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.)
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After watching Lifeboat I felt that the hero of the movie was actually the German,because he was trying to keep them alive. Yes I know that it was self interest, but he was the only one acting with any kind of brains, Also I feel that at the end of The Crow, shows revenge to be unfilling and misguided. This is becasue when he gets rescued he actually calls a plan that would end with the remining villians arrested after putting himself through more pain and agony a good idea. These are my takes, and are probably just my warped viewpoint.
The xenomorphs from Aliens are actually living batteries who can live off electricity, neatly explaining two things: Why they have acid for blood, and how they cut the power in “Aliens” (which was never remotely explained in the film) — they just absorbed it.
A good friend of mine came up with one of the greatest ideas for the Star Wars prequels. She came to this conclusion before Revenge of the Sith came out:
Anakin used the Force to make Padme fall in love with him.
My friend used evidence like when Padme said something like, “I don’t like it when you look at me like that.”
And personally, I think that would have cemented Anakin/Darth Vader as the ultimate villain.
“And personally, I think that would have cemented Anakin/Darth Vader as the ultimate villain.”
Because being a mass child murderer who gets a complete karmic whitewash doesn’t already do that?
Well I suscribe to the ever popular theory there is multiple Bonds. But in my case there was four, it goes Sean Connery, Lazenby-Moore-Dalton (with plastic surgery), Brosnan and Craig.
Also that Chewie and R2D2 knew more than they let on through the original trilogy. Chewie actually subtly pushing Han on Leia to avoid the incestuous relationship with Luke.
My go-to crazy idea along these lines is about time travel in the Marvel Universe, and explaining away any continuity glitches. I imagine there is all kinds of time travel going on behind the scenes, and the changes in the past are causing the present to be rewritten without anyone aware of it. Some villain goes back in time to kill Hitler, but some butterfly effect ends up making the FF launch their rocket 10 years later instead of 1963.
In the same way, the reason you don’t see any B or C-list supervillains around anymore is just that they are working elsewhere behind the scenes. They’re trying to rob banks in Podunk Town, Iowa, instead of New York. Of course, that’s why you don’t see any B or C-list heroes, also… they’re going where the real trouble is.
I’m afraid I’m not sure what you mean here.
@Justin: It’s a Doctor Who reference. There is a famous sequence in the Fourth Doctor story, “The Brain of Morbius”, where the Doctor duels another renegade (named Morbius, natch) in a telepathic duel. The duel involved forced age-regression, and the faces of the Doctor’s three previous incarnations appear in the viewscreen as he is forced back through his own lifespan.
Then eight more faces appear on the viewscreen as Morbius gloats. The faces are those of the production team (including then-producer Philip Hinchcliffe) and were intended to imply that the Doctor had several previous lives. This was never explicitly stated, though, and was never picked up on by any other creative team to work on the series. (In fact, it’s been explicitly contradicted several times.)
This has not stopped some people from insisting, quite angrily, that the Doctor had several incarnations prior to the beginning of the TV series and that anyone who says otherwise is “ignoring the evidence.” Hope that clarifies things!
My theory re: the DC and Marvel Universes and the existences of places like Belle Reve, Arkham, the Slab, etc. instead of supervillains receiving the capital sentences they would in the ‘real’ world…
Captured supervillains don’t not get put to death in those universes because they’re filled with good and kind-hearted people. There’s a subtle and massive diplomatic interplay between governments, law enforcement, and the supervillain community that makes ‘capture alive, put on trial, lock up until the inevitable escape’ a sort of… detente.
The reason that the Joker or Mr. Zsasz or Norman Osborne haven’t been sent to the chair (or simply ‘shot while trying to escape’ or ‘died while receiving medical treatment, so sorry’) is because if that happened, all of the non-hero people involved would fall, dead, to the ground. Supervillains are more than willing to accept being incarcerated; they escape all the time, after all, and there are important networking opportunities available in there, and if they get caught it means they failed. Fair is fair.
But trying to off them? If one of their number ‘dies while resisting arrest’ then every single cop and every member of their families will die soon after. They can’t all be protected by the hero community, and even SHIELD operatives and army personnel don’t mean much to even a halfway competent metahuman.
Concrete example: Merlyn doesn’t really give a fuck about, say, the Scarecrow; in his mind he’s just another freak out of Gotham and frankly offends his sensibilities as a professional. He could give a damn about Dr. Crane doing another stretch in Arkham.
But if Harvey Bullock decides ‘hell with it’ and double-taps him in the head in the back of a paddy wagon? Or if a Gotham judge and jury decide they’ve had enough of this insanity defense bullshit and send him to the chair? The supervillain community doesn’t like that. It doesn’t like that one bit. If it can happen to a freak like the Scarecrow it can happen to any one of them. So Merlyn is going to informally roll up with Deadshot and a few other guys and make some examples. Send a message.
Law enforcement and government officials know this. They understand how the game is played. So there’s a sort of… understanding in place. You go into supermax and they’ll do what they can to hold onto you, but nothing more, because they don’t want to roll the dice and risk launching an all-out war with the powered villain community. They’ve got too much invested in the status quo.
This is my ‘Criminology in a super-powered universe’ theory of the week.
This isn’t my own theory, but I just read of it and I think it’s great: Franklin Richards is the reason that nobody really ages or dies in the Marvel Universe. He’s so powerful that Doom, Galactus and even the Celestials are afraid of him. He has the power (via Annihilus’s Control Rod) to access the energy of the Negative Zone and he can completely alter the reality as he wishes. He subconsciously keeps himself as a child, because he isn’t willing to face maturity and the psychological problems it will bring. Oh, and he’s also Sentry.
I have a theory about Daybreakers, a better-than-you’d-expect movie about vampires. The full explanation is here, but the key bit is this:
The bottom line: vampirism (in Daybreakers> at least) is caused by a virus, and the virus has a purpose: turning humans into an energy source. The reason? Because that’s how the robots in The Matrix turn humans into an energy source powerful enough to run their insanely power-hungry simulated world.
And speaking of Doctor Who and vampires, I think you might enjoy this: a song from the famous musical episode of Amy The Alien Slayer.
I have not yet watched the latest season of Torchwood, but I was so conflicted about Children of Earth when it came out that I came up with a theory to let the show hypothetically keep all the cool new characters they introduced that season without completely FUBARing Jack Harkness’s life and morals.
The thing is, metatextually the goal of that season is a fairly unsubtle scorched earth attack on Jack’s psyche, making it not only possible but INEVITABLE for him to abandon everything that wasn’t already dead and run far, far away, which meant they could either kill the show or start over again with as blank a slate as they liked.
So my theory is that this is NOT Creatorly Fiat, but rather that Jack has been kidnapped by ruthless aliens who identified him as one of earth’s primary protectors and altered his memories to make earth too painful for him to stick around on. Ianto and the grandson were the focal points of the alteration. What really happened was that Ianto took note of the fact that they were building giant toxic chemical synthesizers and arranged emergency breathing masks for everybody. Then they fucked up the 456 with a nanovirus or a child-like robot prototype or something, but amidst all the confusion Jack was kidnapped by the REAL antagonists, who’d been using the 456 as a distraction, and altered his memories to the tragic version to get him out of the way.
The next season would then have opened with Ianto and Gwen and everyone, after they defeat the 456, confused about where Jack fucked off to. Ianto and Gwen have residual issues from that other time he disappeared. Ianto and Alice find a way to go chasing Jack around the galaxy while the others fight off the subtle memory-altering invasion of the meta aliens. Ianto being alive is the only clue the audience gets for a long time that something’s off from the last season. It would be a freaky psychological horror season, like the thing with the Silence in the recent Doctor Who, with Gwen and Lois and etc having memory gaps and trying to figure out why everyone is acting so strangely while Jack runs away and runs away, the occasional glimpse of Ianto on his trail driving him into induced panic attacks as he thinks he’s hallucinating the people he left down, possibly developing a drug problem and adding real hallucinations to the mix. Maybe bring James Marsters back for a John Hart cameo. It would have been awesome.
oh and RE the Matrix energy thing, this is my favourite idea: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/64/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality
I have not yet watched the latest season of Torchwood
Oh good, we got to you in time.
Don’t. Just… just don’t. Read a summary somewhere if you really have to know. Don’t WATCH Miracle Day, for god’s sake.
To strike a necessary work/life balance, Superman routinely ignores calls for help on his time off, interrupting his break periods only if the emergency is either 1)in the city limits of Metropolis, which is a no-death zone or 2)high profile enough to compel people to ask him difficult questions about what he was doing when the disaster occurred.
A kinder explanation for the fact “Hey, people still die in the DCU, what’s up with that?” is that Superman physically requires rest if he’s to be expected to withstand Doomsday or the Silver Banshee or whoever, and the victims of fatal car accidents and accidental gunshot wounds and suchlike are just the price we pay for a fully-functional super-protector. But this explanation doesn’t really quite add up.
The question arises with anybody that fast, really–the Flash (at least the Wally “Speed Force” West Flash), Captain Marvel, Martian Manhunter, and Supergirl could probably *each* end all accidental deaths globally if they fully applied themselves. But clearly these guys need a lot of “me time.”
On the Sentry:
Ok, so rather than being a druggie who drank some super concentrated version of the Super Soldier serum or whatever the fuck Bendis thought he was in that issue of Dark Avengers, this is my theory: the Sentry is actually a facet of the Beyonder bonded with the human Robert Reynolds.
When they Beyonder was about to face death or banishment (it’s been a while, I forget exactly how he was finally written out of things) as a precaution he broke off a part of himself to insure that he would continue to exist in some form. Now since the Beyonder is the embodiment of an alternate universe, this sliver of it’s essence did not go unnoticed by the embodiments of the 616 Universe (Eternity, Infinity, Death and Oblivion.) To deal with this problem the four of them created a being out of combined parts of their essence to hunt down and eliminate this fraction of the Beyonder which they saw as an intruder.
As a means of survival this remnant of the Beyonder fled to Earth. It knew that planet was somehow very important to the universe as a whole and that it is known for having a greater than average amount of beings with extraordinary powers. It figured that if it somehow integrated itself into the lives of these superheroes it would be almost impossible for the thing that was hunting it to destroy it; it would be protected by it’s many allies on Earth and it would be incredibly difficult to remove it from existence due to the tampering with the universe that it had done.
For this to work the sliver of the Beyonder needed to bond with a person and it selected as it’s target Robert Reynolds. It gave Bob incredible powers and altered history so that he somehow managed to touch the lives of the various heroes of the Marvel Universe and thus together they became the Sentry.
Now when the being hunting the remnant of the Beyonder managed to track it down and realize what it had done, it came to the conclusion that the only way to deal with the newly created Sentry without causing too much damage to existence was to beat him at his own game. If the Beyonder remnant was to become the Sentry and try to preserve itself by altering reality to become a very important hero, then as a response the hunter would insert itself into the newly created past as the Sentry’s villainous rival, the Void. When Bob and the Beyonder remnant first bonded (in the first Sentry series) the Void almost managed to contain the problem by making Bob think that the two of them were one and the same and the only way for the Void to be defeated was to make eveyone forget about the Sentry (undoing what had been done over the course of the series. However it didn’t last and Bob came back, and every time Bob tried to find out more and more about who he was the Void kept altering the nature of what it was as a way to undo the damage the Sentry was doing. Eventually however Bob got the best of the Void and seemingly got rid of it (at the end of the second Sentry miniseries.) However, when Bob fell in with Osborn’s Dark Avengers, he still believed that he and the Void were one and the same and began to manifest himself as the Void (he may have also done this once before in the second arc of New Avengers.) Ultimately this led to the events that went down in Seige.
Now what this means is that the Sentry did not exist until that night that Robert Reynolds got out of his bed and that anything that happened prior to that (such as cuddly Hulk or the awful awful awful idea of Bob and Rogue getting together) did not actually ever happen but rather are results of the Beyonder remnant tampering with existance.
That’s pretty much my theory, though I think it needs a bit more fine tuning.
Funnily enough, the Guardian actually published one of these – in a way. Last week, Tom McCarthy joined the newspaper’s ongoing attack against the (rather good) “Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn” film by writing a column that claimed the film was terrible for not strictly following the theories and ideas set out in his book on the subject.
He set out as his example that Spielberg didn’t note that Captain Haddock’s ownership of a mansion CLEARLY demonstrates that he is descended from the bastard son of Louis XIV, and therefore that by ignoring this VERY CLEAR AND IN-CANON interpretation of Herge’s work, Spielberg’s film is ‘worthless’.
…The response to which has largely boiled down to ‘It’s a film intended for children you sad git’, but I’m sure there are more mature responses to such silliness.
@ThatNickGuy: An alternate take; mastery of the Force over years of training induces an ability to use the Force to manipulate the emotions of others towards implicit trust and affection of others – hence Jedi having to shun the idea of taking a lover. Anakin’s only distinction from any other Jedi as ‘The Chosen One’ was to have this ability inherent in him without any training, hence the fact that Obi-Wan kept faith in him up to the end.
By contrast, his son and daughter inherited this trait AND a resistance to it; hence “I’ll Never Join You”.
Oh, anmy own contribution: the Doctor stole his TARDIS from his granddaughter, Susan Foreman. He recognised in her the latent tendencies for maniacal insanity that were inherent in Time Lords previous, such as Omega, Rassilon, Morbius, and indeed the Master.
Up to “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, she was indulging his ‘theft’ of her TARDIS in the manner that one might indulge one’s infirm grandparent in sitting in the front seat of the family car one last time; but in fact, he was attempting to find a safe time and place to drop her off where she couldn’t cause any trouble, after turning her human using the same technology as in “Human Nature” without wiping her memory.
His affection for the TARDIS is partly tied to the loss of his last living relative; and his fear is that she may actually one day reach her full potential and bring back the Time Lords with the TARDIS that she best knows how to control, rising as a dark Lady President.
In relation to this, she – and the TARDIS console, under her control – was the ‘Who Else?’ seen by the Doctor in Room 11 in “The God Complex”.
On the Heathcliffe incarnations:
I’ve never seen that particular storyline or episode, but it only stands to reason that a several-hundred-year-old Timelord could have an incredible number of incarnations. I think it makes the story much deeper and enjoyable if we know we haven’t seen all of his different faces. And River Song being a future incarnation of Jack Harkness is preposterous considering we already know his future incarnation is The Face of Bo, who lives almost to the end of the universe.
Murc: And that even comes with a story hook: what happens when a supervillain really does accidentally die in treatment.
I’ve never seen that particular storyline or episode, but it only stands to reason that a several-hundred-year-old Timelord could have an incredible number of incarnations.
Except the set limit on regenerations, which the Doctor would have crossed by now if you count those incarnations.
Except the set limit on regenerations, which the Doctor would have crossed by now if you count those incarnations.
Except the (purportedly) 11th Doctor himself contradicted that limit when he appeared in the Sarah Jane Adventures.
If the Ghostbusters fought the Jedi, the ‘busters would win.
Okay, mine: Doctor Who. The humans in the furthest distant future that we saw in Utopia, when they actually reach Utopia (in the original timeline before the Master hijacked them and in the restored timeline after the Paradox Engine was undone), eventually channel their energies to mastering time travel, engineer themselves more durable bodies, and travel back to the dawn of time to found Gallifrey. (The big time portal they use for it probably becomes that Void thingy that they look into as their rite of passage. And the season 3 Master business is how “The Tochlifane” became a Time Lord legend in the first place.)
DC Universe (old): After the Crisis, Superman was still the Silver/Bronze Age model. The Earth-1 Superman. If anything, his power level was even higher than those peaks, in fact. But he, like the Earth-2 refugees, was adrift. His original destiny (Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow) was no longer valid, he still grieved Kara,and he did not fit into the new world. He realized that he was too powerful, that he was not fit to be the new Earth’s guardian, so he ‘retired’ to something very much like godhood, and used Kryptonian Superscience and time travel to create a new Superman for the new Earth. This new Superman was essentially a wish-fulfillment for the old one: his parents were still alive, Luthor had always been evil and so did not represent a failure of his, Krypton was stripped of all of its glory and grandeur to a thing that would not even be missed, Lois loved Clark Kent rather than Superman. (At this point the theory splits in two, with one version being that Earth-1 Superman becomes the new one and one being that they are separate people). At any rate, you can then read the last couple of decades, starting with the Death of Superman, as the ‘real’ story reasserting itself over the comforting lies. The parade of alternate Supergirls from 1990-2010 becomes psychologically interesting here…
Re: The Doctor’s regenerations subthread…
I do believe the production team behind the show have openly stated their intention to retcon, ignore, or otherwise subvert the hard cap on regenerations, either for the Doctor specifically or for Time Lords in general. The reason being they’re starting to brush up against this cap and they need to keep the series rolling.
I apologize for bringing Doylism into a Watsonian thread.
I believe there was a rather popular theory among Final Fantasy 8 fans (albeit mostly the slash fans) that the only reason Squall developed such a sudden, obsessive affection for Rinoa after spending the first disc of the game blatantly not giving a damn about her was that Rinoa had unconsciously used her latent Sorceress powers on him.
More on the “wish they’d done it like it was in my head” side, my boyfriend ruined The Dark Knight for me months before it came out. See, my friends and I were all looking at IMDB to see how the next Batman movie was looking, and somebody pointed out that Harvey Dent had been cast. “Hey! That means Two-Face is gonna be in it!” Then my boyfriend said, “Why would they need to have Harvey Dent to be Two-Face? They already have Bruce’s childhood friend in the DA’s office. Though I suppose Hollywood wouldn’t like to have a woman with massive facial scarring in a film.” And then I was very sad, because I knew that nothing they would do with either Two-Face or Rachel Dawes could be as interesting as that (and I was right). At least the Joker was awesome, though.
Indiana Jones was killed in the refrigerator at the start of “Temple of the Crystal Skull” and the entire rest of the movie is a crazy post-death dream he’s having. That’s why he kinda fades away at the end.
Honestly, I thought that was what River Song was supposed to do. Matt Smith’s Dr. Who will be the last “Real” Dr. Who and River Song will take over the Tardis in her own series for a few years. River has already stated she’s seen the moment of the Doctor’s death (and that this wasn’t the worst moment of her life), she’s shown proficiency with driving the Tardis in ways Dr. Who himself hasn’t, and she clearly survives through the end of whatever future episodes we see or we won’t have seen her way back in the Forest/Library episode when she first appears.
That was what I assumed would be the solution to the whole “Regeneration Max-out” problem, at least for a while.
On the Matrix thing, my thoughts were always basically this:
Zion was just another level of the Matrix. As was basically explored in Inception, sometimes you need to layer things to make it easier. The Matrix understood that a ‘perfect’ world was untenable, and even a ‘normal’ world would still have people that figure out someone is wrong. So they created a sad sack hipster world where the people that saw through the bullshit could live. They would be so concerned with basic survival, and the constant threat of the machines, etc … they would never bother to figure out they were still in a simulation.
This basicaly handles some of the bigger holes (how Neo can do weird shit in the ‘real world’, and why the macine story just fails). The ‘true’ story is probably different. The humans won, but the nuclear fallout made the world uninhabitable. So, they put humans into suspension until the fallout was cleared and the world would be habitable again. They could sustain life if no one struggled, thus the whole matrix thing to placate the mind while they used just enough nutrient to keep them barely alive, etc.
Re: Murc
I definitely see that as the sort of the reason for low supervillain mortality. They sort of address that in some of the Flash stories (from the opposite side), with the Rogues understanding that if they were to escalate things, the heros would as well, and they sort of saw the result of that when they killed Bart. The Venture Brothers take the idea to a whole other level with the League of Calamitous Intent, and basically have a whole beauracracy in place to have both heroes, and villains, police themselves so that neither side escalates things into an unstoppable blood feud.
I had been planning on doing a RPG campaign (probably Mutants and Masterminds) around that concept, where basically whenever a Punisher type ‘hero’ would arise, the superheros basically had to stop him before villains started to get more violent, or start going after the heroes loved ones, etc.
Oh, also: Boba Fett: didn’t care one bit about Han Solo, other than as a paycheck, and didn’t particularly care that much about his paychecks either. The man was all about killing Jedi (by disintegration when possible), and bounties were just a way to pay the spaceship maintenance bills. He finds out Vader only wanted Han as bait for Luke, so he’s happy to stick around before delivering his bounty, and even though Vader’s plan is to draw Luke into an ambush/forced conversion situation, Fett takes a potshot at Luke on his way in, turning it into a running firefight. Then, in Jedi, he adopts the same plan Vader did, using Han as Luke-bait, and doesn’t even consider Han as anything remotely resembling a threat in that fight (which is how he gets blindsided while trying to get a bead on, yes, Luke Skywalker.)
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I like the idea that the 13 regeneration limits for Time Lords isn’t about being unable to regenerate more than 14 times, but because going past 13 substantially raises the chance of something going drastically, horribly wrong with your new form. That’s why the Doctor always checks to see what he’s like after he regenerates, especially now that he’s getting close to (or depending on what other theories you have, BEYOND) that important line.
Ooh, I had this theory once — I’d done a flowchart in MS Paint to illustrate it and everything — that the movie Tron establishes a series of divergent realities that play out in other media franchises.
TRON
If good guys win: All is well, no future franchises occur.
If bad guys win: MCP is free to upgrade into Skynet; Terminator franchise occurs.
TERMINATOR
If humans can prevent Judgment Day (or at least win the war with the machines): All is well, no future franchises occur.
If machines kill Sarah Connor, John Connor, or win the war: Skynet is free to upgrade into the Matrix; Matrix franchise occurs.
MATRIX
If humans can overthrow Matrix, or if the status quo is at least maintained: All is…well, perhaps not “well,” but no future franchises occur.
If humans die out somehow: Free of human influence, Earth becomes Cybertron. Machines take on humanoid appearance (sentimentality, perhaps?) and split up into Autobot and Decepticon factions. However, without human bodies to power them, there’s an energy crisis, so the Transformers take the Ark (which is actually not a spaceship, but a vessel that uses Skynet’s time travel technology) to the year 1984 (where the original T-800 was sent; more sentimentality?) to plunder the past for resources.
So basically, as long as Tron happens the way it does in the movie, none of these other movies or TV shows need to occur. It doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny, but if anyone wants to expand upon it (hey, why does Optimus Prime carry something called the Matrix?) they are quite welcome.
@Tales to Enrage So I take it that being a ginger would be the first sign that a time lord is turning evil/insane.
Oh, and unrelated: In Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, after Nuclear Man defeats Superman and Lois Lane visits the “gravely ill” Clark Kent, you can see by the way the scene is performed that Lois knows Clark is Superman, but she knows that the secret identity is as much to protect her as it is him, so with a heavy heart she plays along.
That may have been actually intended, though; I thought I was projecting it onto the movie, but if you read the comic adaptation, Lois totally seems to know Clark is Superman in that scene as well.
This is somewhat obscure, but I think Iji and Portal take place in the same continuity. This is mainly because I like the idea of Iji and Chell as a couple.
Doctor Who, regeneration limits, etc:
I’ve always come down on the 13 regeneration limit as being some kind of cultural or legal limitation, rather than biological. With no Time Lord society around to enforce it, who’s going to stop the Doctor from regenerating all he wants?
@Zifnab-
Steve Moffat has inherited RTDs supremely annoying conceit of making a regeneration into a giant goddamn event, similar to an actual death. It was annoying when Ten spent twenty minutes saying ‘goodbye’ to people he wasn’t actually leaving behind in any meaningful way and all the folderol over what River Song knows about Elevens ‘death’ is equally annoying.
@Wally Kovacs-
Yeah, good points, although the Flash’s relationship with his Rogues is/was (I haven’t followed the title since Wally was the Flash) remarkably cordial and somewhat different from a traditional villain/hero relationship. Hell, the Rogues would sometimes show up at West/Allen funerals and family events to pay their respects. They were once furloughed from PRISON to do that. Not in the Silver Age either, we’re talking late nineties.
Also, that’s the GUILD of Calamitous Intent, sir. You may expect a visit from the Diamond Dogs shortly.
In the Daleks’ second appearance, Terry Nation gives the Doctor some dialogue asserting that their defeat on Skaro really was the end of them, and that these Daleks, busy invading Earth, are the ancestors of the ones defeated in the earlier story.
He may have written that in to make things more timey-wimey (which classic Who largely wasn’t), or to avoid undoing the ending of his previous story. Either way, I always thought that it was gratuitous, and Nation’s Dalek continuity is pretty loose, so it’s never brought up again. A very tiresome person would probably be able to prove that it’s never explicitly contradicted, either, and thus demonstrate that John Seavey’s “crazy idea” is basically canon.
Three crazy ideas about South Park:
1. The reason why everybody in South Park is crazy is because the town was cursed by a witch who was part of a team of pioneers who were misled over Hell’s Pass by the townspeople. South Park was founded as a copper mining town and the miners wanted to keep all the land open for mining. Any non-miners who came to town were told there was better land over the pass, and ended up getting lost and starving to death. The witch was forced to eat her own children to survive, and before she finally died, she cursed all the adults in town to be stupid and perverse enough to do worse things than what she was forced to do. South Park has been messed up ever since.
2. The real reason Cartman hates Kyle is because Kyle keeps forcing Cartman to face the truth about himself, and that destroys Cartman’s delusional beliefs about himself. Cartman has come to hate everything Kyle is: Jews, gingers, even hats like Kyle wears.
3. The real reason why Butter’s dad is abusive is because he is gay and desperately doesn’t want to be gay. He thought that having a child would cure him, and when that didn’t work, he subconciously took it out on Butters.
@Sbloyd, I agree with you on Regeneration limits, as the Timelords in the earlier series were able to remove/grant more regenerations. It’s probbably something to control their population (as long lived as they are) and to make sure they don’t become megolamaniacs like the Master, Rani (and arguably the Doctor sometimes).
Midsomer is on a Hellmouth.
In light of a lot of EU material, the *real* story of the Star Wars saga is the rise and fall of the Mandalorians, from their beginnings as a feared expansionist warrior culture, to their defeat by the nascent Sith Empire, to their scattering into a nomadic group of mercenaries and bounty hunters, and finally to their use by yet another Sith Empire as industrially-reproducible cannon fodder.
The reason the Star Wars universe seems to have only a few dozen people of note is because just about everything *has* been run by only a few long-lived dynasties of fluctuating fortunes.
-The Skywalker clan were one of the chief Mandalorian clans. Their utter defeat and humiliation is why they live in slavery 4000 years later.
–Luke Skywalker is a distant genetic cousin of Boba Fett, and thus every Stormtrooper and TIE pilot he sends to his death.
Murc: Regenerating IS kind of a big deal, but only to the audience who now must readjust to a new actor playing the same character. So I agree that all the set up to Ten’s regeneration was overkill, but I think some sort of farewell for each actor is sort of necessary for that note of finality.
Stavner: Number 3 isn’t a theory, we already know Butter’s dad is gay. The rest just follows logically.
Sure wish the Brunching Shuttlecocks archive was still extant so I could link to “The Luke Side of the Force”, which posits that the entire point of the original Star Wars trilogy was various powerful Force users trying to die in front of Luke.
In “Ex Machina”, Hundred won a permanent victory in the second-to-last issue. There is no invasion threat from another universe, and everything Hundred does in the last issue to prepare for it is just paranoia. Vaughan is making a parallel with Bush and the Iraq War, with a politician sincerely believing that all the terrible things he does are justified by an looming threat that doesn’t exist. There was even a sympathetic character in the comic who said he was worried about Iraq having weapons weapons of mass destruction, just to highlight the parallel.
As for Terminator, meet John Connor Senior. He’s the intelligent, ambitious American soldier who marries waitress Sarah Connor (no relation), and rises in the ranks to full colonel by the time John Connor Junior is born. By the time Junior graduates high school, Senior is a high-ranking general. Junior enrolls in West Point, and his combination of family connections, upbringing, and genetic inheritance from his father means he’s destined for a glittering military career. Then SkyNet takes over, kills Senior, and Junior becomes the perfect rebel leader. The John Connor we see, Kyle Reese’s son, is the real John Connor’s half-brother. Only 25% genes in common, raised by a lunatic and a nondescript foster family, no military connections at all. He’s just an ordinary guy with no particular talent at being a rebel leader. Only his name and his mother make people believe he should be in charge.
Johnathan: The Wayback Machine has it.
I’m not sure if anyone here has even heard of the Gothic series so I’ll explain a lot of the background before I get to the crazy theory. They’re a trilogy (There was a 4th part that was made by a different company with none of the original talent, we will be ignoring it) of Fantasy action RPGs by Piranha Bytes.
The protagonist of the game is “Nameless” or “The Nameless Hero” depending on who you talk to because he obviously doesn’t have a name. The first game would always find a way to cut off just when his name would be given, but 2 and 3 made it clear that he really doesn’t have one. His lack of a clear identity is explained in that he is the champion of Innos, the primary Lawful Good god of Gothic’s pantheon. At the beginning of the first game he is sent to a prison for a crime we never find out, we don’t even know for sure if he actually committed a crime.
So now the crazy theory:
Nameless did not even EXIST until about five minutes before the game’s opening cutscene where he is put on the platform taking him to the Khorinis prison mine. He was spun out of the air, fully formed and with 25 or so years worth of memories and skills, and some local militia found a little paper that says he’s a criminal awaiting transfer. Innos’ Champion was willed into existence the exact right place and the exact right time to save the world on three separate occasions.
@Psych Being ginger can’t be a sign of turning evil/insane because 10 said he always wanted to be ginger.
Although, perhaps a sign of such is loss of legs?
Okay, my take on the Matrix is largely similar to what other people have said (that is, Zion is another layer of simulation nested around the Matrix). My theory relates more specifically to the Architect, and his conversation with Neo about the Matrix’s history.
He describes the first Matrix as perfect, and humans as flawed for being unable to accept it, but if we assume that he’s an unreliable narrator, not above letting his own opinions and prejudices color his telling of events, then the claim that the first Matrix was “perfect” comes into question. It probably was perfect, as far as the Architect, a program of precise mathematical rationality, was concerned. It took other, more intuitive programs like the Oracle to refine the Matrix engine into something humans could comfortably interact with.
From one point of view, the Matrix trilogy might well be the debate between the Architect and the Oracle over whether humans need to be controlled, or whether they’re capable of choosing peaceful coexistence on their own. Seen in that light, it may even be a generational debate. If the Architect is a program who personally remembers human oppression and the war, it gives him a much different perspective than the later-generation Oracle, who is implied to have been created post-war to help revise the Matrix. The Matrix is an attempt to reconcile a wartime generation’s prejudices with the following peacetime generation’s optimism.
Eh, Why not?
Princess Celestia is just setting up Doctor Doom about this “collect all the ponies and get to take over everything” nonsense.
The Meta-Bomb was Flashpoint (spoilers for Batman, Inc. & Flashpoint follow)
In Batman, Inc., Batman was preparing for the ultimate threat, weaponizing the world and the Bat-family.
Flashpoint ended with the DC Universe* rewritten from the ground up. It was a fictional event in a fictional universe, with a meta-fictional outcome.
If the fall of the New Gods could be seen in several different ways (as per Morrison regarding Countdown, Final Crisis and Death of the New Gods), why not the restructuring of the universe?
Flash is faster than the reconstructing universe: he’s watching the pieces reassemble.
Batman isn’t inhumanly fast, and he’s also at the center of the meta-bomb (on the island with El Gaucho, Batwoman and crew). It’s poised, along with the whole Leviathan corporation, to strike against him.
This is why there’s no Bruce-Batman on Flashpoint-Earth, as he’d have noticed the change and fought back.
That’s also why in the very last moment of Flashpoint, Bruce is distracted. Barry Allen hands him a letter from his father. In that final moment, as the new universe becomes whole around them, Batman could have noticed the changes, could have saved the world.
In that very last moment, Bataman’s is struck at his core – the loss of his parents – and is unable to act.
* I’m wondering if it’s the universe as a whole or just DC-Earth. I know the Green Lantern franchise has carried over, and have heard that some Legion stuff did as well.
When Empire Strikes Back was written the intent was for Luke to turn Dark at the end of Jedi. Luke fails at every point in Empire and never earns a turnaround.
And why set up Leia as a potential Jedi if there weren’t plans to fire that bullet? I’m guessing the plan was for Luke to join Vader and kill the Emperor at the end of 6 and then there would have been an Episode 7 where Leia has to redeem a fallen Luke.
Riker came up with and asked Picard to call him “Number One.”