Author: Mura

TV

Late to the party: Fringe & Battlestar Galactica

Most of my media-consuming time the past few weeks has been spent watching Fringe and Battlestar Galactica… which means that I spend a lot of time trying to avoid spoilers, more so with Fringe since it’s got at least one more season to go.

When watching toku that isn’t currently airing, like Den-O (which I need to get back to) or all the previous Kamen Rider series, I tend to just write about what I’m watching since there’s usually a fair amount of people that may be watching, or may have watched recently. With western, particularly US, shows, I tend to feel less inspired to blog about past seasons of current shows, or shows that have actually ended. Which is why I haven’t mentioned either of these shows on this blog before, even though I’ve been enjoying both quite a bit.

Fringe, for me has the unique additional draw of playing Spot The JJ Abrams Trope. Alias is one of favorite shows of all time, and it’s really interesting how many elements from Alias have made their way to Fringe, but in completely different contexts and configurations. There’s also Peter and Walter Bishop, both of whom I adore, and Charlie, whom I also love. I’m in the very beginning of season 2, so the Charlie love in particular has turned rather poignant (spoilers!).

As for Battlestar Galactica, I’ve heard for a long time how good it was and decided to give the miniseries a try. Loved it, and I’m now in the middle of season 2 (just passed the two Resurrection Ship episodes, in fact). My fannish love tends to gravitate towards very specific character types, and so it was that I was instantly interested in Gaius Baltar, and by the time he very obviously considers stealing a little half-blind old lady’s spot on a ship off the nuked and invaded planet, I was just flailing helplessly in adoration. Like I said, I have types. I find him to be absolutely fascinating. Not just him, though; so many of the characters on Battlestar Galactica are really well written. I’m sure declaring one’s love for Starbuck is fairly common. There’s also Mr. Gaeta. Yes, I realize that (at this point), he’s really nowhere near as developed as the Adamas, Helos, Roslins, etc… but Minor Character Who Just Gets Shit Done is another one of my types.

Obviously there is a lot to say about both of these series. Maybe I’ll post more about them in the future. While carefully avoiding spoilers.

Tokusatsu

OOO 23-24: The Fighting Doctor

As far as I’m concerned, the important thing about these episodes is… Date backstory!!

I mean, yes, there was all the stuff about Date’s former colleague, and how she wanted to be pretty like her sister, and how the lesson is that about real beauty and being yourself, yada yada yada… I think it’s fair to say that I have a lot more to say when the underlying theme is about how justice is subjective or the like than this, because… well, there’s not much to say, right?

Anyway, apparently Date was in some kind of Doctors Without Borders, and he was called The Fighting Doctor (so, not exactly Doctors Without Borders, probably). So, yes, I got it wrong, did not expect this, and I found it pretty interesting actually, that he used to dedicate his life to helping others while now his motives appear to be more selfish. Of course, by now the real reason he wants that money has probably been revealed, but at this point it hasn’t, so there you go. Also interesting is how at the end Gotou asks him if it’s okay to just let go of his former colleague like that, since she appeared to be into him, and he says rather matter of factly that has his hands full right now.

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Tokusatsu

Catching up with Kamen Rider OOO… again

Right. Been busy again, yada yada. But it doesn’t feel right to just skip through, so I’ll go off my notes for the episodes I watched (yes, I take notes while watching Kamen Rider, and yes, I realize what this says about me) but didn’t get around to blogging about.

Episodes 21-22 explore whether the desire to fight for justice can become twisted. The Yummy is born from a man who never passed the exam to become a lawyer, and was frustrated because he felt like a failure, and so he left his family. The Yummy initially targets criminals, and so the man accepts the Yummy as a way to punish those he perceives as wicked. From there, the show obviously moves to questioning whether this is really justice, and how self-righteousness twists a person’s sense of justice so they become cruel themselves.

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Anime

Revolutionary Girl Utena ep 1: The Rose Bride

Revolutionary Girl Utena, one of my favorite anime series, is getting remastered release. The first 12 episodes, The Student Council Saga just came out earlier this month. I got the new DVDs this weekend, started rewatching, and figured it would be interesting to blog about it as I watch episodes, hopefully with a new perspective after all these years.

I love Utena because it’s so different from any other anime. It’s a magical girl shoujo series, but it’s really a deconstruction of the genre (probably part of why I like it so much, since I was never a huge fan of straight shoujo). And there’s the sheer weirdness of it all: the Shadow Girls, the duel songs, everything about it. I love it. I also love that it’s a perfect mix of depth and crack.

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Tokusatsu

Kamen Rider OOO 19-20: bromances, badass chicks, escaped convicts and and peacocks

I enjoyed 19 and 20 as a whole a lot more than the two previous episodes. There’s quite a forward momentum to the story, and the story touches at one point or another on most of the key players (and someone who has not been a key player gets a great little moment too).

Read more “Kamen Rider OOO 19-20: bromances, badass chicks, escaped convicts and and peacocks” →

Tokusatsu

Kamen Rider OOO 17-18: a dude named Date

Still playing catchup. These obviously deal with a whole more than just Date, but I’m really interested in him, so that’s what this post will be about mostly.

Episodes 17 and 18 are basically a bit of an introduction to Date Akira, the man behind Kamen Rider Birth. Of note: he’s not quite as non-chalant a dude as his first moments on the show would lead us to believe. He’s just a very pragmatic, practical man, who gets shit done with minimal fuss. He’s technically a mercenary, because he’s just there to earn one hundred million yen in exchange for collecting a whole lot of Cell Medals. Obviously, it would seem that there is a reason why he needs said money, I very much doubt that he just wants money for the sake of having money. In this, he actually reminds me a bit of my favorite Kamen Rider ever, Kitaoka Shuichi, whose desire to win the Rider Battle in Ryuki so he can live forever is presented originally as something fundamentally self-serving… and it is, of course, but there’s a lot more to it than that, and there is a very good reason behind it which, while not actually making him a better man, makes him quite sympathetic. And I’ll just stop now, because Super Lawyer is not the point of the post. I just brought it up because even though Kitaoka and Date could not be more different in a lot of way, the shared quality of having a hidden motivation for behavior which can be categorized as amoral is something I find intriguing about both.

Before his current gig as Birth, he was “abroad” but is just in Japan to earn money. In episode 20, he tells Chiyoko that he wasn’t abroad travelling, he was working all over the world. And in episode 17, there is a close up shot of his pants where you can see a badge which appears to be from a “detention center” in the US. So he was either a detainee, or maybe a guard? There’s a certain military air about him, so it could be either, I think. And I have no idea if this has been revisited or not, so there you go. ← Post-subbed 24, apparently way off!

I’ll admit that I wasn’t too into 17-18’s story about the girl that was in love with her kendo instructor, which is probably why I fell so behind in the series in the first place. The three things I took away from it are that Eiji is clueless about romance, and also the revelation Date made about his own motivations, when he told the girl that if she wanted to ruin her instructor’s wedding she should do it with her own hands. He went on to describe himself as a “slave to desire” (referencing his desire to get a hundred million yen), but that his two rules were to never get other people involved in his own agenda, and to never do something to “make yourself cry”. So what I get from that is basically to be honest about yourself and your own desires, to own who you are, and to take responsibility for your own destiny. Like I said, he’s a pragmatist above all else, who lives by and answers to his own moral code and no one else’s.

The third thing I took from these two episodes was that he declined agreeing to cooperate with Eiji because he thinks Eiji strikes him as someone who’d make himself cry.

(And yes, the image is actually from episode 20, because this post was going to be about all those episodes, then I changed my mind).