on a roll.

Hannibal - Why it was great and why it was canceled

So, two years ago, my fellow TV Sluts blogger Clovis gushed about the season two finale of NBC's Hannibal. Having now binged it all the way into the midst of Season 3 on Amazon Prime, I feel qualified to render my verdict.

The first season was genius. The second season was fun to watch. The third season got decadent and, in my opinion, boring.

For those of you just tuning in and who also hate to click on links, let me summarize NBC's Hannibal. It is based on the Thomas Harris novels involving the character Dr. Hannibal Lecter, whom you may remember Sir Anthony Hopkins playing in a movie over twenty years ago.

I'm not the biggest horror buff, but apparently what makes good serial killer horror fiction is to put Batman-worthy supervillains in a "normal" world where Batman doesn't exist. Dr. Hannibal Lecter is a serial killer who eats parts of his victims. He also happens to be in excellent shape and a decent martial artist. And that "Dr.?" It's because Lecter's both a capable surgeon and an incredibly talented psychiatrist, not to mention an all-around super genius with encyclopedic knowledge of modern police forensics. He also draws, plays the harpsichord and theremin, arranges flowers, and has a sense of smell so good he can identify when someone he recognizes is in a room with him. As you can see from the picture above, Hannibal Lecter's a snazzy dresser.

Seriously, I'm not entirely sure how someone not a member of the Justice League stops Hannibal Lecter.

The TV show features the continuing cat-and-mouse between Dr. Lecter and Will Graham, an FBI profiler who is "super-empathic," meaning he's basically psychic when it comes to looking at crime scenes - able to see how it was done and why. While this is sort of a super-power, it's kind of a crummy one, especially since Mr. Graham feels very hard, like an Imagine Dragons song, so the more he does his super-killer-detector mojo the more it hurts him psychologically.

In the TV series, Dr. Lecter is played by Mads Mikkelsen, who brings a more "coiled spring" energy to Dr. Lecter than Sir Anthony.

Obligatory joke.

The other notable thing about the show is that the killing is truly, truly disturbing, even for a show about deranged serial killers. One of the things Hannibal loves to do is feed people to other people without them knowing, like a sick joke. He's a gourmet chef; NBC had DC-area chef Jose Andres and a "food stylist" consult on every episode, so most episodes Hannibal Lecter will serve something to a police officer or innocent civilian that looks like this:

He said it was pork. It looks really tasty.

And then, often, you have to guess whether it's the person he killed earlier in the show. Sometimes that's explicit, but not always.

"I love organ meats," said Tom, heartily.

They all look amazingly good.

This was said to be fois gras. It would be improbable for it to be a person's liver, but Hannibal Lecter does have a giant murder dungeon under his Baltimore home where he does things like pickle people's body parts in wine and feed them to snails to give the snails an extra "oomph" of flavor. So unclear.

And the show spends long, lingering shots watching people eat them.

Prior to these passed appetizers being made, we watch a montage of Hannibal Lecter selecting folks to murder. Are these little flowers beef tartare? Some of them are, certainly. But how many? 

As I said in my summary above, the first season is great. It's a tightly-plotted "serial murderer of the week" where Will Graham is chasing down multiple crazy people for the FBI while Dr. Hannibal Lecter acts as Will's therapist to keep Will's psychic powers from making him feel too hard. As a horrible human being who eats people, Dr. Lecter does not do this. Instead, he plays games with Will and other folks.

In season two, Will Graham has figured out that Hannibal Lecter is actually a cannibal serial killer with really good aesthetic taste, and Will tries to set traps to get Hannibal caught or killed. This season is suspenseful and well-timed, but a little crazier. Plausibility drops a bit. There are many too many dream sequences and hallucination scenes, as well as sex scenes that illustrate why you shouldn't bother having sex scenes on network TV (oh boy! People writhing artily under sheets or with CGI for three minutes! This is both uninteresting and unnecessary!). There's a B-plot involving a murderous pig farmer and his Italian good squad that added nothing whatsoever to the story other than some gratuitous violence and grossness. That said, I cared about what happened and didn't think the plot twists were too manipulative. And the finale? Like Clovis, I thought it was well-done. If the show ended there, it would have been great. But it didn't.

In season three, Hannibal Lecter, having blown his cover in America when basically the rest of the cast showed up in the season two finale to try to kill him (and he does a much better job trying to kill them in return), is now in Italy having some weird cannibalistic murder-themed codependent relationship with his ex-psychiatrist, played by Gillian Anderson. Everyone's still doing a great job acting, but the plot has become decadent. It goes from twisted murder to twisted murder, with gross revelation thrown in from time to time, without any real suspense. By the time Will Graham found a random Japanese woman guarding a prisoner in Dr. Lecter's snail-filled abandoned Lithuanian castle, with no good reason for any of those things to be and after multiple pointless and gross flashbacks where Eddie Izzard was forced to eat parts of himself, I said to myself, "Netflix has season 3 of The Blacklist on now, so I can see over-the-top plots with murderiness without all the self-seriousness." And I dropped the show like a hot potato. As did NBC.

Season 3's decadence also made me intolerant of the DC-area ignorance of the show's writers and editors in the first two seasons. Will Graham lives in "Wolf Trap, Virginia." This is actually a census-designated place in Fairfax County, but apart from the census bureau no one calls the area around the Wolf Trap Center for the Performing Arts "Wolf Trap, Virginia." Even Wolf Trap's physical address is "Vienna, Virginia." I don't know what kind of 3 to 5 acre farm Will Graham owns in "Wolf Trap," but he's crazy not to sell it to a townhome developer like every other large tract of land in that part of Virginia has been since at least 20 years now; seriously, people are taking parking-lot sized chunks of Fairfax County to build new homes on, housing there is that crazy. The show was filmed in Canada. The police did not wear Fairfax County police uniforms, probably because having policemen who look like city police in gray uniforms would make no sense in crazy alternate universe farmland Vienna, Virginia ("where'd those suburban cops come from?"). But I noticed that they just pulled the sheriffs' uniforms from Fargo out for costuming. Don't get me started on driving times between Vienna, Baltimore, and Quantico. Traffic alone would make Will Graham crazier than analyzing a murder scene.

Okay, I got that out of me. Trust me, you'll ignore it too if you only watch the first two seasons of Hannibal.

Amazon Pilot Season - The Tick

So, Amazon's done its "pilot season" again, where it puts up shows and makes you vote on them, and then really disappoints you.

Or me, anyway. I'm still ticked they didn't pick up the Rachel Dratch vehicle Salem Rogers: Model of the Year 1998. Instead, they went with some much worse shows and The Man in the High Castle, which is quality but is not watching Rachel Dratch show you how funny she is.

For example, Ms. Dratch's performance in Spring Breakdown.
While Spring Breakdown is not a movie I'd compare to, say, Bridesmaids,
it's a great "late night cable"-quality comedy that made me laugh. If
you haven't seen it, you are missing out. 

What I'm saying is, go watch the pilot I'm about to recommend right after you read this. Go to Amazon Prime and put it on loop. Steal other people's Amazon Prime accounts and make them watch it. Hijack Russian botnets, whatever it takes so that Amazon knows that they need to make more of this.

Because The Tick, from the first episode, looks incredible.

The blue backside is only the beginning of the incredible.

Have you read the comic by Ben Edlund, also known as "the guy who did that Gotham show for Fox"? If you haven't, I'll save my enthusiastic recommendation of that for later. There was also a cartoon, and a previous TV show with Patrick Warburton. They're all good, but I have to move this review along.

Last time I checked, this was a zillion bucks on Amazon.com,
meaning I can't re-read the one where the Tick declares that
the Man-Eating Cow has learned good from evil and therefore
will protect the City while the Tick and Arthur go on an adventure.

To recap The Tick universe, the action takes place in a city referred to as "the City," a stand-in for essentially every DC comics city ever, but exaggerated to the level of farce.

It's full of superheroes and supervillains, but the plot follows the Tick, a nigh-invulnerable and super-strong individual in a blue suit with antennae. He has no secret identity, no romantic entanglements, a near-monomania with crime-fighting, and an eternally optimistic demeanor. The suit never comes off.

The Tick's sidekick is Arthur, a nebbish in a moth suit that actually flies. In many ways Arthur is the opposite of the Tick; he has no powers, he has more of a real life than a superhero one, and, as his name implies, has no superhero identity.

Together, they fight crime. In the comics, it was more that crime was detected, and the Tick happily bounded towards it crying something like "evildoers, face justice!" or sometimes (actually), "spoon!" and Arthur would be dragged along for better or worse. In this, they'd face exaggerated parodies of comic book heroes and villains, and situations that crossed over the border of ridiculous and moved on through to "so beyond ludicrous, I'm just going to sit back and roll with it."

All of this is preserved in the new show, except, post-Gotham, Ben Edlund takes it a little darker.

Arthur gets a legally-mandated psychiatric evaluation
after getting caught in vigilantism. 

We now start with Arthur (Griffin Newman), who instead of just being "normal guy," is dealing with some serious issues, which is why superheroing seems like a good idea to him. The City, formerly drawn solely in bright colors, is experiencing a crime wave, in part because, as a radio expositions early in the episode, the City's last superhero team "was blinded by weaponized syphilis and then shot."

Into this steps the Tick (Peter Serafinowicz), big, blue, invulnerable, and monomaniacal as ever. The Tick sees a kindred spirit in Arthur, and immediately bonds to him, "helping" Arthur realize a dream of being a superhero that Arthur isn't 100% sure he wants to have.

Don't worry, it's still funny. It's just now, the laughs sometimes come from that darker place where I laugh and say, "oh, that's awful HA HA HA [snorts drink]."

And Yara Martinez from Jane the Virgin and Alpha House is
a villainess in this show! How can you not watch?

The first episode tees up all the superheroing the Tick and Arthur are going to have, and I think you, like I, will want to see where Ben Edlund and the rest are going with this. At least one interview has Mr. Edlund saying he wants to put in a bunch of the comics characters, and I'd love to see Paul the Samurai or Chairface Chippendale. I don't think they'll put in Stalin-grad, the graduate student of Russian Studies turned supervillain who based his crimes on Josef Stalin, but it would be great if they tried.

"Josef Stalin, grab on to my armored muu muu and we'll leave
this foul Earth behind" is the line that is actually being said here.
Not only did I like the pilot, but the concept has such promise.

To recap: turn on an Amazon Prime account now. Watch the pilot episode of The Tick. You will not regret it.

What Ben's Watched On Streaming for June/July

I've watched a bunch of things on streaming media recently. Here are my short-ish reviews:

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, Season 3 (Netflix)

A friend of mine recently said, "yeah, I was watching Agents of SHIELD, and then it got really stupid." I think she was referring to sometime in Season 2. 

Which is true, Agents of SHIELD perenially has a plot which I'd describe thematically as "peak comic book," where all plot threads come together into a unified whole no matter how disparate they seem to be at the beginning, and some stuff seems shoehorned in. It is apparently inconceivable to the Agents of SHIELD writers that SHIELD could have to deal with two major issues at the same time and they never team up or subsume each other. 

The show is also knocking off characters at a Game of Thrones rate (okay, pre-season 6 season finale Game of Thrones rate) sometimes seemingly because Joss Whedon doesn't want to pay for an actor anymore. Similarly, the "big bad" for the last half of the season sometimes seemed to be down a henchman because, I think, either the actor they had for him (who's B-list famous) was too expensive to be in every episode if he didn't have lines or he had a prior commitment so he couldn't appear in half the episodes you'd expect to see him in.

That said, as a guy who just read all the issues of Radioactive Spider-Gwen and spin-offs available on Marvel Unlimited (Gwen Stacy is a much more interesting Spider-Person than Peter Parker! Also she's in an alternate universe where Captain America was always an African-American woman and Daredevil is evil! You really should read it!), I have a pretty high tolerance for comic book stupid (I had to read through several issues with Spider-Ham -- yes, the Spider-Man that is an anthropomorphic pig -- crossovers) if a show is otherwise diverting. And Agents of SHIELD remains entertainingly diverting.

Also, Clark Gregg is still clearly enjoying his job and is a joy to watch.

Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress (Amazon Prime)

Elevator pitch for this show: "It's Attack on Titan, but with zombie mobs instead of naked giants, and it's set in a steampunk late Tokugawa Japan where most of the action takes place one of the armored supply trains for the rail system that keeps the last few human outposts connected."

The execution is, at best, fair. Writing seems to be done by folks given the directive: "use the formula we know works for shounen [teenage boy-marketed] anime for the elevator pitch you just heard. Do not, under any circumstances, take any risks with plot or characterization or otherwise give the audience something they likely have not seen before in another anime."

It's always magical zombies with glowing hearts covered in some sort of difficult-to-penetrate metal alloy. isn't it?

I could go on and give details, but it would really be a waste of your brain space. It's not good.

Penny Dreadful (Netflix)

This was reviewed before on this blog, but I actually like it a little more.

Let's not get too excited: I don't love Penny Dreadful as high art. I like it as a television version of a gothic horror (which also has influence from - and name-checks - the Grand Guignol style of gory theater) acted by people who are capable of much more substantial work than being "morally compromised supernatural evil-hunting team."

And that's what Penny Dreadful is -- Timothy Dalton plays the rich African explorer father of Mina Harker -- yes, that Mina Harker -- who assembles a semi-random team of dangerous misfits to rescue his daughter from a vampire. They are:

• the African explorer's mysterious African warrior butler/something (Danny Sapiani)
• demon-possessed psychic childhood friend of Mina (Eva Green)
• American gunslinger whose dark secret would be only revealed in the last episode of the first season if it wasn't spoiled by the credits sequence (Josh Hartnett)
• Dr. Victor Frankenstein -- yes, that Dr. Frankenstein (Harry Treadway)

In a parallel plotline, for reasons I can't quite understand, there's Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney); yes, the Oscar Wilde one with the painting. He seems to be there mostly to create multiple romantic issues with Josh Hartnett's character; Gray has sex with two women Ethan Chandler (Hartnett) is romantically entangled with, plus Chandler himself. I don't think this spoils much in the first season because, as I said, Dorian Gray has no direct relationship to the main plot. 

Here's Ethan Chandler and Dorian Gray making out. While there is a bunch of male full-frontal nudity in this show, sadly not of these guys. 

Also, Billie Piper is in this as a prostitute dying of consumption. She needs a better post-Doctor Who agent. 

As I said above, this show is sort of an update of gothic horror and Grand Guignol; the point is not that it's good, it's that it's constantly entertaining or at least shocking in a visceral way. There is a plot and there is dialogue. As the previous blogger on this beat noted, neither are particularly compelling (although the pacing of the story is good). But the production values, the acting, and the fact that everyone making this is taking it seriously instead of winking at the audience somehow raise it above "dumb" to "weirdly fun." 

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Season 2

So, as this blog's resident always-watching-Netflix correspondent, I watched the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

Did you watch the first season? No? Go do that right now! This blog post will wait.

Okay, okay, I'll recap the first season, quickly.

After being kidnapped and held for 14 years in Rev. Richard Wayne Gary Wayne's (Jon Hamm at his sleaziest) underground bunker, Kimmy Schmidt (Ellie Kemper) decides to make a new life for herself in New York City. Having no knowledge of the outside world or life since the age of 14, Kimmy finds herself in a series of fish-out-of-water situations, many involving her job as an assistant/nanny/maid to self-obsessed trophy wife Jacqueline Voorhees (Jane Krakowski). Helping her in their own inimitable way are Kimmy's roommate and decades-long aspirant to Broadway, Titus Andromedon (Tituss Burgess), and landlord Lillian Kaushtupper (Carol Kane).

Tina Fey is a co-creator and producer of this series, and so it goes at 30 Rock speed with gags. It's pretty funny; although occasionally a joke falls flat, most are great.

While the first season was about Kimmy getting settled in NYC and getting the Reverend convicted for his crimes, this one is about the growth of three of the main characters:

1) Kimmy:

Kimmy is a Christmas store employee this season.

Dealing with the psychological effects of what's happened to her instead of repressing them. Tina Fey, in a cameo as her therapist, tells her that she has Robert Durst (Fred Armisen -yes, there's a running Robert Durst gag this season) stress burps.

2) Titus getting out of his lonely rut - Titus starts dating and works to advance his career, instead of just filming bad raps about "black penis" in abandoned warehouses (if you haven't seen Season 1, that's a great episode).

3) Jacqueline, now divorced, tries to figure out what she should do now that she's no longer Upper West Side rich. Also, Jane Krakowski and Anna Camp go "rich white woman war" against each other:

Seriously, Anna Camp is at her cheerful psychotic best here (3rd best - True Blood, 2nd Best - Pitch Perfect, Pitch Perfect 2). 

While all this self-discovery is happening, Lillian is trying to keep the neighborhood from being gentrified by hipster types like Girls' Zosia Mamet:

Pizza rat makes an appearance. A homeless guy nicknamed "Methadone Charlie" makes several appearances. Ice-T gives a eulogy for a man who played a body in several Law and Order episodes.

Oh, and Amy Sedaris is in it, too. Her character briefly impersonates Sia:

I found the second season to build well on the first. It's hard for me to explain why the second season works without ruining half the jokes; like 30 Rock, it's a dense cluster of references and running gags, hearing a knock-off song to the tune of "I Believe I Can Fly" ends up being a hilarious gag in context, but I don't want to ruin the episode for you by explaining the context.

If there's a flaw to this season, is that the show is not subtle. At all. There are episodes with definite political points of view:

• The episode where Tina Fey clearly wants to tweak all the people who complained about ethnic portrayals in last season without engaging the actual art itself, by having Titus reenact his past life as a geisha as a one-man show:

As a high tenor, Tituss Burgess can sing the heck out of the Takeda lullaby.

• Drugs to kids who are merely hard-to-handle, but not actually mentally ill, is a super-bad idea.
• Washington, D.C.'s football team has a racist name and its owners are horrible people.

Depending on how sympathetic you are to these arguments, those episodes will be more or less funny to you. I thought most of them were hilarious, plus David Cross (who I have often found unwatchable outside of Arrested Development) has a great performance.

Bosch, Season 2

It's time again for one of the best opening themes in television again (I'll just wait while you rewatch the Season 1 credits):

That's right, everyone, Bosch is back.

If you don't remember and are too apathetic to read my review of Season 1, Bosch is a police procedural based on the mystery novels of Michael Connolly (fun fact: The Lincoln Lawyer -- the book and the Matthew McConaughey movie -- are a spin-off of the Bosch novels; apparently the Lincoln Lawyer is Bosch's half-brother).

As we left Season 1, Detective Heironymous "Harry" Bosch (played by Titus Welliver) had stopped a serial killer, solved the murder of a little boy, and gotten himself deeply in trouble with the police department for reasons completely unrelated to his gruff personality and "pragmatism" when it comes to police procedure. It's now six months later; Bosch is back to work solving crimes when a mobbed-up Armenian pornographer is found shot dead and stuffed into the trunk of his Bentley.

Suspicion immediately falls on the victim's wife, Victoria Allen (played by Jeri Ryan), as Starfleet is always suspicious of the Borg:

Seriously, though, it's because Tony Allen was a man who launders money for Armenian organized crime and spent a lot of time in Vegas in the company of strippers not his wife. She just maybe was jealous and looking for some of the money.

But clearly she didn't double-tap Tony on a lonely California highway and shove him in his trunk. So who did?

Bosch applies his trademark lack of tact and vengeful need to get the perp to this case, even when it makes him enemies with the mob and the FBI. In the meantime, we continue to follow some of the other characters from Season 1; Deputy Chief Irving is still trying to finagle a chiefship out of Los Angeles politics and his son is working undercover for Internal Affairs. Surprisingly, these plots intersect with Bosch's main case in a way that is neither too brief nor too contrived.

I really enjoy Bosch. It's gritty; Los Angeles in this show is a hot desert full of nasty corrupt people, and that's just the police officers. But each person has a personality, real motivations, and are played well by a cast of people who generally aren't "Hollywood pretty." Even the villains are people, which is refreshing, because that wasn't true even for this show last season.

Last season, Reynard Waits was kidnapping mothers and leaving their infant kids behind in strollers crying. Reynard was a monster; remember that we are introduced to him with a dead prostitute in the back of his literal murder van. There are no monsters this season, just people who have decided to do evil. And the distinction is clear. Bad people still do normal things, like hang out with old friends and then go back to their hideouts to have trouble opening a tin of disgusting-looking Vienna sausages (maybe it was the lighting, but they looked super-gross). The show is better for it.

This gunfight, from the literally explosive final episode, was also one of the most "real" I've seen -- everyone's shooting blind, hitting things by luck alone, and desperately ducking not to get shot.

One warning: this season does not end "tidily." Yes, the bad guys are caught, but it's more of just a thing that happens than a denouement, because life continues to go on. It's interesting, it's plausible, but it's not an NCIS "got the bad guys let's high-five and have some drinks" kind of ending.

Daredevil, Season 2

So, I've watched the new season of Daredevil, the original "Marvel comic book show on Netflix."

It's not much of a spoiler to say this season has more ninjas.

I reviewed the first season some time back, so I thought I'd take first crack at Season 2. However, my thoughts have become long and nitpicky, so I've provided some TL;DR versions up front.

Short review: If you liked the first season, you will continue to like Daredevil. There is a lot of awesome in the show.

Slightly longer review: This is a very entertaining second season that, due to not having the novelty of introducing the character, has to work harder to be as awesome, and it doesn't quite make it. It's good, but not mind-blowing.

The long, rambling review you read this blog for:

Season Two opens some months after Season One; the Kingpin is in prison. Blind but blessed with super-sensory powers -- like the ability to know without actually being able to see how much facial stubble he should have before he stops being sexy and starts being a guy clearly too lazy to shave -- Matt Murdoch continues to prowl the streets at night as Daredevil. During the day, at his law firm of Nelson & Murdoch, Murdoch is flirted with by his office manager, Karen Page. She apparently went for the mysterious hot lawyer in the partnership (Murdoch) instead of the funny, dependable husky one with the pageboy haircut (Frederick "Foggy" Nelson) who was clearly trying to make a connection with her all of Season One, and was perfectly charming doing so, but does not have Charlie Cox's biceps or abs.

(An aside: Mike Colter's Luke Cage still has the best-defined chest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.)

I so want to like the second season of Daredevil more than I do. The acting remains solid, with notable performances by Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle ("The Punisher") and Vincent D'onofrio reprising his role as Wilson Fisk ("The Kingpin").

Jon Bernthal in a scene that does not require a particularly large acting range

Just as everything seems to be going all right -- except for the fact that no one actually pays Nelson & Murdoch except in foodstuffs -- former Marine Frank Castle starts avenging his murdered family by shooting his way through half the organized crime in New York, showing all the restraint of a Quentin Tarantino movie. Murdoch, who (and this is a theme of the season) takes his Catholicism seriously and believes the power to take a life is God's alone (beating them into a brain-damaged concussion is totally within God's plan, though, as I'll mention later), is compelled to intervene.

Simultaneously, there's some business with a ninja-themed magical death cult which brings Matt's super-assassin ex-girlfriend Elektra back into his life. With all the super-tsuris, Murdoch finds it harder and harder to be the Daredevil and be a lawyer, much less a decent boyfriend.

Let me reiterate before I nitpick the hell out of it: I found it decent. It was diverting. Best points:

• Wilson Fisk's fight choreography is amazing. The Kingpin fights with his weight and strength and it's fascinating to watch. Frankly, the Kingpin episodes in this series were the most interesting to me.
• There's a scene where the Punisher has to murder his way through a gauntlet of angry men armed only with his fists, and, as grotesque as it is, it demonstrates how Frank Castle's will to survive just keeps him going (unlike some other fight scenes pointed out below).
• Madam Gao is still (briefly) in the show. She's still amazing as evil tiny grandma. 

The plot moves along at an agreeable pace, and there's lots that's still good, but there are some significant weaknesses:

1) TOO MANY VILLAINS

Last season, we had just the Kingpin. There were some subsidiary baddies, but it was just one plot.

Now, while Matt Murdoch having way too much on his plate is a plot point, there's more more villains than needed for that:

A) The Punisher (an antagonist if not a "villain") is murdering everyone in NYC on his long if ill-defined hit list.

B) The Hand, the aforementioned magical death cult, is doing something apocalyptic in a vaguely Asian way which involves Japanese people and ninja and makes me feel a little bit racist for watching it.

It was a much more sensitive treatment when the Tick and Oedipus faced "The Night of a Million Zillion Ninjas."

C) The Kingpin is rebuilding his empire of crime.

D) There's also a mystery drug dealer who is the proximate cause of the Punisher's family being killed and whose identity is revealed only in the last few episodes at which point you don't care.

You cannot do justice to all of these plots while having four separate antagonists, at least not in 13 episodes (maybe 26, but Agents of Shield continues to show us how to waste a lot of episodes on fanboy references and not enough Clark Gregg). Each villain has associated characters; the Hand brings in Elektra, as well as my least-favorite Daredevil-universe character, Stick (least favorite partly because "blind guy who can hit people accurately with a crossbow" means he isn't "blind" as most people understand the term, but mostly because his plot entwined with the Hand and if you can't tell, I find vaguely-Asian apocalyptic death cults tiresome).

2) LACK OF WOMEN TALKING TO EACH OTHER EASILY INVITES NEGATIVE COMPARISONS TO JESSICA JONES

So, remember last time, when I said Daredevil failed the famous "Bechdel test"? 

Still does, and in a crazy blatant manner.

Seriously, there are only a handful of scenes where two women have lines, and in those scenes, the number of times that women speak to each other is even lower. There are only two substantive conversations between women that I counted; both are between Night Nurse and a hospital administrator and, frankly, are irrelevant to the plot.

Let's not get confused and think I'm saying a story must be include the conversations of women to have merit. They don't. It doesn't even mean the stories are sexist, although they often are. 

Here, failing the Bechdel test makes the story weird. Let me give you an example: watching the scenes with Karen Page in them, it feels like Karen Page exists in a world where there are strangely almost no women. 

Typical number of non-Deborah Ann Woll actresses in the same scene with her.

Karen works at a law firm where both lawyers and all the clients who have anything of importance to say are men. All but one of the law enforcement officers she speaks to are men; all of the police officers assigned to protect her in various scenes are men. The journalist she has regular conversations with is a man. When she digs up a source to speak to, that person is always a man. 

Furthermore, there are two other major female characters in this season. Karen Page doesn't speak to either of them. She's in one scene with Elektra where Karen speaks four lines directly to Matt Murdoch, then leaves. Foggy gets to have a long conversation with Claire ("the Night Nurse"), but Karen doesn't even meet her. 

Claire and Elektra are never in the same scene together. 

Remember: this story takes place in modern New York City. Not a North Dakota oil field or on an Alaskan fishing boat. Statistically, there are women in nearly equal proportion to men in NYC.

Now, we get back to Jessica Jones. Even in a show where there weren't that many male characters, it was clear that men existed in New York. Just because Jessica's boss, BFF, craziest next-door-neighbor, doomed client, etc. were women, that didn't mean that she didn't also have conversations with men who were cops, bar owners, drug addicts, crazy mind-controlling sociopaths, etc. It was a New York that seemed, well, not a weird alternate universe version of itself.

3) YES, I KNOW THAT IT TAKES A LOT OF EFFORT TO KNOCK A PERSON UNCONSCIOUS BY PUNCHING HIM IN THE FACE REPEATEDLY, BUT YOU DON'T NEED TO SHOW ME EVERY TIME

I am not kidding when I say that basically all of the Punisher's facial bruising in this scene can be attributed to Daredevil or someone else punching him in the face repeatedly to try to knock him unconscious.

Daredevil's fights are brutal. In small doses, this is "realism." In large doses, it's tiresome. 

Culture blog The Mary Sue loves a five minute fight scene that takes place down a flight of stairs, calling it an iteration of the "hallway fight" from Season One. I hate it and think it's all that's self-indulgent about the violence and fight choreography of Season Two.

If you don't remember Season One, early on in the season Daredevil has to rescue a child from some criminals. He breaks into their place and fights three rooms full of them in a scene that takes place mostly in the confines of a claustrophobic hallway. It was pretty badass.

It also was early in the show, establishing Daredevil's facility with hand-to-hand combat. Also, in that scene, he's basically wearing black exercise clothes as his superhero outfit, which you can see is torn in places from violence. And even in that scene, there are times where Daredevil pops into a room with a bad guy and the exact method of his dispatch is left to your and the foley artist's imagination.

So, in this new fight scene, Daredevil has, for reasons too spoilery to explain, to fight his way through an entire biker gang down about twelve flights of stairs with an object duct-taped into one hand and holding a chain in the other. No surprise: he does so.

Unlike the scene in Season One, it's now been pretty well established that Daredevil, even injured, can mop the floor with anyone who isn't a Navy SEAL or trained by ninja or something similar. Remember at the end of Season One, where a dirty cop who was about to get shot in the head closed his eyes and then, without the camera leaving his face, there were a bunch of punching noises so that when he opened his eyes Daredevil was standing there and all the people who wanted to kill him were beat down? I don't know how else to say it -- it is not a surprise that Daredevil can beat up a building full of "mere mortal" criminals. There's really no tension to this scene; you know he's going to plow through all of these guys because it's been done on- and off-camera for a season and a half. 

Furthermore, as of the end of Season One, Daredevil wears bullet- and knife-resistant armor, so the risk he takes in fighting an entire biker gang is significantly diminished. Not only do we know that he's going to go like a weed-whacker through these guys, we know that, unless one of them is super-lucky, they can't really even hurt him much. 

And on top of the lack of dramatic tension, there are no rooms where Daredevil can fall in with a guy and you not have to watch him "realistically" beat a person into unconsciousness. Look, I appreciate that Daredevil is a show where, often, it's clear that you usually can't knock a person unconscious with a single blow to the head, but watching a fight where Daredevil delivers "I know your concussed, but now stay down" blows to people's heads is just not that much fun. I sat through it saying to myself, "okay, so when do we get to the bottom of the stairs?"

The excruciatingly long stairway fight is only the apex of watching Daredevil cause chronic traumatic encephalopathy to nearly every baddie he encounters. We see lots of fight scenes that go on for a long time because they have to literally beat the bad guys into submission. It gets old and I just don't enjoy it. 

Separately, I counted at least three separate stabbings in the eye with a sharp object, one of which was waaaaay more drawn out than it had to be. If your fight choreography go to is "stab him in the eye," you need to work on your creativity. 

BULLET POINTS OF NITPICKINESS

If you're going to have Daredevil fight a weird supervillain, the Spot is way more interesting than a mystical Asian death cult.

• New York criminal procedure doesn't work that way.
• Small law office finances, especially dealing with New York City rents, don't work that way. 
• That thing with the sorta-zombies was never adequately explained.
• I'm still not sure how the ninjas are so silent that they mask all the things that Daredevil might be able to hear, but still need to breathe audibly. In the quiet places where Daredevil more than occasionally fights them, shouldn't Daredevil be able to hear the synovial fluid squirting back and forth in their joints? If they can silence that, why's breathing a problem? 
• Daredevil's mask is really unattractive and distracting. It's like a mutant Captain America mask.

CONCLUSION

Daredevil's fine. It's diverting and well-acted. You won't regret watching it. It's just doesn't rise to hoped-for greatness. 

Jessica Jones: The TV Slut Chat

After binge watching Netflix's Jessica Jones all weekend, fellow TV Slut, Ben, and I sat down and had a good old fashioned chat about it. It's mostly Ben using big words and having deep thoughts and me acting like a fool (typical day at the office), but I think we occasionally come up with some insightful things to say. Enjoy!

Maggie Cats(M): So what did you think of Jessica Jones?

Benjamin (B): I liked it a lot. I think I liked it more than Daredevil, which is saying something. The first thing I think about, though, when I read all the think-pieces on Jessica Jones, is that I feel calling it a "noir" is kind of on the wrong track, thematically.It's really blurring the lines between a detective story and a horror story which involves detective work, like The Ring.

M: I agree with all that and getting back to Daredevil briefly, it's clear that the shows both exist in the same world, but their "heroes" are wildly different. Jessica Jones is even darker and bleaker...and she's a type of hero we haven't seen before (at least in the Marvel cinematic universe). I love how broken, traumatized, and scared she is. She's one of the most powerful women in the world and she's basically jumping at shadows and drinking herself into oblivion.

B: Frankly, except for some cop shows which (mostly deservedly) had only one season before being consigned to Netflix (e.g. Hack), we don't have crime-fighters who are basically messes.

M: Exactly. The entire season is really about her finding her own agency again and learning to trust people. I deal with PTSD a lot in my job, and in my lay opinion, they did a nice job with a realistic portrayal of someone with this type of trauma. Well, not mind-control trauma, but you know what I mean. We don't get a lot of THAT in my line of work.

B: I thought that was all pretty good, too. I was a little worried up until about episode 8 that Jessica Jones, for plot reasons, seemed to have it too well together, but then she did some really dumb self-destructive stuff that you do when you can't keep it together.

M: EXACTLY. And the one thing the writers had to do to make the viewer buy into  this season was establish why you couldn’t just shoot Kilgrave and call it a day. And I think that's why Hope was such an important character. Kilgrave had to stick around to get Hope off the murder rap--which clearly represented Jessica's one chance at redemption as well. After all, without her the show would be over in one episode. "Jessica tracks down the guy who violated her and puts a bullet in his head." Done. So how do you keep the story going? Come up with a compelling reason to make her want to keep Kilgrave alive.

B: It's also true that, until Jessica Jones gets Kilgrave to run amok in NYC, if she just killed him, no one would really believe her about his powers and therefore other than Trish they wouldn't believe that she didn't want to do all the stuff Kilgrave told her to do. Many of the people in Jones' orbit - I'm thinking Hogarth and Cage primarily - only give lip service to, "oh, yeah, Kilgrave can control minds" until they encounter him directly.

M: Everyone told Jessica that they understood Kilgrave was bad and the things he did were horrible. But nobody REALLY understood the full extent of it until they were victims of his powers themselves. It's another thing that felt very real and powerful; until you have experienced something like that, you can't really appreciate the true horror. I think the guy who was forced to give up his coat on the subway clearly had it the worst. I mean, can you IMAGINE? Oh, the humanity.

B: Note how he kept going to the meetings, though. Not being able to be an asshole when he wanted to really took a lot out of him.

M: The show is certainly dark and I wouldn't call it funny, but there are little moments like that are funny in a kind of Fargo-"aren't people ridiculous" type of manner.

B: I actually thought this show was more "accurately New York" than Daredevil. The real estate looked realer, the weirdos seemed more like the folks I encountered on the street, etc. I and most of the people I knew lived in buildings like the one Jessica Jones lives in.

M: That takes us back to your first (or was it second) point, I actually found Daredevil much more noir than this in terms of style and lighting. Sidenote: I think Jessica Jones and Veronica Mars would have gotten along well. 


**POTENTIAL LATER EPISODE SPOILER AHEAD**Shifting gears a bit, were you surprised when Rosario Dawson’s Night Nurse showed up?

B: Slightly. I am familiar with the MCU movie schedule, so not exceptionally surprised since Since Daredevil, Luke Cage, and Jessica Jones are all in the Defenders movie together. **END LATER EPISODE SPOILER**

M: I was shocked, I had no idea there would be overlap. I knew they would eventually come together, but was surprised at a cross-over character at this point. Speaking of Luke Cage…any thoughts? I thought he was hot as hell.

B: He is an amazingly attractive man. It seems, though, in Jessica Jones, if you're a man without super powers, you're mostly incompetent. And not worth talking to for the most part. It's refreshing, really.

M: I read somewhere online that this series actually fails the Bechdel test for men. Which delights me. It's so great how Marvel is getting to explore all these new types of characters and storytelling on Netflix. It almost (well actually, not almost) makes the movies look kind of hackneyed in comparison.

B: I wonder how much of this we would have seen had it not been on Netflix or a similar streaming service. This is a "prestige TV"-level of faith in the auteurs.

M: Netflix (and to a similar extent subscription cable) are really redefining what makes a successful tv series. Network programming looks sloppy and poorly planned in comparison.

B: The problem, I think, with network TV is that, like any legacy media, they would like to keep the same level of market share. So NCIS and other pleasers of everyone over 50 keep coming because the newer market is so fragmented. Or riffs thereon, like Mysteries of Laura.

M: It will be interesting to see at what point streaming television stops being considered "new" by more established (i.e. older) viewers. And oh my gosh, I can’t believe we haven’t talked about David Tennant yet!

B: I want to note that the first time we see his face he's licking Krysten Ritter's cheek in classic "creepy pervert" style. Also, we do not see the "soulfully sad" eyes he uses in pretty much everything else he's in.

M: I think David Tennant is a great actor, but I don't think he has a lot of settings. So this character felt very derivative of the Tenth Doctor to me--if the Tenth Doctor was a total sociopath. So what I am trying to say is that I found him really fucking scary. And I think the show made an excellent choice by keeping him basically off-screen for several episodes. We only hear of what he does from his victims; so you aren't REALLY sure what he's going to be like. And then within a few seconds of meeting him, he casually tells a guy to throw hot coffee in his face. As the audience, in that moment, you are like, "oh, I get it."

B: I had a different take on the buildup. Because we see early on how pervasive Kilgrave can be in recruiting small armies of agents, and how insidious their programming can be, when he's not on the screen he's sometimes a lot more dangerous-seeming than when he is. I felt Jessica Jones' paranoia for those first episodes; I totally understand why she wanted to book it to Hong Kong.

M: That’s an excellent point—there’s a lot of “Kilgrave can be anybody.”

B: AND HE IS. They just don’t say it.

M: He’s definitely playing a long game and Jessica is more flying (controlled falling) by the seat of her pants. I mean, she’s basically controlled falling the entire season. OMG SYMBOLISM.

B: It's also good to note that what Jeri Hogarth says about Kilgrave is also true - his ambitions are kind of small potatoes. Darkseid spends like years and years of DC comic time trying to get the Anti-Life Equation, which is basically what Kilgrave has.

M: I wonder what traps Kilgrave has left for Jessica in season 2? There was a lot of time he had to whisper in people's ears, you know. I am sure he made some contingency plans.

B: But that would require he consider the potential that he would actually fail. I don't know that he ever really does. You can see how sort of anti-charming he is when he can't use his powers. I think one of the reasons Kilgrave is so after Jessica is that she could escape him and that just makes him crazy. He's not really interested in controlling the world, he's interested in what he wants now and if he doesn't get it, he throws a fatal tantrum.

M: His emotional development definitely got stunted. Right about the time his parents started stabbing needles into his brain stem.

B: He's like some philosophers' descriptions of demons: unable to manifest the virtues of patience, prudence, etc. except for sheer force of will.

M: WOAH. What? It’s a Sunday afternoon man, you can’t get that deep with me. STOP IT. Let’s talk about how hot Luke Cage is again.

B: He has an amazing chest. So, on that front, what did you think of the first sex scene where Jessica Jones says "you won't break me," and Luke Cage insists that he probably will? And then you see in Krysten Ritter's face like, "man, this is NOT DOING IT FOR ME."

M: I like how I knew they both had super powers, but neither of them knew the other one did. Basically, the first sex scene felt like foreplay for the later sex scene. When they are like, "ah yeah now I can go for it."

B: And then destroy things.

M: So instead of the first sex scene feeling like a culmination of something, it was just really just whetting the appetite.

B: Did you notice that Trish is also super-assertive during sex?

M: UM, YEAH. There is one part right after when she, Simpson, and Jessica are discussing the plan to get Kilgrave when she is like, "Hey, last night was fun, but that doesn't mean I want to hear your opinion.” I was like, GO GIRL.

B: Well, Trish is super-supportive of her BFF/sorta-sister. And Simpson is never right about anything ever.

M: And here's the real crazy thing: it's not like the women in this show are just "acting like men" or whatever you want to call it. They're all just ACTING LIKE PEOPLE. Who are flawed. And kinda broken. And it's wonderful.

B: Yes. They’re not just made up to be “masculine.”

M: So of course Trish is going to back Jessica, and you can shut your mouth, Simpson. This is a great example of how to do blind casting (changing character's genders and races from the source material) correctly.I believe these people were the right fit for the part and make Jessica's NYC feel more authentic. Sure, it's not perfect, but definitely a step toward more diverse storytelling.

B: I know that I really liked watching Trinity from The Matrix and Calamity Jane from Deadwood yell at each other.

M: YES.

And we’ll leave you with that mental image since that’s where the discussion pretty much stopped. We didn’t get a chance to do much summing up (since Ben’s daughter was getting squirmy in his lap), but needless to say we both loved Jessica Jones. And saying that we liked it even more than Daredevil is high praise indeed!

You can watch all 13 episodes of the first season of Jessica Jones on Netflix streaming.