Vox Machina: Good for a Few Laughs

 

TL;DR: it’s ok.

 

How’s that for brief?

 

Ok, seriously, it’s got some fun moments, but isn’t nearly as clever as it thinks it is.  Better?

 

Digging in a bit more, it looks in many ways like a D&D campaign.  The world (read DM) is largely the straight man who gets to be the butt of the players’ jokes.  (A palace guard who bears an uncanny resemblance to Matt Mercer in episode three kinda rubs our noses in it.)  While the world mostly plays it straight, the PCs engage in all manner of shenanigans that range from the anachronistic to the post-modern to the disturbingly bloody.  There’s a running gag with a severed hand in the first episode that almost doesn’t work because it skirts to the edge of being too graphic, and probably crosses it for some folks.

 

The thing is, all of this stuff is exactly what happens at our D&D tables: jokes about the bard out seducing people, the “innocent” character barfing after having half a drink, the character who steals unattended drinks in the middle of a bar fight, the endless scatological humor, the jumping-to-conclusions, the joke about the giant pile that results when the PCs are told to leave their weapons behind.

 

And then there are the things that don’t feel like D&D at all.  There’s a gunslinger character who appears to have the only firearm in the entire world, and that’s all he can do: shoot things.  When his gun works.  The druid’s only spell is summoning giant thorny vines.  The ranger doesn’t appear to have any spells at all.  The cleric’s magic looks about right, and runs the range from healing to enchanting the weapons of others, but is unreliable, failing even to work sometimes. 

 

Plotwise, this is very paint-by-numbers.  You’ll see the big surprise twist in Episode Two probably in Episode One.  You’ve seen this all before so many times that even the “shocking, OMG where did that come from” moments are anything but.  Most of the characters are tormented by past tragedies or self-doubts that quickly get shed when they need to be heroic.

 

That all said, it is entertaining.  Willingham’s barbarian Grog Strongjaw is a one-note joke, but its utter lack of tragic backstory or self-doubt stands out and is refreshing.  The action involves a lot of swooping, spinning camera that moves smoothly and draws you in. 

 

The real stand-out performance comes from Riegel’s Scanlan.  He provides the biggest laughs, the bawdiest moments (mostly in the first episode), and the most uplifting stand-up-and-cheer moments during the action scenes.  And his songs are a real hoot, especially the one in the third episode.

 

About the only thing you’ll likely steal for your own campaign is a blue dragon using the conductivity of the gold in its hoard to zap characters hiding behind cover.  The most interesting magic item in the first three episodes has been a blood-drinking sword, but we’ve all done that before.  The look is so generic gamer-fantasy that it won’t even occur to you to screen-cap anything to use as a visual prop in your games.  Even the villains are straight out of central casting.

 

So yeah: good for a few laughs, a fine way to pass a lazy afternoon or to kill time after dental surgery (ask me how I know), but probably not something you’ll be returning to unless the later episodes really hit it out of the park. 

 

 

Lost and Wandering Vagrant Queen

The opening scene of Vagrant Queen is a God-awful mess. It’s supposed to invoke the opening scene of Guardians of the Galaxy (itself attempting to invoke the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark). But we don’t get any cool, imaginative dungeon-delving and trap-thwarting. Instead, we see our heroine dismember and toy with a pair of would-be robbers before brutally shooting them both in the head.

Sigh…

Listen, I get it; they wanted to show us our main character being a badass survivor. The problem is, she comes off looking cruel. Trying to leaven that cruelty with some post-modern banter would have been cool and edgy in the ‘90s. Now it feels de rigueur and forced.

A lot of this show feels de rigueur and forced.

Take Isaac. He’s supposed to be a loveable manchild a la Starlord. But without Starlord’s competence, because that would threaten the status of resident-badass not-a-queen Elida. So he’s a stupid, not-a-badass manchild. So what makes him loveable?

Er… he’s from Canada?

The show really doesn’t know what to do with Isaac. In the opening of episode 2, much is made of his inability to hit what he’s shooting at. By the end of the episode, he’s sniping baddies through the brainpan with his pistol. He’s all over the place. He’s a jerk from Elida’s past, only he’s sweet (kinda sometimes), he’s stupid and inept except where the script needs him to actually hit what he’s shooting at. Since they don’t even try to justify the mad swings, it just comes off is disjointed, messy, and distancing. He’s clearly intended to be comic relief, but the show doesn’t need him for that because the baddies are all comic relief (even when they’re supposed to threatening). So he’s basically reduced to needing to be rescued and providing the (again) de rigueur post-modern pop culture references.

The heart of the show (and by far the most interesting character) is Amae the mechanic, who wears her heart on her sleeve, believes strongly in the Power of Friendship (and a good plan) and risks her life to do the right thing with barely any hesitation at all. She’s your classic Alan Dean Foster hero and the show really wants to be about her, but its not, so it feels horribly unabalanced.

But it can’t be about Amae because the principle hero is supposed to be Elida. But she’s really, really hard to invest in. When she finally does “save the cat,” about halfway through the first episode, it feels, once again, de rigueur. Her principle virtue is loyalty to a fault. Kinda. Because she feels absolutely zero loyalty to the partisans of her conquered homeworld. I mean, I kinda get it, but it comes off as very selective and even kinda selfish.

It’s just clumsy and poorly written. And before we even get to that point, we see Elida torture-murder a pair of scavengers who, admittedly, were going to rob her and leave her stranded, but they were clearly not going to murder her. (It doesn’t help that their bumbling comic-relief shtick and the ease with which Elida dispatches them completely undercuts any sense of threat that might have justified her cold-blooded reaction.) And then we see her putting up with getting ripped off by the buyer for the thingus she’d been scavenging.

And I get it. We’re supposed to empathize with her plight. But that’s not easy to do. This works for Rey in The Force Awakens because Rey is clearly trapped on a dying world on the ass-end of the galaxy. She has to take the buyer’s quarter-portions of food because she’s got no choice.

But Elida has a starship. And it’s made clear she’s been cheated by this asshole before. So why is she still doing business with him? Why didn’t she fly somewhere else to sell her salvage?

That level of worldbuilding is something the show can’t be bothered with. There’s a lot of WTF worldbuilding in this show. Like the way no spaceships have weapons. I’m serious. Not only do we never see a weapon fired from a spaceship, there are at least two situations where our big bad evil Space Navy guys could easily destroy Elida by shooting her out of space, but they don’t. So we can only assume they don’t have guns on their ships. Which is so very WTF.

It’s cute and silly in the way we expect a TV show starring Bruce Campbell to be. And, on that level, it’s entertaining. It’s about as subtle as a sledgehammer (every flashback involving Elida’s mother ends with the woman saying, “You can never have friends!”). It’s surprisingly gory. It’s internally inconsistent and soooo much happens because the plot needs it to. That said, the leads have charisma (even when their characters don’t) and the set and prop design is fun (the costumes are so generic you’ll hardly notice them but for a few stand-out outfits of the otherwise eyeroll-inspiring villain Lazaro). If they release the third episode on YouTube I’ll probably check it out to see if it gets better. Otherwise…

The Witcher Series

I was going to call it a TV series, but since it's on Netflix is it really TV? I suppose the format is very similar.

The series is ok. I've not played the games or read the books, so it might be goring sacred cows left and right. I've watched six of the eight episodes. The tone is all over the place. Bits are so baldly comedic they feel like they were lifted from that old Wizards and Warriors TV show. Other parts have that ugly darkness you'd expect from the IP's reputation. The CGI ranges from nicely subtle to laughably bad. Ditto for the casting and for the costuming. It keeps trying to have emotional payoff without actually earning it. I fear fans are going to be horribly disappointed, but I'm enjoying it (though chiefly as fun but disposable entertainment).

Henry Cavill's a bit one-note as Geralt, but he oozes charisma. He's not nearly as interesting, however, as either Ciri or Yennefer. Though watching Yennefer flail about with sword and dagger seems a bit meh after you've seen her do all this. I mean, how the heck is Netflix supposed to top death by magical raven punching its way through someone's skull?

Review: The Expanse on Syfy

Watching the opening credits and seeing the ads online,but most especially after watching the opening credits sequence, you'd be excused for mistaking The Expanse for a sci-fi knock-off of Game of Thrones. Heck, it's pretty clear SyFy wants you to mistake it for a Game of Thrones knock-off. The first episode doesn't really live up to that bill, though.

First, there are way too few characters. It becomes fairly obvious that we've got three main characters. Miller is a “cop” who actually works for a private security firm that does the cop-like work on the colonized asteroid Ceres. He's all noir, with his hat and clothes, his tough-guy demeanor and his dialogue that feels like a washed-out imitation of Dashiell Hammett. He's a “dirty cop,” though the implication is that, being a private corporation rather than a public service, the entire organization is on-the-take. We're also supposed to get that he has a heart of gold because he feels guilty about things and then gets ugly-violent about it later.

Jim Holden is one of those characters who's supposed to be mysterious. He's clearly running from something, clearly inhabiting a social and professional level below his actual birth and abilities, and clearly wallowing in (rather tame and mild) hedonistic delights to distract himself from the previous two aspects of his character. He also holds a vague position of authority on an ice-mining ship, doesn't want to advance in rank, and is banging the navigator who is the only other person on the ship who grooms and talks like lawyer instead of a factory worker. He's so generically mysterious he's boring, because you know you can't invest in his character. Luckily, he's surrounded by far more interesting people, and being “mysterious” means he can engage in broad swings in style and tone, allowing him to take plot-necessary actions nobody else in his position would sanely entertain.

Finally, we have Chrisjen Avasarala, an Indian grandmother who wears elegant saris, tickles her grandson, and, as Undersecretary of the United Nations, tortures political dissidents, possibly to death. Like Jim, she's such a different person from one moment to the next that it's impossible to invest in her, but unlike Jim, she's not surrounded by more interesting people. What you'll be paying attention to when she's on the screen is the spectacle of wealth and power and future Earth around her, and the vaguely Tarantino-esque threat of sudden, explosive violence that seems to linger in the background of every scene she's in.

The show owes a lot more to Babylon 5 than it does to Game of Thrones, from its grungy blue-collar focus to its Cold War themes and hidden motivations. You'll also see a lot of Babylon 5 in the space scenes, where ships move like physical bodies in a Newtonian universe but we still hear the rumble of engines as they pass by the camera. The sex is fairly tame (there's a single scene of gratuitous zero-g sex between a man and a woman), the violence isn't very graphic (though it does aim for a certain emotional impact that it doesn't always reach), and the spectacle is a bit too industrial grunge to really pull off the whole GoT-in-space vibe the marketing team would like you to assume.

It's also very much a modern serial show. You can tell they've got stuff plotted out pretty concretely (the story is based on a novel series) and look forward to a slow, leisurely reveal. Also like modern serial shows (and again, very much in the vein of Babylon 5) they love to set up your expectations and then pull the rug out from under you. They do a fairly masterful job of that right up near the end of the first episode.

Unfortunately, our three main leads do such a bang-up job of being mysterious and unpinnable that its really hard to invest in them as a viewer. (There's actually a fourth key character, but you see so little of her that you'd be forgiven for having entirely forgotten about her as the closing credits roll.) If the show is easy to watch (I don't have cable, so that means episodes posted online) and I have time, I'll probably catch the next few episodes to see if it grows on me; I'm at least that intrigued. But I've not seen anything yet worth rearranging my schedule for. On a scale of one-to-five stars, I give it a tentative three stars.

Nerds: the New Wanted Demographic

Granted, this ad was linked to from Libertarian Nerd Central, and granted also that they'd already put a foot down this path by hiring Mr. Fillion. But how many nerd-references can you cram into a single preview spot?



Buffy, Firefly (with a kinda-sorta sideling reference to "Millenium" and "Space: Above and Beyond"?), Underworld... Am I missing anything? Is Elizabeth Dryden a name I should know?