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talkingsoupI've kind of sucked lately at doing reviews, so I figured it was high time to get back in the habit. Especially since this weekend you can expect a very detailed account of The Golden Compass. Very. Detailed.
SPOILER WARNING on all of these.
First and foremost, Avatar had it's kinda-sorta mid-season finale on Friday. The date of its return is still up in the air, though the episodes are written, so they're unaffected by the writer's strike. We're thinking sometime in January. We had Amanda, Michelle, a guy friend of theirs, and Sophia over to watch it, and even Molly, who doesn't usually watch Avatar, joined in.
So this was the Day of Black Sun hour-long episode where the Gaang et. al. invaded the Fire Nation during the eclipse to try and take down the Firelord.
It was the best episode of Avatar I have ever seen.
For one thing, it was nice seeing some old faces. I, for one, missed the Machinist and the swamp guys. And Haru needs to shave that stupid beard. Everyone you could think of showed up to help with the invasion, even Hippo and the Boulder. No Frothers and no Kiyoshi Warriors, though.
The invasion itself was abso-fucking-lutely brilliant because they took so much from history and real battles and such. The Gates of Azulan pretty much are the Gates of Constantinople, with the nets and the fire. The use of submarines--yes, submarines--hearkens back to WWII and before that even, with the first (and crappy) submarine used, I believe, in the Civil War. The weapons of war were just in general so awesome. You gotta love the caterpillar tanks. Sa-weet. Even on the Fire Nation's side--I've been waiting for those war balloons to come back since the first season, and the giant zeppelins are so fucking scary (scary-AWESOME, that is). And Appa was fully armored, which was wonderful in its own way.
The animation and action was as brilliant as you could expect it to be from this show. The fight scenes were incredible. The whole episode was fast-paced and intense.
And also, after three seasons of waiting, Aang and Katara finally kissed!! I'm pretty sure our apartment exploded a little with squeeing.
The invasion, unfortunately, was in large part a failure. It wasn't too surprising--we knew since the second season that Azula, Tai Li and Mei all knew that an eclipse was coming and that there would be invasion during that time. The Earth King accidentally told them, thinking they were the Kiyoshi warriors. Azula was prepared for it. While the others were carrying out the invasion, Aang was at the palace city trying to find the Firelord, but the whole city had been emptied. Toph and Sokka went with him to try and find some kind of underground bunker where the Firelord was likely staying. Katara had to stay behind to take care of her injured father.
The trio met Azula, who managed to hold them up until the eclipse was over and the fire benders got their abilities back. Aang was unable to face the Firelord. He, the others, and the youngest fighters agreed to escape to safety on Appa, while Katara's father and the older fighters agreed to surrender. Aang promised to come back.
But! We found out that Suki, and hopefully the other Kiyoshi warriors, are alive and are being held captive by the Fire Nation. Azula is such a bitch.
The best part of the show, however, had to be Zuko.
After all that's happened--three seasons of chasing the Avatar, one season of battling with himself, his betrayal of the Gaang and Iroh at the end of last season, and his overwhelming angst for this whole season because of his decision--Zuko finally, finally realized what he actually wants out of life. He managed to stand up to Ozai (voiced by Mark Hamill and you can't get any more ironic than that), bitched him out him for picking a fight with his own son and for the warlike tendencies of the Fire Nation, and told him that his true allegiance was to his uncle, Iroh. And then--
--finally--
--finally--
Zuko said that he was going to join the Avatar! YES!
Ozai wasn't too happy, of course, and--like daughter, like dad--stalled Zuko by telling him the truth about his mother. It turns out that Zuko's mother killed Fire Lord Azulan so that Ozai wouldn't have to kill Zuko--and for that, she was banished. She's still alive somewhere.
By then Ozai had his firebending back.
It turns out he can actually shoot fucking lightning out of his hands. Actual lightning, not just blue fire, like Azula does.
But Zuko--for the first time since learning it from Iroh--managed to redirect the lightning right back at Ozai and make his escape.
It was the best moment of the entire damn series.
Now Zuko is following Aang and the others, and will probably catch up with them in the next episode. He's gonna have some explaining to do. Katara's not going to forgive him, and neither will Sokka, I think. But Aang might have it in him to trust Zuko. We'll have to see how it goes.
Lastly--while all this invasion stuff was happening, what, oh what, was happening to Iroh?
He was busting out of prison. On his own. Like a one-man army.
That's what you get when you try to cage a dragon.
Last weekend was the first ASIC marathon of the year. Twelve hours. We watched Neon Genesis Evangelion, which is probably one of the most famous animes ever, though I had never seen it. To finish it off, we watched the infamous Eva movie, appropriately titled "The End of Evangelion."
Eva is famous. It was on Adult Swim forever. It's probably the second most well-known mecha anime after the Gundam Wing franchise.
For those of you who don't know, the show is mostly about Shinji, an unassuming fourteen-year-old boy who gets unexpectedly called by his father to join Nerv, an organization dedicated to protecting humanity. Sort of. Nerv's purpose is to fight off the Angels, a race of beings who are...well, not really angels and are generally pretty hostile toward humans, which is putting it mildly. The only way to fight the angels is with the Evangelions (Evas) which are three of your classic anime giant robots. This is the last thing Shinji wants, but his father, Gendo, is a manipulative son-of-a-bitch with a god complex and Shinji gets kind of sucked in.
Other characters include Misato Katsuragi, who is a very awesome and somewhat troubled member of Nerv who pretty much orders the Evas and their pilots and lets Shinji live with her, Rei, an emotionless Eva pilot, Ritsuko, a Nerv scientist who oversees the three supercomputers that sort of run everything, and Asuka, the third pilot who is brash, bipolar and really kind of amazing in how much of an uber-bitch she is.
There are a lot of stories about this show. The big one is that the creator was battling severe depression, which kind of comes out in the show itself. About halfway through the show, the tone and the mood starts to change. It's very subtle at first, in a way that I wouldn't really know how to describe, but then suddenly things do a complete 360. See, the first half of the show is as you would expect it to be--meet the characters, drama, backstory, more drama, a good helping of angst, and plenty of fight scenes. But all this is done the kind of tone you'd expect from this kind of anime--dramatic and serious, but humorous in places and fun.
The show hits a continental shelf halfway through, and from there everything gets deeper, darker, and you start seeing things that are just plain fucked up.
The shift becomes most obvious during "that really bloody episode" which speaks for itself.
Then Shinji's Eva somewhat randomly goes crazy, sort of comes to life and eats one of the Angels. Shinji then proceeds to spend a month dissolved inside the Eva.
Then it comes out that Nerv has the first Angel, Adam, crucified down in their basement. Why? Who the fuck knows.
The members of the Seele committee who apparently oversee Nerv turn into giant cinderblocks. Still don't know why.
Misato has a somewhat out of character and completely random breakdown that lasts a few minutes.
Asuka goes insane.
It turns out there's bunches of Rei floating in orange juice.
Ritsuko goes insane and kills all the extra Reis. We learn that Rei is a clone of Gendo's dead wife.
That crucified Angel? Lol, not Adam. It's actually Lilith.
Shinji has bouts of hysteria and craziness.
A new pilot comes on the scene, turns out to be an Angel, and the show briefly turns into shounen-ai.
Lots and lots of blood and guts and violence and totally random, fucked-up shit.
And then, well, I don't know how the show originally ended. Apparently the show ran out of money and had to piece together everything into the last two episodes. It wasn't what the creator wanted at all, so after the fact they decided to create the movie, End of Eva. We watched that instead.
Now I understand why people have a hard time describing End of Eva. It defies description. I'm not sure anyone knows exactly what the fuck happened in that movie.
It starts right where the show left off (before the original ending). Seele invades Nerv and starts to kill everyone. Asuka goes even more insane and fights off a whole shitload of evil Evas--only to have them eat her (inside her own Eva) rather messily. Shinji tries to fight and fails epicly. Rei bites off Gendo's hand (in which is living the real Adam) using, apparently, only her organs. She unites with Lilith and becomes a giant glowing woman, which unites with those Evas Asuka was fighting, and with Shinji who has turned into a giant spear (????) and they proceed to turn the entire world into primordial soup. Gendo and Seele seem pretty pleased with this idea. Shinji has to decide whether the human race is going to live or die.
And no, I don't know what he decides. As far as I know, at the end the world was still soup. Shinji and Asuka (mysteriously undeadified) are lying on a beach and Shinji proceeds to half-heartedly strangle her. Meanwhile Rei's giant face has fallen to the ground off in the distance. And the movie ends.
I could actually follow what was happening through the invasion parts, but then it pretty much just turned into Cat Soup. Maybe not quite that extreme. It was a little less weird than Cat Soup, but it made about as much sense. There were random live action shots and random moments of Shinji's inner dialogue (actually lots and lots and lots of such moments...minutes...hours?). It was all very Freudian and deep and psychological and made no sense whatsoever.
I liked the show and the movie well enough, I suppose. Not to the point that I'd buy them or watch them again, but they were interesting, and I did like the fight scenes. Plus now I can say I've seen them.
And I do have to hand it to Eva. It's one of the few shounen shows that has quite a few strong women. I liked Asuka and I loved Misato, who was probably the only consistently sane person on the show, despite her two-minute breakdown.
*sigh* Eva.
And last but not least, the Heroes kinds-sorta-maybe season finale.
This episode sucked. There were only a handful of moments that even made it bearable.
We left off with Hiro fighting Peter and Adam, Claire about to reveal the Heroes to the world, and Mohinder about to meet up with Sylar and Maya.
Peter knocks Hiro out and Adam, surprised to see Hiro, takes his sword. Peter continues to be very stupid and keeps going with Adam.
West, in his worst display of acting yet, tries to convince Claire not to talk. Meanwhile, Noah is still in the Company's clutches, and Elle is starting to question her father (Bob)'s motives. Noah has a brilliant few moments when he tells Elle just what her father did to her.
Then Noah, in a completely out of character move, agrees to play lapdog to the Company, goes to tell his family that, guess what, I'm alive! (it was the most stilted reunion I've ever seen) and that Claire can't tell anyone about the Heroes or the Company, because then the Company will seek retribution. WHAT? NO. If he was worried about the Company's retribution, he wouldn't have left them in the first place. Now he's working for them again--for no real reason. I can understand that Noah realizes that people knowing about the Heroes would be a bad idea--Claire should understand it too, but apparently she's stupid now--but, just, NO. Nothing could make him go back to the Company.
Meanwhile, Nikki and Micah go after Monica to try and rescue her. Monica is tied up in a building that's about to be set on fire--kind of an extreme reaction, I think--and Micah is tracking her using his cell phone.
Mohinder meets with Sylar and Maya, who are in his apartment--why the FUCK didn't he move?--and tries to convince Maya that Sylar is evil. When Mohinder realizes that Sylar is powerless, he tries to attack him, but Sylar pulls a gun. It's only then that Maya notices that something, yanno, might be a little off about Sylar. She freaks out, almost kills everyone, but calms down and Sylar brings them all to Mohinder's lab so Mohinder can cure him. Mohinder discovers that Sylar has the same strain of the virus that Nikki has. Maya tells Molly her sob story and Molly offers to find Alejandro. Maya then finds out, of course, that Alejandro has been killed, and instead of beating the shit out of Sylar or otherwise being badass, she proceeds to yell at him, only to be shot and then brought back to life by Claire's blood.
Ell, who has been watching the whole time on a hidden camera, shows up and fights off Sylar, who of course escapes, injects himself with the cure, and is fine.
Nathan and Matt, meanwhile, get Angela out of prison and ask her about all the stuff their group was doing. They somehow know that Victoria Pratt has been killed, which isn't much of a plot hole, though an explanation would have been nice. They also somehow know that Peter and Adam have gone to Odessa, and Angela tells Matt that if she has to, they should kill Peter. She really doesn't seem to like her children much.
Micah and Nikki reach the warehouse where Monica is. Nikki, in her first display of badassery in too long, kicks the shit out of the kid who kidnapped Monica, then runs into the burning building to save Monica before heroically dying when the building, randomly, explodes. Not every burning building explodes, you know. And they could not have possibly created a more predictable outcome for that whole thing. It's just ridiculous.
Back in Texas, Peter and Adam advance through Primatech, Peter rips a door off, and Hiro shows up again, only to be knocked unconscious again by Peter. Adam tells Peter to kill Hiro. Peter, like a good doggy, agrees and starts to force-strangle Hiro. At this point the out-of-character moments in the show had become too much to count. Matt comes in and rescues Hiro and Matt and Peter proceed to shoot mind bullets at each other. Peter blasts Matt away, and then Nathan shows up, and Peter finally comes to his fucking senses. Hiro has awakened and goes in to stop Adam, but Adam already has the virus. Hiro grabs Adam and disappears with him. Adam drops the virus, and Peter runs in and catches it just in time. Then he explodes it with his nuclear abilities.
Except, then it was a bit ambiguous. The virus seemed to suddenly absorb itself into his hand, and I'm not sure if we're to interpret it as being, now Peter is Typhoid Peter, or if it just looked like the virus was absorbing itself. But if the former is the case and Peter now has the virus, okay, that makes no sense WHATSOEVER since there is not a SINGLE LIVING THING that can survive a nuclear explosion, no matter how small. And I don't fucking want to hear it about cockroaches--roaches can survive the radiation, not the blast. NOTHING can survive those temperatures. There's a reason that Claire and Nathan had their skin melting off those times.
It ends with Nathan deciding to go public about people with abilities. There's a ridiculously corny montage of past season events. As Nathan is about to admit that he can fly, he gets shot in the chest four times and dies.
It was the one of only two unexpected moments in the show, and the only truly emotional one. I'm pretty sure Noah was the shooter.
And again, Angela Petrelli shows her amazing love for her children by saying it needed to be done for the greater good. I thought she was past all that greater good bullshit?
The only other unexpected moment was what Hiro did to Adam. And this, despite evidence to the contrary, I don't find to really be out of character. Pretty much, Hiro stuck Adam in a coffin and buried him alive. Talk about retribution. I have to admit I kind of liked this, since it shows us a side of Hiro we very rarely see.
Oh, and apparently Sylar is Popeye.
And apparently Caitlin, the poor Irish girl Peter left in the future, has been completely forgotten.
I'm so disappointed in this show. It has none of the intensity, the awesomeness, the emotionality or the depth that it did in the first season. It's gone the way of Lost, only faster and to a greater degree. At least Lost still has its mysteries and one or two interesting characters. The only character I still have any real interest in on this show is Hiro. Others are likable enough, but they've been completely trampled this season. And the finale just kind of summed it up, how little sense this season made, how terrible they've been to their characters, and how it really is possible to suck all the fun and awesomeness out of a show about people with superpowers.
I'll keep watching if it comes back in Spring, but I don't have any great hopes.
Long entry.
In the meantime, I'm thinking of writing a letter of recommendation for my professor's tenure portfolio. Just need to figure out how exactly I go about doing that. And I'm pretty sure that I'm going to exchange my Soc major for a minor. Not entirely because of what's been going on with Margo, though it was a catalyst--but frankly, if I switch to a minor, it frees me up to take classes I actually want to take. There are so many awesome-looking classes, but I wouldn't be able to take any of them because I still need a shitload of credits for my major. I would already have had to take a summer class. I think Ithaca College has sucked enough money from my poor parents.
And in other news, Motley Crew is on a downhill slope toward the end. FINALLY.
SPOILER WARNING on all of these.
First and foremost, Avatar had it's kinda-sorta mid-season finale on Friday. The date of its return is still up in the air, though the episodes are written, so they're unaffected by the writer's strike. We're thinking sometime in January. We had Amanda, Michelle, a guy friend of theirs, and Sophia over to watch it, and even Molly, who doesn't usually watch Avatar, joined in.
So this was the Day of Black Sun hour-long episode where the Gaang et. al. invaded the Fire Nation during the eclipse to try and take down the Firelord.
It was the best episode of Avatar I have ever seen.
For one thing, it was nice seeing some old faces. I, for one, missed the Machinist and the swamp guys. And Haru needs to shave that stupid beard. Everyone you could think of showed up to help with the invasion, even Hippo and the Boulder. No Frothers and no Kiyoshi Warriors, though.
The invasion itself was abso-fucking-lutely brilliant because they took so much from history and real battles and such. The Gates of Azulan pretty much are the Gates of Constantinople, with the nets and the fire. The use of submarines--yes, submarines--hearkens back to WWII and before that even, with the first (and crappy) submarine used, I believe, in the Civil War. The weapons of war were just in general so awesome. You gotta love the caterpillar tanks. Sa-weet. Even on the Fire Nation's side--I've been waiting for those war balloons to come back since the first season, and the giant zeppelins are so fucking scary (scary-AWESOME, that is). And Appa was fully armored, which was wonderful in its own way.
The animation and action was as brilliant as you could expect it to be from this show. The fight scenes were incredible. The whole episode was fast-paced and intense.
And also, after three seasons of waiting, Aang and Katara finally kissed!! I'm pretty sure our apartment exploded a little with squeeing.
The invasion, unfortunately, was in large part a failure. It wasn't too surprising--we knew since the second season that Azula, Tai Li and Mei all knew that an eclipse was coming and that there would be invasion during that time. The Earth King accidentally told them, thinking they were the Kiyoshi warriors. Azula was prepared for it. While the others were carrying out the invasion, Aang was at the palace city trying to find the Firelord, but the whole city had been emptied. Toph and Sokka went with him to try and find some kind of underground bunker where the Firelord was likely staying. Katara had to stay behind to take care of her injured father.
The trio met Azula, who managed to hold them up until the eclipse was over and the fire benders got their abilities back. Aang was unable to face the Firelord. He, the others, and the youngest fighters agreed to escape to safety on Appa, while Katara's father and the older fighters agreed to surrender. Aang promised to come back.
But! We found out that Suki, and hopefully the other Kiyoshi warriors, are alive and are being held captive by the Fire Nation. Azula is such a bitch.
The best part of the show, however, had to be Zuko.
After all that's happened--three seasons of chasing the Avatar, one season of battling with himself, his betrayal of the Gaang and Iroh at the end of last season, and his overwhelming angst for this whole season because of his decision--Zuko finally, finally realized what he actually wants out of life. He managed to stand up to Ozai (voiced by Mark Hamill and you can't get any more ironic than that), bitched him out him for picking a fight with his own son and for the warlike tendencies of the Fire Nation, and told him that his true allegiance was to his uncle, Iroh. And then--
--finally--
--finally--
Zuko said that he was going to join the Avatar! YES!
Ozai wasn't too happy, of course, and--like daughter, like dad--stalled Zuko by telling him the truth about his mother. It turns out that Zuko's mother killed Fire Lord Azulan so that Ozai wouldn't have to kill Zuko--and for that, she was banished. She's still alive somewhere.
By then Ozai had his firebending back.
It turns out he can actually shoot fucking lightning out of his hands. Actual lightning, not just blue fire, like Azula does.
But Zuko--for the first time since learning it from Iroh--managed to redirect the lightning right back at Ozai and make his escape.
It was the best moment of the entire damn series.
Now Zuko is following Aang and the others, and will probably catch up with them in the next episode. He's gonna have some explaining to do. Katara's not going to forgive him, and neither will Sokka, I think. But Aang might have it in him to trust Zuko. We'll have to see how it goes.
Lastly--while all this invasion stuff was happening, what, oh what, was happening to Iroh?
He was busting out of prison. On his own. Like a one-man army.
That's what you get when you try to cage a dragon.
Last weekend was the first ASIC marathon of the year. Twelve hours. We watched Neon Genesis Evangelion, which is probably one of the most famous animes ever, though I had never seen it. To finish it off, we watched the infamous Eva movie, appropriately titled "The End of Evangelion."
Eva is famous. It was on Adult Swim forever. It's probably the second most well-known mecha anime after the Gundam Wing franchise.
For those of you who don't know, the show is mostly about Shinji, an unassuming fourteen-year-old boy who gets unexpectedly called by his father to join Nerv, an organization dedicated to protecting humanity. Sort of. Nerv's purpose is to fight off the Angels, a race of beings who are...well, not really angels and are generally pretty hostile toward humans, which is putting it mildly. The only way to fight the angels is with the Evangelions (Evas) which are three of your classic anime giant robots. This is the last thing Shinji wants, but his father, Gendo, is a manipulative son-of-a-bitch with a god complex and Shinji gets kind of sucked in.
Other characters include Misato Katsuragi, who is a very awesome and somewhat troubled member of Nerv who pretty much orders the Evas and their pilots and lets Shinji live with her, Rei, an emotionless Eva pilot, Ritsuko, a Nerv scientist who oversees the three supercomputers that sort of run everything, and Asuka, the third pilot who is brash, bipolar and really kind of amazing in how much of an uber-bitch she is.
There are a lot of stories about this show. The big one is that the creator was battling severe depression, which kind of comes out in the show itself. About halfway through the show, the tone and the mood starts to change. It's very subtle at first, in a way that I wouldn't really know how to describe, but then suddenly things do a complete 360. See, the first half of the show is as you would expect it to be--meet the characters, drama, backstory, more drama, a good helping of angst, and plenty of fight scenes. But all this is done the kind of tone you'd expect from this kind of anime--dramatic and serious, but humorous in places and fun.
The show hits a continental shelf halfway through, and from there everything gets deeper, darker, and you start seeing things that are just plain fucked up.
The shift becomes most obvious during "that really bloody episode" which speaks for itself.
Then Shinji's Eva somewhat randomly goes crazy, sort of comes to life and eats one of the Angels. Shinji then proceeds to spend a month dissolved inside the Eva.
Then it comes out that Nerv has the first Angel, Adam, crucified down in their basement. Why? Who the fuck knows.
The members of the Seele committee who apparently oversee Nerv turn into giant cinderblocks. Still don't know why.
Misato has a somewhat out of character and completely random breakdown that lasts a few minutes.
Asuka goes insane.
It turns out there's bunches of Rei floating in orange juice.
Ritsuko goes insane and kills all the extra Reis. We learn that Rei is a clone of Gendo's dead wife.
That crucified Angel? Lol, not Adam. It's actually Lilith.
Shinji has bouts of hysteria and craziness.
A new pilot comes on the scene, turns out to be an Angel, and the show briefly turns into shounen-ai.
Lots and lots of blood and guts and violence and totally random, fucked-up shit.
And then, well, I don't know how the show originally ended. Apparently the show ran out of money and had to piece together everything into the last two episodes. It wasn't what the creator wanted at all, so after the fact they decided to create the movie, End of Eva. We watched that instead.
Now I understand why people have a hard time describing End of Eva. It defies description. I'm not sure anyone knows exactly what the fuck happened in that movie.
It starts right where the show left off (before the original ending). Seele invades Nerv and starts to kill everyone. Asuka goes even more insane and fights off a whole shitload of evil Evas--only to have them eat her (inside her own Eva) rather messily. Shinji tries to fight and fails epicly. Rei bites off Gendo's hand (in which is living the real Adam) using, apparently, only her organs. She unites with Lilith and becomes a giant glowing woman, which unites with those Evas Asuka was fighting, and with Shinji who has turned into a giant spear (????) and they proceed to turn the entire world into primordial soup. Gendo and Seele seem pretty pleased with this idea. Shinji has to decide whether the human race is going to live or die.
And no, I don't know what he decides. As far as I know, at the end the world was still soup. Shinji and Asuka (mysteriously undeadified) are lying on a beach and Shinji proceeds to half-heartedly strangle her. Meanwhile Rei's giant face has fallen to the ground off in the distance. And the movie ends.
I could actually follow what was happening through the invasion parts, but then it pretty much just turned into Cat Soup. Maybe not quite that extreme. It was a little less weird than Cat Soup, but it made about as much sense. There were random live action shots and random moments of Shinji's inner dialogue (actually lots and lots and lots of such moments...minutes...hours?). It was all very Freudian and deep and psychological and made no sense whatsoever.
I liked the show and the movie well enough, I suppose. Not to the point that I'd buy them or watch them again, but they were interesting, and I did like the fight scenes. Plus now I can say I've seen them.
And I do have to hand it to Eva. It's one of the few shounen shows that has quite a few strong women. I liked Asuka and I loved Misato, who was probably the only consistently sane person on the show, despite her two-minute breakdown.
*sigh* Eva.
And last but not least, the Heroes kinds-sorta-maybe season finale.
This episode sucked. There were only a handful of moments that even made it bearable.
We left off with Hiro fighting Peter and Adam, Claire about to reveal the Heroes to the world, and Mohinder about to meet up with Sylar and Maya.
Peter knocks Hiro out and Adam, surprised to see Hiro, takes his sword. Peter continues to be very stupid and keeps going with Adam.
West, in his worst display of acting yet, tries to convince Claire not to talk. Meanwhile, Noah is still in the Company's clutches, and Elle is starting to question her father (Bob)'s motives. Noah has a brilliant few moments when he tells Elle just what her father did to her.
Then Noah, in a completely out of character move, agrees to play lapdog to the Company, goes to tell his family that, guess what, I'm alive! (it was the most stilted reunion I've ever seen) and that Claire can't tell anyone about the Heroes or the Company, because then the Company will seek retribution. WHAT? NO. If he was worried about the Company's retribution, he wouldn't have left them in the first place. Now he's working for them again--for no real reason. I can understand that Noah realizes that people knowing about the Heroes would be a bad idea--Claire should understand it too, but apparently she's stupid now--but, just, NO. Nothing could make him go back to the Company.
Meanwhile, Nikki and Micah go after Monica to try and rescue her. Monica is tied up in a building that's about to be set on fire--kind of an extreme reaction, I think--and Micah is tracking her using his cell phone.
Mohinder meets with Sylar and Maya, who are in his apartment--why the FUCK didn't he move?--and tries to convince Maya that Sylar is evil. When Mohinder realizes that Sylar is powerless, he tries to attack him, but Sylar pulls a gun. It's only then that Maya notices that something, yanno, might be a little off about Sylar. She freaks out, almost kills everyone, but calms down and Sylar brings them all to Mohinder's lab so Mohinder can cure him. Mohinder discovers that Sylar has the same strain of the virus that Nikki has. Maya tells Molly her sob story and Molly offers to find Alejandro. Maya then finds out, of course, that Alejandro has been killed, and instead of beating the shit out of Sylar or otherwise being badass, she proceeds to yell at him, only to be shot and then brought back to life by Claire's blood.
Ell, who has been watching the whole time on a hidden camera, shows up and fights off Sylar, who of course escapes, injects himself with the cure, and is fine.
Nathan and Matt, meanwhile, get Angela out of prison and ask her about all the stuff their group was doing. They somehow know that Victoria Pratt has been killed, which isn't much of a plot hole, though an explanation would have been nice. They also somehow know that Peter and Adam have gone to Odessa, and Angela tells Matt that if she has to, they should kill Peter. She really doesn't seem to like her children much.
Micah and Nikki reach the warehouse where Monica is. Nikki, in her first display of badassery in too long, kicks the shit out of the kid who kidnapped Monica, then runs into the burning building to save Monica before heroically dying when the building, randomly, explodes. Not every burning building explodes, you know. And they could not have possibly created a more predictable outcome for that whole thing. It's just ridiculous.
Back in Texas, Peter and Adam advance through Primatech, Peter rips a door off, and Hiro shows up again, only to be knocked unconscious again by Peter. Adam tells Peter to kill Hiro. Peter, like a good doggy, agrees and starts to force-strangle Hiro. At this point the out-of-character moments in the show had become too much to count. Matt comes in and rescues Hiro and Matt and Peter proceed to shoot mind bullets at each other. Peter blasts Matt away, and then Nathan shows up, and Peter finally comes to his fucking senses. Hiro has awakened and goes in to stop Adam, but Adam already has the virus. Hiro grabs Adam and disappears with him. Adam drops the virus, and Peter runs in and catches it just in time. Then he explodes it with his nuclear abilities.
Except, then it was a bit ambiguous. The virus seemed to suddenly absorb itself into his hand, and I'm not sure if we're to interpret it as being, now Peter is Typhoid Peter, or if it just looked like the virus was absorbing itself. But if the former is the case and Peter now has the virus, okay, that makes no sense WHATSOEVER since there is not a SINGLE LIVING THING that can survive a nuclear explosion, no matter how small. And I don't fucking want to hear it about cockroaches--roaches can survive the radiation, not the blast. NOTHING can survive those temperatures. There's a reason that Claire and Nathan had their skin melting off those times.
It ends with Nathan deciding to go public about people with abilities. There's a ridiculously corny montage of past season events. As Nathan is about to admit that he can fly, he gets shot in the chest four times and dies.
It was the one of only two unexpected moments in the show, and the only truly emotional one. I'm pretty sure Noah was the shooter.
And again, Angela Petrelli shows her amazing love for her children by saying it needed to be done for the greater good. I thought she was past all that greater good bullshit?
The only other unexpected moment was what Hiro did to Adam. And this, despite evidence to the contrary, I don't find to really be out of character. Pretty much, Hiro stuck Adam in a coffin and buried him alive. Talk about retribution. I have to admit I kind of liked this, since it shows us a side of Hiro we very rarely see.
Oh, and apparently Sylar is Popeye.
And apparently Caitlin, the poor Irish girl Peter left in the future, has been completely forgotten.
I'm so disappointed in this show. It has none of the intensity, the awesomeness, the emotionality or the depth that it did in the first season. It's gone the way of Lost, only faster and to a greater degree. At least Lost still has its mysteries and one or two interesting characters. The only character I still have any real interest in on this show is Hiro. Others are likable enough, but they've been completely trampled this season. And the finale just kind of summed it up, how little sense this season made, how terrible they've been to their characters, and how it really is possible to suck all the fun and awesomeness out of a show about people with superpowers.
I'll keep watching if it comes back in Spring, but I don't have any great hopes.
Long entry.
In the meantime, I'm thinking of writing a letter of recommendation for my professor's tenure portfolio. Just need to figure out how exactly I go about doing that. And I'm pretty sure that I'm going to exchange my Soc major for a minor. Not entirely because of what's been going on with Margo, though it was a catalyst--but frankly, if I switch to a minor, it frees me up to take classes I actually want to take. There are so many awesome-looking classes, but I wouldn't be able to take any of them because I still need a shitload of credits for my major. I would already have had to take a summer class. I think Ithaca College has sucked enough money from my poor parents.
And in other news, Motley Crew is on a downhill slope toward the end. FINALLY.
