Save Olympic Wrestling

I started my day off today taking the morning train into New York City and learning that the International Olympic Committee had made the decision (or at least is beginning to make the decision) to cut wrestling, both freestyle and Greco-Roman, from the Summer Games effective 2020. If you follow me on social media, I tend to think of myself who does not easily fly off into rants of multiple tweets or ponderous Facebook entries, but this did the trick.

For all four years of my high school career, I was a member of my school's wrestling team. Initially my motivation to join was a combination of the fact that my cousins had all done it and I idolized them, and of course because I loved professional wrestling and even at 14 didn't completely grasp the vast differences.

Wrestling was one of the most difficult things I ever did. It was physically exhausting and mentally draining. We used to make fun of the track team because some days their whole practice was a three mile run and that was the warm-up we did before two to three hours of cardio and wrestling (at the time I was a puffed up high school jock--when I wasn't a sensitive actor or snarky writer--and didn't get that runners had to pace themselves at a specific routine or ruin their bodies for competition; I developed tremendous respect for runners, gymnasts and swimmers in particular as my overlooked brethren when it came to the most physically demanding sports). Beyond that, not knowing at the time what I know now about my propensity for anxiety attacks and the like, I'd pace like a madman and drive myself nuts before I stepped out on the mat each time.

Along the way, I snapped two ligaments in my left shoulder that had to be surgically repaired, sprained my left ankle to a degree that it still swells up when I run more than a mile today, and worked over my wrist joints to the point you can audibly hear them pop whenever I raise my hand.

I list those injuries not to draw attention to my toughness (maybe a little), but to point out how much wrestling meant to me that despite all that I never considered quitting.

Years before I was diagnosed with any sort of stress disorder, sought therapy or took medication, wrestling helped me develop the mental toughness I needed to get through high school. The guidance of my coaches, the support of my teammates and the pride I took in being able to survive and when I was lucky thrive in a form of competition more demanding than any other I knew of gave me the courage and confidence to overcome my own fears; if I could do this, I could do anything.

I started as a 110 pound freshman who lucked into a spot on the varsity squad to a team captain and league all-star (second team, but still) my senior year. I learned leadership, teamwork and determination from my years as a wrestler and have carried all those lessons through my adult life.

Admittedly I come to today's news from a somewhat uninformed place (not a shocker), but from what I can tell, the IOC's decision is rooted in the fact that there can only be 25 events at the Olympics and with the addition (I believe) of golf and rugby, two events needed to be cut. A combination of perceived poor visibility, failure to follow regulations and politics led to wrestling getting the chop (the first I don't buy, the second doesn't fly with me while boxing remains an event and the third has to do with keeping stuff like ping pong and cycling because China and western Europe like them and have more sway on the IOC, which is...yeah). I'm anticipating the gender equality argument, but women have been competing in freestyle wrestling on an Olympic level for years (all-female and mixed gender wrestling teams were on the rise when I was in high school and have only grown in popularity since).

I don't want to slag on anybody's else's passion, so I won't go down the "how they get rid of wrestling when they still have badminton and dressage" route; all I can do is argue the case for wrestling, and that's talking about what a positive role it played in my life and why I would hope the IOC would see the value in encouraging young people to get involved in an activity that strengthens them as an individual while also making them part of a team like few others can.

Like track, swimming or gymnastics, wrestling doesn't have a professional league like an NBA or PGA, so the Olympics is what drive high school and college wrestlers to keep going. To deprive the sport of that dream is to cut it off at the knees. This is putting aside the great drama wrestling has provided with stories like Kurt Angle's gold medal victory in 1996 wrestling with a broken neck.

My question would be why there needs to be a ceiling of 25 for events. Is it a matter of TV time? Every station can choose what they air, can't they (my wife made this point)? If its just service to a draconian set of rules, it's time those rules be overturned.

If you wrestled, if you know somebody who wrestled, if you're a fan or if you just value the things wrestling can teach, I urge you to make your voice heard. Look into petitions. Use the #SaveOlympicWrestling hash tag on Twitter. Learn about the issue and see how you can help. The IOC is going to review this issue this summer; I hope their minds can be changed.

Thanks for reading.

Comics Nepotism: Quicksilver & Hector Hall

Nepotism is an ingrained part of just about every facet of society, but it’s not always a bad thing. It’s the bedrock of great family businesses and parents being able to pass something down to their children beyond male pattern baldness or color blindness. Sure you’ll get some slackers getting promoted ahead of you despite your hard work just because of their last name, but nepotism also creates a healthy class of folks especially dedicated to their craft out of appreciation for what they’ve been given who end up being the best they can be.

Looking at pro wrestling (and it’s a blog post by me, so we’re going to), there are all the horror stories about promoters’ kids getting pushed too hard and too fast, but stretching back to the Von Erichs, Curt Hennig, etc. and through today to Randy Orton, Cody Rhodes and the eight billion other legacy competitors throughout WWE and beyond, you find some of the most talented and hardworking guys and girls in the business.

In short, the word “nepotism” seems to always have negative connotations, but it shouldn’t; we get some of our best and brightest because one generation instills in the next their tutelage as well as their sense of respect for what they’ve been born into. Comics has gotten some of our greatest talents because they followed in footsteps, from John Romita Jr., to the Kuberts, to Stephanie Buscema and so on.

It is also highly possible I’ve misused the word “nepotism” thus far, so long story short I think kids getting a shot because of their parents can be a good thing, and now with three at least semi-serious paragraphs out of the way explaining my feelings, I’m ready to talk about fictional characters.

I got on this train of thought yesterday because I was editing some stories about The Scarlet Witch and Avengers Vs. X-Men for Marvel.com, tagging related characters, placing Quicksilver in there because he’s her brother and getting a real “one of these things is not like the other” vibe.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Quicksilver. He’s both a jerk and a super speedster, so to say he’s in my wheelhouse would be an understatement. Loved him as an Avenger, loved him in X-Factor, love him in Avengers Academy. Peter David’s use of him to exposit why people with super speed are often obnoxious in the classic X-Factor issue drawn by Joe Quesada where they have the session with Doc Samson (oh you know the one) is one of the great character pieces of all-time; his squabbles with Magneto, his overprotective stance toward Wanda and his ability to spice up any team dynamic make him an invaluable denizen of the Marvel Universe. Also, I feel for the dude since he got mixed up with that harpy, Crystal.

However, at the end of the day, Pietro Maximoff is a guy whose dad controls one of the primal forces of natures and whose sister manipulates reality itself while he runs really fast. He is by far the underachiever of his family; he makes up for it in bluster, but it’s always interesting to me how Quicksilver ends up at the center of stuff that seems a bit above his pay grade powers-wise because of who he’s related to. If there is an example of nepotism on the fictional side of comic books, I think Quicksilver would be it.

House of M would of course be the major example, as Quicksilver gets The Scarlet Witch to restructure the entire world and becomes the force behind Magneto’s power in order to protect his family as best he can. It’s an interesting bit, actually, because the nature of comics generally dictate that the most powerful characters are at the center of stories like that simply because they’re the only ones who can hang in the big world-shaking rumbles (Superman is the only one physically capable of punching the Anti-Monitor to death, only Thor can survive an up close battle with an out-of-control Sentry, etc.), but Pietro bucks that hierarchy and pushes his way to where he needs to be motivated purely by character stuff; the fact that he can crack the sound barrier barely plays a role in House of M.

In this case, it’s another argument for nepotism (after a fashion, and I may still be using the word wrong, so this post is basically a flimsy house of cards), as it allows a character who wouldn’t be a prime time player from a power perspective crack the tired A-list and forces creators to drive their stories on why and how deeply some players care as opposed to how hard they hit.

My counterpoint—who may prove to actually be more supplementary or complimentary or something—over at DC would be Hector Hall, aka The Silver Scarab, aka The Sandman, aka Doctor Fate, aka probably the new Americommando or something someday. Hector gets into the hero business because his parents were Hawkman and Hawkgirl; initially, they don’t let him in the Justice Society, so it’s kind of anti-nepotism (ok, I’m definitely using this word wrong, but I don’t feel like using a dictionary and/or thesaurus right now), but he gathers up all the other JSA sons and daughter and forms Infinity, Inc., the ultimate “we’re super heroes because our folks are” group, so there you go.

Hector is actually pretty awful at being a super hero, but every time he fails horribly, keeps coming back, basically because he’s got nothing else; despite being some sort of scientific genius, wanting to follow in his mom and dad’s footsteps totally consumes him. He turned evil as Silver Scarab and his teammates had to kill him. He got played by the Dreaming as The Sandman and eventually got booted from the realm back to death by Morpheus. He came back again and had a pretty respectable run as Doctor Fate, but ultimately got beaten near to death and ditched his physical body to live back in the Dreaming with his wife and son.

Once again, the fact that a major facet of Hector Hall was his desire to prove himself to his family and that he continued getting shots to do so beyond the point of your average also-ran added layers to him and made him more interesting. Once again, the advantages he got by being linked to existing heroes were a benefit and not an annoyance, at least to me as a fan.

The silly point I guess I can wrap by making is that in real life we sometimes get aggravated at seeing nepotism in action even if it the beneficiary is best-qualified for their job because we’re human and we feel jealousy. In fiction, nepotism is actually a plus because it can build a character instantly and help them stand out by making their personal ties more important than their power set.

Did I seriously just spend all that time to make the assertion that we view fake people differently than real people? And how many times did I botch the use of the word nepotism?

Both Quicksilver and Hector Hall have white hair; hopefully that revelation makes up for any of your time you feel I may have wasted.

My Harry Potter Rant

I saw the first Harry Potter film in theaters when it first came out back in 2001. I can’t recall specifics, but don’t believe I particularly wanted to see it and further think I was dragged if not kicking and screaming than at least pouting by people with whom I no longer associate (and I think my friend Dan was there as well).

It’s tough for me to objectively judge that experience in retrospect as I was already fairly bound and determined to dislike whatever came on the screen and recalling the company I kept for those two and a half hours does the memory no favors. I decided then and there I would have nothing to do with the little wizard boy and his adventures moving forward.

This was a vow I stuck by with vigor despite the turns my life took over the past decade. New friends who want to make an evening of seeing the new Harry Potter? Have fun, nerds, I’ll stay home and read comics. Date and marry a girl who loves the books and movies? I’ll practically pay Jim McCann to drive over and see the latest with you while I go to Transformers—lesser of two evils? History will decide—darling. Kevin comes to work in full glasses, school boy and drawn-on scar costume for no reason? Well, that anecdote really doesn’t match up with the others, but it totally happened and I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring it up every chance I get.

But with time and love, I suppose we all grow a bit softer and put aside our childish wars. It was with this maturity and boundless generosity that I made the following deal with my wife: I would watch all the Harry Potter movies with her before the last one came out so I could go see it with her and her friends.

And I did it. Yes, I am that awesome a husband. There was a second part of the deal that stipulated she was to watch all the Rocky movies with me, but that seems to have fallen to the wayside…

Anyhow, what do you know, those movies aren’t too bad. Hey, I’m not saying they’re masterpieces and I don’t think I’ll be re-watching them any time soon—the last one was crazy dull—but the stories are wildly creative, the acting is pretty uniformly strong and the visual world brought to life is remarkable. I have to commend everybody from the lady who wrote the books to the cast to every crew member for entertaining me for more than a few hours and not losing my focus. I really do have tremendous respect for the folks responsible for this franchise.

However, there is no question much of my enjoyment has also come from the ability to point out huge, gaping holes in logic that my lack of emotional attachment to this material has gifted me with.

I give you now, as best I can remember it, the inspired tirade I went on directed at the aforementioned Kevin in a public New York City park across the street from Marvel as we lunched that addressed the central flaw in the world of Harry Potter and drew the attention of more than a few concerned onlookers…

Say you run a school and you’ve got a profiler—maybe a person, maybe a hat—that is able to ascertain whether a young person is innately good or evil with beyond scientific accuracy. Let’s further suppose that your profiler identifies a solid quarter of your student body as having the propensity for wrongdoing, across the board from troublemaking bullies to potential serial killers. Do you, say, expel the kids who are going to turn out bad so as to not have them reflect poorly on your institution/train them in skills that will aid them on their dark path? Barring that—maybe it’s too harsh—do you at least spread them out, apart from one another, where hopefully they can receive good influences from kinder associations? Do you have your staff pay special care to watching out and making sure they don’t tend toward the wrong side? Or do you PUT THEM ALL TOGETHER IN ONE PLACE AND LET THEM ENCOURAGE EACH OTHER TOWARDS BEING BAD GUYS WHILE DOING NOTHING TO STOP IT?

If you answered the third option, congratulations, you’re the new headmaster at Hogwarts.

I can’t hammer home the point emphatically enough and will once again resort to CAPS lock in order to at least try: HOGWARTS HAS A FRATERNITY THAT ONLY PRODUCES EVIL WIZARDS AND IS RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERY BAD PERSON WHO HAS EVER MENACED THE WORLD AND YET THEY KEEP IT OPEN AND ADD IMPRESSIONABLE YOUNG PEOPLE TO IT EVERY YEAR.

Also, the school should have been shut down years ago for endangering students and the time travel sequence in the third movie has massive functional problems.

For the most part though, fun movies! We’ll see if I still feel that way after I have to go to the theme park in August…

Cruel Summer: Deathstroke The Terminator

When I first started taking an active interest in DC comic books in the early to mid-90’s, I thought, despite his name, that Deathstroke the Terminator was a super hero.

On the surface, it certainly seemed that way. For one thing, he had an ongoing series, and as far as I could tell, villains didn’t get those (Eclipso was an anomaly to me and I figured that was why Venom only got minis). I also remember reading bits and pieces of Panic in the Sky and seeing that Deathstroke was in there fighting Brainiac alongside Superman and the Justice League, pretty vigorously at that. Heck, I think he even wore a black arm band when Superman died.

And it was the 90’s, so “Deathstroke” was hardly the worst name I saw affixed to a good guy.

Imagine my surprise several years later reading Marv Wolfman and George Perez’ seminal New Teen Titans and learning that The Terminator—who they never really called Deathstroke even though that name was used at some point briefly in his early appearances—was a bad guy!

To be fair though, Slade Wilson wasn’t really that bad a guy. Well, he was. I’ll try to explain.

The thing that pushed The Terminator from vigilante to villain particularly in his earliest appearances weren’t just that he was pretty hard line about the ends justifying the means; it was that his ends were pretty unimpressive from a moral compass standpoint. The guy was a mercenary; end of the day, he was looking to score a pay day, and thus whatever he did to you along the way was cool. It wasn’t personal, but it was still pretty douchey.

Of course the whole genesis of Slade’s introduction to the DC Universe and grudge with the Titans was that his son got killed trying to collect a bounty he turned down from the H.I.V.E. for the teens’ heads so now he feels obligated to finish the contract. On the one hand, it’s honorable in a sense that he’s doing this for his kid; on the other, he’s still trying to ice a bunch of teenagers. And the really nasty stuff he did—primarily using and bedding a (maybe) barely legal sociopath as part of his master plan—code of honor or not was pretty darn inexcusable.

However, The Terminator’s motivation wasn’t really power or even money-driven when it came to the Titans; it was about preserving his family name, which sets him apart from a lot of the villain set similarly to what I was talking about with Kraven recently.

Ironically or appropriately—probably a little of both—perhaps my very favorite Terminator story is entitled “Shades of Gray” and comes from Tales of the Teen Titans #55 by Wolfman and Ron Randall. It’s after Slade has fulfilled his contract and gotten away with it after being acquitted thanks to friends in high places, so Changeling comes after him for revenge over what happened to Terra. Terminator beats the crap out of Changeling but doesn’t kill him, then calmly invites him to join him for breakfast, where he more or less says it sucks that Terra is dead, but he was just doing his job and now that it’s over he’s not going to bother the Titans anymore because he’s got no issue with them.

It’s a pretty awesome issue and a pretty awesome scene. It was also the perfect cap to The Terminator story because there really was no motivation for him to keep coming after the Titans or any other heroes as his story was over and his goal accomplished. Wolfman provided a great coda to the saga of a wonderfully complex character he’d begun five years earlier.

Unfortunately, Deathstroke couldn’t fade quietly into the night because he was too darn popular. To his credit, Wolfman held off bringing him back for a solid few years, and then when he did, he didn’t just invent a new reason for him to oppose the Titans, he brought him back as their ally, which made sense as his son was a member of their team.

At first, Deathstroke was kind of cool as a bad ass pseudo good guy with a distinct dark side. Reading the full Panic in the Sky story, I dug how he’s the guy Superman doesn’t want to go to for help because of his past, but needs for his military experience. He did ok for a bit on the outskirts of the DCU.

But more and more, Deathstroke the headliner became contrived and forced. The guy was a mercenary, yet he wasn’t taking assassination jobs on a monthly basis because stars of their own books just didn’t do that (even with Deadpool, who’s had a much longer shelf life, you notice he always has the heroic impulses creeping up every few issues as opposed to actually being a straight up “Merc with a Mouth”).

So Deathstroke’s book got cancelled and he became a bit of a toxic character for a bit because he was so far afield from the guy he started out as. I think he had a few cool appearances in the Batman books as a dude just taking money to kick the crap out of Batman, which is really the perfect use for him, but they were few and far between.

Then along comes Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis in 2004 and the inspirational rebirth of Deathstroke as a viable ass-kicker. In issue #3, Slade takes on the bulk of the Justice League—no big three—in a matchup fans had dreamed of back in the 80’s yet never saw and he dismantles them with precision and forethought, immediately bumping him back up to A-level baddie. Admittedly some of the ways he took out the heroes could be seen as a bit contrived—I never really bought that he took control of Green Lantern’s ring by just “out-willing” him—but Meltzer wrote the sequence with such obvious enthusiasm and it was so well-laid-out by Rags Morales that the cracks were pretty hard to see beneath the fun.

Suddenly, Deathstroke is back and Deathstroke is cool and everybody wants to use Deathstroke again. Out of all this we get some pretty neat comics, but also some that just seem to miss the point; that point being that Slade Wilson is not a moustache-twirling, cackling, out-and-out villain, he’s shades of gray, baby.

Meltzer had Deathstroke as the “bad guy” in Identity Crisis in the sense that he’s beating up the Justice League, but he’s really more of a set piece than anything else; near as I can tell, Meltzer didn’t really have any sort of goal as far as stripping down Slade Wilson and telling some broad character arc, he just had an idea for a great fight scene and pulled it off nicely.

But in the ensuing half-decade, I feel like we’ve seen too much of Deathstroke as just a plain old super villain who takes things personally and goes after heroes just cos. It’s the flipside of why he didn’t work in the 90’s as a hero.

That first run of Titans stories was awesome because it gave The Terminator a clear mission statement and reason for doing what he did: he was going to finish the contract his son took on to deliver the Teen Titans to H.I.V.E. no matter what he had to do in order to accomplish that, and then he was going to move on. It was nothing personal; they were just a mission.

The Deathstroke of today, in my opinion, takes things way too personal. He’s not a pro anymore. He attacks guys because they pissed him off, not because of any debt of honor or because there’s money to be made; that’s not Slade Wilson to me, that’s just a super villain. You make Deathstroke just another bad guy who holds grudges and has archenemies, you take away what makes him unique and cool.

To be fair, some excellent stories have been written with Deathstroke as a bad guy (I dug his Judd Winick-written appearances in Green Arrow myself) just as some awesome stories were written with Deathstroke as a good guy, but I maintain the best stories have The Terminator awash in shades of gray. It will always be tough to reinvent Slade beyond where those first five years of his existence had him just because Marv Wolfman really did give him a perfect beginning, middle and end, but I also understand there’s too many cool aspects to the guy—his rad costume not being the least among them—to just let him sit in limbo, so I heartily root for those who take on the challenge of taking him into the future.

Ultimately, Slade Wilson is a decent hero and an ok villain, but he’s an excellent character.

Lost: Figuring Out the Others

This isn’t going to be “Lost Week” or anything on The CKT (or at least I don’t intend it to be, though like the rest of you I am eagerly awaiting Lynn Phegley uncut and uncensored in the blog post six years in the making), but I must say I’m finding the after-finale dialogue with fellow fans and observers (particularly over on Sean’s blog) to be in many ways just as enjoyable as watching the show. In this regard, I think we owe thanks to the program’s creators not just for bringing to life something so discussion-provoking and layered, but also—and part of me can’t believe I’m saying this—for indeed leaving so much open-ended so these chats and debates can continue with such gusto.

So if you’ll indulge me, while some of my peers are choosing to veer clear of online chatter and just let the series sink in, I’m really enjoying picking stuff apart and trying to connect the dots that were left somewhat free-floating. I am certainly an amateur when it comes to theorizing what meant what and that whole bag and I’ve got far-less than encyclopedic/photographic recall on six seasons worth o’ mythology, but I have started piecing together in my head some of the nagging mysteries of Lost—and now that the show’s done, I can’t really be “wrong,” so why not put it out there?

To begin with: the Others.

I’ve seen more than one place where a major dangler that bothered folks is why exactly the Others—specifically Ben—did some of the stuff they did in the early seasons, like kidnapping kids or holding Jack, Kate and Sawyer hostage. Particularly, why were they such dicks if they were working for Jacob, ostensibly the ultimate “good guy”? And was Charles Widmore a hero, a villain or what?

I don’t have answers—or really theories rather—for all of that, but I have worked out some thoughts on at least some of it, because yeah, it was bugging me too.

So we know that in the beginning (well, after their Mother went goodbye), there was Jacob and his brother, the dude in black he inadvertently transformed into the Smoke Monster. It’s an important piece of the puzzle to remember that Jacob was hardly infallible—the Smoke Monster being unleashed was ultimately his fault—and had a pretty poor role model—Mother killed a village full of people to prevent her other “son” from leaving the island—as his being kind of a prick, albeit generally well-meaning, has bearing on the later behavior of the Others.

Richard Alpert comes to the island, and after briefly flirting with joining up with Smokey, he becomes Jacob’s right-hand man, with the latter realizing he could better achieve his goals of protecting the island and thwarting his brother if he had followers. Richard becomes Jacob’s indirect pipeline to other people who turn up on the island; their interactions wax and wane depending on what other stuff Jacob is up to.

At some point and for some reason, enough folks now populate the island for the Others to be formed with Richard as their constant guide and a leader picked from within. I’m not sure if the initial Others ended up on the island by chance like (I believe) Richard did or if Jacob guided them there—possibly via Richard, who we know travelled off-island to test people like John Locke—because he needed troops, but that’s not all that important anyhow.

The Dharma Initiative sets up on the island; at this point, Jacob is still taking a relatively strong hand in leading the Others from afar through Richard, so his fear of people he can’t control being on the island inherited from Mother kicks in and he has his people position themselves as “hostiles,” a policy that ends up becoming ingrained in the Others right up through when the castaways show up. They don’t trust outsiders because Jacob doesn’t trust outsiders because Mother didn’t trust outsiders, although Jacob doesn’t clue them in that there are outsiders they should trust…but we’ll get there.

Around this time, Charles Widmore becomes leader of the Others. I don’t believe that Widmore is a fundamentally evil guy, more just a weak man. As a young man, he kills a fellow Other rather than allow the group to be compromised by taking Locke, Juliet and Sawyer to Richard; his fear of being booted from his “family” trumps any loyalty to a single member. Later, Widmore tries to get Ben to kill Rousseau and Alex; I’m not really too sure on the why of this one, but I feel like he may have just been trying to break Ben with a task he knew would weigh heavy on him because he felt threatened (again, Widmore is extremely insecure about his much-valued power). Finally, Widmore is ultimately expelled from the Others and exiled from the island by Ben in large part because he has been leaving frequently and during one excursion fathered Penny with an outsider (who, remember, the Others don’t trust).

Interestingly there were elements of both Ben and the Man in Black in Widmore: he was extremely paranoid about losing his power and place and was ruthless in his attempts to secure them, but at the same time felt somewhat restless on the island and sought to exist outside of it. I also don’t think Jacob ever communicated directly to Widmore, using Richard as a proxy, which contributed to his inferiority complex.

Still, under Widmore the Others were relatively tame and didn’t do much more than rattle the cages of folks like the Dharma gang, keeping true to Jacob’s isolationist doctrine but not crossing the line into mass murder. They had a truce and everything.

Then Ben became the leader.

We know that when Ben Linus was young, a time-travelling Sayid shot him and Richard took him to the temple to be “reborn.” Prior to that, Richard had already approached Ben, which says to me Jacob saw some sort of potential in him. Also at some point, Ben’s deceased mother appeared to him; this was likely the Smoke Monster in disguise, meaning both brothers took an interest in the boy. When Ben was healed by the temple, I think Jacob was asleep at the wheel—he may have been off-island scouting candidates—allowing Smokey to slip in and corrupt Ben at least in part as he would years later with Sayid in the same fashion.

This is a tipping point as Jacob has amassed a group of followers, but because he is imperfect and by all indications a bit flighty, he took them for granted and turned his focus to his candidates, allowing Smokey to slip in and begin manipulating them to his own ends, using Ben as his entry points to gain the pawns he has waited centuries for.

We know Ben never spoke to Jacob until he eventually killed him, but I think Smokey was influencing him from the moment he was healed in those waters. I think Smokey pushed Ben to oust Widmore recognizing him as a potential thread back to Jacob; with Ben in charge and bluffing that he could speak to Jacob; Richard stopped asking questions and accepted that the orders being given by Ben were Jacob’s orders.

This is when the Others start really becoming nasty folks because they are being led by Ben, who in turn is being played by Smokey (I think Ben knew in his heart the guy in the cabin wasn’t ever Jacob, but didn’t realize it was the Smoke Monster; as he says in the second-to-last ep, the Smoke Monster was “summoning him” or something like that). They wipe out the Dharma Initiative—because that’s an x-factor Smokey doesn’t need—and move into their digs.

Jacob doesn’t really notice any of this is going on because he is completely occupied by moving the people he needs into place to crash on the Oceanic flight. Jacob does not strike me as a multi-tasker—he’s quite childlike and probably in a bit of an arrested development state—so it’s not hard to believe he got outmaneuvered by his brother here.

The Others start tormenting the castaways pretty immediately because Smokey knows that these are the people who his brother has earmarked as the island’s protectors and also that he needs them eliminated in order to get away from the place, still his ultimate goal.

We found out in the finale and the build to it that Desmond had abilities that would enable him to either destroy or liberate Smokey. I believe Walt had these same capabilities, which is why Smokey wanted him either under his control or gone, hence why he initially has him abducted by the Others and then later sent away. Heck, this could be why they wanted Aaron as well.

In season two, we learn that the Others have a list of names—much is made of it, but we never really learn what it is. I think it’s safe to say now, knowing what we know, that this was the list of Jacob’s candidates and again, Smokey wanted them under his control, thus he had the Others on retrieval duty. I don’t think, however, Smokey fully understood what role the candidates had to play at that point, he just knew that his brother wanted them, thus so did he. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Jack, Sawyer, Kate and Hurley are the four people abducted by Ben and the Others at the end of season two as well as the final four candidates later on—Smokey was catching on, he just lacked some final bit of intel.

But this is where Jacob comes back in the picture.

Ben develops a tumor on his spine and needs Jack’s help in order to survive. This ultimately ends up being how Jack, Sawyer and Kate are able to escape the Others with their lives.

I think Jacob had something to do with that tumor; I think he finally caught on to what his brother was up to and needed to save his candidates without directly intervening. Yeah, it’s a bit of a stretch, but for whatever reason, it makes total sense to me.

You also notice it was around this time that Richard started being more of an active presence in the Others again after being absent the first two seasons; I don’t think Jacob spoke to him directly or at least not at length—not sure why not—but I think he gave him enough indication that things were spiraling and he needed to reel Ben in.

Not long after this is when Widmore re-enters the picture, searching for the island. His first gambit is Desmond, a strategy I’d wager he was fed by his far more attuned former lover Eloise, who definitely knew the score to a greater degree than he did. Eventually, he does find the island again. I think Widmore’s initial Ahab-esque pursuit was fueled by those old feelings of inadequacy as well as a deep down realization that he bobbled the ball during his time leading the Others, and of course a healthy desire for revenge on Ben.

However, I think after Widmore’s initial freighter plan failed and after Ben visited him and threatened Penny, he was indeed approached by Jacob, either for the first time or at least the first time in awhile; I believe Widmore was on the level when he said right before his death that Jacob had guided him back to the island. I think when Widmore was helping Locke try to get back he was indeed on the side of angels and working on Jacob’s behalf. I also think he brought Desmond back to the island at Jacob’s behest when the end game was approaching and he knew he needed a failsafe. I think in the end Charles Widmore was indeed one of the good guys; a deeply flawed and broken man who embraced his chance to make good after a lifetime of screwing up not totally unlike Jack did in the finale.

So I think that pretty much covers the Others, their leaders, and why their motivation was all over the place: they started out as Jacob’s enforcers, but when he was focused elsewhere, Smokey took over via Ben and made them his hit squad to take out his brother’s chess pieces.

Oh, and why was Dogen special? Because he was the only one Jacob was actually communicating to in the years leading up to the castaways’ arrival; not Richard, not Widmore, not Ben, not even Locke—Dogen, like Ilana, was one of the few people Jacob trusted with setting up what he needed in order to ultimately defeat his brother.

Make sense? I know, probably not, but it was fun to try and puzzle out. Tell me if I’m a moron or not in the comments if you wish and I may give this another go in the future.

A Dozen Thoughts on Lost

Comments courtesy of Sean's blog, image courtesy of TJ's.

1-From just a standpoint of emotional impact, it was an impressive and well-done finale for my money. Scenes are still repeating in my head now and haunting me a bit, so that tells me they accomplished something. Those final two scenes, both the gathering of the extended cast and the inevitable Jack eye-closing close-up, those will stick with me.

2-I resigned myself a few episodes ago that we simply weren't going to get that many answers tonight (as I think you and many others did as well, Sean), so that wasn't crushing for me...but I do feel for the people who held out until the end and are pissed. I don't think they're necessarily wrong, we're just coming at it from different angles.

3-Shannon was the great love of Sayid's life? The thing that snapped him out of the haze? Really? They couldn't figure out any other way to work Maggie Grace into the finale?

4-For some reason Jimmy Kimmel's "The show was Jack's journey" theory that he threw at Matthew Fox during the post-show really both made sense for me and helped me appreciate the episode a lot more.

5-Do we really buy that when all that stuff with the castaways vs the others and the kids being stolen and women not having children and so on and so on was going down, the writers/producers *never* had any notion that the show would end any other way than how it did? It doesn't really matter, I'm just curious.

6-The big unanswered question for me that I don't actually think needed to be answered but I'm looking forward to seeing people's theories on is how Desmond accessed the sideways dimension if it really was purgatory or whatever when Widmore zapped him there. I mean, he did access it, right? Also, did Juliet get a glimpse of it too when she died and that's why she said her line? Did everybody peep the sideways when they died? And what event in the real world triggered it being time for folks in the sideways to "wake up"? Did the last Lostie die?

7-Kimmel also nailed a good one, I thought, with pinpointing the moment in the season premiere where the turbulence on the plane stopped and Rose told Jack "You can let go" as being the moment Jack died.

8-Why did some folks who weren't on the original flight (Desmond, Penny and even Ben seemingly had the opportunity) get to "move on" while Miles, Charlotte and Faraday did not? Why wasn't Ana Lucia ready? Is there any reason Eko didn't show up aside from the actor not wanting to appear? And how exactly did sideways Eloise know what was up? Again, questions I just want to see theories from other people on.

9-How did Hurley get Boone to "wake up"? For some reason, and I can't tell you why, that's the one that stands out for me. The only person he seemed in love with was Shannon, and obviously she was meant for Sayid, so what would have gotten Boone to snap out of it?

10-I don't think Ben got enough play this episode. I thought his story deserved more closure and that was one of the legit fumbles.

11-For somebody who was consistently "eh" on Jack and Kate, I gotta say, this episode did a tremendous job of convincing me in retrospect why these two were ultimately the focus of the show for six years. Well done there, both writers and actors.

12-After writing all this out, I do realize that there is some level of frustration for me out of not getting a lot of stuff I wanted spelled out for me spelled out, but also in writing this I realize that I'm kinda grateful for the open-ended nature of things as a springboard for theorizing and discussion that's going to outlive the show itself for years to come.

A Few Thoughts on Dollhouse

To begin: Dollhouse is (or rather was) a weekly show about a bunch of pretty people ("dolls") who got their minds wiped and took on new identities each week in the service of a shady operation ("The Dollhouse") that essentially pimps them out both to solve problems and to be sex slaves or whatever. There's also a bunch of stuff about a shadier corporation running the shady operation, conspiracies galore, people who you thought were one thing turning out to be another (often dolls), the right to free will, sense of identity, self-awareness, the abuse of technology and so on and so forth, but I just gave you the bare essentials and you can dig deeper if you want here.

Also, it was a Joss Whedon show and also it aired on Fox in the Friday night death slot, so the fact that it lasted a season and a half regardless of quality is pretty much a miracle (because of the latter thing, not so much the former).

Well I'm here to tell you that getting cancelled midway into its second season may have been the best thing to ever happen to Dollhouse. I'm sure the various cast and crew who were employed by the show would take issue with that statement and I feel for them, but having just burned through the last half-dozen or so episodes in the span of a week or so and finding them to be awesome, I stand by my statement and will now attempt to explain why.

In its nascency (I'm sure I made that word up/spelled it wrong, whatever), I didn't really enjoy Dollhouse because it had the whole "new standalone adventure every week" thing that most new shows have and it really didn't work for me. Granted, both of Whedon's previous long-running TV series (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel) embraced a similar concept in their respective first seasons before broadening their horizons after that, but I found it more grating with Dollhouse. On one hand, that's odd, since the core concept of Dollhouse would seem to make standalone episodes the way to go (it gives the writers a chance to create new characters each week and for the cast to play them and on this show it makes sense), but it didn't work for me.

Partly, I think my lack of early interest in Dollhouse when it used this format came down to star Eliza Dushku and the fact that it just didn't play to her strengths. I do think she's a solid actress who shows flashes of greatness now and again, and I also buy that she really really poured her heart and soul into this show (which she also produced), but I simply don't think she's the most versatile of performers. Dushku was amazing as Faith on Buffy because she had nearly an entire season to hone every tic of the character and really inhabit her; even in that one episode where Faith and Buffy switched bodies, she was kick ass as "Buffy" and showed she can play more than just a bad girl sex bomb. However, whether it's her look or her accent or that she's just so good at playing certain parts, it was tough to buy Dushku in a new persona every week as she never seemed to have time to acclimate properly and even harder to buy her as Echo in her passive doll state because it just seems so contrary to every part she is known for.

This is also one of the few cases where I think an incredibly strong supporting cast may have hurt the show more than helped, at least to start. As Victor, the only male doll on the show who really gets fleshed out, Enver Gjokaj may be the standout performer of the whole deal, as his default character is that of the square-jawed action hero, but he slips so easily into the persona of a weasely Russian mobster or British gentlemen or computer nerd sometimes literally one within seconds of the other it's incredible to behold. Essentially, he does what Dushku is supposed to do, but he does it way better, which only highlights that she's not doing it that well, dig? Dichen Lachman (seriously, these actors all have craaaazy names) as Sierra, the "other" female doll who gets significant screentime, isn't that far behind him in terms of adaptability and their improbably romance is one of the highlights of the entire series.

Besides those two, you've also got Fran Kranz being fucking hysterical as wunderkind scientist Topher Brink, Olivia Williams doing a brilliant hell-on-wheels routine as the Dollhouse's icy British head, Adelle DeWitt, plus Whedon repository players like Amy Acker, Alan Tudyk, Summer Glau and other coming in and giving blowaway turns every other week.

In short, you've got a show where the star is the least interesting character and you spend 40 minutes or so an episode wishing she would get off the screen so we can see what the supporting cast is up to.

However, to the credit of Dushku as well as Whedon and the writers, she stepped up her game big-time in season two and made Echo a character you not only cared about but rooted for. You bought her as the centerpiece of a tremendously entertaining ensemble rather than the weak link (even if I still would probably have rather watched a Victor-Topher buddy show given the choice).

This all gets back to my original point; when he kicked things off, I understand Whedon had some sort of glorious five-year plan for Dollhouse, meaning we likely would have seen the conspiracies and big picture stuff take a backseat in favor of a slowburn journey of self-exploration for Echo and friends.

This would have been a bad thing.

In season two, Dollhouse went quickly from being about the dilemma of the week to instead focusing hard and heavy on what the fuck was going on with this crazy ass big brother group who were able to swap out peoples' brains and went to town double-time on setting up mysteries, twists and some pretty great payoffs for questions that may have only existed for half a season or less, but seemed really fucking important, which is a testament to how good the show got.

Echo also stops being a malleable piece of putty who tries on new outfits every week and evolves into a capable action heroine trying to piece everything together, aka the type of character Eliza Dushku is very very good at playing. It also helped tremendously that in the early part of the season she was largely paired off with Tahmoh Penikett--playing FBI agent hunting the Dollhouse-turned-dude working to bring the Dollhouse down from within Paul Ballard--who is hardly a bad actor, but low key enough that he didn't overwhelm her energy and allowed Echo/Dushku to mature into a force who could hold her own in scenes with the rest of the cast as time went on.

The last five or so episodes of the series (I've yet to watch the finale, but as I understand it's basically a coda) are just slambang awesome, as we get a shitload of information dropped on us laying out pretty much the entire mythology of the show (some that was only really laid out for the first time a couple eps earlier) then get a huge reveal of the true Big Bad of the whole deal and an appropriately thrilling and awesome final battle--complete with casualties plus pretty much every significant character from earlier in the super arc at least putting in a cameo--to wind things down.

(To digress for a moment on the aforementioned Big Bad reveal, on a show that had more "this character is not what you thought" moments than probably any other I've ever seen, I have to say that every single one up to that one still rocked in large part because Whedon and company did such a great job making the original iterations seem so sincere. With the Big Bad, I started to have my suspicions the episode before, but it was such a well-done and gutsy turn that I still found myself hoping against it and ultimately enjoying it a lot)

In short, the last few episodes of Dollhouse gave a viewer who had been watching the show for any significant amount of time all they could asked for and then some. If anything, I wish maybe we could have seen more of how the cast evolved into a Buffy/Angel-esque super team near the end there, but again, sustaining that over multiple seasons would have been tough. Also, with Lost so fresh on my personal radar with it's awesomeness at times threatening to be overshadowed by the frustrating lack of answers it provides, Dollhouse and its "everything gets solved because we're going off the air" tack was kinda refreshing.

My final assessment of Dollhouse is that it was a show with a lot of potential that almost didn't see any of it met because of too much ambition and resultant wheel-spinning, but that was instead saved when impending cancellation forced it to have a distinct middle and end; I definitely recommend catching the whole thing on DVD as it's not a lot to sit through all told and I think you'll get a good return on your efforts.

Go Go, Power Guys Who Beat The Shit Out of Each Other

A little silliness to end a Monday on: I don't know if any of you recall last September when word that Jason David "Tommy The Green Ranger" Frank would soon participate in an MMA fighting match of some kind prompted me to write an extended diatribe on the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers as America's most successful bland superhero franchise, but Ben found evidence this morn of our boy's first match in America's sleaziest excuse for a sport:



Am I the only person who thinks this looks like it took place in a high school auditorium with a big cage thrown up on the stage where they usually put up "The King & I"?

Yeah...probably I am.

That Gundam In Tokyo Is Only The Beginning of The Giant Robot Craze

Wow have I wasted a lot of time on this:


So, anyone who reads Linko! weekly will know I've been semi-following the story of the massive robot that conquered the man-made Odaiba Island in Tokyo this summer. I say "semi-following" because really I've just been confusingly posting pictures of the thing sent to me by friends completely devoid of explanation or context. I'm not sure what this exactly says about me and loose collection of nerd reporter, but it can't be good that almost no one writing in the American comics blogosphere seemed to have much of a clue what was going on with this giant otaku installation beyond ging, "Wow! That's neat! Wait...they took it down already?"

So last week, I went google fishing to find out how much info was actually out there for an American audience to dig into this thing. Here's what I gots:


Announced sometime around March, the Gundam earned it's three-month stint of kind of lighting up and blowing a bunch of steam at random intervals in celebration of three factors: the 30th Anniversary of "Mobile Suit Gundam" (first anime of the whole Gundam franchise), the environmentally-driven Green Tokyo Project and, tangentially, Tokyo's bid for the 2016 Olympics (and I know I've been making a lot of jokes about that, but I'm seriously wondering how a temporary installation was supposed to impress the IOC. Did they promise to rebuild duder if they got the games?). Early word of the project must not have hit so hard in America as the earliest mention of the whole shebang I found was on the French Gizmodo where I nabbed the above CGI model from, but soon things started popping up in English

There's a great general write up on the project here, though it's really just a translation of a Japanese newspaper article, and the LA Times travel blog posted a basic fact-sheet on the project and how to get there. These are nice and all, however news of the event rarely popped up on nerd-centric sites. The one major (and probably obvious) exception was the Anime News Network who had all the latest news that for some reason never got widely reposted amongst American comics types, including some great coverage of the robot's unveiling complete with videos I couldn't entirely understand:


A while ago, I got into it with some folks on a comment thread at The Beat about whether or not American comics journalists were any good at covering manga and other Japanese pop culture crazes. I said then and still think now that we do a pretty shitty job of noting the spaces where our interests crossover with those of Japanophiles and teenagers who really dig Naruto and what not. ANN is doubtlessly the site covering this stuff better than anyone out there, and I'll take some shit outright for admitting that I barely check their coverage of anything because I don't connect to/don't understand so much of it. If there's a blog that aggregates more of the manga news and the bigger geek cultural stuff that comes out of sites like ANN for folks like me, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Anyway, ANN had plenty of other fun bits on what Sunrise did across the summer to draw more attention to the 59-foot fucking robot they erected in a major city, including an auction to have one's photo taken from the 'bot's shoulder and the search for the perfect couple to be wed at the statue's feet.

God, I wish I would have heard more about this as it was going on. By far, the absolute best thing I found online was this photoset and too brief news report on the 30-something couple who won the privilege of finally making their three-children relationship legal at the statue's feet while the groom announced, "I swear my everlasting love to Gundam in front of Gundam." You just can't make this shit up!

I'm sure plenty of folks in America see the fact that the Gundam's already been disassembled as a missed opportunity, but ultimately we may be better off not having it around. See, despite it's status as a promoter of a Green Tokyo, the statue's presence seemed to really fuck up the nature 'round Odaiba Island. Plus, there are plenty of ways to live the magic of real life giant robots to this day as the craze seems to just be starting!


Example 1: Baby Gundams!

For anyone super bummed about missing out on the Gundam specifically because they love Gundam and not just giant robots, the owners of the property have plenty of other impressive bits scattered throughout Japan including the above Gundam chibi which stands outside Bandai's headquarters and several "memorial" statues in Toyko at anime museums and the Sunrise animation studios. If that isn't enough, you'll have to be content looking over photosets of the big guy or watching this crazy time-lapse video on a repeated loop.


Example 2: The Kobe Project!

My personal pic for the next excitement-worthy Japanese robot statue is the Kobe Project – the currently underway project to erect a giant version of Tetsujin 28. I think it opens in October (if this blog's info is still accurate), although I can't tell if it's temporary or permanent. In any event, read more about it with photos here and here.


Example 3: The Robot Taekwon V Amusement Park!

As you can see, this one's still in the development and design stages, but it appears that South Korea isn't going to take their neighbor's giant robot construction sitting down. Plans are underway for a whole amusement park centered around that country's Robot Taekwon V franchise (what do they call animated films in Korea? Is it still anime, or do they have a different name like manwha?). Anyway, you can read what little I've found about this project over here.


Example 4: All Robots Are Bigger In Texas!

For anyone who won't be able to afford a trip to Asia this year to celebrate giant roboticism in immobile statue form, the good ol' U. S. of A. has got you covered with Dallas' The Traveling Man installation. Sure, it's not based on a cartoon or anything, but it looks pretty neat. Plus, I bet if this trend continues, we'll see a big ass Iron Man or Stormtrooper in Hollywood by 2011.

At 27, I Find The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Fascinating

Today, thanks to Topless Robot's Rob Bricken, I came across this story yesterday about how former "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" star Jason David Frank is going to potentially maybe think about starting to fight in an MMA league...or something. Honestly, I can't make heads or tails out of most fighting sport news, and what I do understand of it bores me to tears. But the odd news and the somewhat nostalgic response it inspired in a few bloggers got me thinking about the "Power Rangers" franchise, which for some reason has happened way too much lately.

Rewind to 1993: When "Power Rangers" first bowed in the U.S., I was in the sixth grade, and I thought it was total bullshit. At age 12, I was already a card-carrying member of the comic book fanboy nation, and beyond picking up a weekly slate of DC and Marvel books, dreaming of an awesomely awesome career in comics (ha ha, kid) and generally thinking about Batman a ton during science class, I also spent the majority of my non-football season afternoons watching "Batman: The Animated Series" and "X-Men" (once it went to weekdays).

So naturally, when Haim Saban's ridiculously-named team of stock footage-empowered stuntmen back-flipped their way into the Fox Kids lineup, I called shenanigans on the entire endeavor. Not only were the effects hokey and the music cheese-tastic with action scenes that made the WWF resemble HBO prize fights, the show's worst sin in my eyes was its stupefying plot and character work. The Power Rangers were good but dumb. The bad guys were bad but dumber. At some point a giant robot was employed to fight a rampaging rubber monster at the last minute. Someone learned a valuable lesson. The fat guy in a biker jacket got yogurt poured on his head. Rinse, repeat.

But for some reason, members of my peer group found this garbage entertaining. On the cusp of middle school and all the fake rebellion and pseudo-dating that came with it, most of us were about done with cartoons anyway, but in that last blast of sheer kid-dom more than a few seemed impressed by generic Japanese spandex suits and sparky, smokey explosions. I even distinctly remember arguing with some on the merit of Frank's own debut during the Green Ranger "mystery" saga where I proved unable to dissuade them from digging on a guy in "armor" seemingly made from the same material as my grandmother's davenport with arguments like, "You want a real epic? You should read fucking Knightfall." Anyway, after all of that debate, the Power Rangers show should have faded into hazy adolescent memory like "Mighty Max" and "Conan The Adventurer."


But here's the crazy thing: the Power Rangers just kept going. As even the nerdiest parts of me slid away from kids entertainment so I could spend time as a teenager feigning coolness and trying to pretend I wasn't terrified of girls, Saban's company (and later Disney) continued to regurgitate stock footage from Japan's Super Sentai Series all the while casting new batches of 20-something actors and amateur martial arts types fresh off the bus to Hollywood. While I was in high school and college, the Power Rangers bounced across several TV networks while flying spaceships, saving jungle animals, playing supercops, riding dinosaurs and this year getting involved in some kind of motorsport adventures.

While I'm pretty sure I was cognizant of the fact that this obviously cheap-to-produce spectacle continued on in one form or another, it didn't really hit me how hard the Power Rangers were still kicking until I did a year stint as a substitute teacher in 2005. Spending your weekdays passing out dittos to a blur of kids who insist on calling you "Mr. P" honestly wasn't a bad way to save up cash. Beyond the relative ease of the actual "work," hanging with little kids all day makes for great people watching, and over the course of my months bouncing between the schools in my hometown, I started to notice an army of 7 to 10-year-olds rocking Power Rangers gear from lunchboxes and book bags to t-shirts and tennis shoes.

At face value, realizing that the show was still around and still somewhat popular made a lot of sense. With the onslaught of superhero movies since the advent of the '00s, the idea that C-grade spandex type would hang on is a given. In a licensing sense, Power Rangers work a lot as a budget superhero brand both for the producers of the eternally brain dead TV programming and for parents feeding the insatiable desire of kids for useless crap. On the whole, Rangers product costs a lot less than even the lamest tchotchkes churned out for big budget Marvel movies, and I can easily see a parent seeing no difference or at least seeing the difference in buying a crap Bandai Ranger toy for a super-infatuated fourth grader as an reward for mowing the lawn while saving Hulk Hands for birthdays and Christmas.

But beyond all this arm-chair parenting, lately I've been thinking there's a dimension to the Power Rangers popularity that even the biggest super nerds like myself don't look at – or don't want to look at – and it involves our beloved comics medium. The biggest criticism that gets lobbied at Marvel and DC by folks invested in the artform but not in the ins and outs of comics continuity is that the publishers have done very little to capitalize on the popularity of superheroes in terms of recruiting new comics readers. Such complaints divide their anger between a lack of appropriate product (which I think is bunk) and a lack of sales channels to reach kids (which is a harder problem than anyone with a blog can solve). But some days I start to worry that the problem isn't one of availability so much as it is a problem of attachment.


To say it bluntly: maybe little kids just don't really give a shit about most of these characters. Surely, the heroes at Marvel and DC have survived so long because there are honestly compelling stories that have been built around them over the decades, and those stories have translated well to blockbuster Hollywood tent poll flicks. There's a reason all sorts of people in your family that could care less about comics of any kind were pumped to see "Spider-Man 3." But in terms of transitioning that popularity into readership for the actual comics – especially when it comes to younger readers – we've got to acknowledge the fact that most kids who roll out to summer camp in a Spidey t-shirt don't do so because they relate deeply to Peter Parker's plight. Mostly they just think a colorful character who flies while shit explodes around him is kinda neat. And whether those explosions happen around a comic character with decades of well told stories or around the entirely forgettable Power Rangers doesn't make much more of a difference to the kids of today than it did to my sixth grade classmates.

In their sales heyday, comic books were the best way for America's youth to get cheap, fun thrills. Today, that comes from TV and video games as much as anything else, and to expect that most of the fans of those media will follow characters to a reading platform without some built in "cool caché" (*cough*manga*cough*) is totally unrealistic. Those of us with a professional or personal investment to the idea of comics getting read by a new generation need to focus less on harping at DC and Marvel for "failing to capitalize" on their characters' mass media popularity and instead need to start identifying ways to best sell comics of all kinds to the types of kids already invested in reading more so than escapist entertainment.

With Disney's acquisition of Marvel this past week, it looks as though the superhero building blocks of our business are going to have a top spot in the minds of kids for a long, long time to come. As a side result of that, as far as I can tell, it also seems that the Power Rangers reign as America's biggest "budget" heroes may be ending. And though comics-based characters are now firmly entrenched in the mainstream, I'd much rather we ignored that when it doesn't directly affect comics publishing and instead focus on building the best kinds of kids comics we can before we all end up like this:

Has Entourage run its course?

I was introduced to Entourage about three years ago by my then-Wizard colleague and now-Marvel colleague Ryan Penagos, who passed me the DVDs of the first two seasons. I had heard tons about the show, which had a lot of buzz, and flew through those early episodes pretty quickly in time to hop on season three live. It's never been my favorite show on TV, but Entourage is definitely different from just about everything else out there and something I consistently look forward to on Sunday nights.

But after the sixth season premiere last night, I'm wondering if after a solid run it isn't time for Vince and the boys to call it quits.

When it premiered back in 2004, Entourage was an interesting look inside the film industry and the culture of fame based roughly on the real life events of Mark Wahlberg and other members of the production and writing teams. It also was--and remains--very much a male adolescent power fantasy of sorts, as burgeoning movie star Vinnie Chase and his boys get to live it up with beautiful women, ridiculously lavish parties, giant-size mansions and all the cool toys they can get their hands on. However, despite all that, the show succeeded not just with guys, but with ladies as well (my fiancee is a fan, though her interest has waned of late), simply because it's a well-scripted, well-acted piece of television that celebrates and analyzes a world that most of us are fascinated by.

The first two and a half seasons followed Vince's rise from mid-level star to megastar following the success of a fictional Aquaman film, as well as his buddies and brother emerging to various degress in their own endeavors and his agent, Ari, taking increasingly aggressive risks that lead to him being booted from his agency, forced to start his own, and briefly fired by Vince. Romantic subplots are interspersed throughout, but the really intense stuff is the interpersonal relationships between the guys and the trials of business. Vince's own mismanagement of his career, E's success on his own, Ari starting from scratch and even Drama and Turtle branchin out on their own is where the true meat of the show comes from.

I'd say Entourage arguably peaked in the second half of season three and into season four, but also began to show the first signs of cracks in the facade. Vince gets a new female manager (played by the always awesome Carla Gugino) who he naturally falls for. Meanwhile, both E and Ari work to secure the film rights to Medellin, Vince's dream project. Ultimately, Ari is able to get the deal done and returns as Vince's agent, while E hires Billy Walsh, a brilliant but eccentric director he had clashed with in earlier episodes, to head up the project, which he and Vince will produce. This leads to season four, which centers around the production, editing and release of Medellin, during which E has major problems with Walsh and even Vince, leading to some of the most tense and raw episodes of the show.

But honestly, as good as season four was, the tipping point was when Vince parted with Amanda during season three and rehired Ari.

The split between Vince and Ari was a watershed moment on the show because it was the first real sign in nearly three seasons that things could go wrong in the storybook lives of this crew. Obviously they were going to reunite eventually, because Ari is a huge part of the show, but the speed and ease with which it happened reminded you that as much as Entourage seems like a "real" examination of Hollywood life and politics, it is very much a scripted half hour show that relies heavily on formula.

Season four ended on another positive note, not for the characters but for the audience, as Medellin bombed at Cannes and it seemed as if Vince and his career were fucked. Indeed, the fifth season opened with Vince on a beach somewhere ready to abandon working as an actor while E and Ari prepared to focus on their own enterprises. However, the show once again quickly circled back to the status quo as Vince is lured back to L.A. and his buddies drop everything to help him rebuild his career.

Every time the fifth season showed signs of moving in a different sort of direction with Vince facing actual adversity, rather than him having to claw his way back, stuff just fell into place for him, right up through the season finale where he is seemingly down and our back in Queens but E somehow moves heaven and earth to get him cast in a Martin Scorcese movie. I found it more frustrating that throughout the season both Ari and E had chances to really break out on their own, particularly when Ari is offered a job as a studio head, but Vince basically guilts them into not advancing their own careers because (on a metatextual level) that would offset the rhythm of the show's dynamic.

It was in season five that I realized I really didn't like Vince very much. Adrian Grenier is a skilled actor who plays the role of the entitled pretty boy to perfection, but the writers have really made the guy tough to relate to or have a kinship with. We hear constantly about how Vince came from nothing and earned his way to where he was, so that was kinda cool in the early season because you figured "maybe this could be me," but time and again he has slacked off, acted like a child and generally done nothing while E and Ari save his ass time and again and he rewards them by whining when they dare to attempt success outside his sphere of influence. Kevin Connolly, who plays E, is actually given top billing in the credits, I'm guessing in part because he is an infinitely more likable character, but as much as you want the show to be about his journey, it never really gets to be.

And that's really the problem with Entourage at this point: you know what you're going to get and it's nothing groundbreaking anymore. The status quo is never going to be upset to any great degree. Ari is never going to be anything more than an agent. E is never going to leave Vince. Fuck, Drama is never going to be that successful because it would ruin their material.

So the big tension points of the sixth season premiere were that E might get his own house and Ari's assistant, Lloyd, wants a promotion. Even though Lloyd was the B-plot by far, it's the more interesting one, because when all is said and done, E is not going to get his own place and will continue to live with Vince and Turtle until the show wraps.

So here's the question: should Entourage keep going? Because the thing is, even though it is very predictable, it's also reliably entertaining if not exactly the trendsetter it once was. The material is still funny and entertaining, the casting for supporting roles and guest stars alike is fantastic, and Jeremy Piven sure as hell isn't winning those Emmys on his personality and charm. Entourage could run several more seasons and continue to be moderately successful, but it's also going to stray further and further away from being the exciting, unpredictable show it once was.

Do you go out while you can still at least remember being on top or milk the run you've got for all it's worth even when you know your best years are behind you? Given the subject matter of Entourage, it's a pretty ironic question to ponder.