I suppose someone’s going to have to talk about this, aren’t they?

Personally, I can get neither excited nor outraged about this. DC, in response to what they have to believe to be popular demand for this, is publishing a prequel that will be subject to more scrutiny than the ‘Gone With the Wind’ sequel. They’ve lined up some pretty decent talent for this, although personally if I was any one of these writers or artists I wouldn’t take this job for love nor money. A good chunk of your potential audience has written you off as a soulless hack simply for the act of saying “yes”, especially since Moore himself has been on record for the last 27 years as saying he does not want other writers handling the characters. Even if they’re persuaded to buy the series, they’re going to be comparing you to the towering shadow that Moore and Gibbons cast over the comic-book landscape since 1985. If I thought I was good enough to write or draw something that could be favorably compared to ‘Watchmen’, you can bet I wouldn’t want to make it an actual prequel to ‘Watchmen’.

But more than that, I wonder, is there really a demand for this to begin with? Even if Moore could be persuaded to return for a prequel (which, let’s face it, was never going to happen…and frankly, I think this marks the point where DC has officially given up on seeking a rapprochement with Moore…which at least means we should finally see those comic-book based ‘Watchmen’ figures…) …even if Gibbons would return to work with Moore…is this actually necessary? Do we need (as Moore himself put it) to see a “Moby-Dick” prequel, or tales about what happened to Nick after the end of ‘The Great Gatsby’? For some reason, stories told in comics seem to have a momentum driving them to sequels that we don’t see in other media. (Arguably, movies fall victim to the same pressures, but it seems to be only the “light” films that give in. ‘Transformers’ gets a sequel, but nobody’s out there demanding we see a ‘Silent Running 2′.)

I think that to some extent, comics fans been conditioned to see comic books as a continuing story, despite decades of efforts to break away from the notion. The idea of a “final issue” is one we’ve never gotten truly used to, because the vast majority of comic book fans read comics to be immersed in a universe rather than to read a particular story. (Okay, that’s a pretty big statement to make, but I think there’s something to it. Comic book fans want to enter the Marvel or DC universe for a while, to vicariously live in a world of superheroes and excitement and strangeness, and so the individual stories aren’t as important.) As a result, when someone does put out a sequel or a prequel to a big story, the simple desire to return to that universe is enough to overcome even knowing skepticism about a story’s prospects.

Take ‘The Dark Knight Strikes Again’, probably the other best-known return to the other best-known 80s story. Miller was already beginning to be considered as “past his prime”, and many people doubted he could recapture the lightning in a bottle that was the original mini-series. The promotional artwork and story synopses sounded like fan-fiction based on a classic, and nobody really seemed to have a compelling rationale for the project beyond the simple mercenary belief that it would sell. And yet, sell it did. I personally bought the whole series. I thought the first issue was shoddy and embarrassing, and I still bought the next two. The pull of “what happens next?” was just that strong.

I think that DC believes that the same rationale will work again. They look at comics fans and see people so interested in the Watchmen universe that they don’t care about what’s going to be on those pages in particular; they just want to go back to that world for a little bit longer and live there. I don’t have any particular investment one way or another; I don’t hope they fail, but I don’t wish them success either. All I do have is two words regarding people who tried to recapture the spirit of a cult classic with different creators, hoping that people’s affection for the original would draw them back to a sequel:

“S. Darko”.

I signed up for Netflix last week and they have tons of Star Trek and dinosaur shows.  I am at peace.

I decided to go through the Star Trek: Voyager episode listings and found one I don’t remember ever seeing, which I guess is appropriate because it’s called “Unforgettable,” and it’s about the crew meeting an alien woman who claims they can’t remember meeting her before.  It’s a weird thing for me to realize there’s a Star Trek episode I’ve never seen before, because I miss the style and format of the TV shows and this is as close as I’m going to get to bringing it back.

Unfortunately this episode sucks turds.

The concept is not so bad.  Kellin is a Ramuran bounty hunter who visited the ship a month ago to recover a fugitive, and after she left the crew were made to forget about her in the interest of Ramuran security.  Only trouble is that Kellin fell in love with Commander Chakotay, so now she has fled her society (the same high crime the earlier fugitive had committed) to seek asylum on Voyager.  She’s there to continue her romance with Chakotay, but this just makes Chuckles all the more suspicious of her story.  (Given Chakotay’s history with women I don’t blame him.)

The main problem is how they explain this memory-erasing stuff.  Voyager‘s sensors can barely detect a Ramuran ship, even when it’s heavily damaged, and its transporters can only get a lock on Kellin for about two seconds at a time.   (The transporter works fine on her when Chakotay goes down there and holds her in his arms, so I suppose it works best when it’s feeling sentimental.)  The Doctor can scan her with his medical tricorder, but the readings disappear from the computer almost as soon as he takes them.  Fortunately, the Doctor can diagnose her injuries with a simple visual analysis.  Mind you, the Doctor is a tricorder (albeit an overgrown, huffy one), so his eyes shouldn’t work any better than his instruments.

Kellin explains that non-Ramurans are unable to form long-term memories of their experiences with Ramurans–once she left, the crew forgot about her within hours.  Let me pull up the transcript:

CHAKOTAY: Is this done through technology? Telepathy?
KELLIN: It’s a factor of our biology. You see, our bodies produce a sort of pheromone which blocks the long-term memory engrams of others.
CHAKOTAY: Is that why the tricorder can’t scan you? Why we couldn’t get a transporter lock?
KELLIN: We’re impervious to those sort of devices.

I want to point out here that Chakotay is asking if a pheromone could interfere with the ship’s sensor readings.  You might think this line would be delivered with sarcasm: “So your scent kept us from detecting your life signs through the vacuum of space?”  But no, Robert Beltran is deadly earnest when he asks these questions–he’s concerned about the well being of their new guest and the mystery threatening his ship, and he wants to learn everything he can, so he just wants to be sure he knows what this pheromone can do.

None of this, of course, explains why the crew can’t remember talking to each other about Kellin.  For example, B’Elanna doesn’t appear in this episode, so presumably she’s down in engineering the whole time and only hears about all of this secondhand.  Maybe the idea is that Kellin is sweating all over any place she goes, so once she visits the mess hall the whole crew will inevitably be contaminated.  I don’t know.

Does the pheromone erase all short-term memories that occurred during Kellin’s presence?  Does the crew not remember doing anything at all that happened while she was aboard?  Or do they remember everything except that this nice lady was standing around the whole time?  I mean, let’s face it, Chakotay had sex with her.  When he recalls the events of that evening, is it just a blank or does he remember jumping on top of empty space and having an awesome jerkoff session?  Let’s say he gloated about it the next morning to Paris and Kim.  I wonder how they remember it after this episode is over.  “What’s up, broskis, guess who played with himself all night long!”

I don’t want to seem like I’m nitpicking the central conceit of a sci-fi story.  I mean, I accept that these people eat and breathe, and other science facts, so I’m perfectly willing to believe there are mindwiping aliens.  If Kellin hadn’t bothered to explain it, or muttered something about chroniton fields, I would have been fine with it.  But the explanation given is profoundly stupid.

I came up with a better setup for the premise in about a minute.  Goes like this: The Ramuran security force is armed with memory-wipey devices like in Men In Black, and computer viruses for purging alien records.  Because they’re so secretive and xenophobic, operatives like Kellin are allowed to interact with outsiders but are required to destroy their memories and records of the interaction.  (There was a Next Generation episode like this, and it worked better than this one.)  If my idea sounds familiar then it’s because you watched this episode, since the Ramurans do have flashy-things and computer viruses.  Which means the whole pheromone business is totally superfluous; it literally adds nothing to the story except plot holes and a reassurance that the people writing Star Trek: Voyager did not give a shit.

At the end, when Kellin has had her memory wiped and recants her request of asylum, Chakotay is left heartbroken and determined to make sure at least one of them remembers their romance.  So we see him in the mess hall recording a personal log…with pen and paper, so the computer virus can’t get it.  This is at once brilliant–ha ha, those aliens didn’t count on that!–and absurd–why didn’t the aliens think of that, and why didn’t you think of it the first time she left?  Neelix goes out of his way to refer to “those ancient writing implements,” like some eight-year-old who doesn’t think he needs to learn cursive because he has an iPad.  But I have run out of invective, because Voyager has taken me to the limit.

Next time, Neelix, next time.

Recently, Rob Shearman and Toby Hadoke embarked on a marathon project, the kind of thing that is only really ambitious for Doctor Who fans: They agreed to watch the entire series. It’s amazing to think about, really; what would be the baseline for fans of most other science-fiction/fantasy show, “Have you seen every episode?”, is considered to be the mark of utter devotion to Doctor Who fans. They’re actually writing a three-book series about their epic re-watch, “Running Through Corridors” (full disclosure: I’ve hung out at cons with Lars Pearson and Christa Dickson, and they’re really nice people and I enjoy plugging their stuff.)

But it’s more complicated even than that. Because if you read “Running Through Corridors”, you’ll notice that they don’t actually watch every episode. They can’t. They listen to audio recordings, they look at still photographs that another devoted fan has formed into a sort of slideshow, and occasionally they’ll view short clips, but for 108 of the episodes they write about in Volume 1, no recordings exist. Think about this for a moment. If you were to define a “true Doctor Who fan” as someone who has actually seen every single episode, they would have to be fifty years old at a minimum (and older, if you want them to have coherent memories of the missing episodes.)

It’s hard, I suspect, for fans of other shows to really wrap their heads around this. Sure, ‘Firefly’ or ‘Star Trek’ gets canceled (frequently, in the case of the latter…) but they can console themselves by watching and rewatching the old stories, creating a shared experience based on the show throughout their fandom. While Doctor Who fans…Doctor Who fandom is generational. Older fans share fond memories of stories younger fans cannot, by definition, experience, and must discuss solely based on received wisdom. (It was even worse in the pre-video days. ‘Star Trek’ might have been endlessly re-run, but there were many Doctor Who stories that were not seen for decades due to a lack of rebroadcasting. Even the stories that the BBC saved, they didn’t decide to show again until home video made it a lucrative moneyspinner for them.)

Which is why Doctor Who fans experience an unprecedented excitement when, as was the case today, new episodes get discovered. It’s not just that there’s more Doctor Who for us to watch; as mentioned, it would take a solid year of two-a-day watching to get through the whole series, and probably several thousand dollars of financial outlay to buy them all. (To say nothing of the books, the audios, the films…I’m not sure how long it would take you to watch “all of Doctor Who”, but suffice it to say we’ve never been short of it.) It’s not even the sense of joy that something we consider to be part of the world’s cultural heritage has been restored. I don’t hold any illusions that Doctor Who is high art, even though I do consider it to be significant and worthy of preservation.

It’s the sense of discovery. For decades, all we’ve ever experienced of ‘Galaxy Four’, visually, is what other people have told us; fans who’ve described it, writers who’ve novelized it, reviews that have discussed it. Most of us don’t even know what the Rills or Chumblies look like; only a couple of still photos exist of either of this episode’s principal “monsters”. (Although, not to spoil, the real monster is prejudice!)

It is exciting, to finally get a chance to see for yourself what you’ve only heard about from others your whole life. Of course, it probably won’t live up to those excited, fannish descriptions; what does? (Certainly not ‘Tomb of the Cybermen’.) But it’s the joy of reclaiming some of the series for ourselves, away from the “fan consensus”, that is unique to Doctor Who and one of the reasons why days like today are such an event. An event that seems unlikely to be repeated; the number of attics and cellars containing lost episodes has to be growing smaller by the day, and these discoveries are rarer and rarer each time. This may be the last…but we thought that last time, too.

On thinking about it, I think that part of the fun I have with fandom is coming up with crazy theories.

I don’t mean just crazy speculation. I know some people get a charge out of watching the first two episodes of Season Six and thinking,  “Hmm, I wonder if River Song is going to secretly be a future incarnation of Captain Jack…” But in general, I try not to do that because I become interested enough in my own ideas to prefer them over what the writer inevitably comes up with. (The Doctor should have escaped from the Pandorica through a time crack that opened up on the inside, dammit!)

What I’m mainly talking about id deliberately subverting textual evidence; I have fun trying to come up with the most contrarian interpretation that the text will support. I think it’s important not to take it too seriously…some of the least pleasant conversations I’ve had as a fan are with people who will insist that the Hinchcliffe Doctor was real and will not let it go. But if you’re willing to enter it in a playful spirit, and if the other person is willing to play along (some of the other least pleasant conversations I’ve ever had are with people who get really pissed off by suggestions that Boba Fett was anything other than a total badass and will cite obscure passages from the Star Wars Cookbook to support their contentions…) it can be a lot of fun.

I’m sure people who regularly read this blog, and who can distinguish me from MGK, will know about some of the crazy theories I’ve talked about (the aliens in ‘Aliens’ are sentient and just don’t have a whole lot of empathy for human beings, the Jedi are ruthless sociopaths who hold the Republic in a subtle-yet-inescapable grip and Luke “wins” by rejecting both philosophies.) But I’d like to hear some of yours. So, in the playful spirit of subversively silly fan theories, go ahead and propose your own in the comments!

(OK, one more of mine: At some point in the far future of the Daleks’ own timeline, they are reduced to a single settlement that is left to survive as nothing more than a “nature park”, a sop to the various races that didn’t want to commit genocide even against the mortal foes of every other life form in the universe. This settlement contains the last, degenerate, pathetic remnants of the Dalek race, guarded by Thals for so long that both sides forget that a larger universe even exists. And it’s this last Dalek city, this final tattered refuge of the once-terrifying Dalek species, that William Hartnell’s Doctor visits in the very first Dalek story. The Doctor’s first encounter with the Daleks is actually the last story from their point of view.)

When ‘The Dark Knight’ came out, I confess that I did not have tremendously high hopes. Not because of Heath Ledger as the Joker or anything I’d heard about the production, but simply because I had yet to see a live-action Batman movie I actually liked after six tries (I liked the ’89 Batman when it came out, but it hasn’t aged well for me.) Even ‘Batman Begins’ holds the distinction of being the one Christopher Nolan movie I haven’t been able to really get behind (its messages about violence strike me as extremely confused. “I won’t kill this man because Killing Is Wrong! And to save him, I’m going to blow up the building with the entire League of Shadows still inside it!”)

But ‘The Dark Knight’ worked. It was, finally, the Batman movie I had been looking for. A brilliant Joker story that made the character convincing, terrifying, and absolutely riveting to watch. A deep, heartfelt exploration of human morality as the Joker works on Gotham City in an effort to prove that given the right circumstances, with the proper motivation, anyone and everyone will become a killer…and fails. Or does he? Seeing Harvey Dent finally snap and prove that at least for him, the Joker was right is a cruel, twisted, but ultimately honest exploration of both characters. It’s a great movie from beginning to almost-end.

Because that’s the one problem with ‘The Dark Knight’. The ending makes no goddamn sense. (I’ll explain why after the cut. Spoilers, sweetie!)

For those of you who don’t read my own personal blog (and you’re certainly not obligated to), I recently posted an angry, possibly coherent rant about some people’s belief that Leia appears as a more empowered, feminist character in ‘Empire Strikes Back’ than she does in ‘Star Wars’, despite large amounts of extremely blatant textual evidence to the contrary. (Suffice to say when your reaction to being in a strange, unfamiliar, possibly dangerous situation is, “I’m going to go find a pretty dress and get my hair done, then sit in my room and wait for the menfolk to come back and tell me what’s going on!” …you fail at empowerment.)

And I was discussing the idea with my wife, who is a very smart woman and a feminist, and we were bouncing around the idea of what ‘Empire’ might look like if Leia was actually treated like the strong, fearless, intelligent woman she was in the original ‘Star Wars’, rather than the Ice Princess Who Just Needs A Big Strong Man To Tell Her What To Do in ‘Empire’. And she suggested I blog about it. The rules: Change the actual plot as little as possible, while having Leia do things that an actual well-written, well-developed female character would do as opposed to a whiny damsel in distress.

First off, the sexual banter between Han and Leia would change. Less of the Slap Slap Kiss bullshit that fans have been conditioned to believe is an actual romantic relationship by decades of seeing women suddenly go gooey in films over guys who have been total assholes to them, and more actual, um…banter. Instead of telling Han she doesn’t like him because A Woman Doesn’t Know Her Own Mind and Needs a Man To Show Her Who She’s Interested In By Forcibly Sexing Her Up…(the classic “AWDKHOMANAMTSHWSIIBFSHU” trope…) Leia knows perfectly well that she’s attracted to Han, but she’s also a little annoyed that he knows that she knows and that he’s acting more than a little smug about it. So she flirts with him in a way that puts him just a little off-balance, because Han’s the kind of cocky guy who needs to be put off-balance in at least one area of his life because it tempers his exuberant confidence. Han, for his part, is playing along because he knows Leia is worth it and he’s pretty sure it’s just an act. (Pretty sure.)

From there, we cruise through to the first major “Leia gets to hold the Idiot Ball because she’s a woman” moment, the escape from Hoth. In the film, Han realizes that Leia has stayed too long and is in danger, he informs the Rebel command that he’ll be taking her off planet, and he practically carries her off over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Leia is portrayed as passive, whiny, and naive, while Han gets to demonstrate his superior judgment and discusses with a MAN what to do about this whole “woman” situation while Leia gets no input at all.

In the revised version, Leia stays longer deliberately. She risks her own life to make sure that the Ion Cannon stays operational until the last transport has left, then heads for the Falcon’s hangar. Han is shocked to find her still on-planet, but she explains that she had a plan all along: hitch a ride on the Falcon. “But I told you I was leaving five hours ago!” he said. “You also said you had one last minor repair to the Falcon,” she responds. “I figured you’d still be here when it was time for me to leave.”

At that point, things go roughly the way they do in the film for a while, with one key difference: Leia operates the gun turrets while Han and Chewie fly/fix the ship. Because as we saw in the first movie, there is a turret that can be operated independently of the cockpit, and Leia isn’t the kind of person to sit passively by and watch other people do the rescuing when she can pick up a gun and start shooting. She might not be as good of a shot as Han or Luke, but she can at least make the Imperial pilots nervous. (Oh, and that also means Leia’s primary role during this section of the movie isn’t to sit there whining about each decision Han makes, only to be proved wrong by his manly manliness that manfully mans up at every turn.)

Jump ahead past the kiss (which would still happen, although again, without the “Oh, I don’t like scoundrels like you,” “Sure you do, you just don’t know it yet. Once I commit sexual assault against you, you’ll realize you love me!” “Oh, hey! I guess I do!” bullshit) to Bespin and Lando. Here, instead of spending all her time changing outfits and getting her hair done, Leia decides to ingratiate herself to Lando using her diplomatic skills, and see if she can’t get a few strings pulled to get a message out to the Rebel Alliance (an actual sensible, active thing for a major character to do in that situation.) Instead, she comes back to Han and tells him that Lando is being evasive. There are areas of the city he won’t show them, he avoids letting them use the communications systems, and he won’t give a straight answer as to what’s wrong with the Falcon. She suggests that Han and Chewie keep an eye on the repairs at all times, while she goes looking for Threepio. (Again, note the active decision making, instead of just letting other people do things while she whines.)

Of course, they get captured anyway, they get tortured (and the suggestion Timothy Zahn made would be more explicit here, which is that Leia is actually tougher under torture than Han…after all, she wouldn’t give up the location of the Yavin base despite torture and drugs)…and Han gets frozen in carbonite. From there, things would progress pretty much as normal, because Leia becomes a more active character once Han is out of the picture. (Still not fond of the “Leia gets a flash of woman’s intuition Jedi insight” sequence, but that’s something that could be handled better if it was foreshadowing for Leia actually using Jedi powers in ‘Return of the Jedi’.)

The point of all this? Only that it is possible to handle Leia as an active, decisive, intelligent, emotionally-mature female character without losing the essential plot of ‘Empire’. The fact that they didn’t do this isn’t a reflection of some insoluble plot conundrum, it’s a reflection of laziness and a reliance on stereotypes of female behavior on the part of the writers. And this is the “best” Star Wars flick?

Last week…okay, this week, but it was meant to be last week…I talked a bit about Terry Pratchett’s latest novels, and someone suggested in the comments that I should write a “So You Want To Get Into Discworld” post. This is actually a really good idea; the question of “Where do you start with the Discworld books?” is a pretty common one among fans of the series. Much in the same way as “Doctor Who”, in fact, and much for the same reasons; both series are very long (32 seasons of Doctor Who, 38 Discworld novels), both have very loose continuity that enables you to jump in at different points (lots of Doctor Who fans have started with “Rose”, lots of Discworld fans have started with “The Wee Free Men”) and both have beginnings that aren’t necessarily the best in their series (Doctor Who starts with a relatively-inaccessible black-and-white episode from the infancy of television, while Discworld’s first book was written as a random fantasy parody, and is something of a hodge-podge of ideas.) But as both are tremendously rewarding to the long-term fan, both are worth getting into. So where do you start?

With “The Robots of Death”, a classic Fourth Doctor…no, wait. Sorry. Got a bit mixed up there. You start reading the Discworld novels with the understanding that you really do not need to read them in order. It helps you to understand a few details, such as why the Librarian at the greatest institution of magical learning on the Disc is inconveniently stuck in the form of an orangutan, and why the Thieves’ Guild of Ankh-Morpork is a fully-licensed and authorized body of law enforcement, but it’s not actually necessary. Each book is fully stand-alone, they frequently feature different casts, and Pratchett is one of the best expository writers in the business, so you should be pretty good to go no matter what point you pick to jump in.

That said, there are better spots to jump in than the first book. It’s interesting, and you’ll want to come back to it sooner or later to catch up on some of the things he’s helpful enough to establish at the beginning, but it’s also very clearly Pratchett’s juvenalia, and Rincewind (the main character of the first couple of books) is probably his least likeable protagonist. Not that he’s unlikeable, but he’s a cynic and a coward and really only has one bona fide moment of true heroism in the roughly seven books he stars in. So we can skip ahead a bit, past the first five books that Pratchett uses to establish the concept in his own mind and figure out what he wants to do with the fictional universe he’s creating as he goes.

Which means that the first book to start with is ‘Wyrd Sisters’. It’s a sharp, funny, easily accessible book that satirizes Shakespeare (the plot is sort of a bizarre remix/mashup of Macbeth, with the witches as heroes and the king as a villain) while establishing a lot of the core concepts and characters that you’ll see recur over the course of the series. Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and the kingdom of Lancre all get an excellent introduction for the casual reader (even though Granny Weatherwax has previously appeared.)

From there, you can comfortably read ‘Pyramids’, ‘Guards! Guards!’ (the novel that introduces the City Watch, probably the best-loved characters by fans)…skip ‘Faust Eric’, which is a pretty direct sequel to one of the first five books, but then you can read the next six in a row (‘Moving Pictures’, ‘Reaper Man’, ‘Witches Abroad’, ‘Small Gods’, ‘Lords and Ladies’, ‘Men At Arms’.)

Now go back and read the first five. By this time you’ll be attached enough to the characters that you’ll feel comfortable reading through the first two (slightly sloggy) novels, and by ‘Equal Rites’ Pratchett’s writing skill has evolved to the point where you’re reading perfectly serviceable fantasy novels. ‘Mort’ is excellent (and has sometimes been my advised starting spot), and ‘Sourcery’, while a little rough in places, does answer a lot of questions you might have had about how magic works on the Disc.

Then go back and read the one you skipped, and pick up again with ‘Soul Music’. Not only will you understand pretty quickly why I suggested going back and reading the early books (‘Soul Music’ and ‘Interesting Times’ are fairly direct sequels to the earliest books) but you’ll also be struck by how much Pratchett has evolved as a writer in those first eleven years. He went from being a good writer to being a truly great writer, and as you continue onwards, you’ll be impressed even more. All of them are worth reading, and by the end, you’ll be just as much of a fan as I am.

And at some point, you’ll want to read them all over again from the beginning…

Been a busy weekend, but let’s face it, I had to get to this sooner or later. I can’t talk about DC’s greatest heroes winding up at J.K. Rowling’s magical wizard academy without talking about Marvel’s big heroes and where they’d wind up. (I’d discuss the X-Men, but let’s face it, they already are at a school for people with strange and unusual powers run by a manipulative old guy who’s training them to use their powers to fight evil. The only difference is that Dumbledore didn’t generally chuck bowling balls at people’s heads to test their reflexes.) So who would wind up in which house? Who am I picking as an “Avengers” lineup? Let’s find out!

Captain America: An obvious choice for an Avenger, but a less obvious decision over which house he winds up in. On the one hand, you can’t question the courage of the star-spangled Avenger; this is a guy who wanted to join World War II before it even started, because despite the fact that he weighed ninety pounds soaking wet, he wanted to go sock Hitler on the jaw. And that’s before you even get into the “standing toe-to-toe with Thanos despite Thanos having the Infinity Gauntlet and Cap having his fighting spirit” thing. But courage, while it is an important trait of Cap, is not his defining trait.

The recent Cap movie actually showed it best, in the scenes between Steve Rogers and Professor Erskine (some of the best scenes in a great movie.) Cap doesn’t join up because he wants to go out and prove his courage fighting Nazis, he joins up because he believes strongly that he should stand up for people who can’t stand up for themselves and it never even occurs to him that he’s one of them. He joins out of a sense of duty to protect others, and if that’s not Hufflepuff, I don’t know what is.

Iron Man: Lately, of course, it seems like Tony is a prime candidate for Slytherin; somewhere around the time he conquered his alcoholism, desperate writers have settled on “asshole control freak tries to use technology to control his surroundings and finds out the hard way just how badly that turns out” as his default story arc. (That is, when he’s not being mind controlled to kill lots of people. You begin to understand why they rebooted him three times.) But underlying the whole desire to control is a naive, almost pathetic belief that he can solve all his problems just by inventing cool enough stuff that it will fix everyone’s problems in the whole world. Tony Stark thinks that if he can create a better process, a better system, then he can create a better humanity. This belief that intelligence, properly applied, can solve any problem makes him a perfect Ravenclaw!

Thor: Thor routinely goes out and fights giants. Because he can. You’d just have to wave the Sorting Hat in his general direction to hear “GRYFFINDOR!” shouted out in the Great Hall.

Hawkeye: He’s one of my all-time favorite characters and a staple Avenger (who has, in my personal opinion, been mishandled worse under the Quesada/Bendis era of the series worse than any other character in the entire franchise, and that includes the decision to make Power Man and Iron Fist Avengers.) He’s also a joyously uncomplicated character, a brash manchild who found purpose and meaning to his life by joining the Avengers and adopting their ideals as his own. Arguably, Hawkeye’s turn under the Sorting Hat would involve a long, telepathic argument over whether or not they should just make a fifth house, because it’s downright insulting to stick Earth’s Mightiest Heroes in a bunch of lesser outfits. But eventually, the Sorting Hat would decide that a guy who deliberately forgoes Hank Pym’s growth serum to  battle mad gods and alien armadas armed with a bow and arrows belongs in Gryffindor.

Hank Pym: Okay, maybe Hank Pym was handled worse by Bendis than any other character…let’s call it a toss-up, okay? (Yes, I have issues with Bendis’ handling of the classic Avengers characters. Specifically, I have several hundred issues, and all of them establish clear character beats that Bendis ignores because paying attention to established characterization takes up time he could be using to plot his latest three-issue long halting conversation.) The point is, Hank Pym’s defining character trait isn’t anger or emotional instability. He had a major nervous breakdown at one point that caused him to lash out against his friends and loved ones, but what caused that breakdown was the stress of trying to be a superhero even though he was never really cut out for it. He wanted to be a scientist, helping people through his inventions instead of hitting people, but duty to the people he cared about kept calling him back to it. It’s that sense of dedication to the Avengers that makes the Sorting Hat choose Hufflepuff over Ravenclaw, even though it might take a while to choose.

Wasp: Let’s see. Janet became a superhero because her father died and her new boyfriend suggested she help him avenge that death (two emotional connections early on.) She spent her free time volunteering at a local hospital reading to sick children (duty to the helpless.) She met a bunch of superheroes and immediately suggested they all bond together into a common group (more dedication to community and family.) She eventually wound up becoming the chairwoman of the Avengers–not because she was ambitious, but because a chairwoman was needed and it was time for her to step up and help the team. She eventually sacrificed herself…um, sort of, because Thor did something, or…*sigh* Bendis… *sigh* The point is, when you look at the Wasp’s career, she’s always been about dedication to her large, self-made, extended family. She might never have become a hero if she’d been left to her own devices, but she cares about heroes enough to want to help them out. She’s a Hufflepuff if there ever was one.

Bonus non-Avenger characters! While I will maintain, to my dying day, that the inclusion of Spider-Man and Wolverine into the ranks of the Avengers was a colossal mistake that shows that Bendis not only never understood any of the characters he was writing, he actually never understood the core concept of the book he took over and should not have been allowed near the series with a ten-foot pole, I also know that people probably want to know where they wound up. So for the record, Spidey‘s a classic Hufflepuff (“with great power must come great responsibility”), while Wolverine would be a Gryffindor until he got expelled for sneaking non-butter-beer into the dorms and wound up getting kept by Hagrid as a pet.

Which still leaves a lot of Avengers. Let’s face it, unlike the JLA, the Avengers has a constantly fluctuating line-up; feel free to add your favorite Avengers in the comments!

Hey, it could happen. The DCU is big, it’s got magical, and the Big Two comics companies have a long and stories tradition of incorporating their tie-in comics wholesale into their fictional universe so that they can get the cheap sales hit of crossing over their established heroes with the new corporate icon on the block. (Which is why they can’t reprint Marvel Two-In-One #21 and Power Man and Iron Fist #73, but that’s another long, angry post.) Sure, the money-printing engine that is a comic-book adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s work remains inexplicably absent, but she and her devotion to actually maintaining the integrity of her fictional characters can’t live forever. Someday there’s going to be a JLA/Harry Potter comic. And the question then is, who gets sorted into what house?

Superman, like Harry himself, would be a good choice for more than one house. His steely-hard integrity and devotion to friends like Jimmy and Lois (when he’s not in the Silver Age and “teaching them a lesson” about one thing or another by subjecting them to absurd robot-double based humiliations) could land him in Hufflepuff, while his intellect would also make him a good fit in Ravenclaw. (Although that’s an element of the character that’s been played down post-Byrne reboot…it used to be that Superman used the Fortress of Solitude to do his own elaborate experiments too dangerous or complex to be carried out in labs on inhabited continents, but these days he mostly subcontracts out the “being smart” to STARLabs.) But ultimately, Superman is someone who isn’t afraid of anything. It’s what makes him such an inspirational superhero; he’s what we could be if we were freed of our insecurities and vulnerabilities. And it’s what would make him an excellent Gryffindor!

Batman, of course, has already been covered with devastating accuracy by Chris Sims. I’d recap his logic here, but that’s what links are all about; suffice to say that he’s dead right, and Batman would be in Ravenclaw. (Where he would be joined by Batgirl, Oracle and at least one or two Robins, if the crossover was big enough.)

Wonder Woman is interesting, because while she’s every bit as brave and heroic as Superman, what defines them as different is Wonder Woman’s boundless compassion. She’s always been more interested in reforming villains and showing them a better way to live (anyone remember the Golden Age Paula von Gunther?) It’d be pretty easy to see her and Helga Hufflepuff commiserating on the plight of those poor students scorned by the other three houses and making a commitment to ensure than nobody goes through Hogwarts alone. She understands that “loyalty” and “dedication” are more than just being a tireless worker or a good friend, but being someone anyone can rely on. Which is what makes her the best Hufflepuff!

Green Lantern has, of course, already been through a glorified version of the Sorting when he became Green Lantern. Sure, it was funny-colored aliens instead of battered old hats, but who knows what the Sorting Hat is actually made out of? It looks kinda leathery; maybe somewhere in the mists of time the four founders of Hogwarts skinned themselves a Guardian and made it into a hat, and the tradition just evolved from there. In any event, “fearless” as a requirement for Green Lantern-hood makes it pretty obvious that whether Hal, Kyle, John or Guy, they’d all be Gryffindor!

The Flash…Barry’s the easiest to categorize, but all of the Flashes over the years share a certain reliability and dependability to them. The different Flashes, no matter which one you’re talking about, never had any particular trauma in their past that made them “driven to dispense justice” (except in the TV show, of course…) They just got powers, looked at the world around them, and said, “Hey, I should help out with this.” For Barry, it was an extension of his job, and for Wally, it was an extension of his friendship with Barry. Jay shares the same matter-of-fact approach to heroism, the kind of steady and old-fashioned nature that would make them excellent Hufflepuffs!

Martian Manhunter is another very easy one; he’s classically been seen as the team’s tactician ever since the characters stopped being merely a collection of superheroes that followed a writing formula and started being an actual team that people wrote stories about. (Which was sometime in the 1970s, probably..) We see it clearest in Morrison’s JLA, but it’s usually Martian Manhunter who is coming up with the plan and telling everyone else (with his mind) how to get it done. As such, he’d be right at home with Batman in Ravenclaw! (Anyone who does not want to see a storyline where Batman and Martian Manhunter forge a group of teenage witches and wizards into a merciless, steel-hard magical justice dispensing machine has no poetry in their soul, dammit.)

Aquaman is unique among all the Justice League in that he’s actually more important in his “civilian” identity than in his superheroic one. As King of Atlantis, he is responsible for guiding the destiny of a nation and commanding its people…and while he’s at times a reluctant ruler, and he’s certainly no despot, he is nonetheless accustomed to being the leader of a nation. He has to set an agenda for a whole country, he has at times had to fight challengers to the throne, and even when dealing with his own teammates, you can tell that he expects them to follow his direction…and while you couldn’t say that it’s the only aspect of his character, any more than you could claim that Batman isn’t brave or Wonder Woman isn’t smart, Aquaman is a rare example of a good character whose strongest aspect is ambition. As such, he would be a fine example of something sadly lacking in Rowling’s actual novels…a good Slytherin!

There’s the basic seven; if you have thoughts on other DC characters and their treatment by the Sorting Hat, feel free to leave them in the comments!*

*Yes, it is distinctly possible that I’ve gone completely insane. As it’s the kind of insanity that leads to Batman giving ninja-training to a horde of telepathically-linked Ravenclaws, I make no apologies.

Sorry about the lateness of this post; I just got done with a weekend at CONvergence, a Twin Cities sci-fi con that fits nicely into that category of “not so tiny that it’s just a dealers’ room and a movie room, but not so huge that you have to stand in line for two hours for everything.” I got to see a clever little indie movie called ‘My Sucky Teen Romance’ that people should keep their eyes out for, got to chat canon with Lars Pearson of Mad Norwegian Press, and generally had fun. But now, it’s back to work!

“Work”, in this case, elegantly describes the task of thinking about the ‘Matrix’ sequels. Because while I do recall bumping into a few defenders that hectic summer, I think that with the benefit of almost a decade of hindsight, nobody really wants to say that ‘The Matrix Reloaded’ and ‘The Matrix Revolutions’ were any good at all. But I’m not here to discuss the bad things about them. I think we were all aware pretty quickly of the mistakes they made…the fight scenes that were there simply because they thought they had to top the first movie’s fight scenes, the dull speechifying, the inexplicable downgrade in power that Neo got offscreen, the “what the fuck happened” final conclusion…today, though, I’m more interested in discussing the good ideas that were buried in under all the dreck, the stuff that could have been the bones of a good sequel before they began slapping the bloated, corpulent flesh onto it. So let’s talk about the good in the ‘Matrix’ sequels, shall we?

1) The Oracle is a liar. That would actually have been really brilliant, if they’d only followed through on it properly. The whole first movie, we’re set up to believe that the Oracle is a wise, mysterious, shamanic figure who is guiding Neo to his ultimate destiny. The second movie, we find out that all that’s true…but his destiny is to cull the “free humans” down to a manageable number, and she’s actually a computer program whose job is to convince him to betray mankind. Hell of a second act twist, sets up a brilliant third act…shame that they found the least interesting way possible of executing it. (I had one friend who explained to me that he didn’t even realize that’s what the twist was, because “after about the Architect’s third sentence, it all just started to sound like the grown-ups from Peanuts talking.”)

2) The Merovingian. Not anything about his actual execution, mind you: He’s dull, smug, pretentious, snotty, and his endless blather kills every scene he’s in. Oh, and his plot function is terrible too. But the idea of the villain of the second movie being a powerful renegade computer program who prefers the Matrix to his “natural habitat”, who is the opposite of Smith in the first film because he adores the pleasures of experiencing life through sensory input, and who is running a secret “underground railroad” for programs who want to live in the Matrix…that’s quite clever. And it makes sense that such a person would be against the One, because he’s enjoying things the way they are and doesn’t want the boat rocked by the One, v6.0. It needed a lot more drafts, but it’s a solid idea.

3) Smith returning as a computer virus. The idea that Neo somehow accidentally made him is stupid, and the less said about it the better, but again, there’s the germ of a good idea under this. At the end of the first movie, Neo is all-powerful. If you want to get at him, you need to get at him outside of the Matrix. For the artificial intellegnces, recreating Smith as a living computer virus, one who can infect human brains and wear human beings like suits, would be the way to go. (Although it’d have to be for the third movie, once Neo has realized his destiny and rejected it.) But one of the key elements that they almost utterly neglected is that Smith hated even being in a simulation of flesh…being in an actual flesh body should have been a source of major character conflict for him. Perhaps he becomes a nihilist, hoping to bring down the Matrix and bring about the extinction of both humans and computers rather than continue as he is.

Which would lead, in the end, to a roughly similar finale. The AIs realize that Smith, their creation, is a bigger threat than Neo, and form a truce with Zion to stop him. Neo dies saving everyone, the AIs make the Matrix voluntary (one of the things they should have played up is that the average human being is driven insane by Neo’s attempts to “snap them out of it”.) And eventually, they all live sort of kind of happily ever after until everyone realizes that the whole “using human beings as a power source now that solar power is inaccessible to us” thing actually violates the laws of thermodynamics in a big way and they’d all have perished in a frozen grave ages ago.

Okay, so the original had its problems too.

A good while back, in my first real post for MGK, I talked about the problems with reboots and how they rarely work from a storytelling standpoint. (There’s also an argument that they rarely work from a sales standpoint; for every high-profile success like the Silver Age relaunch or the Ultimate Universe, there’s ten failures like the post-Zero Hour Fate and Manhunter.) But that leaves us a question that seems more relevant than ever this week, what with DC announcing that they’re relaunching the entire DC Universe except for the bits that Geoff Johns likes because they’re so awesome. If reboots are rarely critical successes, and they’re rarely commercial successes, why do people keep doing them?

The answer lies in the world of being a comic book writer…or more relevantly, a comic book editor. The world of a comic book editor is a never-ending pressure cooker nightmare, like being trapped on a treadmill that never stops while angry chihuahuas constantly bark at you and nip your heels. (Yes, I did just compare comics fans to angry chihuahuas. I feel, after reading the comment boards on comics websites in the wake of DC’s announcement, that the analogy fits.) Every month, the book must get out the door. It doesn’t matter if the artist has chlamydia, if the writer has been washing down LSD and amphetamines with whiskey and beer for three weeks and still can’t come up with a good idea for a story, if everyone hates each other and the editor has to route all communications through him because he’s the only one on speaking terms with any of the creative team and that only because he signs their checks…the book still has to come out.

And worse, these days people aren’t just expecting a comic story. We’ve been trained to spot fill-ins and reset buttons and retcons and similar tricks to bring out an issue without actually moving the story, and such things are quickly derided. The metastory is what counts these days, and it’s not just about bringing the book out, it’s about changing the main character’s life forever while still leaving it in a condition that can sustain a monthly book. Which means that it’s not like being on a treadmill after all, not anymore. Now it’s like being stuck in a car that’s got no brakes with the angry chihuahuas in the backseat and every turn is an opportunity to slam headlong into a brick wall going seventy-five miles an hour. (Which is what more or less happened with Aquaman.)

What with all that, even the best creative teams eventually pile up a gradual accumulation of mistakes. Things that seemed like a good idea at the time now seem like the thing that cost you about twenty percent of your reading audience, and not all of the changes are as easy to reverse as a costume change. You can do stories that undo other stories to a limited extent, but eventually audiences get sick of contrived deals with the devil and hokey memory erasures and you wind up stuck in a corner, telling stories about a teenage version of your old character who’s from a parallel universe created when a time-traveling supervillain set a trap for his enemies using pocket-dimensional copies of a superhero who’s no longer in continuity thanks to…

You can start to see why the idea of sweeping it all under the rug and starting over from the point when your characters still made sense sounds like a good idea, right? Reboots cut away, at least in theory, all of the detritus that piled up over the years, all the Spider-Mobiles and deaths of Doctor Octopus and Grim Hunters and teen Iron Men and missing hands and Jewel Kryptonites, and leave the character iconic and sensible again. To a desperate and semi-sober editor, it’s got to start looking like a pretty attractive idea. Even if it doesn’t work, it’s not like the amazing adventures of the one-handed, dead, wifeless, childless, kingdomless Aquaman is going to sell anyway.

So once again, we see another reboot. Once again, it’ll probably fail. But when you’re reading that new Justice League #1, complaining about how we’re seeing the origins of these characters for the fifteenth time instead of getting a new story…remember that poor, drunken editor, okay?

While I was struggling to come up with a topic for this week’s post (they don’t all spring fully-formed as though from the brow of Zeus, y’know…actually, it’d be pretty creepy to have a kid that way. You’d be sitting there, getting these headaches that get worse and worse, wondering if you have some sort of tumor…and bam! Suddenly your head explodes and a fully-grown woman crawls out, soaked in gore. Hell, that sounds more like a Cronenberg movie than a Greek myth.)

Um…anyway, while I was struggling to come up with a topic for this week’s post, I was toying with the idea of coming up with a “Defenders” movie to match the upcoming “Avengers” movie, on the grounds that it would be kind of, y’know, cool to see it happen. Except, of course, that we still haven’t gotten a Doctor Strange or Namor movie, and that the Silver Surfer’s rights are being held by different people from the Hulk’s rights, and he’s only ever been a supporting character in the FF movies anyway, and the whole rationale for the Surfer joining the rest of them doesn’t make sense in the movie continuity…

And then I proceeded to “…and anyway, it’s not like that was a very good incarnation of the team to begin with, even though it’s the version everybody tries rebooting when they reboot the Defenders, and frankly it’s not like the series ever had the same popularity as the Avengers in the first place, and it’s actually kind of a fundamentally flawed team dynamic…” and it occurred to me that maybe a post dissecting the Defenders’ flaws would be a little bit more interesting than a “Hey, you know who would be a cool Namor? Benedict Cumberbatch!” post. (Although he would.)

So let’s talk about the Defenders as a concept. Because I don’t think anyone has ever really sat down and done it, with the possible exception of Steve Gerber (who always struck me as a more intuitive writer anyway.) The original idea of the Defenders, and the original team line-up, was that it was going to be the opposite of the Avengers. This was going to be a team of the guys who weren’t straight-arrows, who weren’t team players, who weren’t the guys who would love to hang out together and bicker about who was going to be on monitor duty that week. These guys would be dangerous, anti-social loners with their own agendas.

The problem with that is that it doesn’t work. Dangerous, anti-social loners with their own agendas do not, by definition, work together as a team. At least, not for the kind of long-term purposes that you need for an ongoing series. Sure enough, the first few issues are full of phrases like, “This is the last time I work with you three,” and “Only because the fate of the world is at stake,” and “As much as I hate the rest of you, I’ll help…this time.” Within a few issues, Namor and the Silver Surfer had departed for good.

Which led to the next, more interesting incarnation of the team. Instead of focusing on the “the Avengers are team players and we’re not” aspect, writers (particularly Steve Gerber) focused on the “the Avengers are socially acceptable and we’re not” angle. The Hulk and Doctor Strange stuck around, with Doctor Strange acting as a sort of counter-culture Tony Stark and the Hulk as a none-too-bright Thor substitute. Nighthawk completed the trio by being a whiny, insecure anti-Captain America, and other characters joined and left as needed. This concept lasted for the best part of the series 150-issue run, even as the characters who made it up came and went. (Although it should be noted that the version that didn’t have Doctor Strange or the Hulk lasted about twenty-five issues. As awesome as the Beast was, he just couldn’t make up for the lack of an A-list star in sales terms. The “New Defenders” line-up was roughly akin to the “Justice League Detroit” era, if you don’t mind me cross-company-izing my analogies for a moment.)

Subsequent relaunches, though, have focused on reuniting the “classic” Defenders line-up (as previously mentioned.) This doesn’t work now any better than it did in the beginning; the Hulk is still bad-tempered and quick to anger, the Sub-Mariner is still a bi-polar jerk with his own agenda, and the Silver Surfer still sees Earth as a cross between a prison and an insane asylum (and one that he’s escaped anyway.) The series just doesn’t work with the classic Defenders line-up, and that’s all there  is to it. What’s needed is a Defenders team that reunites the best aspects of the classic team, keeps the core concept of “counter-culture heroes” but has enough popular A-listers to make the book a success. Doctor Strange is a good start, but you need more heroes that are popular in the real world but disliked within the Marvel Universe. Heroes that are team players, but that don’t get much respect from their fellow supers. Heroes like Spider-Man, Wolverine, maybe Power Man and Iron Fist, maybe a borderline socially-acceptable hero like Hawkeye…

Sound familiar? Yep, it’s the Avengers line-up we had up until just a couple years ago. Despite the “Avengers” name, it’s actually the kind of Defenders line-up that most of the classic-Defender-era writers would have killed for. It’s the kind of line-up that would make a good series and maybe bring some respect to the team, make them into the kind of heroes that really would get their own movie.

Except that, y’know, the people who own the rights to Doctor Strange still aren’t the same people as the ones who have the rights to Wolverine and Spider-Man…

We can all agree now that it was crap, right?

I don’t mean in the purely aesthetic sense; it was pretty obvious even at the time that this was a 64-page special padded out to seven issues of thin, underplotted gruel with Millar’s penchant for pithy one-liners and macho posturing substituting for actual story and characterization, and with a hamfisted 9/11 analogy that seemed simultaneously trite and tasteless even at the time and now looks just unforgivably crass. I mean that since all that was a given, we had to rely on it being not so much a “good” story as an “important” one, a change to the status quo of the Marvel Universe that would resonate for decades in the same way as ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ altered the shape of the DC Universe. (Which was, after all, what Millar promised. Sure, there was some hype there; after all, that was pretty much what Stan Lee promised for every issue of every title back in the Sixties.)

Then again, Stan Lee delivered on that promise to some degree. The characters he and Kirby and Ditko and others created stood the test of time as original, ground-breaking, and genuinely unpredictable. Whereas five years later…let’s look at the “massive, enduring changes to the Marvel Universe” and see how they stood up, shall we?

There has come to be something of a debate over the last few days over the morality of the Doctor’s actions in the opening two-parter of Season Six. It’s something I really want to talk about, to the point that I’m posting a day early to weigh in on it (since I just posted a piece about The Incredibles in my own blog and I don’t want to push it down the page right away.) And since Season Six is so recent, I’m going to quarantine the whole thing behind the cut so that people who haven’t seen “The Impossible Astronaut” and “Day of the Moon” can remain unspoiled. Then I’m going to point out some things to those who feel that this is out-of-character cruelty from the Doctor.

Admittedly, this is one of the easiest shows to get into, in some ways; the series’ premise is explained neatly and succinctly in under two minutes by the opening credits. The show is little more than a vehicle to make fun of old movies much the way classic horror hosts like Vampira and Ghoulardi did, and the actual premise (mad scientists experiment on the effect of bad movies on the human brain, as measured by a guy and his robot companions forced to watch said bad movies) is just an excuse to make it happen. Every episode is more or less its own self-contained story, and if you can get behind the concept of mocking cheesy sci-fi films, there’s not much more you need to know.

In fact, this is one series you definitely don’t want to watch from the very beginning; first off, the “very beginning” is only available in the form of fan bootlegs, since the series started as a local show in the Twin Cities. (I remember turning it on and thinking, “Ooh! Sci-fi movie! Huh? Why are there guys in the lower right-hand corner of the screen? Ohhhh…this is the BEST IDEA EVER!” I was so disappointed when it went to cable and I couldn’t watch it anymore. (My parents didn’t believe in cable.)) Secondly, the first season is very much all about them getting comfortable with their series; nobody had ever done anything exactly like MST3K, and it took them a while to figure out how to pace their jokes. (Which is “frequently”, by the way…they estimated that in later seasons, they wrote about 700 jokes per episode.) And thirdly, not all the episodes are legally available; the producers got broadcast rights but not video rights to most of the movies they showed, and so the process of releasing the series on DVD is as much an adventure in “What can we get the rights to?” as “What are the classic episodes?” (Fortunately, the series’ creators actually included the phrase “Keep Circulating the Tapes” in the credits for the first seven seasons, and their pro-bootlegging stance has led to a wide network of informal episode trading. So long as you buy the episodes that are commercially available, they seem to be willing to turn a blind eye to bootlegging the ones that aren’t.)

So I’d skip ahead to at least Season Two, perhaps even Season Three or Four to introduce you to Joel (the original host and “man in space” for the first five seasons.) He’s got a laid-back delivery style and a penchant for silly gimmick props (the Invention Exchange, which opens every episode for the first six seasons or so, was an exercise in prop comedy.) The most recent release from Shout Factory, “MST3K Volume XX”, features several later Joel episodes (“Master Ninja” I & II, “The Magic Voyage of Sinbad”), while the next release will feature five classics (the complete “Gamera” collection.) These episodes also feature the classic mad scientist duo of Doctor Clayton Forrester and his dim-witted sidekick, TV’s Frank. Doctor F is perpetually frustrated and grandiose in his schemes by Frank’s incompetence (and his own, which he chooses not to acknowledge.)

In Season Five, Joel left (due to creative conflicts over what would eventually become “Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie”) in the episode “Mitchell”, which may still be available through Rhino. He was replaced with Mike Nelson, head writer for the series, who played a temp at the mad science labs who got shanghaied into doing his own bad movie riffing. Shout Factory’s first DVD set, the “20th Anniversary Edition”, features three excellent Mike episodes…including the departure of Doctor Forrester at the end of Season Seven. (Cast changes are a feature of the series.)

The last three seasons, which aired on the Sci-Fi Channel, featured Pearl Forrester, Clayton’s mother, who vowed to carry on his work after smothering him with a pillow. She acquired her own henchmen (Professor Bobo, an ape from the titular Planet Of, and Observer, a brain in a dish with a human to carry it around) and proceeded to do her own tormenting. This era featured some experimentation with actual storylines, which some liked and some didn’t. If you like the idea, try to watch “Revenge of the Creature” through “The Deadly Mantis”, “The Thing That Couldn’t Die” through “The She-Creature”, “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” through “Agent for H.A.R.M.”, and “Prince of Space” through “The Projected Man”. Watching those out of order will leave you occasionally wondering why Mike is in Ancient Rome, or what Pearl is doing on a planet where apes evolved from men!!! (Luckily, you can always ignore all that and just focus on the movie.)

Eventually, the series ended…but it’s definitely not gone. Joel is currently doing “Cinematic Titanic”, a live stage show where he and several MST alumni riff on bad movies (they also have some DVDs available), while “Rifftrax” features Mike Nelson and other MST alumni riffing on major studio releases through the magic of downloadable MP3s that you can manually synch up with films like “Iron Man”, “Twilight” and “The Happening”. (They also have some DVDs available.) All are recommended.

I’ve tried to cover the basics, but really, it’s a wide and sprawling show that I’ve barely scratched the surface of. (Just think, all this space and I haven’t even mentioned “Manos: The Hands of Fate”.) Feel free to share your favorites, and remember to “repeat to yourself, ‘it’s just a show, I should really just relax!’”