Castle Vardulon

Criminal Minds 609: Into the Woods

2012-01-27T00:57:00.001-05:00

There's a full moon in the opening shot of this week's episode, which can mean only one thing: They're taunting us with yet another case in which the killer isn't a werewolf. Come on guys, would it kill you to do a Halloween fantasy episode? Goth rockers and vampirists just aren't cutting it!

See what I did there?

Okay, moving right along, a family is out walking in the woods, being watched by a nefarious figure in the trees. Turns out the figure is a black bear, and they come very, very close to being its dinner. In a happy turn of events (that quickly turns gruesome) the bear wanders off. Why? Because it's already had its fill of human!

Oh desiccated corpses. You never look great.

It seems the child was abducted while camping a year earlier, then dumped along the Appalachian trail some two states over! The team rushes out of the office just moments after hearing about the case (seriously, why aren't they doing this on the plane?), but they're too late - two children have already been targeted, watched from the brush as they happily caper about on their family's camping trip!

Don't worry too much, though - except for that one time in the episode Reid directed, this show has never killed off a child we actually met. And that time we really only heard him talking through a wall.

There's a weird costuming choice when we see the team on the plane. Although at the end of the briefing Greg announced that they'd be at the ranger station within the hour (including trips to and from the airports? How short a flight is this? Could you not just be driving?), when they're on the plane everyone has taken the time to obtain and dress in sweaters and fleeces:

I'm confused - did they stop at the FBI gift shop on the way out of the building? I know they keep 'go-bags' at the office, but don't those generally just have a change of clothes and sundry needables? Why would they have clothes for a variety of different weather conditions? How big are these bags?

When they get to the Ranger station they immediately visit with the father of the dead boy, played by Justified's Johnny Crowder, sans wheelchair! In a suspicious coincidence, it turns out that Johnny stopped desperately searching for his son right around the time the ME says that the boy must have died. Johnny's explanation for this? The psychic connection he had with his child was suddenly cut off, making him sure the boy was dead. That's seriously all the explanation offered, and Greg accepts it.

Again, this is the same show that refuses to do a werewolf episode.

Joe and Reid talk over the facts of the case with the head ranger - it's unlikely this would have been the killer's first victim, so they suggest checking for other children who've disappeared along the trail over the past few years. Meanwhile Derek and Emily are searching the dump site, and discover a marking on the tree under which the body was buried! This means he wanted to be able to find the body, suggesting a deep familiarity with the area. Also, another marked tree means that they haven't found a grave, they've found a graveyard.

Greg walks Johnny through the events of his son's disappearance, hoping some detail will reveal a vital clue to the killer's identity. Sadly, all Johnny has to offer is guilt over not protecting his son. With a possible suspect cleared, it's just a matter of finding out who the new victim is! Turns out it's a kid who disappeared two years ago in the same area and time of year. So the killer grabs a young boy in the fall, molests them all winter, and then kills them in the spring. Ick. So yeah, obviously the two kids who are grabbed in the next scene are going to be fine. This isn't that kind of show.

And yes, both children are stolen. Why? The show needs a ticking clock, and five months of brutal molestation won't cut it, sadly. They need the threat of immediate murder hanging over the little girl's head for the threat to be real. Also sadly.

By looking over all the various cases Reid has managed to pinpoint a dozen that seem to fit the 'profile' of the guy they're looking for. His M.O. involves walking the entire trail back and forth, grabbing victims as he goes. No one knew about it because they were grabbed from across state lines, and no bodies have been found. It's only the killer's decision to spend the last couple of winters hidden in one place that created a clear pattern they could follow!

They're still faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem, however: whatever this hovel is, it's probably well camouflaged, since no hikers have reported it! Or, you know, nobody though an old utility tunnel or whatever was worth 'reporting'. It could be that, too. There's a brief interlude in said bunker with the locked-up kids, but no new information is given, so let's move on.

The next day everyone finds out about the latest abduction, but the response seems to just be a couple of rangers, hikers, and dogs. Would this guy really be so hard to find? Now that they know his MO and the fact that he's going to bed down in the area for the winter, how many places could he possibly be? The team notes that he can't be traveling more than two miles per hour with kids, giving them a super-small search area. And since he has to be hiding in an established structure rather than a makeshift lean-to (harsh winters are namechecked), don't they at least have a list to be working from?

Instead, all we hear about are bloodhounds and Johnny offering to help look. An offer that Greg rejects, because he can't have an expert on the area interfering with the case. It's more important to give the profile before the search and rescue teams head out. Because a profile of the killer is completely useful to people searching for footprints in the dirt.

Oh, and the killer is holding them in a cage in a place whose supposed origins are unclear. Take a look at this screenshot:

Is that wall supposed to be rough, painted concrete, or is it a poorly-built set that's meant to represent the uneven stone walls of a mine?

While I'm busy trying to figure out what's going on with the walls, the killer drags the boy off to be molested, while the little girl is left stuck in the cage. Then we cut over to the profile scene, which is one of the biggest wastes of time in the show's history. Search parties don't need background. Here's the vital info - he's got two victims. The girl's going to die soon. Go find them in a building, cave, or underground shelter! I think orders under twenty-five letters are the most effective, aren't they?

Johnny swings by the ranger office to help out, letting Reid interview him about the places in the woods he's already checked. Before they can get anywhere, we cut back to the cage, where the freshly-brutalized boy is returned to captivity. Although traumatized, he's got a plan - next time the killer comes to get him, his little sister should run! You know what? I've heard worse plans.

It immediately goes wrong soon after, when the killer returns with firewood, as the little boy is able to wound the killer by smashing a pipe into the man's injured leg. Sounds great, right? Except they little boy doesn't keep hitting the man, creating a situation in which they could both escape, rather he just yells for his sister to leave. She does manage to get away, however, and almost immediately she's spotted by Emily and Derek, who happened to be in the area.

But will she be able to explain where she was being held? No, the direction is lost on her. Somehow the authorities miss the next most important question: how long had she been running? Even if they don't know the absolute direction, a radius based on their current location would narrow their search from thousands of square miles to just a handful.

Not that it's going to do the little boy much good, as he's already being dragged through the woods by the killer, who knows that his position has been compromised. Because the little boy doesn't have the wherewithal to stomp on the killer's foot or struggle free, the rescuers who get within fifty feet of him don't get a chance to save the day.

The team manages to find the abandoned mine that the killer's been using, and turn up some food and flowers used to treat joint pain. That, combined with the knowledge that the guy's a limper (provided by the little girl), lets the team know that he'll need some kind of pain medication soon once he's gotten to civilization!

Speaking of civilization, while looking at the records, Reid notices that the killer's first abduction off the trail was in Jonestown, PA - maybe that's his home town? It's a great theory and all, except for one thing - how do you know that this is his abduction? Children being kidnapped isn't exactly a rare thing in the real world, and in the world of Criminal Minds it's essentially commonplace. You didn't know this guy existed until yesterday, and the one thing you know for sure about him is that he likes kidnapping children on the Appalachian Trail - so, with no witnesses or physical evidence (and certainly no body), how can you possibly have assigned this random kidnapping in a PA town to him?

Of course, this baseless guess turns out to be right - the killer goes to a transient hotel, dragging the kid along behind. His plan? Trade the child to another paedophile in exchange for a bag of painkillers! Wow, this is just the most unpleasant episode of Criminal Minds in ages, isn't it?

Luckily Garcia's on the case, checking the local list of sex offenders for people who disappeared from 'the grid' around the time he started murdering people along the Appalachian Trail. She discovers that the transient hotel is the only place in the area where local sex offenders can safely live without violating school zones - making it a good place to start a search. After all, if you were a criminal on the run from the police, wouldn't it make sense to go to the last place that your Parole Officer knew that you lived? I kid, of course, he needed the drugs, and because the paedophile he's loaning the child to doesn't like him very much, it makes perfect sense that he couldn't call and set up a meeting somewhere.

The team rushes to the hotel, the exterior shots of which don't do a stellar job of hiding the fact that this was clearly shot in a major metropolitan area, as opposed to a town of roughly a thousand people. There's a close call in which the paedophile injures the little boy while chasing him around the room, then flees with the kid's unconscious form, but the guy never gets out of the building, and he's arrested without any further incident.

Unfortunately, all the police attention around the building tips off the killer that the police are looking for him, allowing him to flee into the woods with his bag of pain pills. All that's left is for Reid to give Johnny a bit of his son's property that was found in the mine.

THE END

Oh, except for the Prentiss Award-Winning line of the week.

Every week, Derek and Joe. It happens every week.

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

There were definitely profile-y kinds of things going on, with them intuiting his needs for shelter over the winter based on his crimes, and that he would be familiar with the area as a result.

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

I'm pretty sure it could have, although that's just because I'm shocked at how surprised everyone seemed to find where his hideout was. When a kid goes missing in the woods, aren't abandoned mineshafts the first place you check, whether someone kidnapped them or not?

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

4/10 - I'd love to give them a little more credit this week, but the lack of psychological insight when it was called for really played against them. I'm talking specifically about judging where he lived based on a kill 'off the trail' that they couldn't link to him in a million years. Wouldn't it make far more sense to simply say 'when his health deteriorated to the point that he needed a winter shelter, he'd probably pick a location that he was most familiar with - maybe he's from here!'

Also, it's great that when they've got a list of sex offenders in the area they don't simply show their pictures to the little girl and ask which of them is the killer. Because knowing for sure as quickly as possible wouldn't be of any use, would it?

The Lost Simpsons Characters - Nelson's Dad

2012-01-26T07:56:00.001-05:00

Now for another part in this semi-irregular series documenting the way The Simpsons has shrunken and devalued its world by casting off characters and plotlines.

We met Nelson's dad way back in season 4's 'Brother from the Same Planet'.

There he was the soccer coach who showed favoritism to his unpleasant son. You may also remember him from Season 6's 'Bart's Girlfriend', in which he reined Nelson in with a leash.

So, what happened to Nelson's dad? He disappeared. In later seasons Nelson would be assigned a generic 'neglected child' background, in which his father abandoned him years earlier, offering him an excuse for his behavior, as well as a reason to feel sorry for him. The show would then take it a step further, bringing Nelson's father back, explaining that he hadn't actually run off, but rather been kidnapped by a circus. Happy endings all around!

What was lost with the exclusion of Nelson's original father? Accuracy! I don't know how many people reading this have actually met a bully's parents, but Nelson's father being a smug jock who encourages his son's bullying is incredibly well-observed. Nelson's father may be one of the most true-to-life things the show ever offered, and he was removed so that the show could be more generic and cliched.

Thanks, Simpsons.

Dante's Inferno Craziness

2012-01-25T03:40:00.000-05:00

I actually enjoyed the film adaptation of Dante's Inferno quite a bit, so I'm not going to pick it to death, but I thought I'd point out two things that I found humourously puzzling.

This is the man that Dante meets at the gates of hell. He announces that he lived in the time of the false gods, and Dante takes a random shot in the dark as to the man's identity - is he the epic poet Virgil? Amazingly, that's exactly who he is.

Somehow, neither man is surprised at how well that guessing went.

The second thing is an animation error that makes absolutely no sense to me.

Check out the man's shackles at fifty-seven minutes into the film. Now let's check in on them one second later.

Suddenly the chain is gone and his arms are overlapping the shackles. This one is just baffling to me. How do you even make a mistake like this? There barely any movement on the screen, and the chain was a simple overlay. This is Bakshi's Spider-man level of weird.

Other than that, however, perfectly fun film.

TheAvod gets Sequelitis!

2012-01-25T03:10:00.000-05:00

That's right, it's time for three separate sequels to be covered on theAvod - here's the twist... two of them are the third entry in a series! Crazy, right? It would have been nice to get three threes in there, but sadly, it was not to be.

Anyhoo, download the episode by right-clicking here, and listen to DM and myself discuss the craziness that happens when series go on so long that they become good again!

The Eighty-Eighth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

2012-01-24T01:41:00.001-05:00

"Like a ghost murder from fiction!"

It's my fondest dream to someday use that sentence in an appropriate context.

Tales From the Darkside 318: Auld Acquaintences

2012-01-23T02:20:00.000-05:00

On the subject of Supernatural-

2012-01-22T04:00:00.006-05:00

The producers of Supernatural do an excellent job of disguising their limited access to travel. Yes, from time to time it can seem like all of America is a giant pine forest, but for the most part the location scouts do an exceptional job.

There's one episode, though - season 6, number 17 (the Titanic Show!), which features a sequence set in what I can only describe - and anyone who's ever been there should be able to attest to this - as the most Vancouver location of all time.

I don't know if it's the planters, or the modern condos, the terraced steps with ostentatiously stylized railings, or the giant freaking mountain range in the background... when you put all of it in one place, it just screams southern B.C., to the point where claiming it's anywhere else seems patently ridiculous.

An important storytelling lesson learned by comparing Skyline to Thor

2012-01-21T03:09:00.009-05:00

In Medias Res - perhaps the most overused dramatic device in modern fiction, it's impossible to throw a stone these days without hitting a movie that begins in the middle of the action. It's a daring move, or it would be, if most stories weren't using the weaker version of the device, in which, instead of starting in the middle of the story and trusting in the audience's ability to follow along, just teases the main action, then flashes back to explain how the characters arrived in the situation that starts the film.

While not completely inappropriate, this use of In Medias Res requires one thing - that the situation be unusual enough to require an explanation. If it doesn't, then all the film has done is wasted the audience's time. For examples of each type of flashback IMR, let's consider the films Thor and Skyline.

As Thor opens, a mysterious man has fallen through a wormhole and crashed into the ground. Who is he? How did he get here? This is pretty far from an everyday occurrence, so the next half hour of the film is spent detailing the amazing series of events that resulted in this absurd situation.

The film Skyline opens with the beginning of an alien attack - light beams down from the sky, and anyone foolish enough to look into it is drawn up to the spaceships far above. A few people staying in an apartment notice the lights, and one of them is captured. The the film then flashes back, not to explain the spaceships, but rather to let the audience know how a group of people wound up sleeping in an apartment. Since sleeping in an apartment at night is basically the least surprising thing that can happen, all the time spent establishing the series of events that led the characters to that point are a complete waste.

Also, apropos of nothing, you can't introduce a new kind of monster in the last minute of the movie, and expect us to just accept that's what the brains were for, Skyline.

Criminal Minds 608: Reflection of Desire

2012-01-20T00:56:00.002-05:00

The episode begins with Penelope reading pretentious dialogue while doing her makeup in front of a vanity! Is she getting ready for a play? We don't find out right away, since Robert Knepper is busy murdering a blonde woman while another woman watches from the shadows. He's dressed as if this is a flashback set in the 40s, and the fact that he's making his victim watch an ancient film on a projector only serves to complete the theme.

He makes the victim re-enact the scene, but she's too freaked out to get her lines right. An old woman who can only be Robert's mother jumps out and finishes the scene with him, but luckily they're interrupted before the kiss. Sadly for the victim, the interruption comes in the form of her begging for her life, which only serves to set Robert off. He drugs her with chloroform, drives her to an alley in his Mercedes, then patiently waits for her to wake up before killing her with a plastic bag held over her head.

Yes, it turns out Penelope was in a play, something about her being a rape victim who now murders a rapist/killer. The most fun thing about the scene?

The detail that when she fake shot the guy with her starter pistol, she cheated it off to the side so that it would look good for the audience without being potentially dangerous for her co-star. That's a great observation, and suggests that people working on the scene had a theatre background, or at least believed in research. I'm kidding, of course, this could only mean a theatre background. Of course, that theatre background should have led someone to prevent Garcia from whispering her last line to her victim at a level that no one in an audience could possibly hear.

Still, the audience loves it, and gives a mostly-standing ovation. I can't spot Xander in the crowd, though, which is strange, since he seems like he'd be super-supportive of this kind of thing. She also hasn't told the team about her involvement, but she tries to let them know in a passive-agressive attention grab 'accidentally' letting some playbills slip out of a while running down the victim's details.

Speaking of the victim, post-death the killer cut up her face, removing her lips, and he also sent a glamour shot of her to the papers, dressed up like a star from the Golden age of Hollywood. At least the guy's embracing his theme, right?

After the credits, the team heads over to the police station and talk about how this killer is desperate for attention - they warn that withholding it as much as possible at this point is probably the best course of action. They also talk about how this killer is completely unique, as if they haven't ever dealt with murderers who mutilate corpses and then contact the press about it. Weird.

Robert is spending time down at the train station with his mother, trying to teach a random little girl how to walk with grace while waiting for his next victim to climb off a steamer from Indiana, looking for a shot at the big time. You know, this story would make more sense if this episode was set in LA or New York, rather than Georgetown. The scene still plays quite humourously, largely because Robert is a talented enough actor to sell his character's mannered oddities. Especially when he spots his next victim and dismisses the little girl he'd been helping moments earlier.

The team splits up as usual, with Reid and Joe goes to check out the corpse, while Derek and Emily head back to the crime scene - the theory is that the killer must live in the area, and an attention-seeker will probably be the type to hang around the crime scene, checking out the investigation. Then they come across a homeless guy living in the alley where the girl was discovered. The twist? He's a different homeless guy than the one who found the body and called the cops - and this homeless guy says no one else hangs out in the area! That, and the fact that the killer wrote a note in blood on the wall behind a homeless shelter points to one conclusion - it was Robert in disguise! Also, it seems weird that the cops didn't keep the guy who discovered the body around for the FBI to talk to. After all, isn't the guy who finds the corpse generally your first suspect? A scene where Robert acts under makeup and convinces Derek and Emily to send him on his way would have been good villain-establishing.

In a fun bit, the show lets us see a piece of the terribly-written screenplay Robert is obsessed with. How do I know it's terrible?

"Robert hangs in the shadows just as his life now hangs in the balance. But life without love is no life at all." Okay, but what am I seeing onscreen there? Hack.

Oh, and the killer stuffed a piece of the same screenplay down the victim's throat.

Robert is busy at home, putting lipstick on the lips he cut off from the dead woman in the alley. His mother arrives, demanding that he come upstairs and read 'Scene 43' with her, which I'm going to go ahead and assume is the bit we saw from the projector. She doesn't seem upset at all by the pieces of flesh.

The next day the mother is berating Robert about his failures as a man - he's panicking because the cops are investigating him, and she thinks he should 'man up'. Robert points out that if he wasn't a 'real man', could he have abducted the woman from the train station, who's in the next room at this very moment? She doesn't have a good answer for that, although I've got to ask - if he was worried about being caught, why specifically try to bring himself to police attention?

Garcia talks to Greg about having trouble locating the movie the script is from, but based on the glamour photo, it's obviously from the 50s, which they tweak to right away. Then some flat-out nonsense happens, with Garcia and Greg co-winning our Prentiss Award of the night!

Let's set aside the madness it takes to assume - even given the film-related details of the case - that the killer is keeping his victim for a number of days equal to the act structure of the script he likes (even though nothing in their case - the nor parts of the show that only the audience is privvy to - suggests this), how on Earth can you get away with saying 'most' stories have three acts? You're in a story with five, for god's sake!

The team has - based on absolutely nothing, mind you - connected the disappearance of the train station woman with Robert's murder spree, and hold their profiling session, announcing that she likely has less than two days left to live. There's actually some practical advice being offered this time, however - since they have a physical description of him they can stake out the newspaper he dropped the picture off at last time (although covering the other ones in the area would probably be a good idea too), and they guess that he probably has a classic car, given that he's clearly obsessed with the 50s.

By the way, over at Robert's house he's doing the whole makeup/photo thing, which counts as psychologicallly torturing his victim onscreen, meaning that she's probably going to make it to the end of the episode, rather than using the standard 3-kill structure.

Feeling sensible, the team heads over to the train station, then wastes time trying to 'profile' where he might have been sitting, rather than simply getting the camera footage, and checking to see who followed the victim out of the building. Which they'd actually have a pretty good idea of, really - they know when she got on the train, which means they'd have an exact record of when she got off, and should know within about five minutes (if she stopped to talk or buy something) when she was walking through the main concourse.

This goes incredibly well, as the team learns what Robert looks like, and we learn that Robert's mother is a figment of his imagination. It's only onscreen for a second, but check out their video footage of Bob-

Versus what the scene looked like to us-

So he's taking care of his mother's corpse? This isn't just Sunset Boulevard, it's also Psycho!

Greg makes a good catch when he notices that Robert was sitting at the train station for three hours - the parking meters outside only allow for one! So he must have a parking permit, which is apparently a thing in Georgetown. Although, since they know he's driving around, I'm not sure why they're not just going through driver's license photos with the images they have of his face until they find someone who lives in the area and has a 50s-era car. Seems like that would be a better use of Garcia's time than anything she's currently working on.

Also, if he doesn't really have a partner, how is he managing these abductions? They tell us that he's chloroforming women in broad daylight and then driving them away. I'd assumed that he was using his mother as part of a ruse, but since she's not real, how is he knocking women out on the street and then getting them back to his parked car without anyone making a fuss?

We're just going to have to chalk this one up to bad writing, aren't we?

Okay, over at Robert's house the latest victim is proving far better at playing along with his madness than the last one was, meaning that she's got a great chance of surviving this ordeal! Good for her!

She then messes up her chance by headbutting Robert during their dramatic reading and then trying to escape rather than pressing her advantage. As punishment, he cuts off her toes so that they'll fit into a pair of costume shoes. Ick.

The team tries to connect Robert to a parking permit, but they've got a problem - one kidnapping alley was in one zone, and one was in another! The only permit that covers all zones is a handicapped parking permit! So they start cross-referencing that with trucks/vans/SUVs for some reason, and hopefully they'll find their man! I have no idea why they're going truck/van/SUV - didn't they just establish that he'd be driving a well-maintained vintage car?

Robert drops the latest photo off with the newspaper, and Greg decides it's time to draw the killer out by having Garcia hold a press conference! But what will the substance of her comments be?

Hopefully they'll come in time to save the victim, who freaks out when she discovers Mom's corpse - although the show doesn't reveal that's what she saw, as if they didn't already reveal the surprise.

Penelope is nervous about the press conference, since she's not exactly sure about what it's supposed to accomplish. Derek explains that if they make the missing girl famous, the killer will 'make a move'. Although, since that move up until this point has been 'dump her corpse', I'm not sure why they think this will help. Let's see how it plays out.

They wait until they have the press at a fervor, and then announce that people in the M street area should reduce their movements, because they have an address on the killer!

Somehow this works to convince Robert that the cops are coming to get him, so he drugs his victim and drags her out the front door, hoping to get her body safely dumped before the cops come knocking. So they're going to catch him because he's an idiot - that he would believe that the FBI would announce that they were on the way to arrest someone on a live news broadcast? Also, are they idiots? Let's say this works, in what world does their scheme not immediately result in Robert killing his victim and skipping town?

Even if you believe the scene in which Joe and Greg figure out that the victim was killed in Robert's car (I don't - they base their conclusion on the fact that the ME said the body was killed less than a half hour before being dumped - which she couldn't know since they didn't find the body immediately), they only come up with this realization after the press conference plan is already in place. Meaning that when they came up with the plan it was with the full knowledge that implementing it would almost certainly result in the victim's death.

Classy work, guys.

Tucked away in an alley, Robert prepares to murder his victim, but at the last possible moment Joe and Greg spot his car, saving her life! Robert runs off, but they have a trail of blood to follow and his car registration, so it's only a matter of time before he's arrested. We get a little backstory - mom was in a movie, the co-star knocked her up, having Robert ruined her life, and she had him dote on her forever, turning him into a madman. How they can afford to live in a Georgetown mansion if she only ever made the one movie is left unexplained.

The cops show up at his house and Robert surrenders, showing off the twist on his way out the door.

Which would be a more effective surprise if she hadn't been established as fake in that earlier scene.

Also, that corpse has been dead for years. Don't you have to get handicapped parking permits renewed fairly regularly? And if the stressor was her death, why had he just started killing now?

Oh, I get it, the stressor wasn't Mom's death, it was when the corpse's had finally rotted off, and he could no longer kiss her, so he had to harvest a new set. Now I understand. And also wish I didn't.

THE END

Except for a coda about the team supporting Penelope in her theatrical ambitions. How sweet! Still no Xander there, oddly.

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

I wish I could say yes, but the main play for the team was figuring that if they put out a press conference the killer would off his victim and dump the body. Which is exactly what would have occurred if Greg and Joe hadn't miraculously been driving by the exact random alley where that was happening the exact moment it happened. They were right, but the way in which they were right was designed to kill the victim, so I can't really applaud them for it.

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

They had video of his face, and the knowledge that he had a parking permit. I'm not sure why they needed the press conference at all.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

1/10 - I can't stress enough that they actually tried to get the victim killed. Also, they abandoned a perfectly good theory about the classic car halfway through the case, shifting their focus to vans and SUVs for no reason, and doing it so completely that when Greg actually saw a classic Mercedes parked in an alley he dismissed it until he realized that there were people inside.

Not your finest hour, team.

One Last Thing about Bart's Girlfriend

2012-01-19T07:53:00.004-05:00

Seriously now, on what planet do children get up super-early on Sunday so they can get some elaborate games of Cowboys and Indians in before church?

TheAvod Baffled!

2012-01-18T03:51:00.000-05:00

How else would you describe the condition we were left in after watching this year's episodes of Sherlock? How could one show be so great? It has wound up being a show whose greatness is almost impossible to quantify, not that we didn't spend an hour trying. Right-click here to download the episode and join in the fun!

We also discuss the finale of American Horror Story, a show that's much easier to describe: so stupid and insulting to its audience that it's hard to hate, leaving its crazy scrappiness as something of an admirable quality.

The Eighty-Seventh-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

2012-01-17T01:39:00.001-05:00

Picturesque? Isn't that the ultimate example of an adjective you're supposed to show rather than tell?

Kick Ass 2 continues to worsen.

2012-01-16T20:57:00.000-05:00

In issue 5 of Kick-Ass, three things happen. Just three things. Each one of these three things is stupider than the last. Somehow they requires twenty-some pages and costs three dollars.

Thing 1: The villain is told by his relatives on the police force that he can't expect any protection now that he's a mass-murderer.

Why is this thing stupid? The scene doesn't reflect the reality that by now everyone on earth would know the villain's identity, and every law enforcement agency in North America would be all over him. Everyone who'd ever met the villain or his father would be under total surveillance, or even held as material witnesses until they provided information leading to his capture.

Thing 2: Kick-Ass' father is murdered in prison.

All kinds of stupid here. The man is in prison because he confessed to being a superhero in order to protect his child. The police believe that he is Kick-Ass, despite the fact that there is copious amounts of video footage of the superhero in action, and he's clearly a foot and a half shorter than Kick-Ass' father. He's then killed in prison because even though protective custody exists, and is generally used for jailed police officers or child molesters, the prisoner who literally every criminal in New York wants to kill is somehow not in it.

Thing 3: Villains attack Kick-Ass' father's funeral.

Nothing about this sequence makes sense. A terrorist organization, after brutally murdering dozens of people, announces its desire to murder Kick-Ass. Why would he then hold a public funeral for his father, assuring that both he and all of his fellow superheros would be in one public place at a predictable time? The only situation in which I could imagine this happening is if the police/FBI/HomeSec/ATF/Interpol were using the funeral as a trap for the villains - kind of coldhearted, but plausible. That isn't the case. Why does it go forward? Because the villains announced that they wouldn't attack the funeral.

And then every law enforcement agency in the world took the word of a pack of wolves that they wouldn't attack a sheep convention, so they left it essentially unguarded, considering the resources at their disposal.

Bonus Thing: The villains are somehow drawing new recruits.

At the end of the comic Kick-Ass is abducted from the funeral by the four new henchmen that attack it. That's right - there are four new henchmen. Not the guys who dress up in costumes, just gunmen for hire. Which brings me to the stupid part - who on Earth would sign on with the most wanted man in America? The villain has no ideology, and there's no possible series of events in which this doesn't end badly for him, so why would anyone volunteer to sign up for a suicide run?

Sure, he can pay them money - but his finances are limited, and these men are being asked to shoot up a funeral containing dozens of armed NYPD officers. Even if bad writing allowed them to get away without being shot to death, how long before they were identified and went away forever after being charged with domestic terrorism? Is there an amount of money on Earth worth that risk?

Kick Ass - Buy three instances of your intelligence being insulted for one dollar each, and the fourth is on the house!

Haiku! Starring Butchered!

2012-01-15T02:43:00.006-05:00

Today I'll be utterly misusing a Japanese art to review the film:

At seventy mins,

Somehow it's the most padded

Film I've ever seen.

I can’t believe a movie this stupid exists: Skinwalkers

2012-01-14T08:47:00.002-05:00

I'm going to put you in a hypothetical situation, one analogous to something from the movie Skinwalkers, and I'd like you to tell me how you'd respond.

Alright, say that everyone had a switch on their body that could be flipped, turning you from just an average person into someone who loves nothing but murder. The problem with these switches? Once they've been flipped you can't turn them back, and there are no outward visible signs that it's been done - but internally, you've transformed into a switchflipper, with loyalty to nothing but other switchflippers.

Okay, now let's further assume that you're part of a group of regular people on the run from a group of switchflippers. One of your number is kidnapped by the switchflippers, then released a day later, completely unharmed - but, of course, she could have had her switch flipped, and there's no way you could tell until she betrayed you and started killing people. How would you treat her? Would you welcome her back into the group, taking no precautions of any kind?

Let's take it one step further, and say that precautions wouldn't even be hard to take, since you're fleeing from the switchflippers in a vehicle specifically designed to contain people safely, one filled with straps and chains and the like. Also, this whole 'containment' thing wouldn't be an ongoing situation because, when you're forced to make the decision, you're literally less than 24 hours from gaining the ability to cure all switchflippers, everywhere.

So, in that situation, would you let the member of your group have free rein, or would you take the precautions I mentioned, the ones that are readily available to you?

If you would, then you're smarter than all the heroes of the movie 'Skinwalkers'.

Criminal Minds 607: Middle Man

2012-01-13T00:55:00.001-05:00

The episode opens with what I thought for a moment was a flashback to the time a crazed Minuteman was chasing immigrants through the desert on an ATV, but it just turns out to be a group of killers chasing a woman through a corn field with a 4WD. Can't imagine how I got those mixed up... Anyhow, they catch her, and that's that.

I seriously hope these guys own this cornfield, or they're straight-up leaving tons of evidence about their type of truck and where they came from literally everywhere. What are the odds that some guy's livelihood being trampled by thugs never really comes up are?

Back at the office, Garcia gives everyone tablet PCs to receive their briefings from - will product placement be the order of the day on Criminal Minds from now on? Let's stay turned to find out! Also, Reid balks at the idea of going computer, and Garcia hands him a stack of papers. Which raises a question - is it easier to speed read from a piece of paper or a computer screen? That's worth looking into. In this case I'd imagine it would be faster with the paper, since turning a page is generally more efficient than faffing about with touchscreen controls, and a piece of paper is considerably larger and holds more information than a tablet screen. Still, this is a topic where I'd like to hear from an actual speed reader.

The facts of the case are simple - strippers are being kidnapped on Friday nights, tortured for a weekend, and then murdered on Sunday nights! It's happened three times so far, and the latest woman was just kidnapped, meaning they've got one heck of a ticking clock to work against! In this case Derek actually underestimates the deadline, as he claims they have 'less than two days' to save this woman (which they presumably will, since in cases where a victim can be psychologically tortured the show often goes off the 'teaser kill - mid-show kill - rescued' model), but that's underplaying the desperation of this victim's plight. We know this is Saturday because she was kidnapped the night before, and since her file has already reached the FBI, we can assume that this isn't super-early in the morning at Quantico. By the time they actually fly out to Indiana and start working the case it's already going to be mid-afternoon, leaving them with 30 hours tops to deal with the situation. Which is roughly as implausible as it gets.

Hopefully some plot development will contrive to keep this woman around for an extra couple of days. Either that or, contrary to my predictions, she'll get killed, and they'll rescue the next one.

Oh, and they did bring up the fields that the women were found in. Each one belonged to a different farmer, and was torn up by the killers' activities, with a dead body left in the middle of it. So we're expected to believe that on three separate occasions no one noticed a giant 4x4 zipping around their fields in the middle of the night, giant floodlights flashing every which way. Got some sound sleepers down there in Indiana, don't they?

Hey, I wonder if they used the 4X4 to abduct their victims? It seems like they would, and since the cops definitely know what kind of vehicle they're looking for, checking the parking lot and ATM cameras at the various strip clubs, looking for the same vehicle seems like a good avenue of investigation. Maybe they'll even do that after the opening credits!

As Greg arrives at the police station he sees the local sheriff bullying and berating a subordinate, then the lout talks about all the dead prostitutes he saw when he worked in the big city. His opinion? They were basically asking to be brutally murdered. You know, if we hadn't already seen all three killers, this guy would obviously be in on it.

Speaking of the killers, two of them meet at a bar to discuss the revelation that the girls are dead! Yup, somehow at least one of the killers didn't think the girls were being killed at the end of their weekend of rape and torture. The other one claims he didn't know either, but he's not exactly a convincing sort.

More importantly, though, how can even one of these guys possibly be just finding out about these murders? The show tries to cover for this by including that scene in which the Sheriff yelled at his subordinate for talking to the press about the case, but the show seems to think that 'talking to the press' doesn't mean letting them know that the same killer is responsible for all the victims, but rather keeping the fact that these women are dead completely under wraps. Which is, you know, completely impossible. Let's set aside for a moment the fact that these dead bodies were being discovered by local farmers, who doubtless wouuld have told people, and consider that while all these women were found in one county, they were all abducted from different cities around the state, up to to hours away! How on earth could the local sheriff keep anyone in another city from even reporting these deaths? Is he keeping all these bodies in a freezer somewhere? It's been over a month since the first body turned up - does that woman's family have no idea that she's dead?

Seriously, though - there's absolutely no way that one of the participants could just now be finding out that he was a killer. I understand why the writers want this plot development to occur now - one of them freaks out and wants to go to the cops, winds up murdered by the other two - but if they wanted it to spin out that way, then they shouldn't have stacked up so many previous victims. The premise just completely defies belief.

Greg talks to the latest victim's father, who's unimpressed by Greg's assurance that they're working on a 'profile' - how is this going to help find his daughter? Hey - that's what I want to know, too! Do you think the dad has been reading these reviews?

Over at the strip club where the latest victim works the team is trying to figure out how a killer could have gotten one of the dancers alone. One of the dancers remembers two guys inviting dancers to a 'party'. They check the security cameras, but there are two many 'blind spots', and apparently no cameras in the parking lot, somehow. Meanwhile, over at the field where the body was found, Joe and Derek figure out that there must have been at least three killers, since two couldn't be assured that they'd be able to successfully chase a woman through a cornfield. They're right, of course, but it's kind of an unsubstantiated jump in logic - these are women who've been tortured for a weekend and then heavily drugged before being tossed out in the field - how far were they really going to get?

The two other killers swing by the frat house where the prime villain lives, and confront him about murdering the other women. He admits to it, and seems unphased by the news that the FBI has arrived. In fact, the prime killer thinks that nothing about their weekend plans should change, since they've been so good at covering their tracks.

Meanwhile, it's conference time back at the police station! They go over the known facts of the case - explaining that the killers always went to the clubs on 'theme nights' to ensure that they wouldn't be spotted by the cameras in the huge crowds. Which seems like a little more writing than necessary, since it's already been established that the women were abducted on Friday nights - wouldn't that be the most popular night at a strip club whether there was a promotion or not? Hell, aren't promotions generally not on the weekend in order to keep the club jumping on traditionally non-popular nights? Oh, and they also see the guys in the private booths signaling a third person across the club, confirming the 'three killer' theory.

They're doing a nationwide DNA search against the samples they found under the last victim's fingernails, but Joe warns that since there were only two samples from three killers, it's likely that one of them didn't know about the murders, and will now have to be taken care of! Which is both exactly right, and impossible to guess. Once again, there's no way these deaths wouldn't have been covered on the news, so this whole part of the storyline utterly preposterous, especially Joe managing to guess its existence.

We then cut to the murder hovel, where two of the killers are discussing whether or not to kill the third. The younger doesn't really want to, but the older one is clearly going to go through with it no matter what. Later on, the third killer tries being kind to his victim as a prelude to maybe letting her go, but obviously that's not going to work out, especially since the other killers show up. You know, this plot would work just fine if the least vicious killer was growing more and more uncomfortable with his crimes, and freaking out because the FBI has shown up. This whole 'secret murders' plotline just unnecissarly adds a layer of 'this could never happen' to an otherwise serviceable plotline.

Now it's time for the profile, where they reveal their theory that the killers are most likely college students. Their basis for this announcement? 1: Murders started after the summer. 2: They're only killing on the weekends. 3: They don't appear to have a lot of money.

I'm going to debate the third point for a second. They've got a car, they've clearly got a secondary location where they're keeping the women - there has been no sign that they're low on resources. The only proof they offer to back this up is the fact that the guys go to strip clubs on the 'cheapest nights' (you know, the mythical Friday theme nights - one of which was 'ladies night', which wouldn't have been any cheaper for them) - except you already said that they went on those busy nights so that they could blend in with a large crowd. You're not allowed to use the same piece of information to draw two completely different conclusion without any other evidence. Since you don't have any, this is a stretch.

Nonetheless, the team apparently heads out to canvas the various universities, hoping to find a lead. University campuses which, as you know-

Tend to be incredibly busy on Sunday afternoons:

Come on, Criminal Minds - I know you never want an episode to take place over more than a couple of days, but this is just lazy.

The team's plan? Get as many cops out and about, increasing pressure on the 'pack' of killers, hoping that the weakest among them will turn himself in. The plan is surprisingly effective, since the entire pack seems uneasy when they see the cops all over their campus. The campus that they're all going to on a Sunday afternoon. Seriously, Criminal Minds, what the hell?

The youngest gang member tries to quit, but he doesn't run right to the police, so this can't possibly go well for him. Speaking of bad news for criminals, the DNA found on the victim matched a series of rapes and murders from a Louisiana college town - the police closed in and two locals disappeared, leading the cops to assume they were the killers and stop looking. Hold on... couldn't they have gotten DNA from those guys' apartment and checked DNA to confirm their theory? Also, why did they stop looking? Shouldn't they have put out an interstate search for those guys? Hell, they have names and photos of them, so why isn't Garcia searching for them specifically at the local colleges, rather than just 'any student from Louisiana'? I mean, we're pretty sure that the lead killer murdered his partners and skipped, but why is the team so certain that's what happened? Shouldn't they be covering all bases?

Oh, and in case I glossed over it with all my criticism just then, I'd like to remind everyone that Garcia is about to solve the case, just like always.

We then cut to Sunday night, where the killer's sidekick and the weak guy are out driving through a cornfield in the evil truck. The sidekick explains that the plan is to dump the truck and then leave town, although I'm not sure why the weak guy needs to go along for that - or why it would ever seem like a good idea for them to be together again. Not that anyone's motivation really matters at this point, since this scene exists only to confirm the team's (entirely baseless) suspicion that the team is going to kill off the weak link.

Why am I being so harsh on this theory of theirs? Because it's so profoundly coming out of left field - they talk about the idea of a pack killing off the weakest member as if it's a truism that shouldn't even be questioned, but two of the other times we've seen this happen - the Manson episode (with BLACKWOLF!) and Angry White Men - there was no dissent within the killer pack, and the time that there was - Last House on the Left - the team didn't see it coming.

Okay, so - weak link is dead - what's next? A thresher tears up the weak link's body on Monday morning, and the team rushes out to examine the scene. They've found the body four counties away from the usual dumping area - meaning that they must have some connection to the force! How do they jump to this conclusion? The team suggests that since the cop cars that were stationed around local cornfields were well-hidden, someone on the killing team must either be working for the police or received information about the plan from someone who was. Which would be a great theory, if the team hadn't blanketed every campus in a hundred miles with cops and FBI agents on Sunday. Doesn't it stand to reason that the exact same trigger that drove the team to kill would let them know that they should dump the body as far as possible from the cops that they now know are desperately searching for them?

Of course, the unfounded supposition turns out to be right, when we discover that the sidekick is... twist! - the Sheriff's son! Garcia discovers this by searching for cops with children who go to the college - and it turns out that he also has a history of violence! Greg confronts the Sheriff about his son's background, and flat-out accuses him of abusing his family. Because obviously violently confronting a bully is the best possible way of getting him to turn over his only son to you. Shockingly, the Sheriff helps them with the investigation, despite claiming that his son wasn't involved.

They then discover who the killer is in the most preposterous way possible. Naturally it's Garcia who does the job - why is it preposterous? Because it's accomplished by expanding her search from current college students to anyone who went to the college in the past couple of years... seriously? She didn't already do that? They knew the town that the killer lived in in Louisianna, and where he currently lives in Indiana - why not just search for people who moved from one place to the other within the time frame? Could there really be more than one or two guys?

Oh, and the killer was also thrown out of his frat on rape charges. Yet another thing Garcia didn't search for the first time around. She's really dropping the ball this week, isn't she?

Now that they have the killer's identity, it's simply a matter of driving over to his house and saving the day! There's one last stupid think on the way, though, and it's the Prentiss Award-Winning line of the night:

Yes, that's exactly what you want to do in a hostage situation: assign the negotiator who'll make the criminal the most uncomfortable, anxious and unpredictable! There's no way that could go wrong!

Anyhow, the team rushes to the house and shoots the killer. Emily does a predictably terrible job of negotiating, forcing them to shoot both the killer and his sidekick. Although the sidekick is shot non-fatally (by his father!), so it's not a completely happy ending.

THE END

Also, it seems the latest victim's dad is in a wheelchair, which I guess I missed in the last scene with him.

And there's a scene where the Sheriff realizes that all of the abuse he heaped on his son is responsible for turning the kid into a killer. Greg tries to comfort the man, explaining that it's not too late for him to be a father and for the son to turn his life around.

Greg is, of course, lying.

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

I actually liked some of the writing around intuiting group behaviours, but this episode was basically a textbook example of how profiling can be misused to improperly narrow down a suspect pool. They immediately jump to the conclusion that they've got three killers who are college students - based entirely on supposition. Of course, they turn out to be right, but what if they hadn't been? What if the 'pack leader' hadn't killed his teammates in Louisianna, but instead all three of them had moved to Indiana and started killing again while taking manual labour jobs and living off the grid? You'd have the exact same set of facts the team is working with - but their insistence on focusing on a single theory to the exclusion of all others would keep them from ever finding their killers.

Until, of course, Garcia solved the case the way she always does.

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

There was a DNA match, and a guy in town who went to colleges abutting murder sites in two different states. This was one of the most solvable cases I've ever come across.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

3/10 - Despite the incredible solvability of the case, I have literally no idea how they got a warrant to head out to the killer's house at the end. They had no physical evidence, no witnesses, nothing but the knowledge that one guy with a history of violence had been hanging out with another guy with a history of violence. That's a textbook example of how to develop a person of interest that you interview/follow/investigate, but enough information to get a search/arrest warrant within fifteen minutes? Not in a million years.

This is one of those situations where a little more evidence would have helped sell the whole thing. Let's say that someone on the street had seen three guys in a big black truck idling across the street from the strip club, but didn't get the plate number? Then llet's further say that they were able to match tire tracks from the parking lot to tracks out in the field, confirming that this same vehicle was being driven by the killer - then later, when it turned out that their suspect had the same model and colour of truck registered in his name, it would at least be believable that a judge might take the confluence of circumstantial evidence as being enough to justify a warrant.

Hell, you could have even made it that the guy was in violation of his parole in another state (like he was only allowed to leave Louisiana as long as he was going to college, and even though he'd dropped out his overworked P.O. hadn't caught it yet - but Garcia does!) giving the local cops the legal right to head over to his house, arrest him, and search the place for any sign of the woman. Either of these simple fixes would have gotten rid of any plot holes - but they simply didn't bother.

If the Criminal Minds writing room has an official mood, I'm fairly sure it must be "hope (that the audience isn't paying attention)".

More from the Bart's Girlfriend episode!

2012-01-12T07:48:00.006-05:00

While the idea of Skinner setting Bart up to misbehave is a funny one, I've got to ask something about Scotchtoberfest.

How can Bart misbehaving at an event off-campus on a Sunday be grounds for detention? You might as well give the kid detention for jumping over other kids with his skateboard back in Season 2.

Also, and this is one of the many reasons early Simpsons impresses me so thoroughly, check out the crowd for Scotchtoberfest.

The crowd has been given tams, capes, and bottles of whiskey. Now that's some excellent work, both by Skinner setting up the sting, and by the animators including little details to give the scene verisimilitude.

TheAvod Gets Narcissistic!

2012-01-11T08:00:00.002-05:00

I know you're psyched to hear what Merman and myself had to say about the movie Transformers 3, but I've got a splitting headache at the moment, so I can't say. Luckily, we also recorded our thoughts some five months ago, enabling you to right-click to download and listen to them!

The Eighty-Sixth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

2012-01-10T01:36:00.000-05:00

Puns, the intimation of something perverse to come, and a decent helping of cheesecake and beefcake all at once. It's possible congress may have had a point...

Tips for low-budget filmmakers: Edison Death Machine Edition

2012-01-08T02:55:00.000-05:00

When making a low-budget movie locations are at a premium. People call in favors, beg for access, and find the cheapest possible places to film. This is how one winds up rewriting a script so that Captain Kidd's grave is located in the parking lot of a motor lodge.

Of course, sometimes a script can't be rewritten - sometimes you need absolutely need a location because the entire premise of the film depends on it. Such is the nature of the museum in Edison Death Machine. Simply put, there's no movie without a museum. Unfortunately, despite the assurances of the following placard-

This is clearly not a museum. They tend not to have low foam ceilings, glaring fluorescent light, or institutionally-tiled floors.

The chairs aren't especially believable, either. So, let's say you find yourself in a situation where you have access to a retirement home or medical clinic, but need it to double for something else, like a museum or school. Here's a fun trick...

TARPS!

Remove the ugly chairs, put the odd art aside, and throw some tarps over the questionable flooring and toss up a few stepladders. Then just put up some signs announcing that the location is being repainted in anticipation of the big event that's important to the script - suddenly you've doubled the believability of your location!

Can't really suggest much to help with the low ceilings and ugly flourescent lighting... maybe use the stepladders and shoot from high angles? That could hide it nicely!

Anyhoo, until next time, this has been Count Vardulon's Tips for Low-Budget Filmmakers! TM and R, 2012.

How to Ruin Your Own Movie: Evil Things Edition

2012-01-07T02:49:00.000-05:00

The film opens with the resolution, as is so popular in the found-footage genre-

So everybody dies at the end. Don't bother getting attached to any of them, folks! Not that you could - this is not a story about the world's most likeable college students. Lots of bickering, lots of people telling the main filmmaker to 'stop pointing the camera at me', as if that will somehow make it seem more realistic. Here's a tip for future 'found footage' flimmakers - in real life, people mind being filmed, or they don't. And if they mind, their friends turn off the cameras, because if they don't they seem like complete and utter tools.

So unless you want utter tools and lots of bitching from characters, make it so the people in your movie don't mind being filmed all the time. Trust me, all that people will notice is that the movie is pissing them off less than most 'found footage' films.

Another good thing to avoid is long sequences stolen directly from other 'found footage' movies. In this case, there's an extended (10 minute!) sequence where the characters get lost in the woods. It's not like this is even justified by the plot - they're not looking for anything or seemingly going anywhere. A group of five people apparently just think to themselves 'hey - let's go off wandering into the scraggly woods without compasses, maps, marked trails, or any idea of the geography of the area!'

Meaning that the characters are also too stupid to continue to live.

My own personal check-out moment came 13 minutes into the movie - the characters had already been menaced by a reddish/brown van that nearly caused an accident by speeding past them and then stopping, blocking one lane of a highway. Later, when the group has stopped to eat at a diner, and the van returns to continue stalking them, everyone acts like there's nothing they can do to protect themselves.

As if reckless driving and menacing people on the road aren't crimes. Yet when one of the group heads outside-

It's not to take down the license number and call the police, but just to bang on the van's window and then allow it to escape.

No, I don't have any idea why, either.

Another good tip for ruining your own movie? Don't have an ending! After an interminable amount of time during which interchangeable people hang out and then briefly get lost in the woods, a videotape is left on the front porch:

This is just 50 minutes into the movie. The characters watch it, and realize that it's footage of them from the past two days - the killers have been taping them that whole time! The monsters even snuck inside the house and filmed the students as they slumbered!

After this the lights go out in the house and the group finds themselves unable to escape because their car has been stolen. How they didn't hear it drive away is beyond me - maybe it was stolen while they were lost in the woods, but if so one would think they'd have noticed on the way back to the house.

Over the next ten minutes everyone hides and is killed off camera, and the film calls it quits at the 70-minute mark, without anything intelligible having happened, other than a ripped-off-of-Silence of the Lambs sequence that defies belief.

Yeah, it's not that dark in there. There's a clearing around the house, there's a full moon outside, and all the windows are open. She's been in the darkness for something like five minutes at this point - plenty of time for her eyes to acclimate themselves to the darkness.

But the film doesn't have the good sense to call it quits after the end of the movie as it should, despite it being well under feature-length - instead there's footage of the killers searching out their next victims (apparently they love killing people who have video cameras), and then the writer/director/editor offers us all of the footage that the killers took while stalking the group.

Why? Other than to pad out the running time, I have no idea. We already saw this footage when the characters were watching it, and seeing a more complete version offers no new information.

This isn't one of those endings where the 'killer's private reel' shows the audience something revelatory that sheds new light on the film. All we learn is that yes, in this earlier scene-

There was a guy out in the snow filming them with a camera. Which we already knew. The scenes don't even tip off that there are easter eggs we can go back and enjoy if we want to watch the film a second time, because - as far as I can tell anyhow - there's no sign of the killers in any of those other scenes.

It's not like there aren't questions that need answering - and the 'killer's reel' is notable for something that's missing. There's no footage of the group out in the woods, even though it's established that at least one of the killers were there, watching them.

We know this because of the big unanswered question of the movie - why is a Predator making a snuff film and driving a van? That's capitalized for a reason, BTW - at no point in the film do we get the slightest idea what the killers look like, but twice in the film (the woods, the end), we get to hear the sounds they make which are (SPOILER ALERT), the exact kinds of rolling clicks that Predators from the film of the same name use to communicate with one another.

Why are aliens killing filmmaking teens out in the snow when they're only capable of living in warmer climates?

I've got no idea. And if you asked the writer/director/editor of Evil Things, I doubt he could tell you either.

Criminal Minds 606: Devil's Night

2012-01-06T00:52:00.002-05:00

We open on a montage of images from Detroit, MI - boarded and shuttered businesses and homes. Letting us know that, contrary to common belief, Detroit is not an economic Shangri-La of full employment where dreams come true and everyone, regardless of race, creed, or colour, goes to bed with a full stomach. Anyway, enough social commentary - let's hit the show!

A man in a hoodie drags someone out of the cage he keeps in the back of his van. He drags the unconscious man by way of chains to a makeshift pyre he's created out of old wooden pallets. Then, as the man screams for mercy, the villain pours gasoline everywhere and lights the place on fire!

He then stands around to watch the victim burn, which seems super-dangerous, as things like pallets are often made from pressure-treated wood, and might well contain a variety of hazardous chemicals that can escape in the smoke when they're set on fire. Of course, the fact that he's raising his arms like a supervillian on the cover of a Spider Man comic and worshipping the flames suggests that this isn't a man overly concerned with long-term ramifications of his actions.

Then we head over to Greg's house, where he's getting his son ready for Halloween! Which is apparently tomorrow night. His son doesn't want to dress as spider man (weird coincidence, right?), but this can't be important, so let's move on. To the briefing! Where we discover that this killer has been murdering people annually in the three days leading up to Halloween, which Reid calls 'Devil's Night'. Isn't that just October 30th, though? Or have they expanded their arson activities a few days because of the overcommercialization of the holiday? Also, why has it taken the police three years to notice this pattern? You'd think during the first year, when one body turned up on each of the days leading up to Halloween, killed the exact same way, they'd be a little suspicious. Then, when a person was burned to death on October 28th the next year their suspicion would be confirmed, and the FBI would be called in! Why has it taken until the third year - did the show just want to jack up the body count for no good reason?

There's a little discussion about the fact that - as usual - this isn't about an arsonist (since those can't be caught), but rather a serial killer who burns people, and then we get the Prentiss Award-Winning line of the night, when Reid explains the MO of arsonists:

That's just not true at all. Arsonists will burn anything they think they can get away with burning - which is why they tend to focus so much on abandoned buildings. If arsonists tended to burn dwellings with people in them, which would often result in deaths, then the police would pay way more attention xto them than they actually do. It's a dangerous crime, but unless it causes a death or was obviously used for insurance fraud or as part of an extortion scheme, there's a reason it's not really a high priotity to investigate.

Still, the team wants to look into it, so off to Detroit they go! After the credits of course - although this week's round-table scene ends on the weirdest note, as Emily poses what the show seems to think is a brain-teaser designed to confound the team - how his he getting his victims across town and into buildings without being noticed?

Seriously, show? How is that worth cutting to the credits on? He has a vehicle, obviously. Just like every other serial killer you've ever tracked. When was the last time you chased someone who didn't have a vehicle with a large trunk or a van to stuff a body in? Half-wit.

On the plane they address the Devil's Night situation - it seems the The Crow lied to us all, and it's actually a 3-night vandalism festival in the streets of Detroit. Of course, with the crumbling of all Detroit's institutions, the fires have only gotten worse. The team's theories nonsensically mention how angry the killer must be (file that under duh), before centering on the place where the serial killer and arsonist circles cross - proximity to the investigation!

Okay, it's like the show is desperately trying to make me happy, which I have to respect. The next scene opens with Ernie Hudson's voice overtop the image of-

An old firehouse! Ah, Ghostbusters - you make everything better, don't you? Well, except for Extreme Ghostbusters, obviously. I don't even know why they bothered stopping by Ernie's office, though, since they immediately split up and heads to the morgue and latest crime scene. What do they expect to find in those places that Medical Examiners and CSTs haven't already?

There's not much info at the morgue - the killer clubs people over the back of the head, then puts a bag over their face before burning them. Interesting, but nothing that couldn't have been said over the phone. Meanwhile Ernie shows Derek and Emily around the latest crime scene, while giving them some info about the neighbourhood watch group that looks out for the annual fires - more suspects for the 'close to the investigation' list!

We get a pretty bad failure of location scouting when Emily is gobsmacked at the size of the gigantic building the man was burned to death within. Unfortunately, this is the building they secured for the shoot:

While not tiny by any means, as warehouses go, this is nothing impressive - if it would take you less than a minute to walk from one end of a structure to another, I can't see that it's large enough to be worth commenting on. Really, this is just another in the frequent examples I've found of the producers being unwilling to change lines of dialogue and story details to reflect reality on the ground.

They then come to the conclusion that the killer must have researched reaction times, since Ernie's men were at the fire within five minutes of the alarm. The fire alarm that the long-abandoned husk of an engine factory still had, for some reason. Also, more dialogue suggests they weren't able to consider their location, as they talk about the unpredictability of fire and the killer's need for an escape route. Except he was never in any danger - he chose a building crafted exclusively from concrete and iron, then built his own bonfire, ensuring that it wouldn't spread. A more interesting psychological angle to probe would be why he's so determined to burn only the victims and not the buildings, thus ensuring that their charred bodies would be left on display for 'first responders'. Of course, this doesn't come up.

There's some crazy nonsense victimology going on in the next scene, as they use circular and self-reinforcing logic to try to pull a fast one on the audience. First they announce that killers are often familiar with their earliest victims, which is true (we covet what we see every day, Clarice), but then jump to the conclusion that if he knew one of the victims (which is still a wild guess), then there's a good chance he knew all of them! A statement that is both completely incompatible with all available real information about serial killers, and everything the team has ever encountered while working cases on the show.

Anyhoo, they go to talk to a the wife of the latest victim, hoping that their random suspicion will turn out to be accurate, and she'll remember a black guy in a hoodie publicly threatening to murder her husband. Emily proves to be terrible at victim counseling - the wife asks to see a photo of her husband's body, and she's forced to break the news about his manner of death, which the wife handles in a predictably terrible fashion. Isn't Emily supposed to be a psychologist of some manner? I know she used political connections to get transferred into the unit, but still... Here's a tip for avoiding Emily's faux pas in case you ever find yourself in that situation, offered in the form of a paraphrasment from Ernie Hudson's breakthrough role: If someone asks you if their husband was alive when his body was set on fire, YOU SAY NO!

The wife is then handed off to Joe for some light hypnosis to help her remember the details of her husband's abduction. Not sure why they did the intro scene with Emily - couldn't we have cut that and gone straight to Joe, or just had Emily do the watch-waving? This feels like a reshoot/editing situation.

Thinking back over the parade they went to, the wife remembers the husband splitting off to get some Mexican food while she bought a gyro. Joe asks her who was sitting near her husband, and she remembers a monster with a badly-burned face.

I'm not exactly clear on how this guy could have clubbed a man of equal size into submission and then disappeared into a huge crowd, but I'm sure that will be explained. I'm kidding, of course - this show is no more concerned with plausibility than it is filling plot holes!

In the conference room they're running full-tilt with the premise (based on nothing, I'll remind you) that the killer knew all of his victims. So it should be just a simple matter of checking who among all of the victims knew a horribly burned guy. While they're looking into it, the killer kidnaps a guy from an SUV while the victim's young daughter sings a religious song! Devilish! Now they've got a witness to the van, at least.

Before the team gets the call about the abduction there's just enough time for some truly bizarre pseudopsychological nonsense - Emily asserts that by choosing to burn people in the 'heart' of rivertown and the 'core' of the buildings, the killer must be subconsciously saying that whatever grievance drove him to this, it's something that effected him deeply and profoundly!

Thanks, Emily. Because the fact that a burn victim has started abducting people and charring them to the bone wasn't enough of a clue that he's had a profound disappointment in his life. Also, if he wasn't trying to send the cops a clue about his emotional state, he'd be burning people in a suburban mall in the middle of the afternoon - after all, it's not like he's picking the insides of abandoned buildings for reasons as prosaic as not wanting to get caught, right?

Okay, so the victim in the van knows the killer (confirming the theory), and calls him 'Caiman', or at least something that sounds like that. The victim is a contractor by trade, so the team has Garcia check to see if any of his employees who worked with fire were fired recently - also they need to be checked against the list of neighbourhood watch volunteers, naturally. For some reason their first eliminator isn't 'are there any burn victims on the list?'

Despite avoiding the most obvious clue, Penelope still manages to find the killer, whose name is 'Kaman' - I feel my mistake was a fair one. While the killer tries to avoid roadblocks, the team gets some of his backstory: He was a rough kid who got his act together, but was then in a car accident caused by an old criminal buddy, and was horribly burned, causing him to lose everything he cared about! And now he's been getting revenge on everyone who slighted him, like the landlord who kicked him out of his apartment while he was in the hospital, and the contractor who fired him! Also eight other people, who the writers aren't going to bother inventing connections to, naturally.

The team rushes to his home, even though there's no reason to believe he'd be there, since they know he's driving around with a victim in his van, and he doesn't burn people in his house and then move them somewhere else. Maybe they can find a list of the places he's planning to use as burn sites!

While not finding anything of consequence, Emily and Derek drop some more nonsense, saying that grabbing the contractor must have be a sign that he's devolving, since it was such a risky move, what with there being a witness and all. Yes - grabbing a guy late at night on a dark street when you don't know there's a little girl in his car is way, way riskier than somehow clubbing a man in the middle of a literal parade of witnesses and then dragging him to your murdervan.

With his planned burn site off the table, Kaman stops the van and drags the contractor out in the middle of a parking lot. The man is doused in gasoline, set on fire, and then let run wild. Naturally, instead of stopping, dropping, and rolling, the stuntman instead runs directly into the path of an oncoming car.

Wow. You know that guy's dead.

The team rushes to the scene, and discovers that Kaman simply ran off, rather than getting back into his van. Theoretically this should make him easy to catch, but the cops have absolutely no luck in tracking down the monster in the hoodie who can only get around by limping slowly. Actually, the cops may not be involved yet - despite the fact that they're chasing a serial killer, the only evidence of Detroit government involvement are Ernie and his fire trucks. I know arson investigators take point on fire-related crimes, but should he really be running a manhunt?

Emily and Derek's search finally bears fruit, as they come up with a photo of Kaman's girlfriend, conveniently taken in a location that can be used to track her down-

Amazingly they ask Penelope to 'scan the backgrounds of the photos' to look for information. Really, Emily? You're too busy to just look at the photo yourself and ask Penelope to search for something like Mo's Diner?

Laziness is not a virtue, people.

Kaman runs to 'Jay-Mo's Diner', which is run by Alias' Carl Lumbly! Who's also the father of Kaman's ex-girlfriend. He wants to see her one more time before the cops put him away, which seems like a totally reasonable request. Jay-Mo won't give up the information, though, and gets beaten for his trouble.

The team is on the way, however, since Penelope has cracked the code - although she lies twice while telling the team about the location of the diner. The first lie? That the sign only ends with an O. The second is that all of the pictures were taken in the diner. Here are the pictures being discussed:

We've already seen the 'Mo' in the picture, so that's that, but the second claim is just bizarre. Pictures 2 and 4 are clearly outside - two is even in a place with ivy on the wall behind her! While the first one shows her next to a shelf, allowing for extrapolation that they're inside the diner, there's no solid evidence to suggest it.

Despite the fact that the team is just a few blocks away when they get the diner's location, the limping monster is able to set it on fire and make a clean getaway. Luckily Carl Lumbly is safe - although his daughter might not be, since Kaman announced that if she wasn't in the diner, he knew full well where she would be! Hopefully somewhere within slow limping distance-

Oh, hey, remember when I questioned the explosion that now appears in the opening credits, and pointed out that nothing ever blows up on this show? Check out what happens just seconds after Greg drags Carl out of the building:

Wow! Although I've got to say that's not an ideal place for a diner. Garages on either side? What kind of foot traffic are you going to get? It's almost like they dummied up a storefront in an alley in the warehouse district somewhere so that they could set off an explosion one night without bothering anyone.

In what might be the most preposterous use of 'profiling' I've ever seen on the show, Greg and the team have to figure out who the girl in the pictures entirely based on Carl's assumed emotional connection to her. They assume this because Carl 'went through hell' to protect her. How do they know this, exactly? I mean, yes, that's what happened, but how could they possibly know it? Kaman has been beating people up and burning them for no reason at all - if Carl had given up the woman's location immediately, does anyone on the team really think that Kaman wouldn't have still beaten him to within an inch of his life and then set the business on fire?

Oh, right, here's what I was supposed to be complaining about - instead of asking Carl who the woman is or where she is, he simply asks 'is she close by?' And Carl, even though he's capable of speaking in clipped sentences says 'yes' and 'save her', rather than giving them any useful information, such as 'my daughter' or 'my sister's house'. Which is who and where she is, respectively.

Still the team manages to figure it out, and rushes to the house, but gets there far too late to be of any use. Kaman was going to set the place on fire, but when he finds out the reason that the woman broke up with him was that she was pregnant and worried about letting their son near an angry burn victim, he gives up.

THE END

Except for a coda where Greg's son decides to go out for Halloween as an FBI agent!

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

Here is the partial credit I'll give Greg this - instead of shooting Kaman when he arrives at the house, he says 'hey, maybe you don't want to burn your son alive, huh?' and it totally works!

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

There was a witness. And all of those people who wound up burned to death had somehow crossed a monstrous burn victim. Seriously, when the first victim was kidnapped and burned alive, how did the investigation not uncover the fact that two years earlier that same man had been responsible for a car accident that burned a guy nearly to death? And that the selfsame burn victim had gotten out of the hospital just a short time before the crime? Wouldn't this really solve itself?

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

1/10 - I almost gave this one a zero. Everything went the killer's way at every turn, and he was only caught because of things unrelated to the team. There was a witness that led to roadblocks, but after that, everything went Kaman's way. Even if Greg hadn't shown up, he probably would have surrendered rather than killing his own child.

The real failure this week was victimology. The team jumped to the conclusion right at the beginning that the killer probably knew his first victim. Then they proceeded to do... absolutely no research into the first victim to determine if someone would have had a grudge against him! Five seconds of Penelope typing would have revealed that he'd caused a man to almost be burned to death, but the team didn't bother. And that unwillingness to do the most basic research cost a man his life. Bravo, Team!

Oh, and just one more time - how did a crippled burn victim abduct a healthy man in the middle of a crowd without anyone noticing? They never actually told us.

Another Simpsons Question!

2012-01-05T04:02:00.006-05:00

When Bart got a girlfriend in Season 6, it went terribly for him. So, in hopes of breaking the hold she had over him, he decided to just avoid her entirely.

Naturally, the joke is that he hasn't really thought this whole 'avoiding' thing through, and though he'd like to keep away from her for three months, it doesn't occur to him that they both attend the same school and church. In fact, a moment after he's revealed the joke of the scene by circling the first day he'll avoid her, Marge walks in and announces that it's time to go to church!

Funny scene and all, but I've got a question - why are they going to church on Monday?

Is it a prank on Bart (and all the children of the town) because it's also April first? Inquiring minds want to know, Simpsons!

TheAvod Specializes in Features!

2012-01-04T08:04:00.001-05:00

That's right, with the new year dawning, it's time for a brand new special feature, this one concerning popular Canadian horror flick 'Bikini Girls on Ice!' So go out and grab yourself a copy, pop a bag of your preferred snack, and download our episode by right-clicking here!

Then wait a minute while it downloads before starting the movie. Oh, and also listen to the instructions at the beginning of the podcast so that you'll sync up the movie properly!

Now go and enjoy!

The Eighty-Fifth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

2012-01-03T01:29:00.002-05:00

I think I can take a pass on commenting this week. Just happy to have found this.

Tales From the Darkside 315: My Own Place

2012-01-02T02:17:00.000-05:00

Adventures in Fake Journalism: The Simpsons 717

2011-12-31T01:40:00.000-05:00

In the Season 7 episode 'Homer the Smithers', Burns is presented with a Junior Jumble-

Amazingly, it's a fully-constructed far-too-easy jumble. The clue involves a woman calling her husband a 'fat slob', while the riddle is 'What did the man need?' So let's solve it!

Dog
thE
iT
He

Which gives us the letters DETH. Which can't be turned into anything at all - so the Jumble is a failure. Strangely, though - it's simply a case of the circles being misplaced. If they were slightly rearranged, the selected letters would be DTIE.

This, of course, can be rearranged into what the fat man needs. A 'DIET'.

Criminal Minds 605: Safe Haven

2011-12-30T04:11:00.000-05:00

A woman is tied up in a room upstairs. Meanwhile, a killer downstairs idly flips television channels on a kitchen television. Based on this look we get of him, he's obviously pretty young. The parents try gamely to make their escape, but the mother's heart really isn't in it since her children have already been murdered, so their deaths are inevitable.

Now it's time for the meeting room, where the team discovers that this is the second family to be murdered in just two days! The only information they're able to glean is that the fathers are somehow the focus of rage - other members of the family are killed relatively bloodlessly, but the fathers are brutally stabbed to death... but why?

We'll have to wait a moment to find out, since there's some extraneous plot to deal with. Remember Eric's daughter?

Yeah, me neither. Anyway, she's in Quantico to visit Derek, since she's being abused by her foster family. Will she be taken in by Derek, since he empathizes with her struggle, being the child of a murdered cop himself? I certainly hope so, since that would be an interesting turn for the character, and it's not like Derek gets many of those.

Credits!

On the plane they learn a couple of interesting things about the scene - in each house a dinner place had been set for a guest and there was no forced entry... could the families have known their killer? I also haven't heard any discussions of fingerprints yet, which is odd, given that the killer was walking around touching things without wearing gloves.

The show is being weirdly lazy about disguising the fact that the killer is an evil teen - usually in their 'flashback' sequences they have a generic killer, since the team has no idea who they're looking for. But check out the ghostly figure in the playroom-

Clearly a really young killer, even wearing jeans like their villain. The only difference is that he's not wearing a hoodie. Odd.

Over at the police station the team has a different take on the murders - they think the killer is targeting mothers, since being bashed in the face killed them slowly, while the vivisection of the husband was done post-mortem, likely out of curiosity. It's a good observation... but will it help them catch the killer?

They try to figure out how the killer could get the family's complete trust and have the chance to be alone with the children when he's so profoundly crazy. The show then thinks it's doing a clever twist by having a priest drive up to help a hitchhiking kid on the side of the road.

Who could be more trustworthy than a reverend, since both families were super-religious? Of course, the audience already knows the killer is a teen, so the twist that the rev is going to wind up dead doesn't work as well as it might.

The team finally clues into the killer's identity when they find that the reverend was murdered in mid-drive, and then his arm was dissected. Impulsive plus cutting up for fun = a child, it seems. Reid then goes a little further and says that the lack of sexual experimentation with victims (weird code word for rape?) could be because he's prepubescent. Except the killer-

Is clearly in the neighbourhood of 14, and doesn't have a high voice, so that's not likely.

He's currently at a rest stop, waiting for some help. When a family arrives at the rest stop he claims that a bus left without him, and he's stranded on his way to Chicago. The family offers to take him to the police so that they can track his mother down, and he happily accepts. Which is odd, given that his MO is to get them to their house and kill them. Is he going to stab them in the car again?

Oh, and I'm calling it now, the family who picked him up? Single mother and two kids - the kids are not getting killed. We're midway through the show, and this would normally be the second set of victims, but the show has never once in over a hundred episodes killed a child past the teaser. These kids have lines, they're safe.

When they get to the police station the killer is able to worm his way into the family's home when the kids see a tattooed thug being brought inside, and guilt the mom into letting the kid stay with them overnight before going to the cops. Here's the thing, though - what would have happened if there hadn't been a thug outside the jail? We're asked to believe that this killer is incredibly streetwise and expert at spinning lies to ingratiate himself to families - but dumb luck keeps him from being turned over to the cops? That's not really satisfying.

There's some B-plot stuff with Derek investigating Ellie's neglect and trying to have her transferred to Virginia. Man, this might get interesting!

Reid has a guess about where the killer is from based on two things - A: Nebraska's 'safe haven' laws were written so that any child could be abandoned at a hospital, not just a baby, and the first mother worked at a Nebraska hospital. Logic would dictate that must be how she met the killer! Although you'd think as a nurse who works with the public that she'd know better than to bring a child disturbed enough to be left at a hospital home with her, but let's move on.

Over at the new victims' house, the mother makes the killer dial 'home', so that she can leave a message with his 'mother'. He calls the first victim's answering machine, and the mother leaves a message detailing her name and how she came to meet the killer. This message is picked up the next day by Reid and Joe, which gives them their first concrete lead! Now it's simply a matter of getting over to the woman's house!

When they arrive at the house, the children are fin (told you!) but the mother and killer are missing! Hold on a second... what is the team doing at the house?

They found out that the killer's latest victims are in Des Moines. They are in Council Bluffs when they recieve this information. So rather than simply calling the cops (or FBI) in Des Moines and having them raid the house, apparently they thought it was important that they do the raiding themselves. Here's the thing, though-

While the 80 might be the straightest road in the world, and sirens can certainly speed up a trip, that's still a hundred and twenty miles. Did they say to themselves 'sure he might be killing the family right now, but what's another hour, in the great scheme of things?'.

God, they're terrible at their jobs.

The kids don't know where their mother and the killer have gone, other than that they left in the car, where they are right now. The mom is trying to reason with the killer and talk him down, but he's unimpressed. I'm equally unimpressed, because this show just lost me. Why? Because the mother could kill him at literally any moment. Allow me to demonstrate.

She is wearing a seatbelt. He is not, because he's dumb, impulsive child who doesn't like being restrained. A simple turn into a tree, telephone pole, or yes, even a wall, while travelling as slowly astwenty miles an hour will leave her almost completely unharmed (between the seatbelt and airbag), while he will be sent into the dashboard/windshield with all the force of a sledgehammer impacting his head. The end. She hasn't already done this, however, which suggests she won't. Which makes everything that happens her own fault.

We do learn his motivation, though - he wants to get back to his mother's place to get revenge on her. If he wanted to get home, why didn't he just steal a car from one of the families he murdered? It's not like these people don't have automatics. Wouldn't that have been far easier than hitchiking and then murdering whoever picks him up?

It turns out the first victim had talked to a friend about placing an abandoned child with them (how come this didn't come up earlier?) on the night she died, and the kid gave a name and place where he lived. The team jumps to the conclusion that while names are easy to fake, who has another town ready in their mind? They search town records for teens with histories of mental or behavioural problems.

While that's happening, they try to resolve the B plot in the least interesting way, by Derek asking Garcia to track down Ellie's mother. Yawn.

In other news, the killer has the new victim drop him on the side of the road near his house, then stabs her. Which, again, is entirely her fault. He then steals a skateboard and races home.

Going by kids with behavioural problems who haven't been in school in a few days (there's an easy-to-access record of that?), the team narrows the possibilities to thirty-odd kids, but that's too many to visit. Although if you assigned five people you could call all of those houses in less than ten minutes, give them the situation - whoever abandoned a spree killer would, I'd imagine, be happy to invite a police cruiser over to their home if they heard he was coming back.

More importantly, though - how is the killer not already at his house? According to the kids he left with their mother in the middle of the night - Newton, IA, where he's headed, is just thirty miles from Des Moines - even counting them having to drive out of the suburbs, that's no more than an hour's trip. How could the team possibly catch up if they didn't find out about the journey until six hours later?

The killer's MO is to tie up the children of the families, so the team extrapolates that he'd probably do that to his own family as well, so they look within the sample group for younger siblings who have recently been hospitalized with injuries.

The team rushes over to the house, where the killer is holding the mother and daughter hostage. They're playing out a little psychodrama - the long and the short of it is that the killer is evil because the mother was awful to him his whole life. Why? It seems that she was pregnant with twins early on, and that one kid absorbed the other. So she treated him like a murderer his whole life and he became one.

Sadly, when the FBI arrives they're able to arrest him without incident, instead of simply shooting him to death. The kid then brags that since he's 13 (really? Okay...) he'll be out of jail in five years anyhow. Derek says that he'll go to every parole hearing to make sure that doesn't happen. Except he won't have to - there's no way this guy won't be tried as an adult. He may be 13, but he brutally murdered 10 people, including four children in two states - by comparison, I was able to find an Iowa case where a 14-year-old girl beat a single old woman to death and went away forever. So yeah, he'll never see freedom again.

Even if it turns out that he only had 9 victims, since the idiotic woman survived her stabbing somehow.

THE END

Oh, and the Derek storyline is wrapped up in the least interesting way possible, with Eric's ex-wife showing up to take custody of Ellie, absolving Derek of all responsibility.

Yawn.

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

This time it almost was - analyzing behavioural characteristics told them their prey was likely a child. Unfortunately, that guesswork in no way helped them in their search for the specific child they were looking for - although the guesswork about the abusing younger siblings was of value.

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

In every single way. Oh my god did the cops drop the ball this week. Not only did they find out how to catch the killer in a completely traditional way (the phone message), but they only didn't know that they were looking for an evil kid because no legwork had been done in Omaha. The kid was dropped off at a hospital. A nurse took him home and called friends about a foster placement. The next day her whole family was dead. Somehow the cops didn't look into what she'd done in the last day of her life, or checked her phone records. There were multiple people who could have told them exactly who the killer was that first morning, and hospital security cameras could have gotten them a picture of the killer. This is some of the shoddiest policework ever depicted on this show.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

3/10 - Seriously, Derek almost gets an interesting arc, and then it just disappears? What the hell, Criminal Minds?

Haiku! Starring Luster!

2011-12-29T02:13:00.002-05:00

Today I'll be utterly misusing a Japanese art to review the film:

Yet More Jekyll/Hyde

Only Misogyny Themed

Don't Watch This Movie

TheAvod New Year!

2011-12-28T03:45:00.000-05:00

In this, the last new episode of 2011, DM and myself offer a nearly Asylum-themed show! Not only do they watch a questionably-written movie about the Boogeyman, they crack the code for what makes a decent Asylum picture. Tune in to find out what it is! Also, American Horror Story continues to disappoint.

Sound tantalizing? Well don't worry, because these water and grapes are well within reach! Just right-click here to download the new episode!

The Eighty-Fourth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

2011-12-27T00:56:00.002-05:00

Is this a thing anyone actually ever said? Or was the writer simply trying to get colourful at an inopportune moment?

Tales From the Darkside 314: My Ghostwriter the Vampire

2011-12-26T00:58:00.001-05:00

Merry Christmas, everyone!

2011-12-25T04:34:00.029-05:00

I'm just going to go ahead and assume that everyone's been good this year, and therefore you deserve your gift - the greatest comic book story ever told! That may sound like hyperbole, and it's possible that I'm just biased towards the story, as it features both my favourite Golden-Age Hero (Zero, the Ghost Detective!) and a villain so spectacular that it must be seen to be believed! So, with no further ado, I give you, from the pages of Feature Comics #71, dated September, 1943 :

If necessary, all images can be bigified through clickery.

You know what's super-comforting? That there are a host of other ghost detectives out there equal in skill to Zero. After all, were he 'peerless' among ghost detectives, then if something bad were to happen to him, it could be disastrous for the whole world! Since he's just on par with all the other Ghost Detectives, however, there's plenty of backup available were things to take a left turn.

So, as the story begins, Zero is out in a country manor, enjoying a dinner with friends, as Ghost Detectives are wont to do. They implore him to tell a story about one of his adventures, and he naturally selects one about a werewolf. This winds up being a controversial choice, as another guest strenuously objects to the topic. Why?

This proves to be a prophetic pronouncement, as just one panel later:

Okay, that caption was just needlessly convoluted. Also, doesn't it seem like Zero, the Ghost Detective, ought to know about this whole werewolf resurrection lore? Isn't that his entire bag? One last thing - why is the werewolf wearing a red dress?

Anyhoo, the partygoers do the only natural thing in this situation - they all run outside to look for the werewolf ghost! This ends in a predictably tragic fashion, when-

Because this information will be important later, I'll point out that Lila's brother is the hysterical man who was worried about werewolf ghosts. Now that the werewolf has been established as a threat, Zero tells everyone to head back inside while he deals with the situation.

Now there's an excellent question: What IS a werewolf doing around here? Also, how can you argue with that villain's fashion choice? Yellow cape on green suit? Bravo! Also, for you colour-blind readers out there, just FYI, this is meant to be a different character than the guy in the red gown who was howling on the hill earlier.

The attacker lunges at Zero, nearly pushing him into a well. Naturally Zero wins the skirmish, and turns his assailant away, revealing the man's secret identity-

Good motive, totally understandable reaction to Zero's recklessness - all this only leaves one question - why was he growling like a werewolf when he attacked? Jim won't get a chance to explain, since-

Luckily Zero, presumably having read the introductory panel, knows the only way to deal with a werewolf ghost:

Since he's terrible at throwing, Zero is left with just seconds before the werewolf ghost mauls him to death. Thankfully, at the last possible moment, he remembers that he's a superhero who's themed around killing ghosts, so he simply takes out the weapon he designed to do just that:

With the werewolf ghost dead (again), now there's one final plot twist to reveal - when Zero and the other partygoers find Jim's body, they're shocked to discover that he's turned into a werewolf!

Rather than condescendingly pointing out that Jim was standing next to that man while Lila was murdered (as, with all honest, I probably would), Zero patiently explains the bizarre twist ending, putting a cap on the story, and turning it into the greatest comic ever published:

There could be backstory here, they might have revealed that this was the werewolf that turned Jim into one before he killed it, and now it's back for revenge... none of that nasty 'plot' stuff makes an appearance, though. Back in the 40s they knew how to wrap up a tale:

"Turns out he was a werewolf too. Huh."

If every story ended this way, there would be no war in the world.

Something else I've noticed from The Simpsons

2011-12-24T01:36:00.000-05:00

When the schoolkids get stranded on the deserted island in 'Das Bus', there's much comedy to be gleaned from their complete inability to handle life in the jungle. Just check out their attempt at a shelter:

Yet somehow when it comes time to imprison Milhouse they get a cage made out of bamboo and vines together quickly enough:

They also seem perfectly adept at constructing a spit and roasting a boar to perfection.

A vicious wild boar they killed with sharpened sticks.

What was the message of this episode again?

Criminal Minds 604: Compromising Positions

2011-12-23T04:10:00.000-05:00

A couple are out on Lover's Lane, getting it on in their car. Not consensually, however - they're being forced to have sex by a man with a pistol in the front seat!

Naturally, he kills them, and the next day the team is on the case! It seems that two couples have been killed, only a week apart. Emily refers to this as 'not much of a cooling-off period', which is strange, considering that by the standards of this show, one kill a week is positively glacial. And again, I'm not sure how she knows the term 'cooling-off period'.

Before they can head off to Ohio to sort out the crime, Garcia swings by Greg's office, asking if she can come along as the communications liason. There's some blather about her job crossing over the most, and how important it is to have one, but the fact is, last week the team was without a communications liason, and absolutely no one noticed.

Also, isn't it much more important that they have a tech expert ready to go at a mainframe the second they need the information? Since she solves almost every case for them? Let's compare cases solved by Garcia to cases solved by JJ. It's an easy comparison:

Garcia: All of them.
JJ: None of them.

Whose role is more vital for the team again?

Hey, new opening credits team shot!

And how long has this explosion been in the opening credits?

Nothing ever explodes on this show.

While on the plane they talk in circles for a while about what the MO tells them about victimology and the killer. The conclusion? Maybe he knew the victims! So your big accomplishment is that you should look into the victims' lives? Wow - that was two minutes well spent.

They arrive at the police station and meet everyone - Garcia does a good job of prepping all the interviews, impressing everyone. Does this mean she's going to be on the road with them all year? That would tend to conflict with her duties on Suspect Behaviour, wouldn't it?

By checking into the crime scene and victims' families, they notice a few similarities - the men in the couples were super-successful in their lines of work, and the killer tried to create a comfortable environment for his victims to have sex in. Super-weird, but they make the assumption that the killer will be an alpha male along the same lines as his victim! Will that be helpful in catching him? Probably not!

Garcia then botches her job by talking to the press without clearing it with Greg, but I'm not really interested in this storyline, so let's continue on - to their sexual profile! Because the killer doesn't rape the women and forces the men to wear condoms and put on romantic music, the team figures that he has a physiological problem keeping him from having sex, like prostate removal or some such. Gee, what about cartoonishly small penis, as Mandy profiled way back in the pilot? Couldn't that be it?

While the team is worrying about their profile another couple is being murdered, although in this case one of them completely deserves it: the wife. That may sound harsh, but check this out. While the husband is busy fighting for their lives despite his hands being cuffed, kicking the villain for all he's worth:

That's a leg choke, by the way - the wife, despite not being restrained in any way, shape, or form, does absolutely nothing to help, or even flee for her life. Not stabbing the killer with something, trying to secure the gun, nothing. So after the husband gets shot because she didn't help, I can't feel at all sorry about her attempts to make nice with the killer end disastrously.

Also, the killer-

Looks completely different than the stuntman who was playing him while he got beaten up.

The team looks over the latest crime scene, and determines that the killer is probably in the swinger scene! They figure this out based on no information, so it can't count as profiling or psychology of any kind. Seriously, they jump from making the husband in the couples wear a condom to 'maybe the villain is a swinger'! It's nonsense.

Meanwhile, Garcia's having lots of trouble juggling her two jobs - she brings in Xander to help, but her equipment is all so customized to her tastes that he can't be much assistance.

Derek and Emily go to talk to the 'madam' of a swing club, and she - hilariously and nonsensically - mistakes them for Jehovah's witnesses.

She's got cleavage showing and he's wearing a t-shirt and a gun on his hip. They're too sloppily dressed to even be FBI agents, and she mistakes them for the clean-cut Jehovah's witnesses? As if.

They interview her about the world of swinging, and discover that only couples can get in - so who is this guy's partner? There's some more conversation about him going back to old patterns, and how loss of control over his partner because of his impotence has probably led to this crime spree, but none of that will help catch him, so let's move on.. to-

More murders! The killer tries to bluff his way into an orgy without his wife. Somehow he's able to accomplish this, and then he immediately takes out his guns and starts shooting people. Later, we'll learn that all of the victims were men. As if you can shoot indiscriminately into a crowd at an orgy and somehow pick who you're going to hit:

You can say all of his 'targets' were men, but there's no way all his victims were.

Oh, and Emily dropped the Prentiss Award-Winning line of the night:

Um, didn't you just learn about this from the madam two scenes ago? More importantly, participation in this kind of activity is exactly the kind of thing that's used to blackmail people. Why WOULD you give your last name? At least they know his and the wife's (probable) first names. And really, how many men named James are married to women named Maryanne and fit the exact physical

Oh, and because I forgot to mention it a second ago, there's no way he wouldn't have been caught after the shooting spree. How do I know this? Well, not only did he fire two non-silenced pistols for more than a minute, he then took the time to pick the lock to back room in the house, just so he could murder the boyfriend of the woman in charge of the orgy. So he was there for between five and ten minutes after the shooting started. How did the army of copy rushing to the scene not catch him?

They (understandably) focus on the fact that he paused to pick a locked door, and decide he must be a locksmith. After all, if it wasn't habit, why would he have picked a deadbolt rather than simply shooting it out? Other than the fact that his handgun wouldn't have destroyed a deadbolt - have these people never seen mythbusters?

There's a passing comment that they 'knew he found his victims at the gym, but not how' - which is kind of an overstatement. After all, the victims all went to different gyms, so the idea that he found them at those individual places was complete conjecture. Also, none of this explains why he jumped racial lines, which is super-rare for murderers.

The case hasn't been solved yet entirely because of Garcia, it seems - she's been too busy talking to the families of victims to track down the employees of locksmiths. Again - you know this guy's first name and his wife's first name. You also have an exact and current physical description - match up marriage license records by age and name, then run photos by the madam. Why are you acting like this is a hard man to identify?

Their alternate path to finding the killer? Check out the first person he might have killed - the man his wife cheated on him with! After all, he must be obsessed with his wife cheating on him, since he's murdering couples? God, this makes no amount of sense.

Garcia calls a variety of locksmiths and lies about being from the phone company until she finds someone named James with a wife named Maryanne. So yeah, my public records search idea would have gone way better than any of this nonsense.

They check in on the wife - she's pregnant, and since James hasn't been able to have sex in a year, it must not be his baby! Assuming, as a consequence, that he must have already killed the father of her child, they show her photos of recent unsolved murders. The baby daddy is in there, of course, and the wife breaks down immediately after seeing him. Then it turns out that this whole 'trying to talk to the wife' thing was a waste of time, since he's wearing a cell phone that she can call. He hangs up when he sees it's her, though - which raises the question why they didn't just track his location rather than phoning him?

Not that any of it matters - they ask the wife where he's likely to go, and she tells them about a bar they used to hang out at. Rather than simply walking in casually and shooting him, they have Emily go in and claim to be someone he met at an orgy, and then only shoot him when things go wrong. There's a whole scene of her lying unconvincingly during which the rest of the team could have walked up and shot him, but for some reason didn't - letting the conversation drag on solely so we could see how bad Emily is at reading people.

Which is an odd choice, among ways to present a profiler.

THE END

Oh, and Garcia will be back at the office from now on. Duh.

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

Of course not. They had no idea who they were looking for until he shot up a place where he was well-known.

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

They were told the name of a guy, his wife's name, his exact appearance, and they knew his probably occupation. He also carried a cellphone that doubtless had GPS. Of course the cops could have easily caught him.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

1/10 - Come on, Criminal Minds - at least pretend their suppositions are helping, would you? I don't know why they weren't checking for his cell phone the moment they knew his name.

Terrible Moments in Taglining: Real Steel

2011-12-22T01:45:00.009-05:00

"Courage is stronger than steel"

I'm fairly sure that's not accurate. If it was, then Hugh Jackman would have climbed into the ring and fought the evil robot himself, like the main character in the Twilight Zone episode this was based on.

Of course, the character in the story lost, and that doesn't play on the big screen.

Merry TheAvod Everybody!

2011-12-21T03:45:00.000-05:00

That's right, continuing our annual Christmas tradition, DM and myself decided to check out some killer Santa movies - here's the twist: No Silent Night Deadly Night!

Daring, right? So check out the challenge by right-clicking here to download it!

The Eighty-Third-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

2011-12-20T00:53:00.002-05:00

Wow! Old-fashioned probably-racist turns of phrase! I wonder which kind of Indian he was referring to?

Tales From the Darkside 313: The Milkman Cometh

2011-12-19T12:57:00.002-05:00

Baffling Decision Theatre Featuring: Ringer!

2011-12-18T02:39:00.002-05:00

Perhaps the ultimate guilty-pleasure TV show, Ringer is the absurd tale of a woman who goes on the run from the mob and takes over the life of a twin sister she thinks is dead, but really the sister is a scheming villain who wants to steal all of her husband's money and disappear somehow. I'm not clear on the details, since (at the time of writing this), the season is just eight episodes in.

On top of the amazingly crazy premise, the show's madness is assisted by writers who have apparently never met a person, ever. Nearly everyone on the show makes baffling, impossible decisions when confronted with any problem, to the point where the average viewer's jaw will be on the floor three or four times per episode. These aren't examples of people getting in a bad situation and doing something dumb on the spur of the moment because they can't think straight - these are people going through elaborate, multi-step plans to accomplish nonsensical goals for reasons that are coherent to no one.

I offer, for elucidation, two examples.

1 - The situation: Evil Sister's best friend has disappeared. Cheating Husband thinks good sister (who he thinks is evil sister - this gets confusing fast) killed her, so he covered up the crime as best he could. Now the police think he's involved in her disappearance/death, but in reality, both of them are innocent. Good sister is upset because while the cops are wasting time looking at the husband, they won't be searching for the real killers.

Her solution: Find murder evidence and plant her own fingerprints on it.

But why would she do something like that? Excellent question! I have no idea. She claims it's to clear cheating husband so the police will stop being distracted, but all she's accomplished is to send them on an even more pointless wild goose chase, since now they're looking for her. And further police scrutiny is the absolute last thing she needs, given that she's living a double life and on the run from the mob.

2 - The situation: Good sister's NA sponsor/boyfriend (yeah, she makes plenty of bad decisions) has been kidnapped by the mob boss good sister was supposed to testify against. He's held for a week, hooked on heroin, and then let go, in the hopes that he'll lead the mob to good sister.

His solution: Go to see good sister.

But why would he do something like that? God only knows! What's lost in his decision-making process is the fact that by kidnapping the sponsor and then letting him go, the mob boss has accidentally solved all of the FBI's problems. Kidnapping is as serious a crime as murder, and since he committed the act in hopes of intimidating a witness in a federal murder investigation, that opens up all sorts of avenues of investigation. The entire motive for good sister going on the run - she was the only witness to mob boss' crime, and he wanted to killer her before she could testify - has just been nullified, since the mob boss has just committed an equally serious crime, and left another witness alive.

In a subsequent episode the sponsor/boyfriend will claim that no one would believe him, since he's a drug addict - but his situation is actually better than good sister's was. In her case she was the only witness to a murder and there was no physical evidence - and she's a drug user as well. In his case there was DNA evidence - collected by the FBI - which proves that the mob boss' goons were stalking the sponsor. As for his word against the villain's in court, one of them is a respected teacher who - until he was kidnapped and given heroin, had been sober for five years. The other is a sleazy native mob boss who's known publicly to be a drug dealer and runs a strip club. Which of those two would a jury be more likely to side with?

One final note - in episode eight, we discover that the man evil sister has been sleeping with in Paris is a subordinate of her husband's. He comes to New York for a dinner meeting, and is surprised to see good sister there. Upon meeting her, he acts like they know one another, and explicitly mentions the affair that they've been having. Good sister neither finds this the least bit suspicious, nor does she pursue the matter in any way.

But why would she do something like that? Who knows? God, I love this show.

The Simpsons actually cares about continuity?

2011-12-17T01:10:00.005-05:00

So, in the Simpsons season ender last year, Ned and Edna started dating. This led to a scene in which Ned, while hanging out with Homer at Moe's, runs into some of the men that Edna has slept with over the years, including Joey from Aerosmith. Remember their assignation?

First off, bravo for the callback 19 years later - that's quite the accomplishment. More importantly, though, I've got to say that the years have not treated the animated depiction of Joey very well-

That's what he's looking like these days! Which brings me to the eternal question - how, exactly, does time work in Springfield? Homer has aged five years over the course of the show (from 36 to 41), while his children remain the same age, but apparently this was just a narcissistic move by the writers, who didn't want to be older than Homer, at least for a relatively brief amount of time.

Strangely, the 20-year age jump of Joey's isn't the only reference to the extreme passage of time in the episode. Ned mentions in passing that his 'Leftorium' has been the anchor store of the 'sad mall' for ten years. Which means we're not only getting a reference to the Leftorium being built almost twenty years ago, but also to the fact that the 'Springfield Mall' that it resides in has essentially been made obsolete by the opening of the Heavenly Hills Mall back in season nine.

Of course, Lisa almost got married back in 2010, so what does time even mean any more?

Criminal Minds 603: Remembrance of Things Past

2011-12-16T04:10:00.000-05:00

A family gets ready to drive to a football game on a windy night! The whole thing is shot like a slasher film, mysteriously open doors and windows, a woman alone in the house briefly, but it's all a misdirect - it's actually the family's absent daughter who's being murdered! And her killer forced her to call her parents to talk about being murdered!

Then the show cuts over to Joe, who's trying to work on his new book - Greg calls him in because this case resembles something he'd worked on in the past. Although apparently there's no 'signature' this time, not that we're told what the original signature was.

Over at the office Garcia is sad about JJ's absence, and has taken to standing outside her office, looking forlorn.

Okay, prediction time - they gave her that office number because they were planning on bringing her back in episode 620! I know that theory is based on the show demonstrating any pre-planning at all, which is of course unsupportable given the show's history, but I still hope it's true.

Then it's time for the briefing - before we start, though, Derek mentions that he's still in touch with Ellie, Eric Close's orphan daughter. Random character note, or are they building to something? Joe then drops by, and they're able to start the case. A guy tortures and murders young blonde women, and then has them call their families. Joe feels like he almost caught the guy back in the 90s, and he's been out of the game for almost twenty years. Could he really be coming back as a seventy-year-old killer? The hands of the killer, shown in this pre-credits cutaway, suggest not:

But I guess we'll see!

The team runs down the case on the plane - seriously, why do they even meet at the office? It's not like the vote about whether they're going or not. Also, I haven't missed JJ at all. The important points - the women are being abducted in broad daylight, from public places. How is he managing this? The team isn't interested in speculating, they find it more relevant to totally misuse the term 'signature' in explaining why they think it might be a copycat. It seems that the original victims called relatives and left messages about the torture (only a couple actually got people on the phone, since the calls were usually made late at night). In the original cases the women were forced to say that they enjoyed the brutal torture, but that hasn't happened in the two new murders. This is the missing 'signature' that they're discussing. Which is just a brutal misapplication of the term. A signature is anything the killer does to fulfill their own needs that doesn't materially contribute to the crime. The entire phone call scenario is a signature, not just the 'blaming the victim' tag. They really should have announced that the signature has changed - not that it was absent.

The team divvies up to cover different aspects of the case, and the hunt is on! A look at the corpses reveals that, like the original victims, they were cut up and electrocuted - but in a twist the killer clubbed them over the head to abduct them, rather than managing to talk them into an isolated location as the original killer did. Frankly, I'd like to hear how he managed to talk twenty different women to their deaths - seems like a bit of a stretch.

Next we meet the new killer, as a pretty girl chats with him while he brings groceries to his cruel, decrepit old father who he's charged with caring for. Oh, pretty neighbour - will you be the second victim, or the one who gets rescued? I'm pulling for you to be third!

I've got to give the show this, anyhow: at least they're not stretching out the mystery. This scene makes it painfully obvious what's going on - the old man is the original killer, and now he's convinced his abuse-victim son to help him kidnap and murder new victims. Just to make sure we don't miss the connection, the son has driven up in his van, which features an ad for his services as a bonded and licensed electrician.

The team interviews the various family members and discover that the speeches the women made didn't sound entirely like them. Could there be some significance in the monologues being scripted? I suppose if they matched the originals exactly it would confirm that they're dealing with either the same killer or someone with access to the transcripts from the police department. In any event, they should just be assuming it's the same killer at this point - copycats are basically the rarest thing imaginable, and unless you have some concrete proof that you're not dealing with the same guy (different DNA or fingerprints, for example), you should absolutely be working under the assumption that he's the same person.

Oh, and the reason for the change in MO is made explicit in the next scene. The evil father is suffering from Alzheimer's, and his abused son spends most of his time trying to jog the old man's memory. Of course, the old man would rather go out and murder, since despite the fact that his original list of victims involved 20 people over eight years, or one every five months, now he's a spree killer, and hopes to manage three in as many days.

Checking out the crime scene the team discover a video of one of the women being abducted - while leaving a pharmacy in a crowded parking lot, she heard something and then ran off towards her killer. But why? We get a sense of it in the next scene, as a woman walking in the park discovers the old man's ruse. He runs up, looking disheveled, and announces that his caretaker has suffered a heart attack, and needs her help!

What, really? On what planet does this not immediately result in the woman dialing 911 or the parking lot lady running back into the pharmacy? This isn't like a lost dog, where someone might be willing to help. These are situations where random women have no skills to assist in a medical emergency, but are completely capable of attracting qualified help. So why didn't they?

So anyhow, she's dead, and her body turns up the next day. Once again, the murder is a recreation of the last victim in the original set. Not only are the wounds exactly the same, but the script the killer makes them read from is the exact thing that the young woman said twenty years earlier! Why is he so obsessed with he last kill?

Somehow they still think that it's a copycat, and Greg wants to release a profile to that effect. Joe's desire to hold the profile leads to the Prentiss Award-Winning line of the night:

This is all based on feelings and guesses, Greg. How can you not know that? Also, since the profiles never help catch anyone, what does it matter. And hey, if the original killer is now 70, as Joe is guessing (what was that based on again?), wouldn't that explain the change in MO?

Now it's time for more with the killer and his son. They have a standard abuser/abusee chat, and the son offers a telling detail - he first helped out when he was a child, and a woman tried to escape the house. That's right, a ten-year-old tackled a serial killer's victim in order to help out. Ouch. They're already picking out their next victim, which is going to be just as easy as ever: obviously no one's awareness will be heightened even though a serial killer has killed three people in that town that week, and the manner in which the two killers operate is now common knowledge.

So that happens. But meanwhile, the team has figured out that it's a father and son team - the rest of the team dismissed it, but Joe insists that it's the only possible explanation. Why did they dismiss it? Because inherited sexual sadism is so super-rare! That's right, rareness led them to dismiss that out of hand, but not the possibility of a copycat. Because there have only been like five father/son serial killer situations, as opposed copycat killings, which has never happened. Idiots.

I'm being hyperbolic, of course, there was the New York Zodiac.

Now convinced of Joe's profile, the team just has to figure out how to save the latest victim! I'm kidding - there's still twenty minutes left, and the latest victim isn't playing along with the whole 'leave a creepy message' thing. The dad would have rather just killed their next-door neighbour, but the son correctly points out that there's no way on earth they wouldn't be caught if that happens. Unconvinced, the dad murders the latest girl in a fury, officially entering the 'devolution' phase of his spree.

Over at the police station, the detective in charge of the case wants Joe to talk to the press - apparently the fact that a father-son team is involved has leaked, and fears need to be allayed! Wait, how did that leak? The FBI team only came to that conclusion an hour ago in a sealed room. Why did they tell anyone? Isn't this 'leak' situation really on them?

The team then decides to take a different tack - instead of focusing on the last victim, since that's the one that the killers are trying to recreate, why not look into the two victims whose families weren't called! That seems like a good lead, right?

Hey, why aren't they tracing the phone calls? Even if they're being made from a cell phone, there should still be a record of what part of town the cell phone was located in.

So the team looks into the people who didn't make calls: one was the first, so they write it off as a developing MO. The other was the eighth victim. Her story:

I don't know what program Garcia is using, but it's terrible.

The team clues into the connection - this victim had a father and son of the correct age, and the only logical reason they'd have to not make her phone someone is because everyone could have possibly phoned would have been in the room with her. Which is cute and all, but why didn't any of those victims describe the killer to their parents' answering machines? Seems like a missed opportunity, since they obviously knew they were going to be killed.

Anyhoo, now that they've identified the killers, we're faced with the greatest failure of profiling yet. All those years ago Joe was in the room with the killer, and missed it. Now maybe he was just taken in by the performance of a grieving husband, but here's the thing: every other victim was a single young blonde woman living alone. The eighth victim was a 30-something wife and mother who lived with her family. All the victims were electrocuted, and the woman's creepy husband was an electrician. How hard should this have been to figure out?

Time to set the ticking clock: while the team runs over to the killers' house, the son leaves to kidnap his next door neighbour. So while the old man is being arrested, a young woman is being dragged off to a warehouse somewhere! Will the team be able to find her? Of course they will, but how?

In a great moment, Joe dramatically arrests the old man for the murders committed so far in the episode. Except he only gives three names - there were two teaser kills, the woman in the park, and the latest victim. Yes, the latest one's body hasn't been discovered yet, but are they not aware of her? It seems like the mysterious disappearance of a woman exactly fitting the victim profile in broad daylight would have gotten to them.

There's a hitch in finding the son - he drives up to collect his dad, sees the cops, and then drives away. For some reason the cops weren't looking around for the van registered in his name.

Joe tries to get the old man to reveal his son's location, but he doesn't have much information to offer. He does mention that he used a piece of electro-shock therapy equipment to badly burn his victims. A simple records check reveals that the old man rewired an incredibly creepy mental institution that was subsequently shut down:

Why wasn't more of the episode set here?

The team rushes over there, and instead of simply shooting the son, they make him feel bad about his life by revealing that the victim he helped subdue was actually his mother!

THE END

Oh, and there's another call to Derek from Ellie. Emily thinks it's a bad idea to keep in touch, and that she should be getting help from a professional. Um, isn't Derek a trained psychologist? If not, what's he doing on the team?

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

Bad profiling allowed the guy to go on killing for twenty years, taking an additional sixteen victims. Then it helped a little, letting them figure that the only person who would help a serial killer years into his decline would be his son. So it's basically a wash.

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

In any wife's murder the husband is always the prime suspect. Add to that truism the fact that this victim didn't fit demographically with the others, was abducted from her own home, and the husband had the training necessary to kill her in the manner the murderer used, and it's kind of inexcusable that they didn't get him twenty ears ago.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

2/10 - Also, how did Joe profile that the killer was a guy in his late 40s back in 1983 when the killings started? They had no forensics and no witness statements. All they knew was that a guy was able to talk single women in their early 20s into an isolated location, and then kill them brutally. Why on earth would he jump to the conclusion that he was dealing with a man in his 40s? Wouldn't someone their own age be far more likely? Also, isn't it super-weird for a man to only start killing in his 40s - shouldn't there have been a trail of earlier crimes building up to the serial killings, meaning that the supposedly innocent husband of a victim would have had a history of assault, sexual and otherwise?

Man, if they're not even going to play by their own rules, what's the point?

Haiku! Starring Asylum!

2011-12-16T02:27:00.001-05:00

Today I'll be utterly misusing a Japanese art to review the film:

The least essential

Nightmare on Elm Street happens.

This pleases no one.

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Paranormal Activity 2: Tokyo Night

2011-12-15T01:35:00.018-05:00

Okay, for a film never intended for release in North America (because of the - I assume - serious legal blocks to doing so), PA2:TN has some stunningly detailed fake journalism on display. Let's start with their fake search engine, shall we?

Ah, Go Search - is it any wonder you became the world's number one web search service? You have a button that says 'happy' on it!

The real gravy comes next, however - check this out:

Three google search results - all in English, and surprisingly detailed at that!

The Answer to Miracles and Paranormal Activities

Before we give you a scientific explanation to some paranormal activities, we will briefly take you through some famous example cases. The Story of the Borley Rectory Devil (England), the Rosenheim Poltergeist (Germany), The murder case of devil-possessed Katie (San Diego, US), The Glamis Castle (Scotland)....

(How great is it that they included famous paranormal incidents? I've added the links to web articles about them for convenience)

Woman dies in accident while on the run after murdering boyfriend

On 18th August, 2010, a car driving the street of San Diego, CA, ran over and killed murder suspect, Katie while she was on the run after murdering her boyfriend, the police says. The police have found videotaped recordings of numerous paranormal activities that is said to have taken place around Katie.

(Okay, the grammar is breaking down a little now, but how nice is it that, just like in a real search engine, the text they're looking for is highlighted? Also, I think the movie was set in 2008, since it came out in 2009...)

Woman said to be possessed by the devil kills boyfriend - NOA.com

On 11th October, Mr. Micah was found dead inside a house in San Diego, CA the police reports. The police have found records of Micah being attacked by his girlfriend with home he lived, and are currently in search for Katie. Also, it has been reported that these video recordings show various paranormal activities...

(Now the grammar is just a mess, and they don't know how last names work in North America - also the timeline is just getting weird, or maybe I was just confused. If Katie was run over in August 2010, did she just run around as a demon for two years until that car hit her? That would be odd.)

Impressive detail for a ten-second shot, right? It gets better when the character clicks on the third story, and we discover that an extended version of it was written:

(picking up where the last one left off)

and that Katie was displaying deviant behavior when she murdered Micah, the police said. The police are currently in search for Katie who has disappeared after the murder. The video recordings are currently being analyzed at the research institute. It is said that the video camera recordings found from Micah and Katie's house showed numerous incomprehensible footages. There were videos showing doors opening on its own, bed duvets turning over on its own, and one of Katie being dragged out of bed and out of her room while in her sleep by something invisible. There were many more footages of this sort, of objects moving about by itself, and things smashing to pieces, in the videos. Micah and Katie explain that these activities (unreadable) to the devil that is possessing Katie's body. There is a video showing Katie murdering Micah, and it has been reported that Katie was displaying totally abnormal behaviour while she killed him. The video footages are til being analyzed and no... (unreadable)

--------

The amazing thing? There's another half-page of this. Someone put in a lot of work for something that would likely never be read other than by creepy obsessives. I've got to tip my hat to PA2:TN - this is some of the most detailed fake journalism I've ever encountered. And we're not even done!

In a subsequent scene, one of the characters looks up devils - and the result: A fake website!

At first, I thought this had to be a real website, but when Google didn't turn up anything, I read a little closer:

About Devils

Devils are a supernatural being which are often symbolic for ideas within religious beliefs such as earthly desires, wickedness, and evil. They are often depicted in myths as something that tests the minds of saints or prophets for their faith in god.
The Term is used for anything that confronts god, and often used as a derogatory term for gods in other religions other than one's own. Most "devils" found in Christianity are often one of the above.
Devils in the Western culture are mostly depicted as seen in the illustration (see right). They take on human form with black to dark navy blue skin, red eyes, and pointed ears, wide mouths with sharp teeth, sharp claws and black bat-like wings. In Japanese, they can be counted as "persons", "spirits" or "bodies". The word "spirits" comes from the idea of counting the number of gods in Shinto religion. Example: "72 Spirits of Solomon".

The Western term DEVIL (or TEUFEL in German) derives from the Greek work DIABOLUS (####### in Greek) which is the equivalent of Satan in Hebrew. It is a word usually used for any beings that confront the idea of the Jewish/Christian God. However, the words "diabolus" as well as the Hebrew word "Satan" do not originally contain supernatural meanings. The original meanings of the words a "impeder" or "calumniator".
In the Letter to St. Timothy of the New Testament reads: "In the same way, their wives are to be...not malicious talks..." (3:11). The word "malicious" in the original text reads "diabolus".

On the other hand, the term "Demon" is translated into words such as "fiend", "evil god", "ghoul" or "genie" and is a word that is often used represent evil beings in texts outside of Christianity/ However, in using the word in daily practice, there is no precise line that strictly differentiates devils from demons.

The Derivation of Devils

In the Abrahamic religions, devils stood for supernatural beings other than the God HImself and his servants. As a monarchist religion, Judaism denies the gods of any other religion and referred to them as devils. The same belief seeped into other religions that derived from Judaism, namely Christianity and Muslim. The image of devils in the Western Christian worlds is derived mostly from the gods that people believed in the ancient Mediterranean world, the most widely known being the Baal or the Moloch gods. (These godships were already referred to as "Shedims", a Hebrew word meaning demons by the Jewish)

However, it is important to note the it was not true that every god other than the Christian God was regarded as devils. Some gods were incorporated into Christianity belief. Some good examples are the gods or a representation of a god in the Neo-Babylonian Empire, such as Michael and Bagrieal. They were incorporated into the Jewish religion as the heavenly angels as the postexilian Jews were greatly influenced by the Persian religions such as the idea of Amesh Spenta from the Zoroaster religion.
Stories of Michael and Garbriel can also be found in the Old Testament, and the come into play as archangels of Heaven. It is said that there are examples where through the generations, native European gods have turned into nymphs and fairies.

A Satan (the word originally meaning "tempter" or "seducer") was at first a device which God used to challenge or test humans. Therefore, in the Old Testament, although he was always an enemy to humans, he was at the same time a servant of God. Satan may also be referred to as the "archenemy" or the "arch nemesis", but he is treated- (CUT OFF)

(And over on the sidebar:)

The Possession:

The possession by the devil usually starts with the voice, and then the voice invades the body, finally taking over and possessing it.

The voice stage - voices can be heard from electronic devices, usually a small child's voice asking for help.

The invasive stage - the "devil" talks to the mind through respiratory sounds, (CUT OFF)

I've got to say - if this was all written by the filmmakers for a ten-second shot (and the out-of-nowhere nonsensical lines about Shintoism suggest that it was), my hat is off to them. Also, my fingers are tired.

TheAvod PlaceHolder!

2011-12-14T15:45:00.000-05:00

The Eighty-Second-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

2011-12-13T00:48:00.002-05:00

You know, there's little I can imagine more heroic than shooting people in the back. Of course, this is just the teaser image, I'm sure Tiny doesn't actually-

Oh. That's cold, man.

Tales From the Darkside 312: Miss May Dusa

2011-12-12T00:56:00.001-05:00

The Lost Simpsons Characters: The Devolution to Ralph Wiggum

2011-12-11T01:04:00.001-05:00

As the Simpsons began, both Bart and Lisa had lives outside of the home. They both had social circles - Bart hung out with kids that weren't Nelson, Martin, or Milhouse, Lisa had all her friends over for slumber parties. In addition to actual friends, there was a wide circle of other children who attended Springfield Elementary. Among them was this guy, part of a two-man chorus who wittily commented on the action in a variety of scenes:

You may think that this character is Ralph Wiggum, but that's not a wholly accurate assumption. First off, there's the obvious intellectual disparity - this kid says things like 'It's recess everywhere but in his heart', while Ralph says things like 'I bent my Wookie'.
His two of appearances as part of the chorus are in Season 3 - Episode 8 'Lisa's Pony', and Episode 23 'Bart's Friend Falls in Love'. His third appearance is in Season 4, Episode 4 'Lisa the Beauty Queen', which is important, because it comes three episodes after the introduction of Ralph Wiggum - at that time a different character!

Here's a scene from the riot in Season 4, Episode 1 'Kamp Krusty':

This is the child identified as 'Wiggum' in the 'handing out mail' scene. while the hair may be similar, this Wiggum child, presumably Ralph, bares no other physical resemblance to the chorus member we've seen up until now - and there's no sign that he's a classmate of Bart or Lisa's.

The proto-Ralph chorus member is in Bart's class, however, and if you wanted proof that he was never intended to be Chief Wiggum's son, one need look no further than Season 4, Episode 6 'Itchy and Scratchy: The Movie'. Early in the episode, Homer attends Lisa's parent-teacher conference. Not only is Wiggum not there:

That's Martin's Dad, second from the left!

But check out who's sitting in front of Homer:

An adult version of the Chorus member, clearly intended to be his father!

It would be nine more episodes before the concept of Wiggum having a son and the Chorus Member would merge together, and the witty character we know and love as 'Guy who says clever things from the sidelines', would be reduced to the, frankly, retarded character:

I know there's always a paste-eater, but did it have to be the clever guy?

Ralph Wiggum. I'm not suggesting that this was a turning point in the show's journey towards awfulness, but it certainly shrank the world the Simpson lived in, and that would go on to create problems further down the line.

Saturday Night Live RapeWatch: Steve Buscemi Edition

2011-12-10T02:29:00.024-05:00

You make me sad, SNL.

Long story short, there was a sketch 'lampooning' the whole college football child rape scandal. As if there was much to laugh about. Their angle was that this would lead to crazy witch hunts, in which anyone even slightly creepy and pathetic would be suspected of being a child molester.

Harmful messages in this sketch include: All molestation is adult man on male child, investigations into child molestation are over the top and a waste of time, false accusations are a common occurrence, only 'creepy' guys molest children.

I'm not going to say that this isn't a subject that it's possible to make jokes about, I'm just suggesting that the writers at SNL hold off until they actually manage to find one.

You make me sad, SNL.

I'm going to try to sleep now.

Criminal Minds 602: JJ

2011-12-09T04:09:00.001-05:00

It seems this season proper is going to open with a 'torn from the headlines' kind of a case - a coed is missing! The cops think they know who might be responsible, but there's no evidence? Sound familiar? Well, not to me, but I'm assured by friends that this all relates to the Natalee Holloway case somehow. I'm not going to talk about it very much, though, largely because my word processor tells me I'm spelling her name wrong.

Before we get started, though, I'd like to quickly point out how weird it seems that this missing woman is getting so much attention given that she disappeared inside America, without any particular narrative that could be used to promote the case. People made a big deal about Natalee Holloway because the racist undertones of a white coed going missing in a foreign country served a xenophobic narrative that certain media outlets enjoy pushing. This character went missing in Maryland. Does this show not realize how many coeds go missing in the world of Criminal Minds without anyone in the media caring?

Spoiler Alert: It's a lot.

Maybe we're not supposed to pay too much attention to the case of the week, however, since the main focus of the opening sequence is that JJ is having a high-level meeting with AD Strauss, the evil woman who hates Greg. Who is also in the meeting.

Why the important pow-wow? The Department of Defence wants JJ to transfer over there, but she's refusing because she loves her job too much. Greg thinks she should consider taking the job of being the PR liason for the Pentagon, but she's not so sure. Here's where I demonstrate my utter ignorance about how the American government works - can people seriously get transferred from the FBI to another, utterly unrelated government agency? Is that a thing that happens?

"Hey, you seem to be doing a great job investigating the mob, agent - how'd you like a job at the department of Agriculture?" That doesn't sound right, does it? Also, I'm not sure exactly why JJ would be such a 'get' for the DoD - her job consists of two things: picking which cases to investigate (which has no use to Defense) and getting the press to report more or less information, depending on the case, buying their co-operation with promises of more comprehensive access to the casefile once the baddie is in jail. Again - not hugely useful over at the Pentagon.

Also, how many Prentiss Awards is she going to win over there?

As opposed to all the other murderers you interview, where you get endless bites at the old interview apple, right?

Anyhoo, case time! A lady is missing! And two evil pals did it! But the cops can't get them to turn on one another, and the clock is running out on charging them. How can the team help out? And can they do it before the rich one of the pair escapes into the aether? Let's find out after the opening credits!

What, seriously? The missing woman isn't dead? Why would you tell me that just seconds into the show proper, Criminal Minds?

Is there anything else that quotation could possibly mean? Well, it could strictly be referring to JJ leaving the team, although having an opening quote referring solely to that seems like overkill.

The missing coed was last seen with two scummy guys, who claim they dropped her off at her hotel, but somehow there were no security cameras to confirm or disprove the story. In a hotel. In a tourist town. With no leads, they need to psychologically break down the suspects to save the day. Normally I wouldn't bet on them, since the team is generally terrible at that sort of thing, but since the opening quote told us this ends without a murder, I'm sure conversation mill somehow work to let the team figure out what hole this woman is buried in.

They do some simple interrogation tricks - get food for one so that the other will think that he's being betrayed. But will it work?

Meanwhile Joe and Reid swing by the place that the coed was abducted from. Everyone seems to think that she was too cautious to get into a stranger's car, yet there she is on the tape, walking right up to the guys - the only possible conclusion? She must have known them prior to that night! Well, if that's true, it should be easy enough to check - but more importantly, why would the killers lie about it? Their story is that they took her away from the bar, had sex with her, then brought her back to her hotel - it's a scummy, but legal, story as is, if they met her earlier in the day and that's why she was comfortable leaving with them, why would they not mention that to the police? Doesn't lying about something inconsequential just make them look super-guilty?

Back at the office JJ tries to negotiate the depressing family dynamics of parents blaming each other for their child's death. Also, we learn that the coed's brother died of leukemia and that they were both excellent swimmers. Which of these two facts seems more likely to be important later? Spoiler alter - in case I didn't mention it earlier, the place she was abducted from is on an island.

After getting the villains' criminal histories, the team starts the interrogations. Derek confronts the leader about his failure to get into a good college (he cheated on the SATs), while Emily awkwardly contrives to let the follower see the lunch being brought to his buddy. Luckily the subject of her investigations is such a dope he doesn't understand he's being set up. I'm not sure why neither of these guys have asked for a lawyer. The rich one announces that he's innocent, and doesn't need a lawyer. Which is just crazy.

In fact, if anyone reading this is ever brought in for questioning for a crime they didn't commit, get a lawyer right away - here's a tip: cops think you did it, that's why you're there. Not having a lawyer just makes it easier for them to get a confession. Which they probably will, whether you did it or not.

As predicted, the guys are confronted with their lie - the follower met the coed earlier in her vacation, when she rented a jetski from the place he works. Again, why would they lie about this? Also, why would they each ask for a polygraph at the same time?

While considering how the villains could have gotten to coeds' trust, the police chief expresses some doubt as to their guilt - a notion Greg immediately disabuses him of, referring to the villains as 'serial killers'. The chief questions this, and Greg offers some nonsense in response:

While the qualitative aspect is true, you literally cannot refer to someone with one victim as a serial killer. That's what serial means. A bunch of crimes in a SERIES. The best you've got is serial rapists, since they attacked someone last year. Hey, why haven't you gotten her on the phone to talk about their MO? Sure, she retracted her statement, but she might have some info to offer - and given that there's a missing coed in play, she could easily be guilted into helping out.

Well, at least now we know how they're going to catch these guys - one of them is an idiot. While the rich one lies pointlessly about having no previous history with the coed, the poor one tosses out a crazy lie about why he got home so late. Which involves admitting that he got home super-late, which he didn't have to admit to. His claim? That after the freaky group sex (that was totally consentual, of course), they drove the coed down to the docks to watch the middle-of-the-night catch come in before taking her back to her hotel. Or maybe the docks came first, and that's where they had the freaky group sex? This is the least clear narrative an accused killer has ever put forwards. The twist? He also passed his alarm polygraph test... but how?

I'm not saying these are the most inept attempted murderers ever, but the rich one actually tries to explain that he couldn't have hurt the coed because he has a picture of them together.

As if demonstrating that at some point in their night together the coed was smiling somehow proves that nothing happened afterwards. Derek and Joe try to push the rich into confessing, stopping just short of beating the guy up. The photos on the rich guy's phone offer something of a clue, though - while she seemed happy enough to be around rich guy, she had no interest in poor guy whatsoever. Could this rejection have driven him to kill?

Before we get to that, however, it's time for an interlude where Greg talks to Strauss about keeping JJ on the team. It seems that Greg tried to go over her head to keep JJ around, but it didn't work. Moving her is an 'executive decision'. Greg demands that something be done to stop the transfer, since JJ is a vital member of the team. Which, of course, she isn't, but now giving JJ something to do last week makes perfect sense: They wanted to both give her a big scene for her reel, and make the argument that she was vitally important to the show, even though she demonstrably never helps solve crimes.

Even more insultingly, Strauss announces that JJ has to go back to DC immediately - apparently there's some kind of really important press conference that the DoD absolutely needs her to organize.

As usual, the show falls apart when it's time to solve the case! After JJ spots the coed's phone in the back seat of the car in one of the villain's pictures, she wonders how it wound up in the coed's room for her parents to find. Wait, why did the parents have it? If everyone's looking for this girl would the police have found it while searching the room, and be holding onto it as evidence? Oh, that's right - the parents had it so that JJ could be the one to spot it, reinforcing the illusion that she has some value to the team. Gotcha.

Anyway, from this they surmise that the poor kid must have gone back and killed the coed without the rich kid knowing it. How did he get her away without a struggle? Super-great question that they don't have an answer to. They theorize that he might have lured her outside and drugged her somehow. Except the phone was in her room. Also the murder happened quickly, and must have been spur-of-the-moment. Did he have chlroform just lying around? It's not like she's going to accept a drink from a creepy guy in a hotel parking lot at 3AM.

What happened then? He dumped her in the ocean, which explains the passed polygraph. It seems that there are always a lot of sharks in the area when the catch comes in (instinctively I would question sharks in Maryland, but I've actually been to the Maryland shore once, and I saw an adorable baby sand shark, so I'll just tap out on this one), so he would have been able to throw her drugged body into the water and be sure she never turned up again.

But how could this result in him passing the polygraph? I'll let the team explain:

Again, I'm as far from a scientist as you can get, but I'm fairly sure that's not how polygraphs work. They're not semantic machines that allow you to carefully word answers. It's all yes and no. The fact is, this guy has been fidgety the whole time, always acting super-guilty. In his head, he knows that throwing someone to sharks is murder, so he feels like he killed her. In his head, he knows that her body is in the ocean, because he put it there. There's no way the polygraph isn't going to be spiking for most of that.

They don't actually use these theories to get a confession from the villians, instead they just send the coast guard out to look for her. Which they could have done the second they found out one of the villains had a boat, three days ago.

That would have saved her a lot of exposure and possibly hypothermia. Also, that is one super high-tech solar-powered buoy. You'd think with all the bells and whistles there would be an emergency beacon on there somewhere.

So anyhow the coed is rescued and the day is saved!

THE END

Except for some bizarre aftermath scenes, where they keep talking about how the coed 'hung on' in the middle of the ocean using unimaginable 'strength'. Um... did they shoot all this before the insert of her lying on top of a buoy? Because wrapping your arm around a buoy and holding onto it while floating in the cold ocean for days - yeah, that takes a lot of strength. Lying on top of one for a couple of days - while terrible, only takes slightly more strength than allowing yourself to drown, which takes none. And is no one's first choice.

Unless, of course, they mean it in a more generic 'baby Jessica is a hero for falling down that well' sort of a way.

Oh, and JJ leaves to work for the DoD. How will the team ever cope? Exactly the same as ever, I'd assume, since JJ never really contributed to the show. What's even stranger? They're basically admitting this by not replacing the character. Although it's nice to hear that Greg plans to get her back! Somehow.

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

Psychology was not an element in this case. In the least.

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

They found concrete evidence that one of the villains had gone back to the room, then extrapolated from there based on his boat ownership. Straight-line policing.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

1/10 - This episode has one of the clearest meta-narratives I've ever seen. Check out this scene from the end of the episode, when JJ is saying goodbye to the team.

This isn't something that the writers and producers seemed to be planning on, this is something that was forced upon them, and so they paused to have every character announce what a raw deal the actress was getting. I have no idea what the behind-the-scenes story was around her departure, but man, everyone who worked on the seemed pissed about it. Combine that with the endless references to it being out of Greg's hands and you wind up with a clear picture that someone at the network had some kind of a problem with AJ Cook.

At some point I'll have to go to internet gossip sites and find out what it was. The strange part is, whoever had a problem can't be so powerful that they were able to keep the final quote off the air - a line that is literally the actress, not the character, talking about being fired from the show.

I'll give this to Criminal Minds - that's like nothing else I've ever seen on television. Other than the last episode of Cop Rock, of course.

FactCheck: The Natalee Holloway disappearance!

The obvious point of origin for this week's episode, the show remained fairly true to the source material, with a coed disappearing while on vacation, and being last seen in the company of some local dirtbags. Sadly the real case didn't have such a neat wrapup, with the likely killer, one Joran Van der Sloot, never being convicted of the murder. Heck, they still haven't even confirmed that Natalee is dead.

Although it's not much of a consolation, at least the public can be largely sure that Sloot was, in fact, the killer - he's currently jailed in Peru for a different murder. Committing subsequent murders isn't something that innocent people tend to do. Also, in a particularly scumbaggy note, he offered to tell the Holloways where their daughter's body was in exchange for a quarter of a million dollars. He would later claim that this was just his way of getting revenge on the people who had hounded him for so many years, but let's be super-judgemental here for a second: what kind of a person would do that? Someone who's comfortable using a couple's crushing emotional agony to make himself money.

So, a sociopath.

Haiku! Starring Setup!

2011-12-09T02:24:00.001-05:00

Today I'll be utterly misusing a Japanese art to review the film:

What's worst: Plot, acting,

Or the repeated shots of

Randy Couture's ears?

Unsolicited advice for Mark Millar

2011-12-08T06:51:00.003-05:00

After reading Kick-Ass 2, issue 5, I suspect you're laboring under an unfortunate misunderstanding: the following line from Spaceballs-

Was not intended for use as a plot outline.

TheAvod Takes a Sampling of Wares!

2011-12-07T03:45:00.000-05:00

Eclectic is the watchword of today's TheAvod, with the Divemistress and myself covering a wide variety of films, from Lucky McKee's latest to a Korean movie to the story of an alien invasion told from the POV of some British punks!

Yes, you can learn about all that and more by just right-clicking here to download the latest episode of TheAvod!

The Eighty-First-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

2011-12-06T00:37:00.001-05:00

Wow, sentences were light back in the 40s, huh? Tim McVeigh gets a lethal injection while Zoff picks up a dime. Hardly seems fair.

To the society where Zoff lives, obviously. In case you thought I was on the other side of this.

Tales From the Darkside 311: Seasons of Belief

2011-12-05T00:55:00.007-05:00

Oh my god! This is it! This is the episode I've been looking for all this time!

I'm going to just shut up while we watch it together. Will it be as scary and messed-up as I remember? Let's find out!

Okay, done?

Yeah, I'm messed up too. That was everything I wanted it to be. Who would have guessed that an episode of the oft-disappointing Tales From the Dark Side would totally live up to my memories?

I've got to wonder, though - how does it play for people watching it for the first time? Was it a surprise? A shock? It's obviously stated what's going to happen, but still, I didn't really think it would be like that...

Anyhoo, see you back here next week, as I begin watching the last thirty episodes of the show, because why not?

Really? All ten?

2011-12-04T03:20:00.011-05:00

There are a large number of things about the movie Episode 50 that don't make any sense. For example, every single thing that happens in the course of the movie. Really, every moment of its running time refuses to make sense. I'd like to focus on one particular sequence from the film, however, more for brevity's sake than anything else.

After a brief introduction suggests that the movie is about a show so boring that it could never have made it past the pilot stage, let alone to episode 50, the gang meets a ne'er-do-well who's dying of cancer. Before he goes, he'd like to know whether or not he's going to hell. Why is he so concerned? Well, in the following clip, he explains why he feels he's earned god's punishment.

Which brings me to my question: really? You've broken each of the ten commandments ten times each? Is that really plausible? Let's look at them one at a time.

1: I can't believe you were worshiping gods other than Yahweh. Let alone putting ten different gods before him. That's just crazy.

2: Did you spend a lot of time making carvings of gods or heaven? Did you then worship those idols? I'm guessing no on both counts.

3: I don't think you ever took the lord's name in vain. That may seem like a stretch, since 'god damn it' and 'god bless you' are both in the common parlance, but when we talk about the ten commandments, we mean serious lapses. When they say 'taking the lord's name in vain' they mean having the hubris to assert that you're speaking for god's will. Not just saying 'god damn it', but full-on saying that you have the authority to say definitively that god will damn something. Since you've presented yourself as an Agnostic, I doubt you had enough faith at any point in your life to honestly claim authority over god's decisions.

4: I will completely give you this one. There's no way that you kept the Sabbath day holy even once in your life. So that's 1/4 so far. Not a fantastic record, guy.

5: Since you were obviously never cut off, and don't seem to have killed your parents, I find it hard to believe that you failed to honor them in ten separate instances. You're still living a life of luxury despite your crimes, so I'm going to guess that your parents were rich scumbags as well, and you honored them by carrying on the family tradition of excessive scumbaggery. So that's another failed category.

6: You killed ten people? That seems excessive to me - I mean, you were in jail until very recently, so I don't doubt that you killed someone... but ten people? No way. Maybe if you were a mob boss or something I'd believe it. Even the head of a large corporation, where profit-inspired negligence could have led to plenty of deaths, that I would buy. According to your intro, though, you're just the scumbag scion of one of America's richest families. I doubt you've been dropping bodies left and right.

7: Were you ever married? I don't doubt that you've had sex with married women, but that doesn't really count on you so much as it does on them. Since we don't know your marital history, we're going to call this one UNDETERMINED.

8: Did you ever have to steal? You're a rich scumbag. Anything people don't just give you you could afford to buy. I'm going to say probably not to this one as well.

9: If we were reading this one in the common colloquial "Don't Lie", then I'd say sure, but the proper text is much more specific - the commandment concerns not just lying, but lying to implicate a neighbor in some way. Yes, you're a man of low character, and I'm sure you'd be quick to lie to ruin someone's life (while bettering your own), but how many opportunities are you going to have to do something like that? Certainly not ten, so you're not getting this one either.

10: You were a rapacious consumer of all life's pleasures - of course you coveted everything in sight, all the time, no matter who it belonged to. This one's all yours.

So, in the final analysis, despite your claim to have broken each of the ten commandments ten times, only two of those are actually plausible, and one inconclusive. So there is no way you broke seven of the commandments as frequently or excitedly as you claim. What are you so worried about?

More importantly, why are you crying about the existence of demons, rather than running to the nearest cathedral to repent your sins and get baptized?

Wow do I not understand web advertising.

2011-12-03T01:59:00.001-05:00

I think everyone's familiar with pseudo-interactive ads, in which it's suggested that the advertisee can win something by clicking on an ad. There are a wide varieties of these, with simple trivia questions, variations on whack-a-mole and so forth.

Just the other day I encountered a variation so bizarre that I felt it was worth calling out. Check this:

1

You get to pick a side and help Zeus or a soldier kill the other one. What is the backstory here? Why does a soldier think a sword would work on a god? Why is a god trying to stab someone with a lightning bolt? It almost makes me want to click on the ad so I can find out who is responsible for this madness.

Almost.

Criminal Minds 601: The Longest Night

2011-12-02T04:08:00.002-05:00

After the shockingly bad season ender so disgusted me, I'm going to try to handle this episode as quickly as possible. Because yikes.

The episode opens with more more Leonard Cohen, and a fantasy scene of the young Tim Curry with his mother.

Oh, god, is he going to be mother obsessed as well? Were they not cribbing from the Frank storyline hard enough as it was?

When we come back to the real world, while the rest of the team is stuck in traffic, Tim has somehow escaped, traffic apparently not being an issue when you're driving a giant RV. At first it seems like the daughter has escaped, but it turns out that Tim just let her go so that people would open their doors when they heard a scared little girl banging on their front door. The door opens, and Tim murders some more people.

Will they ever catch him? The team's not doing a great job, as they're all gathered at the sister's place, trying to figure out where Derek and Eric are. This leads to an absolutely hilarious sequence, where literally twenty seconds after the team gets frustrated about how Morgan wasn't able to tell them where he was going because the cell phone towers went down (don't they have backup power supplies for exactly this purpose?), this happens:

Robert Davi speaks into a police radio. Which is working just fine. God damn it, Criminal Minds, how are you this terrible?

While still tied up, Derek interviews the sister about Tim. Which is a great use of time until they're rescued. He finds out about the RV, where coincidentally Tim has just taken Ellie (That's the daughter's name!), announcing his plan to make her his partner in crime as they travel the country together!

Gah! Too... much... Frank!

JJ gets to the house and passes out satellite phones (apparently they're too good for police radios), and discovers that Derek is ignoring his injuries and won't go to the hospital. Why? He's obsessed with saving Ellie because he promised Eric that's what he would do! Heartwarming!

Oh, and Emily is riding with the sister to the hospital, and we discover that Tim loves listening to the radio so he can hear about himself. I'm sure that's going to be important later, but right now it seems pretty random.

Then we see another interlude with Tim and Ellie. He tries to explain his philosophy of murder, then kills a witness who notices his RV after the description of it goes out over the air. He then cuts Ellie's hair when he hears that her description includes 'long brown hair'. Which is kind of hilarious, if you think about it. Imagine the roadblock where that would work.

Officer 1: Why'd you let that guy through? He was a filthy freak with bad teeth in a dirty old RV with the first three numbers of the license plate we're looking for, and he had a kidnapped girl with him.
Officer 2: But we're looking for all that and a kidnapped girl with long brown hair. His kidnapped girl had short brown hair.
Officer 1: Oh. Good work, then. Carry on.

The team tries to figure out how to find Tim, and Emily has an idea: call him over the AM radio! JJ refines it a little: break into the emergency broadcast system and take over all the stations at once!

Will it work in time to save the next family Tim wants to kill? Of course not, we're too early in the episode. The next kill happens in an amazingly preposterous manner, with someone opening the door after midnight because a terrifying monster announces that he ran over a bicycle left in the yard:

Yeah, you know what? Keep it.

So the husband gets shot, and while the wife is upstairs not calling the police after hearing a gunshot downstairs (also not calling the police? The entire neighbourhood that was woken up by the shot), Tim explains to Ellie some of the finer points of controlling families (grab the children!), then heads upstairs for some rape, torture, and murder! He's interrupted when he realizes that the family has two children, rather than one, and Ellie has dispatched the extra one to call the police.

Tim tries to escape, but a posse has gathered outside. He steals the family's car and drives out through the garage door. Sadly all of the members of the posse are on the street, none close enough to their cars to follow. This leaves the team without any clues when they arrive. Other than the RV and knowing the make, model, and license plate of the car they're looking for. Which is something, I guess.

Inside the RV they find the article about Eric that seems to have inspired Tim's quest to steal the daughter and make her his own child. They guess this based on the fact that the section of the article mentioning the daughter was underlined a number of times. Wait - how did Tim find out about this? It's not like Eric was national news, and he's only just now come back to LA. All this time has he been reading LA newspapers, looking for information about someone connected to his first killings? It can't be because he was just in LA anyways for the blackouts and discovered Eric by chance - in the last episode they flat-out stated that the first two victims were killed on Eric's beat to draw his attention before the blackouts even started. Huh?

Okay, things just got even dumber. JJ finally managed to get access to the emergency broadcasting system, but when she reports it to Greg, he says that she has to go down to the emergency center and start talking over the radio to Tim immediately. She protests, correctly, that she has no psychological or hostage rescue training, but Greg says that it will take him too long to get there.

The world of Criminal Minds: Where it makes more sense to have a completely unqualified person try to talk a mass murderer out of killing a little girl than it does to patch in a phone call to a radio broadcast. Hey, don't worry though - Greg's going to give her some 'tips' on how to proceed.

Reid, meanwhile, contacts Garcia about a murder from the 60s, thinking it might have something to do with Flynn's... wait, what? What did Greg just say?

This happened twenty-seven minutes into the episode. At this point, no one has yet learned Tim's real name. Somehow Greg is using it nonetheless.

Criminal Minds: On top of everything else, it's shoddily edited!

Time for more Flashbacks from Tim! Why does he put children in closets and then make them watch while he rapes and murders their mothers? Turns out she his mother was a whore who made him wait in the closet while she serviced customers. And then, as Garcia discovers, he killed her and one of the johns when he was 13.

Does Ed Bernero think we've forgotten season 2? Maybe he wants to put the Mandy era behind him, but we still remember. Hell, he brought the Fox back and expected us to know who that was, but Frank is supposed to just drift away like a leaf on the breeze?

And BTW, it's in this scene that we learn Tim's character's name is 'Billy Flynn". Three minutes after Greg first used it.

JJ starts talking to Tim over the radio, and despite her opening with stammering incompetence, she manages to get through to him. Apparently a heartfelt appeal from a mother to an abused child is plenty to melt his killer's heart. So here's the whole sequence if you want to watch it.

If you don't (and you shouldn't), let me precis it.

JJ: "Mothers should be nice, yours wasn't, and that's sad. So maybe don't kill any more? Please?"

It's one of the most trite and poorly-written things to have ever been presented as being 'profound' and 'touching'. Naturally, because this is a terrible episode, it works. On a man who's raped/killed ~400 people.

Oh, and in case you want more of a downer? Eric's sister died.

So Tim let Ellie go and walked into a house. He then calls Derek and asks him to come inside. Tim has the family tied up, but he's not exactly psyched about killing them, so he's not actually pointing a gun at anyone when Derek walks into the room. For some reason Derek doesn't immediately shoot him upon entering. I'm not sure why. I understand that Tim wants to confess about shooting his mother, but why would Derek want to listen? Finally Tim raises his gun so that Derek will have an excuse shoot him, and we're done.

THE END

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

Psychology was entirely responsible for catching Tim, in that he gave himself up when JJ made the speech that made his heart grow three sizes that day. I can't award any points for it, because it's not even slightly believable that this speech - even if it had been well-written, would have gotten to him. What, he's just now, 40 years later, considering that maybe it would have been nice if he'd had a nice mother? And maybe he should try not to be such a bad guy any more?

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

Supposedly every cop in LA was looking for a guy. And they knew the model, colour, and plate of the parked car he was sitting in for hours. So yes, conventional police techniques could have sorted this one out nicely.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

1/10 - I'm not saying the idea of being able to talk a killer into being introspective couldn't work. I'm not even saying they can't give themselves up. I mean, it's only happened once that I can think of, but it did happen. I'm just saying that it wouldn't work on a man whose evil is the scale of Tim Curry's. Not even a little, would it work.

Criminal Minds FactCheck: The Night Stalker!

Richard Ramirez was a rapist and murderer who attacked people throughout the LA area in 1984/85. Like Tim Curry in the episode, he was a vicious killer with no good reason for his actions. Like Tim's childhood abuse at the hands of a prostitute mother, Ramirez is able to claim a vicious relative pushing him around during his formative year. In his case it was a vicious cousin.

The show also tweaked to one of the most chilling aspects of Ramirez' MO, a complete unpredictability when it came to targets. He attacked whoever struck his fancy, so long as he thought he could get away with it - but he wasn't especially careful. As he left a number of victims alive, right from the beginning the police had a decent idea what he looked like (including the terrible teeth so discussed in the episode), but that didn't help them catch him. Without fingerprints or a positive identification, the police were left spinning their wheels while the public went mad with terror over a span of months.

He was finally identified after one of his victims managed to see the car he used to drive away from the scene of the crime, and make note of the license plate. Armed with this information the police were able to find the car and remove a fingerprint from it. With Ramirez already in the system, it was a simple matter to identify him, and the press went public with his picture.

Interestingly, the scene in which Tim is surrounded by an angry mob is based on an actual incident from the Night Stalker story. Once his picture was out there essentially everyone in California was looking for him, so when he was spotted in East Los Angeles an entire mob of people kept him from stealing a car and beat him severely until the police arrived to take him into custody.

Today, he sits on death row awaiting execution, a full 22 years after receiving the death sentence. Now let's all take a moment to sigh wistfully and wonder - if only that angry mob had been slightly more effective...

Mystery Solved: Scream Edition!

2011-12-01T01:55:00.000-05:00

Despite having seen the film Scream literally dozens of times, it held one lasting mystery. What, exactly, was opening victim Steve's last name? At the end of the movie he's credited only as "Steve", and the two times it's mentioned in the films weren't of much use.

So is he Steve Orrest, as Rose McGowan suggests?

Or is it Steve Orf, as Courtney Cox seems to say?

Turns out it's neither! Turns out I wasn't the only one still thinking about Steve all these years later. Check this out from the credits of Scream 4-

Doctor "Orth"! Finally! Yes, it seems that Scream 4 featured Steve's never-before-mentioned older brother, who's now a local doctor! It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it performance, here's the half-a-second during which his face is visible.

Also, in a scene that appeared in an earlier version of the script, but may never have been shot - it didn't show up in the deleted scenes - Doctor Orth even had a chance to ruminate on his family's role in the film franchise.

Ah, Steve - you may have died a pointless death, but history will remember you fondly.

Also, weirdly, now that I know what it's supposed to be, when I go back and watch those clips, I can totally hear those actresses attempting to say 'Orth'. Funny how the mind works, isn't it?

TheAvod is opposed to bullying!

2011-11-30T15:44:00.002-05:00

Bullying - it's a difficult subject to broach, which is why we gloss over it while talking about a movie that involves a bully getting revenge on his tormentors from beyond the grave! The name of that movie? Tormented. Clever, right?

Anyhoo, check out that review and a couple other by right-clicking here to download the new episode!

Then meet me here next week for more movie madness!

Haiku! Starring Blitz!

2011-11-30T02:21:00.006-05:00

Today I'll be utterly misusing a Japanese art to review the film:

There's far too much plot.

This was based on a novel?

I understand now.

The Eightieth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

2011-11-29T04:02:00.004-05:00

These stories are only ever 4-5 pages long, consisting of a maximum of sixty panels. Not a lot of space to tell a story. Yet the creators were so fond of then-contemporary rapid fire banter that they waste two panels on a text approximating the effect, even though the dialogue contributes nothing to the story!

Bravo!

Tales From the Darkside 310: Deliver Us From Goodness

2011-11-28T00:54:00.008-05:00

Okay, finally - a title where I have no idea what the episode is going to be about! Even the opening image, of a plate being set for a fancy dinner party offers no clues. Come on, Tales, surprise me!

It turns out that the show is taking place in the home of a man running for mayor - they've invited a prospective supporter over for dinner! As they get settled in the manager complains about his allergies - will that be important? Then it's time for dinner - the manager explains that in order to get elected, the whole family has to be presentable and positive. This might be problematic in the case of the odd-looking and gawky daughter-

When the mother starts talking about the value of supporting men who would strive for greatness she's suddenly underlit-

Which turns out not to be just a director's flourish, as the other characters comment on it. She plays off the comment, and doesn't even answer questions about heavenly music that plays whenever she speaks. Things get even stranger when the manager complains about the meal, and states that he'd have preferred fried chicken. The wife's wish makes it so, and a buck of KFC drops onto his plate.

Faced with the supernatural, the manager takes his leave in the fastest way possible. Who can blame him? The next day the family still hasn't received a satisfactory answer about the whole 'magical powers' thing. The daughter talks about the salacious adventures of her friends' parents, but her super-classy mother won't be phased. She will, however, use her magical powers to transform her daughter's clothes into that of Cleopatra after a miscommunication.

This, understandably, freaks everyone out, and the father is finally willing to talk openly about the situation - he points out that the mother promised that this sort of thing 'wouldn't happen any more'. What's that kind of thing? Apparently she doesn't even know!

She goes to visit a local priest (since it's not a 'methodist' kind of problem), who is understandably skeptical. After seeing the effects of her powers for himself, though, he's excited to get to the bottom of things. He interviews her about her opinions, and comes to the conclusion that she's so classy and humble that she must actually be a literal saint! She's not happy about it, given all the problems her nature is causing her for family. This leaves her with only one option - start sinning so that god won't be so happy with her!

Her solution? Set up a Buddhist shrine in her living room! Yeah, that seems a little weak to me as well. Her daughter has a better suggestion, if she's just looking for an idol to worship:

Oh, Bruce - I could see a religion springing up around your memory.

The mother starts swearing and telling off her meddling mother - thereby checking the first four of the ten commandments off a list.

Now that's a supportive family. They even made a chart! Hopefully she won't have to kill anyone or cheat on her husband, though.

When god continues to not forsake her she moves on to killing insects, then balks at the 'sixth' commandment, the one about adultery - I put that in quotes because they're using some bizarre version of the ten commandments where they've merged 'no other gods before me' and 'don't make graven images' into a single commandment, which is just crazy. What's the new commandment? I need a better look at that list.

She skips on to stealing her daughter's clothes, and then lying about it! She does some quick coveting, but it doesn't work - the chorus of angels continues to sing. Well, that's just one sin left - seduce a priest! Naturally the priest isn't really on board with this idea, so she's foiled.

In the next scene she makes a comment about doing all the sins, though, which makes me wonder if they went through with it off-camera - that's certainly not the way the scene was going, though, so who knows? She's brought in a friend to act as a sinning consultant, and discovers the problem right away - the mother isn't enjoying the sins at all, and she's not doing them for herself!

All she has to do is start taking pride in her accomplishments, and god will no doubt start judging her harshly. They make up a series of signs proudly boasting of her status as a saint, and then plan to go around town boasting of her holiness. It's this arrogance that finally gets rid of god's favor - which then switches over to the friend who helped her get rid of her sainthood. More because the episode needed an punchline than for any reason that makes sense.

Ah, the old harmless comedy episodes. You're always fun, but never fantastic.

Huh? Ringer Edition!

2011-11-27T02:55:00.005-05:00

From time to time, a line of dialogue appears in a show's script that winds up onscreen, even though enough elements of the scene that contained it have changed that a rewrite should have been necessary.

In the pilot episode of "Ringer", at the end of an NA meeting, Sarah Michelle Gellar's boyfriend/sponsor questions whether it's too late for her to be drinking coffee. Nothing wrong with that if the scene had been filmed as it was doubtlessly written to be, at night.

That, obviously, wasn't the case:

An awful lot of light streaming through the window, isn't there? That's because the window isn't just facing an extremely bright parking lot, but rather it's the middle of the afternoon. Check out this next scene set some time later.

The script isn't carved into stone, you know. You can always change a few words if conditions on the ground change. Unless you're not paying attention. Which is a possibility, this being Ringer and all.

That Happy Cat!

2011-11-26T13:21:00.001-05:00

Oh, Snowball - you get disrespected quite a bit by this show, don't you? Lisa's cat has been dead for around four years when the show begins - the official number is given in a Halloween episode, so there's room for a little shakiness. Speaking of that Halloween Episode (Treehouse of Horror III, specifically), something puzzling occurs - while the characters discuss Snowball, the cat featured here:

The picture Lisa holds up is of Snowball II-

Even more puzzling, when we get to the pet cemetery, we find that the cat was buried under the name:

Snowball I? Wouldn't naming a cat that suggest it wasn't going to be long for this world? The same way that calling it the 'First Battle of Bull Run' ensured that there would be a second some years later?

One might want to dismiss this episode as nonsense, what with it being Halloween-based, and therefore non-canonical, but check out what happened in Season 7's 'Sideshow Bob Roberts':

Not only do the voter rolls use the name 'Snowball I', but the gravestone:

Once again features a picture of Snowball II. Tsk tsk, show.

Although I can't complain too much about the episode that gave me my favorite fake headline ever:

Why not indeed!

Criminal Minds Season 5 Recap!

2011-11-25T16:07:00.001-05:00

It`s a one-month-early Christmas present as we take a look back at Criminal Minds Season 5!

This was a weaker than usual season for the team, with two zero-scoring episodes! Is this a record? That sounds like something I should check!

Anyhoo, the season-ender was a cliffhanger, and therefore not scored, but the rest of the episodes involved a crime being solved, and therefore count. The total score for the season was 45/220, for a 20% profiling rate. Truly, from a psychological standpoint, this was the worst season of Criminal Minds.

The best episode, surprisingly, was the Suspect Behaviour spinoff showcase, in which the team actually used a description of the kind of person they're looking for in an environment small enough that it could help identify the killer - when there were no other clues available! Everything else about that episode was egregiously bad, but at least there were a couple of positives.

The worst episode, naturally, was '100', in which instead of catching the villain, he phoned Greg and invited him over for a fistfight. Yikes.

See you back here next time for the resolution of the Tim Curry cliffhanger! Will he kill that little girl? Almost certainly not! Will he be captured or killed? Um... duh?

Saturday Night Live RapeWatch: Jason Segel Edition!

2011-11-24T02:25:00.001-05:00

Jason Segel hosted this past week, plugging his upcoming Muppet movie. I have certain misgivings about that particular project, not the least of which being that it appears to feature Rowlf, who had been retired after the death of Jim Henson as a way of honoring him. Rowlf being the first, or 'alpha', Muppet. I've got to say, appearing as a backup singer in an opening monologue song is a rather ignominious reintroduction for an historic character who's been gone for two decades.

But hey, let's move on to the objectionable! No rape jokes this week (thank Odin), and just two sketches including homophobic punchlines! This first was the kissing family, which got its biggest laugh when surprise guest Paul Rudd appeared just in time to make out with the host. The other was in a digital short, which featured a transvestite prostitute for no reason other than the cheap laugh it pried from the dark souls of the audience.

So, the numbers!

Rape - 0
Homophobia - 2

You know, I'm really happy that SNL is cleaning up its act, and hope to see this trend continue off into the future. That doesn't mean I won't continue keeping an eye on it, however. I'm watching you, SNL.

Next week - Nothing! Because it's Thanksgiving! The week after that, Steve Buscemi - which should be interesting, to say the least.

TheAvod PlaceHolder!

2011-11-23T03:43:00.000-05:00

After watching three utterly random movies, the DM and myself discovered that while Gacy and Sherlock Holmes underperform, there's way more to say about a movie called Butchered than anyone could possibly guess in a thousand years. Also, it's possible that the only joy that can be gleaned from American Horror Story is in trying to figure out the rules of its world.

For these stories - and many others - simply right-click here to download the latest episode of TheAvod!

The Seventy-Ninth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

2011-11-22T04:00:00.002-05:00

Now, I'm no spy hunter, but do you think there's a chance it could be the guy who didn't know the right word to say?

Tales From the Darkside 309: Baker's Dozen

2011-11-21T00:53:00.003-05:00

Finally, an episode where the title doesn't give away the game! Unless this is actually about a baker who gives someone a cursed 13th muffin. That can't be it, can it?

Well, it does open in a Bakery, where an elderly man serves up a tray of cookies while lamenting his lot in life - still working while old: tragedy! Fun note - this episode was written by George A. Romero!

As the old man takes a break from complaining a man arrives at the door. It's Rick from Magnum PI, making his second appearance on the show! He's there to see the woman who owns the shop, who's extremely confident about the medicinal qualities of her baked goods. Rick agrees about the magical qualities of her goods, and proposes franchising the business, bringing her incredible cookies to the whole world! The old lady isn't very interested, so naturally Rick does the only logical thing and threatens her with stealing the recipe - he imagines that whatever's in the cookies that makes them so special can be measured and quantified by lab technicians, then replicated somewhere else.

It's like he's never seen an episode of one of these things, isn't it? Not that I think they're going to chop him up and turn him into cookies of course, but he's obviously misunderestimated the literally magical properties of the cookies he loves so well.

The old lady saw Rick coming, of course. She's unimpressed with the idea of partnership, but reconsiders a little when Rick explains that he doesn't want a piece of her business - just her advertising account. He even shows her a mockup of an ad-

Which impresses her for some reason that escapes me. Isn't it supposed to be 'Country Sunshine'? People rarely contrasts the City and the County.

The old man walks out to sweep up the floor, and gets an earful of abuse from the old lady for her trouble. Once she's left the room the old man passes a new cookie over to Rick: it's a gingerbread man! Rick's confused - there are only supposed to be twelve variety's of cookie! Making this cookie the product of the titular Baker's Dozen. Also, it's probably a voodoo gingerbread man, since this is set in New Orleans.

The old man sends Rick off with a warning that the old lady is a real witch, and that she works for the devil. Only by employing the gingerbread men can she be taken down!

As ever, the witch is onto him, and uses some dough to torture the old man, who turns out to be her father, and then turn him into a rat. She's not worried about Rick, you see - she's sure he'll wind up using the gingerbread men to improve his own life, rather than battle her. Given Rick's history with black magic on this show, she might be on to something.

Rick, for his part, has come home to suspicion and accusations - his wife believes that he's cheating on her! During their fight he accidentally dips the gingerbread into his coffee, and it burns her leg! It seems that the cookies work on whoever you're thinking of when you damage them. Rick takes this as well as can be expected:

Ah, villainous laughs - you're underappreciated.

There's a quick montage as the old lady becomes super-famous and Rick narrowly staves off failure by murdering people who get in their way!

Then, sometime later, Rick drops by the original bakery, which is still being cleaned by a de-ratified old man. He's there to see the old lady, demanding more cookies so he can finally get his career going. She has no interest in that - while her business was taking off she ensured that he wasn't a success, primarily so he would focus entirely on her business. Rick, natually, doesn't like the sound of that, and even considers using his last cookie on her. He can't go through with it, though, and heads home to his (luckily still alive) wife.

She continues accusing him of infidelity, so Rick heads off to take a shower, leaving his wife alone with his last gingerbread man. Which he doesn't keep locked in a safety deposit box, for some reason. On the cookie's wrapper she sees something incriminating:

Lipstick! But whose is it? The old lady didn't give him the cookies in the first place, so it shouldn't be hers. Was he actually cheating on his wife? But why would his mistress have access to the one thing he valued above all else? This plot point is confusing the hell out of me.

Naturally the wife takes this as proof of infidelity, and destroys the cookie in anger, completely unaware that at the same time she's tearing her husband to pieces in the shower above!

Back at the bakery, the old woman continues tormenting her father, once again turning him into a rat - but only after he swears that he'll get even with her. The old woman laughs at the idea, but she's forgotten the title of the episode, and the old man only ever gave Rick 12 cookies...

Yup, the rat starts snacking on the head of the cookie that represents his daughter!

You know, this was a way more effective episode than usual. Despite him not directing it or scripting the originally story, I'm going to assign all credit for the success of it to George A. Romero. Congrats, George!

A Lingering Question About Tucker and Dale vs. Evil!

2011-11-20T02:36:00.000-05:00

Who was the other killer? Over the course of the film, we hear quite a bit about the Memorial Day Massacre, and even learn that one of the perpetrators of it was the villain's father:

One problem, though - what happened to the other killer? We know that there were two killers because, in the villain's flashback, they are clearly visible:

Now, one might say that this is the consequence of his status as an unreliable narrator, but since the story came from his granparents, who presumably heard it from his institutionalized mother, it's pretty trustworthy. Beyond that, consider Tucker's cabin-

It was clearly the property of the Memorial Day Massacrer, and since the cops caught one of them, but never found the cabin and all the evidence inside, it must have been the property of the second killer.

So Tucker bought the cabin from the other killer. Will this, combined with the survival of this film's villain, provide the foundation for a potential sequel's plot? We can only hope!

What's that? More Simpsons Things I Noticed?

2011-11-19T01:12:00.000-05:00

In the Simpsons episode 'Sunday Cruddy Sunday', better known as 'The Other Super Bowl Episode', Marge and Lisa have a subplot while the boys are off dealing with all that football mishegoss. They have some trouble with a Vincent Price-approved egg-decorating kit, and call a hotline, where a recording of Price leaves a very confusing message.

What's so odd about this? At the end of the sequence, Lisa asks Marge to clarify whether Price is alive or dead. Which is a good question to ask, based on the convolutions in the message. Except for one thing - Lisa didn't hear the message. The entire time Marge was on the phone she held the handset up to her ear, while Lisa stood nearby. So how did Lisa know what was being said?

Criminal Minds 523: Our Darkest Hour

2011-11-18T16:06:00.002-05:00

Scratchy travelogue footage plays as an RV drives across America while Leonard Cohen plays on the soundtrack! It seems that this killer has excellent taste in music. Or at least the music supervisor on the show does. The killer is simply listening to news radio, where he hears that a blackout is planned for that night in LA because of a heat advisory. So the killer (TIM CURRY!) waits outside a large house until the lights go out and heads inside to do some murdering.

It seems no one noticed a crappy, run-down RV parked in the middle of an upper-class neighbourhood and called the police. Which is entirely plausible. Also plausible? That someone would hear a crash downstairs during a blackout and not immediately call the police. Do they not recognize that blackouts are the most popular occasions for thieves to strike? Of course they don't, they're teaser victims on an episode of Criminal Minds, they have no internal lives.

The team is going to head out to LA to deal with this situation, because in addition to the murdered husband and raped wife, two other women were raped and murdered earlier in the week. So it's off to LA to stop Tim Curry before he kills again!

I'm kidding, of course, this is a season-ender, which means it's going to be a cliffhanger. The only one that wasn't was season 2, which was the second part of a two-parter. Since this isn't that, and this season hasn't set up a Reaper who can swoop in right before the credits, it looks like we've got at least one more episode of Tim to look forward to! And the Asian cop who's their LA liason, I assume. Let's check in with him after the opening credits!

Okay, it's not him after all. It's Robert Davi and Eric Close. Who are the highest-profile cops we've ever had. Are they getting a spinoff or something? Or is Davi just there as a nod to now-forgotten show Profiler? In any case, they have no information to offer, other than the fact that the killer is exploiting the blackouts, which we already knew. Also of no use? The testimony of the living victim, who's too traumatized to be of any help.

Eric shows up at the office - JJ has to brief him for an interview. He's something of a media darling, and the press loves talking to him. Meanwhile, a woman is bringing her son home, then isn't surprised when the door she unlocked is suddenly wide open. Because, again, that's not suspicious at all. When you know that there's a mass-murderer running around killing people during blackouts. Obviously, her stupidity gets her killed, but the son is fine.

Well, as fine as you can be when you saw your mother murdered. Eric and Derek interview him about the crime, but don't get much information. Now it's time for the profile! They figure that he's self-conscious because he kills in the dark and turns pictures away. The profile ends with the Prentiss Award-winning line of the night, courtesy of Greg:

Come on, Greg, I cut you a lot of slack, but how is understanding why he likes the dark going to help you find him? Can we at least stay within the realm of plausibility?

Eric drops the last victim's son at a relative's house, and he gets a touching and supportive scene. Way more than you'd expect from a guest star. At the same time Derek is considering whether they should cancel the blackout or not - if they don't, there will definitely be more murders tonight, but at least they'd be in a specific area that can be watched. If they do, the whole city could go dark. Maybe I'm being naive, but couldn't they put out a message saying 'unless you're elderly or sick, turn of the A/C tonight, or you might be murdered by a serial killer? I mean, I love my A/C something awful, but I'd flip it off a few days if there was a killer running around.

Derek also wants to bring the son in for an interview, but Eric thinks he won't be able to help. This leads to a conversation about how Eric knows so much about the kid's emotions. Eric's answer? He lost his own parents in a car accident, so he knows how it feels to be helpless. Derek commiserates about seeing his own father murdered, and then they move on.

Back at the station, Garcia drops a bombshell - Tim has been killing people all across the country during blackouts, never hitting the same city twice! Over 25 years he's killed someone in every state, it seems!

Okay, hold it right there. Let's leave out, for a second, that having a super-serial-killer criss-crossing the country in an RV is a complete rehash of the Frank storyline back in season 2, and just consider his MO. He only kills during blackouts? What kind of sense does that make? While blackouts are not uncommon things during the summer months, unlike LA's rolling blackouts, across the country they tend not to be scheduled. The man is traveling by RV, and he's a serial killer, so he can't be speeding, since he looks like a monster-

-smokes crack, and his vehicle is doubtless full of guns and stolen items. Even if there were a lot of blackouts that were multi-day affairs, which is a rarity, what are the odds that this guy would hear about them, let alone be able to drive there in time?

Or does he just pick a city at random and live there until there's a blackout, kill someone, and then move on to another city? What I'm saying is, absolutely nothing about this guy's stated MO makes any sense at all.

We cut to later that night, where Tim has killed another family, leaving only a baby alive this time. The team runs down his MO, trying to figure out why he's come back to Los Angeles - the first time he's returned to a city in his life. Coincidentally, he started killing in Long Beach all those years ago - what's the connection? Oh, and Garcia has clued them in on all of Tim's murders, which include 200 houses, meaning he's killed somewhere between three and four hundred people. And not once did anyone notice a super-creepy RV in the area. Somehow.

This scene also includes the biggest waste of time in the history of policework:

Yup, they went to the trouble of putting up a paper map of the US, and tagging every single one of his crimes on it. That must have cost fifty dollars and taken 2-3 hours. And for what? The places he's killed across America have no relevance - Garcia already told you the patten: Blackouts. And she can both bring up a map just like that on her computer and send it to your laptops if you'd like her to. So why bother making it?

Okay, this episode just toppled over the cliff into stupidity. I seriously can't believe how ridiculous what just happened was. Let me lay it out for you: Tim is back in town specifically to taunt Eric Close. Because 26 years ago when he started killing, Eric's parents were among his first victims. And somehow Eric didn't know that. And even though they've known for the better part of a day that he's been killing people all across the country, it's only just now occurring to them to check the names of those early victims to see if there's a connection.

Now they're saying that Tim must be familiar with Eric because he's a media darling, which shoots a hole in the entire premise of this storyline. There is - full stop - no way that Eric couldn't know that his parents were murdered. If he's a media figure that the news interview a lot, at some point his name would have been typed into Lexis-Nexis, and the result would have been 'dead parents'. That would have been the next question asked of him. There's no way it couldn't be.

Look, Criminal Minds - either Eric Close is a media darling with enough attention paid to him that Tim Curry would be able to remember him as the survivor of one of his first murders, or Eric Close doesn't know how his parents died. You can't have it both ways. Without being terrible writers. Which you are.

Okay, I'm calling it quits on this episode. Let's zip through the rest. Even though it's now clear that Eric Close is the focus of Tim's attention, he makes no effort to secure the safety of his family, which includes his younger sister and a daughter (he's a single dad).

By the time it occurs to them to look into this, the sister and daughter have been kidnapped (how did Tim know where they lived? Cops tend not to have addresses listed in the phone book for exactly this reason) and brought to the house in Long Beach where his parents were murdered. Which is conveniently empty. Because of the blackout that takes out the whole city, somehow there isn't a single cop in the city closer than Derek and Eric, so they have to rush to the house alone. They find that Eric's sister has been raped and brutally beaten while the daughter was forced to watch. Tim gets the drop on both Derek and Eric, he knocks Derek out and kills Eric.

Cliffhanger achieved!

THE END

By the way? This is some of the worst writing in the show's history. Remember that time Frank had the brilliant plan to hide Elle Fanning in the one place on earth she could possibly be found? This is worse.

The entire team is in the police station (which is full of cops!) when they realize that Eric's family is the target. Yet when we cut to the arrival at Eric's house to find that they've been kidnapped-

Only Eric and Derek are there. Why aren't they breaking down doors with a swat team and rushing in en masse the way they always do?

Oh, that's because if they weren't alone for no reason at all, the producers wouldn't get the ending they want.

Seriously, I have no idea how this happened. In one scene they're all in the police station, planning to go to the same place. In the next they're in three separate cars, all in completely different parts of the city, acting like the lack of cell phone service is a problem. As if they weren't all in police cars. With police radios.

God damn it, Criminal Minds.

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

Nothing solved this week - the only psychology that came into play was helping Eric remember a thing that he couldn't have not known. Oh, and Greg - you never found out why he needs the darkness, and it didn't help lead you to him. So whatever.

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

You saw that picture of Tim Curry. He lives in a beat-up trailer that he parks in swank neighbourhoods whenever he goes to kill. He shoots people - not right at the end of an attack, but during the repeated rapes and torture. There's no way that neighbours couldn't hear those gunshots. How can I be so sure? His entire MO is that he kills people during blackouts when they leave windows open from the heat. Even if he closes the window of the house he's in, the people next door and across the street have theirs open. And gunshots are LOUD. There is no way the police wouldn't have caught this guy.

Christ, at least Frank was subtle about it.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

N/A - No resolution this week, so I can't offer any kind of a ruling on it. Let's figure it out next time!

Criminal Minds Factcheck: The Night Stalker!

I guess we'll cover it when he actually gets caught in two weeks. So check back then!

Saturday Night Live RapeWatch: Emma Stone Edition

2011-11-17T00:39:00.001-05:00

So, let's consider tonight's episode of Saturday Night Live, hosted by one 'Emma Stone'. The host, unusually willing to go all-in for massively unflattering comedic characters, and thereby embiggening otherwise lacklustre scripts. The millionth appearance of Wiig's moronic game show contestant character would have been a complete disaster had Stone not rescued the sketch by shamelessly making out with her ventriloquist's dummy.

It was an odd week.

But a tasteful one! Perhaps cowed by the news out of Pen State, there were absolutely no rape jokes this week - and Seth Meyers even managed to cover the story tastefully! We are truly living in an age of miracles and wonderment.

The numbers:

Rape Jokes: 0
Homophobia-based jokes: 1

Congratulations, SNL! Another decent week! Hopefully when Jason Segel hosts next week you can keep this streak going!

TheAvod PlaceHolder!

2011-11-16T03:42:00.000-05:00

Okay folks, this week we made a valiant attempt to produce an all-star Avod, only covering DTV movies in which slumming celebrities appeared. Things didn't go according to plan when the Jason Statham movie proves far better than anticipated, and our third celebrity: Steven Segal, proves so terrible that nothing he does can be classified as 'slumming'.

Still, we gamely covered it all, and had a good time doing it! You can share in that good time by right-clicking here to download it to your very own computer/science-infused portable device!

The Seventy-Eighth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

2011-11-15T03:56:00.003-05:00

(click to bigify!)

When it comes to heartwarming sights, it's hard to find many more cheery than a mobster announcing that he may be a crook, but he's an American first, damn it!

Tales From the Darkside 308: Serpent's Tooth

2011-11-14T00:52:00.002-05:00

Okay, so based on the title and nothing else, this is going to be an ungrateful child-themed episode? Of course, if it is, it's not like the show would be breaking any new ground. Hell, we had a 'bitterest pill' just a few weeks ago. Alright, so - what's this one about?

We open in an apartment, where a mother prepares a meal while an idle child reads a book and listens to his walkman. Gosh, I miss walkmans. The meal preparation involves an oddly graphic depiction of a plucked chicken being chopped in half. Is that something which could get on television these days? I mean, it's already dead, but PETA's pretty powerful...

My musings are interrupted by the punk-costumed daughter who comes walking down the stairs, looking for her lipstick. The mother has hidden it, hoping that she can convince her daughter to stop tramping about in slutty clothes. They have a generic fight about these issues, and the daughter, being 21, storms out while threatening to leave for good.

The son calls her on her nagging, and she offers the standard 'you're going to miss my nagging when it's gone'. Foreshadowing?

After discovering that her son is disobedient as well - he's changing his major! - the mother looks for comfort from Myron, a scholarly friend. He quotes the 'serpent's tooth' line from Shakespeare, although he credits it to the Torah, for some reason. Mom looks for more practical advice on how make her children more obedient. Luckily Myron is something of a mystic, and offers her the serpent's tooth in question.

He also gives her the standard 'be cautious when using the cursed artifact' spiel that everyone always says. Although I'm not really sure why they bother, given its woeful lack of success in every case it's been used.

The very next day the tooth begins working - unfortunately Myron never bothered to explain how it works, so the specific details: Mom says things and they happen, immediately turn out quite badly. The son's eyes go bad from reading and his sneezing develops into a cold. Then all the appliances disappear into thin air:

Man, nagging really has some terrifying consequences if taken literally, doesn't it? Given what a nag Mom obviously is, you'd think Myron would have given her a heads' up about what the tooth actually does. Her daughter even breaks her ankle from wearing high-heeled shoes! It's only after the unpleasant neighbourhood boy's face literally freezes while making an unpleasant face that Mom finally clues in to what's going on.

Now handed the powers of a god, how will she abuse them next? First it's time for some gloating, as she smiles to herself while her children suffer. Then it's time for a quick cure. Since she believes that chicken soup will cure anything, it magically does!

When we next check in on the family they're doing exactly what the mother wants. Studying dentistry, dressing conservatively, even the little boy next door has become a helpful gofer! Her children are understandably terrified of her and her schemes to remake the world in her own image. The latest scheme: convincing her daughter's scummy beau to become worthy of her! When that doesn't work out, she turns him into a slice of bread. Seriously. Then, instead of simply using her god-tooth to fix the problem, she apologizes and goes to answer the door.

Not exactly top-flight mothering, if you ask me.

At the door is the little boy, whose gofering went so terribly that he's forgotten all the evil powers the old woman has at her disposal. So he tells her off, and finds himself suffering from an epileptic fit as a result. Poor kid.

Obviously it's time for Myron to come and sort things out - but he claims that the power is too much even for him to deal with! Mom finally takes the tooth off without first fixing the slice of bread or the little boy. She insists on keeping the tooth, though, which can only end horribly.

Predictably enough, when her daughter goes back to dressing in a slutty fashion Mom immediately puts the necklace back on and, following her tradition of in no way thinking through her wishes before making them, announces that if anyone ever loved their children as much as she loves hers she would turn into a pillar of salt!

Irony!

The fate of the now-epileptic little boy and slice of bread go unresolved.

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

2011-11-13T02:34:00.003-05:00

T&DvE is a fascinating example of Fake Journalism, in that it actually features all three types of text. First off, there's the plot-related text written specifically for the prop:

Left Article:

Memorial Day Massacre: One Survivor

Police found one woman
clinging to life after the Memor-
rial Day Massacre. The yet un-
identified victim was taken to
hospital early this morning.

(unclear)

We are currently inves-
tigating. When the young woman
will be questioned on the inci-
dent when she is able."

The Coroner's office is still pro-
cessing the bodies of the victims
(unclear)
the exact cause of death.

Police are asking for (unclear)
help in gathering information.

Right Article:

Victim Identified

Police have reopened a 2-year-old-
(remainder unreadable)

So after this article specifically written for the film, the next four pieces of newsprint use standard Latin filler text.

Before, right at the end of the piece, we have a hybrid newspaper, which starts with some film-related text, formatted as no newspaper ever would be:

Memorial Day Murderer Found!

(off-page) The Hillbilly Killer successfully
(off-page) death penalty of the killer.

Before moving in to filler text - this time, rather than gibberish, the text copies the obituary of Allen Klein in its entirety.

The other fun point? We learn that the sheriff-

Was named 'Peter F. Gun'. Also, since they captured the killer two months after the Memorial Day Massacre, I'm not sure how the Sheriff searched for 'years'.

Saturday Night Live RapeWatch: Charlie Day Edition

2011-11-12T02:42:00.000-05:00

Another week, another episode from the newly clean and perpetually mediocre Saturday Night Live. This week's host was Charlie Day, of film and television fame! Yes, I just didn't want to type out the super-long title of his show. Sue me. He was an excellent host, however, both getting laughs from his standard gag of gradually increasing the volume of his yells, and displaying a heretofore unknown ability to ape Dane Cook's voice and mannerisms. Kudos to you, Chalie Day!

It was a homophobia-light week, with no instances thereof, and just one rape joke, which I'm going to give them a pass on. Why? Because it was used as a background line in a sketch about how the Greek gods are reacting to the financial crisis. It's true, a lot of their mythology revolves around gods turning into animals and raping women that turn out to be their relatives. What I can't give them a pass on is the terrible history - many jokes are made about the fact that the Greek Pantheon seems to have a god for everything except the economy. But they did have a god of that - Hermes. As god of trade (and commerce?) I'm fairly sure the economy is within his wheelhouse. It's an easy enough fix as well - just mention that since Hermes was overworked (he's the god of A LOT of things), he handed responsibility over to Dionysus (or is it Bacchus? Those are the two I can never keep straight), and they get to the ending the sketch required.

Now, the numbers!

Rape: 0
Homophobia: 0

Bravo, SNL! Unless I missed something. Full disclosure, I may have fallen asleep during part of the episode.

Next Week: I have no idea! Remember when I said I may have fallen asleep? Yeah, well apparently I missed the 'next time on' during that lapse which may or may not have happened.

Criminal Minds 522: The Internet is Forever

2011-11-11T04:06:00.007-05:00

Apparently this week, the internet is forever! Ooooooh! Spoooooky! I know that's a childish way to mock it, but come on, that's such a silly thing to say. It's like saying books are forever or an idea is forever. The internet, like all things, is there until it's not. It's bigger than most, but no less ephemeral. So, now, with all that depressingness out of the way, let's talk about serial killers!

A murderer has broken into someone's house and set up cameras so that there can be classy black and white footage of them creeping inside and murdering them, Michael Myers-style.

Hopefully this will be distinct from the time James Van Der Beek was using cameras in people's houses to case the joint before murdering them.

Okay, there's a twist - we don't know if there are killings yet, because according to JJ none of the three bodies haven't turned up, nor has footage of the crimes showed up on youtube. Let's pause though, for a moment, to consider Reid's new haircut.

Is it just me, or has his personal appearance reached a point where his supervisor needs to talk to him? I know this is a poorly-disciplined team, with Derek too-often wearing Ts, while JJ and Emily keep shirts untucked, making it impossible to wear a holster on their hip, but this is just beyond the pale. Reid now officially looks like an armed homeless man who's just following the team around.

Garcia has already cracked part of the killer's MO - none of the victims were reported until three days after they were kidnapped, and the killer covered for this by leaving messages on each of their Facebook pages that they were going to be out of town for the weekend - so only when they didn't show up for work Monday were they missed. Here's the thing, though - two of the three women were in committed relationships, even though they weren't married. While it's true that an 'I'm away' Facebook status might keep casual friends or even family from being suspicious when they call your house and you don't answer all weekend, can you imagine a boyfriend who would be so accepting if his girlfriend mysteriously disappeared, both flaking on weekend plans and then being completely unreachable?

Because I can't.

We also get a stupid, but not Prentiss Award-winning line of the night right away, as Joe lays out the situation:

How can you assume that? You have no bodies. Why would you think he only has three days with them? Yes, it was a whole weekend before they were reported missing, but why would that report change anything if he's got them locked in a cellar somewhere? Also, even if he's killing them immediately, don't killers benefit simply by there being as long a time as possible between the abduction and the police finding out about it? A person who noticed a mysterious van on the street while getting a late-night snack Friday would have a way better memory of its description Sunday morning than they would on Tuesday.

So the killer is finding people on facebook and picking women who are especially active, listing everything about their lives - sadly they announce that there's no way to track who was checking out their profiles, so that's a dead end. Obviously the killer had to know about the layout of the houses to disable alarms and get in and out so cleanly, but JJ explains that the police already checked into it, and every person with access to the house - repair people, dog walkers, etc... had already been checked out and cleared.

The team talks to the friends and relatives of the victims, looking for any clue to how the killer might have found them. None are forthcoming, but the last victim's boyfriend does pick up something in the crime scene photos: pictures that have been rearranged! Checking the walls the team notices stickypad reside where cameras had been placed and then removed. Now they have a basic idea of how the killer operates. Talks his way inside to put in a single camera, uses the information gleaned from it to figure out both the keycode to the security system and when it's going to be safe to sneak around the house. Of course, that doesn't explain why you'd need to plant eight other cameras around the house, so the team decides to scour the internet for signs that the villain has been putting his work out there.

Reid has his own trail of clues to follow - he thinks that all the victims actually look alike, despite the fact that they don't! Yeah, I'm not being glib here, either.

Different jawline, cheekbones, eye shape, brow, nose... what is he supposedly seeing?

Speaking of seeing things, Garcia is able to track down what she describes as 'what the cameras were streaming' on the night of the murder. Which is an odd description, since what they then watch is not the raw footage of the crime, but rather a fully-edited video, complete with youtube-style title:

In addition to the fact that the victims were murdered in bed and then removed, we learn that the killer doesn't wear gloves for the crime - but he's probably so meticulous that he doesn't leave prints!

There's actually a more promising lead, however - even though we're watching the finished, edited content, the team continues talking about it as if it was a record off the live feed. Which is important, since, according to the code Garcia finds, that live feed was being watched by a group of fans! This is both a disturbing development, since it means we're dealing with snuff films, but also a positive one, since more complicit people means they'll be way easier to find!

The team goes over their spate of unproductive leads. They're sure that anyone this familiar with computers would have gotten into the homes by offering tech support, but all those people check out as clean! So how is he doing it? Garcia has another lead, though - if the killer doesn't think he's being hunted, he'll likely conceal his streaming the same way, meaning that she'll be able to track him! And since the killer streams using the victim's own wireless network, they'll be able to get a fix on her address! But will it be fast enough to save her? Of course not! She's the mid-episode victim.

This little conversation does lead to the Prentiss Award-winning line of the night, however:

How do you know that, Greg? You just watched a video of a man walking into a house and strangling a woman to death. It took about ninety seconds. Then you paused the video. You have no idea how long he spent in the house afterwards.

More importantly though - and I know this is a little cold - even if he kills the newest victim there's a good chance you could get there in time to catch him. Since the killer is running the stream from his van, he has to start it before walking up to the front door. So that's thirty seconds right there. Ninety for the murder, 2 minutes to carry the body downstairs, then another three (at least) to walk around the house collecting all the cameras and replacing the art in front of them to hide where they were. So that's seven minutes before the hard part - actually getting the body out to and inside of his vehicle without being noticed. Whatever the technique he's using, it's got to take at least a few more minutes, bringing us up around Garcia's 7-minute mark. While this sucks for the victim, it does give cops a good chance to get there in time to catch him. Just set up a cordon around the area and look for any vehicles driving around in the middle of the night, with a special eye towards anything large enough to hide a body as well as the computer equipment he must have in there.

Now it's time for Reid's reveal! Despite the fact that what I'm about to report isn't true, Reid feels that these three faces:

Are structurally identical, as seen in this computer mock-up.

How shoddy is even the computer mock-up? Greg announces that one of the similarities is that in all three the left eye is slightly lower than the right. Which isn't even slightly true. Check out the eye line drawn straight across the right eye in each picture - the left eye in each case has a different relationship to it.

So let's pretend all of this makes sense, how is it going to help them catch the killer? Well, the team thinks that since the kind of sociopath who would film his crimes must be a narcissist, he must share the same underlying facial structure!

It's a nice idea, although searching Boise's Facebook users for women with the same features would probably be the more useful play. Speaking of, the killer is stalking his latest victim at a cafe even while they're talking about him! As predicted, she also bears no real resemblance to the other women.

Check out how much higher her left eye is than the right. Half-wits.

Now it's profile time - they talk a little about how he's going to live on the web, but the most interesting thing is that they hand out a sketch, saying that they have a pretty good idea what he looks like.

Okay, let's noodle this one out for a second: according to Reid the killer was picking these women because of a way in which their faces were subconsciously similar to his own. Since the women look nothing alike, he's talking about bone structure and nose shape. Which is all well and good, but since those three women look completely different to the point that, even with the exact same hairstyle you'd never confuse them with each other, aren't there a similarly large number of faces that the killer could have based on the same underlying structure?

When JJ gets around to giving this information to the press, there's only two goals she wants to accomplish: talk the guy up to feed his ego, while warning potential victims not to post pictures of themselves. It's a nice idea, but it's immediately foiled when all the reporters want to ask questions about the 'facial symmetry' issue - specifically why a guy would want to kill women who look like him. This raises an important question: why was that in the public profile? That's information that they really didn't want to leak out because of the possibility that it would affect the killer's self-image and drive him to faster, sloppier murders. The second you tell anything to a roomful of people, though, it becomes exponentially more likely that it was going to leak.

Which brings me to my point - why did they tell all of this to the cops? Knowing how you got the sketch you're putting out won't help the cops with their investigations - this is definition of sensitive information. Why did the cops need to know it?

The killer is so annoyed by his methods being questioned that he runs in and strangles the latest victim immediately - leaving Garcia with two options: track the house, but they'll be too late to save her, or track the people watching, which will give them a lead. Greg orders her to do the second.

Here's the thing, though: is there anyone watching? Despite the way it's been presented, we're told that this 'murder as performance art' thing is shown only as a live feed. Which means his fans, whoever they are, have to be sitting at their computers, ready to watch it. This means that in one way or another, the killer has to be sending out a message to them, letting them know when the murder is going to take place, give or take a couple of hours. Up until now, all of the murders have taken place in the middle of the night, let's say around 2AM. This latest murder is happening at least six hours earlier, something like 8PM, since the woman is puttering around the kitchen, in normal street clothes. The guy was so agitated that he sprinted into the house and attacked a woman who was awake - even if he sent out a tweet letting his fan club know the kill had been moved up, how realistic is it to assume that any, let alone all, of them would have been sitting around, waiting to hear that message hours before they were expecting it?

They find a clue inside the house - the killer was in such a hurry this time that he left a piece of fiber-optic cable lying around! That's right, he brings in his own line, which makes sense, since he's streaming eight cameras simultaneously with no lag during the murders. Which raises a point - why did they have to find a piece of cable to figure this out? Shouldn't Garcia have known that this couldn't have been done through a regular home DSL line? Also, if he was using his own internet connection, why did it show up as belonging to the victims when she did her trace of the stream? God, this is a questionable week.

At least they've got a couple of leads - they figure that he got into the houses by offering to demo fiber-optic cable, that's why he didn't show up in their normal list of technicians and workmen who had access to the house. Which is all well and good, but why didn't the team already know about them, if that's the case? These are women so intenet-addicted that they take photos of every meal they eat and post it on their wall. If a guy showed them much faster internet service, isn't that something each of them would have mentioned in their updates, given how big a part of their lives revolves around the speed of their updates?

It still proves to be a good lead, as the phone company immediately gives them the name of a guy who was hired to install fiber-optic lines, but was fired for stealing a bunch of the cable himself. The problem? It's not his real name!

Garcia claims she'll only be able to track down the guy if she finds out his online handle, which the team gets from the perverts who were watching the feed. A couple of them were, against all odds, local, and they're happy to trade the guy's info for a deal. And man, do they need the deal - part of the killer's MO is that he sends people child porn that they have to keep on their computers in order to watch the show. That way no one can go to the police! Unless, of course, the person simply deletes the illegal content.

The one puzzling point is the seemingly innocuous old man who streamed the murders - he didn't have any porn on his computers, so how was he involved? Well, he works as a refrigeration technician, and you guys think the villain is preserving the bodies. Are these dots really so hard to connect?

The team does see it, so they have to rush to the house of the killer's next likely victim - a woman whose home network was hacked, and shares the ridiculous facial qualities. She's already been kidnapped, though - it's important the killer change his MO, you see, because using his established one, the team wouldn't get to rescue someone, and they have to rescue someone literally every week.

In a move that is sure to lead to his downfall, the killer sends the team footage of the victim tied up - but still alive - in a meat locker. Between Garcia's expertise and the fact that the old man works in refrigeration, it's a simple enough matter to find out where the killer's lair is located. The team rushes over there and captures him without incident.

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

Does pattern recognition count as profiling? No? Especially when it makes no sense? Oh, okay.

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

Man, this wasn't a hard one to solve, they just made it look at way through incompetence. A couple of months before being killed each woman would have tweeted about their Fiber-optic demo. Like ten people in the whole city install that stuff. One of them was a creep who was fired for stealing. Not exactly a hard one to crack, once you get tech-savvy people tracking him down.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

1/10 - Even I, someone without a fantastic grasp of computers, can see how rough this week's plot was.

Adventures in terrible web Advertising

2011-11-10T01:24:00.000-05:00

Look, I know that these ads are progressively generated as they pop up on my screen, and that the same one shows for every city - just because I'm near Ottawa, 'Ottawa' becomes part of the headline. What's less explicable is the use of the word 'best' to describe a restaurant that would serve this:

Seriously... what the hell is that thing? I see fried chicken, gravy, bacon, processed cheese... I've got flat-out no idea what the white slab is. Veal? And what manner of bun is that? Dear lord, people - if you ever see something like this on a menu, run far and fast.

Who on earth was putting together an ad campaign and thought to themselves "Yes - that's the perfect foodstuff to excite people about our promotions!"? Whoever they were, they deserve to be fired. And then to be forced to eat one of those abominations.

TheAvod PlaceHolder!

2011-11-09T03:42:00.000-05:00

It seems that theme shows are incredibly difficult things to organize! We go to all the trouble of arranging a fake documentary/found footage show, but then technical issues keep DM from being able to see one of the movies! Luckily the other two were about haunted asylums, and it's really, really not hard to come up with a third movie about a haunted asylum.

What was that third movie? For that matter, what were the other two? Find out by right-clicking here to download this week's episode!

The Seventy-Seventh-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

2011-11-08T03:54:00.000-05:00

An important thing to remember about the '40s: Perspective had yet to be invented.

Tales From the Darkside 307: Heretic

2011-11-07T00:52:00.003-05:00

The episode opens in a rich man's loft - his employee has brought him the latest container of purloined antiquity. It seems the rich man is a dealer in such things, especially the rare and macabre. At first the contents seem like a disappointment, but then, beneath a false bottom, he discovers a rendering of a satanic ritual!

The rich man is pleased with the quality of the piece, and anticipates turning it over for a large sum of money. Hearing about that prospect, the worker asks for a little raise in his percentage. The rich man, naturally, isn't interested in that idea, and instead tells the worker that the only way he'll ever be successful is if he figures out some way to screw someone over and take their action. Which is completely advice you want to give someone in this situation.

That night the lights in the rich man's apartment go off, and he discovers a mysterious monk waiting for him. Despite the oddness of the situation the rich man lets the monk say his piece - which involves explaining that the painting has value beyond the monetary. Naturally the rich man isn't hearing any of it. Even when the monk points out that the 'mere beggar's bowl' that the rich man dismissed from the crate is actually the relic of a saint. I'm actually a little shocked that the rich man didn't understand the bowl's significance earlier, since it was actually rendered in the painting he found so compelling.

The monk makes an offer - return the stolen art and repent, and he'll avoid tragedy. Being a lapsed catholic, the rich man isn't impressed by the offer, and knocks the bowl out of the hand, and the monk dutifully disappears. It's only then that the rich man notices something odd - the painting has changed:

The monk had come out of it!

Oh, and the rich man is the chained guy lying on the ground.

That's right - the rich man is now a prisoner of the inquisition! Charged with his thefts, he faces the judgment of the church. Despite the painful reality of this 'dream', the rich man still refuses to confess and repent. Now that's stubbornness!

He finally confesses after being stretched out on a rack, and after he promises to return all of his goods, the inquisition decides to release him. Which marks them as far more reasonable than the actual inquisition. True to their word, the rich man finds himself back in his apartment moments later.

What does he do? Immediately tries to sell the painting to one of his scummy clients! Man, people in fiction never learn from their supernaturally-induced delusions, do they?

Hold on, now he's trying to burn it? So the sale wasn't for the money, he just wanted it out of his apartment? You know you can just mail the thing back to Spain, right? The church's address can't be hard to find, and it won't cost you more than twenty dollars to bubble wrap that thing and air-mail it over.

No, he tries for the bonfire effect, but it proves pointless. The painting simply will not burn! Attempting to do so angers the inquisitor, however, who disappears from the painting, looking for vengeance!

Since he doesn't know what's coming, the rich man continues his attempts to get rid of the painting by any method that doesn't involve simply mailing it back to the church. This time he tries to sell it to his workman, who agrees to buy it. Before he can arrive, however, the Inquisitor makes his presence known, and traps the rich man in the painting forever!

Naturally this seems like a windfall for the workman, who arrives moments later, but a bright light flashes when he touches the painting and the rich man's body appears, so we can be assured that a similar fate is going to befall him quite promptly, even though the episode has ended.

While it wasn't the greatest episode, I've got to applaud the producers of this episode for using the old 'multiple copies of a painting with slight differences' trick. It not an expensive gag, but it's one that I've always found particularly effective at creating a low-level baseline chill.

How to Ruin Your Own Movie: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

2011-11-06T02:11:00.000-05:00

Tucker and Dale opens with a faux-verite sequence in which a pair of newspeople have gone to the scene of a massacre to do some investigating on their own. For some reason, they've gone in the middle of the night. Anyhoo, they both get murdered by this guy:

And then it cuts to:

Well, first off, it's "Three Days Earlier", since the movie isn't taking place on the day I'm watching it - that wouldn't make sense - more importantly, though, moments later we're introduced to the college kids who are headed out into the wild for the week, and among their number is this guy:

Who's obviously the killer from the opening sequence. Which means that we've had the film's entire narrative arc (college guy goes progressively more nuts, bedeviling the main character, until he's almost killed, but survives at the encounter) spoiled for us.

Thanks for ruining all the surprises the film had to offer, filmmakers.

Still, though, quality movie, you'd just be better off skipping the first minute.