The Thirty-Second-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

When I saw this panel my jaw dropped. So I thought that the experience should be shared with everyone.

Yikes.

Criminal Minds 404: Paradise

Ooh, the episode opens with a trucker barreling down the road in the pouring rain, listening to rock music blaring from his radio - does he keep the music loud to drown out the screams of the people he keeps locked in the back?

Guess not, since he just ran into a car that was parked across the middle of the highway! So they're dealing with a killer who drugs people and then uses trucks as his murder weapon! Clever!

Also, now that 24 is off the air, I have to take my practical stunts where I can get them.

Back at home base the team breaks down the case - it turns out I was wrong, the people are already dead when they're put in the car, the woman raped and tortured, the men beaten to death. With this revelation JJ and Garcia are able to run down similar crimes, and find that there have been a number of similar cases in the past few weeks. Yes, weeks. Because every serial killer is a spree killer in the world of Criminal Minds.

Which brings them to the big question - how is the killer finding his victims? Tow truck ruse like in the hunting humans episode? Seems like this is the perfect place for that 'geographical profiling' thing. After all, if the killer is driving the victims' cars to the various highways where he leaves them for trucks to destroy, then he's got to be within easy walking/biking distance of all of those sites, right? Unless there's a second killer and they take 2 cars - but still, there's going to be a comfort zone situation and... you know what? I have no idea why I'm trying to solve this crime for them. Let's just meet our victims who, according to the timeline, will be tortured for 2 days before being murdered (in the business, they call this 'the ticking clock!).

On the way home after a trip to Reno, a married couple (one of them is William Mapother, of Lost/being related to Tom Cruise fame, and the other is Robin Lively - the Teen Witch!) decides to stop in at a motel to spend the night. After which the plot of the movie Vacancy will likely ensue. Hopefully we won't see too much of the couple - I didn't even like the movie, so I'm doubting that the rip-off is going to offer many improvements.

Criminal Minds 403: Minimal Loss

I'm just going to air the opening seconds of this week's episode, so everyone can share them with me.

A few points here: 1 - I liked the way they got a character to say this week's opening quote within the reality of the show. That's a nice touch. Unless there's another quote after the opening credits, in which case this was just an attempt to make the guy sound as little like an actual reporter covering a siege as possible.

2 - Don't often see loop lines that obvious, huh?

3 - Man, that's one calm and collected cameraman, isn't it? Giant explosion goes off just a few hundred yards away and he doesn't even flinch before zooming in. And such a precise zoom, too...

The show then jumps back three days to let us know that we're covering the Waco story - Reid and Emily are headed in undercover after an anonymous tip let the county know that a crazed religious leader has been molesting the girls at his evil compound. Social workers are supposed to interview the children to investigate the allegations, and for some reason they've called in the FBI to help out. And they're going to need all the help they can get - it turns out the cult leader is Luke Perry!

He's headed back to the Oz well, playing another bible-thumping madman! Although there was a lot more to his Oz character than I'm guessing is going to show up here. Luke allows them to head into the school and interview the potential victim, a creepily pious 15-year-old. She shuts down the whole investigation when she reveals that not only did she not make the phone call, but she's actually married to Luke!

Yeah, her. Ick, right? It seems that it's all legal because her creepy mother gave consent to the marriage! Before we can dig any deeper into the pscyhodrama everyone is rounded up by men with guns - it seems Luke was tipped off by a reporter that the cops were prepping a raid! The cultists immediately start firing on the police - no 'Rules of Engagement'-style open-to-interpretation misunderstandings on this show!

Then, in a move that's so stupid that the woman doing it can't be described as deserving to live any longer, the actual social worker that was covering for Emily and Reid runs up to try and get the cops to stop shooting. By yelling at them. From a room they're currently firing at, and being fired at from. So yeah, she immediately gets hit by a cop's bullet and is killed instantly. Luke gets his men to stop firing so that the police can retreat, proving that he's not all bad, at least.

The Thirty-First-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

Come, harken back with me to days of yore-

Those halcyon days when America (in the form of an anthropomorphized avatar) had the necessary moral authority to yell abuse at a manufacturer of poisoned candy. In many ways I would have loved to have lived back then.

Except for all the poisoned candy.

After.Life wasn't well thought out beyond the halfway mark.

Afterlife (that's right, I've abandoned the nonsense clever title spelling immediately) is a story about a dying woman (Christina Ricci) who gets into a car accident and winds up lying on a slab in Liam Neeson's mortuary. Liam patiently explains that he has the special ability to be able to see and communicate with people's souls after they're dead, and over the next three days between her 'waking up' and her funeral, he's going to make her look presentable while also easing her transition into the next life.

Perfectly good premise for a slow-paced, likely pretentious meditation of the grieving process and letting go, right? Well, it would be, except for the twist, which I'll get to after the jump, to protect people who may want to see the - just kidding! Liam's a serial killer who gets off on convincing people that he has magic powers so that they'll voluntarily allow themselves to be buried alive - after which Liam retires to his tiny bedroom and has a good chuckle to himself about the whole thing.

Criminal Minds 402: The Angel Maker

This week's episode opens with a cliche - the blond woman creeping around her empty house, suddenly being scared by movement, but then it turns out that it was just the cat. The show tries to be clever by having the woman acknowledge in dialogue that her situation is cliched, but then it goes and drops in a second one, Myers-style.

Yup, it's the old 'out of focus killer moving soundlessly getting ready to ambush the woman' shot. I don't fault the show for employing classic horror movie tropes, I fault them for thinking that they're better than the tropes, and making jokes that outright claim as much.

The woman is, unsurprisingly, beaten to death with a hammer just a short amount of time later moments later, and then her corpse is violated with a post-mortem rape and stabbing. Ick.

Back in Quantico Greg is getting an MRI - demonstrating a nice acknowledgement by the show that there are major lasting physical repercussions from being within five feet of a huge explosion. He's warned that he should stay away from further loud sounds for a few weeks, lest he be deafened permanently! Greg badgers his way into being put back on the active duty roster, but the scene ends with a note of concern from his doctor, who has to tell him that the phone in his jacket pocket is ringing. Which is a great idea, except that it requires the audience to believe that Greg, a man who's now been living for a few months with a serious degree of hearing loss, wouldn't have already switched the phone's vibrate feature on to compensate.

Once Greg has arrived at the office the start going through the details of the case, but not before Derek takes a moment to tease Reid about his ridiculous haircut:

I also take a moment to mention this seemingly random and unimportant act because it's worth noting that, according to the first episode, Mandy had everyone refer to Reid as 'Doctor Reid' because he looked too young to be an FBI agent, and he wanted to ensure that the man was given the proper respect that his intellect warranted. Now it's four years later, though, and Reid no longer looks too young to be an FBI Agent. He now just looks like an FBI agent with a haircut that's completely inappropriate for an employee of the federal government to be sporting. He's by far the least-appropriately attired member of a team that includes a member who feels comfortable running around in jeans.

While representing the FBI.

Hey, so where were we? Ah, yes, the new crime is a copycat for a serial killer who called himself 'The Angel Maker' - a serial killer who was executed one year to the day before this new crime. Ready for the twist? The semen found on the dead body was an exact DNA match for the Angel Maker! What could possibly explain this development? Let's find out after the opening credits!

(although the only two possible explanations are identical twin or semen smuggled out of death row)

Criminal Minds 401: Mayhem

Yay, Greg's not dead! His ears seem to have blown out (and the show's producers have decided to express that by overlaying a high-pitched whine that actually hurts my ears - great for relatability, bad for my ears), and his British chippie is nowhere to be seen, but at least Greg's not dead. Also, the bomber runs up to him to check if he's okay:

How do we know that this guy's the bomber? Well, let's see... he's a middle-eastern guy within easy walking distance of a bomb that just went off. Criminal Minds just isn't the kind of show that's going to have a non-evil middle-easterner show up to mess with our preconceptions.

Seriously, has this show ever had a middle-eastern person on it that wasn't a terrorist? I mean, I know it's about profiling, I just didn't think they meant 'racial profiling'.

Moving right along, the bomber (whose name is 'Sam') announces that he's already called an ambulance - Greg asks him to call back so that he can tell them the victims of the bombing are FBI agent, which will presumably get them to hurry their asses up.

Greg finds Kate a little further up the road, badly injured - while attempting to treat her he refers to the bomb that went off as 'an IED' - which seems like an odd choice of phrase. What with it being a car-bomb, and all. More to the point, though, they've got to reason to assume that this is a jury-rigged explosive made from artillery shells or salvaged landmines. Really, the only reason to use the term 'IED' is to reinforce a connection between this attack and the kinds of things that happen in Iraq and Afghanistan, which seems like the kind of overly political thinking that people under stress wouldn't do. If Greg were a veteran just back from the war, I'd totally buy him using IED as a synonym for 'bomb'. He's not, though, so it's all kind of a stretch.

Anyhoo, Kate's bleeding badly and will likely die if she doesn't get treatment immediately. There's a hitch, though - the SOP of bombers is to set off a small bomb to injure a few people, then use a bigger one to take out the cops and paramedics who arrive to help.

Ironically, the very orders that Kate put out to save lives may wind up costing her her own!

Also, what do you want to bet that they never explain how someone was able to sneak up to an FBI vehicle parked in front of an FBI building and plant a bomb in it with nobody noticing?

I Hate Indiana Jones: Day 62

Indiana Jones and the Hole-y Plot (Part 4)

Building on the previous article, let's accept, for the sake of argument, that the door used to be open, and then some kind of security system closed it only after the skull was stolen – how did the conquistadores get down to the treasure room in the first place? The only way to open the temple is to let out a huge amount of sand through holes in a rock, which causes a central pillar to descend, which acts as a counterweight moving some outer pillars, which work the mechanism that opens the floor, revealing a staircase that juts out from the wall - for just fifteen seconds. Then the stairs begin sliding back into the wall, but the hole in the roof of the temple doesn’t close again.

So, after the Conquistadores opened the temple with this mechanism, and presumably used some kind of a grappling hook system to get back up again after the stairs had retracted, why did the natives reset it? What possible motivation could the natives have had for doing this? To keep invaders from stealing any further skulls? How could a theoretical invader possibly do that without them already having a skull to open the door? It can’t be to keep outlanders from grabbing all of the antiquities held in the cockpit’s antechamber, because, as isolated kung-fu-monkey-ninjas, they would have no conception of those items’ value.

This rather gaping plot hole grows out of the fact that the audience is never privy to anything approaching a motivation for the natives of the lost valley. Do they want the skull back? If so, why didn’t they grab it? Do they not want it back? If not, why did they docilely let a group of guys carrying the skull climb their pyramid? You can’t tell me their religion didn’t allow them to touch the skull, because they didn’t seem to have a problem burying along with the Conquistadores.

Traps and doors that needed to be reset were commonplace in the other Indiana Jones films, but at least there some sense of purpose could be ascribed to the people who maintained them. The thuggee wanted to ensure that the secret passageway into their underground lair was well-guarded, so they made a crush room. Obviously they’d want to use that passage themselves at some point, so there was also a simple reversing lever. Likewise the Hovitos’ traps would only be effective at keeping people away from their idol – a clear motive – if they were hidden in the walls, so it makes sense that they would sneak in and reset them every time someone wound up stabbed by some light-triggered skewers.

As for the zombie kung-fu monkeymen, because it’s never clear what they want, their actions can never make sense. The fact that those actions are internally inconsistent is just awful icing on a shoddy cake.

Thirtieth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

Oh, Captain Marvel-

(click to bigify!)

Why must you dance so elegantly around giving us the answers you know we crave? Answer me, dammit, would you have supported Hilary or not?

Of course, we already know how you feel about capital punishment, what with the way you made sure that alien inchworm was sentenced to death that one time.

Also, for the record, this story was set at the North Pole. So... yeah.

The Walking Dead Persists in Disappointing

So anyway, I watched the rest of this week's The Walking Dead and... well, yikes.

On last week's Avod the DiveMistress and myself got into a discussion about how terrible The Walking Dead's second episode was - most notably because of the character of Merle, the racist sexist violent redneck stereotype who everyone left to die on the top of the building. This week opens well, with a glance at Michael Rooker's desperate struggle for survival, in which he proves more intelligent than either character in the film Saw:

By using his clothes to grab the item of his salvation. Which would lead me to give the character (and by extension, the writers) a lot of credit. If the next scene featuring Merle's predicament wasn't so ungodly stupid. Here, in three images, is the crux of that stupidity:

This is, of course, a reference to Saw/Watchmen/Mad Max. So let's see just what The Walking Dead got wrong by taking a look at those scenes, shall we?

Criminal Minds Season 3 Recap!

Another season of Criminal Minds down! Some high highs this year, with the arrival of Joe Mantegna livening up the show a little, and the team finally battling that satanist they'd been itching to match wits with since "The Popular Kids" back in season 1.

The lows were especially low, however - between the show robbing us of our Santa-themed killer and the trip down bondage and child molestation lane, there was a glut of especially contemptible content this year.

Of course, we're not here to wallow in nostalgia - let's examine the only hard-and-fast metric ever designed to judge the relative psychologicality of Criminal Minds storylines!

Due to the writer’s strike there were just 20 episodes this year, featuring a total of 21 serial killers. The season didn't feature a two-parter, and while Penelope's shooting did occur over two episodes, the solving of it was featured entirely in episode nine, so I've counted their investigation there.

The total profiling score for the year was 50/210, or 24%. While this is up from last year's 20%, it's still lower than the series high-score of 25% in the first season.

Picking this year's best psychological writing was simple enough - it was the one time an episode climbed over five. Its inclusion is a little on the questionable side, though, because, much as in 'Riding the Lightning', in this particular case a crime wasn't actually solved. When we're introduced to the killer in question, he's already on Death Row, in the middle of a plan to have his execution delayed by adding a few more names to his list. When Reid stopped him with an impromptu profile, I decided to count it as 'solving' the case, despite the lack of mystery. Hell, it doesn't even really count as difficult profiling, because Reid wasn't actually using evidence to reverse-engineer a portrait of a killer, he was merely explaining how the killer's insanely bad childhood led him inexorably to murder - a task that was made immeasurably easier by the fact that he had access to the killer's entire life story.

It was much harder to decide on the worst showing for the profilers this year - beyond the now-standard format of most cases being solved by completely traditional policework, this season offered a shocking number of examples where the team had almost no measurable impact on the investigation. Where things would have turned out essentially the same had they remained in their comfortable chairs back at Quantico. Of all of those failures, though, one stands out above the rest. In the episode 3rd life, not only did the team fail to catch the culprit, they were beat to it by a mob hitman, who was trying to rescue his daughter from a group of vicious rapist/murderers.

When criminals are doing a better job of catching serial killers than the FBI, it might be time to turn in your badges, guys.

The Walking Dead is Also Poorly-Written

Here's a question I'd like to pose: if bad writing from the source material has been preserved in the finished product, is that better or worse than something just being badly written? Does faithfulness to the source material excuse the stupidity, or does the fact that years have passed without anyone noticing the problem, or bothering to fix it if they did, make the mistake even more contemptible?

I'm referring, of course, to the big reunion scene from episode 3 of The Walking Dead (it appeared in issue 2 of the comic).

That's TVRick, gleeful to discover that his family has survived.

This, of course, is comic Rick at the same moment.

What's wrong with both of these scenes? Simply that, while Rick's surprise at discovering that his family is alive is heartwarming (and needlessly profane, in one redacted case) it could not have happened this way in the context of either story.

The Walking Dead is Weird, Huh?

So I'm watching The Walking Dead, and being mildly diverted when I'm not getting angry, then suddenly I hear the oddest thing. Take a look at this brief sequence, where Rick shoots a zombie outside the police station, ensuring that Lennie James and his son will no longer be able to use it as a hideout:

Did you hear it? Buried under the sound of the chain-link fence is something that should be familiar to everyone who owns an Xbox 360.

Yup - it's definitely the 'achievement unlocked' sound effect.

Easter egg by the producers? Playful sound technician just dropping it in and hoping that no one would notice? You be the judge, because I've been too judge-y lately!

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

I’ve learned some amazing things while reading comics for this series, but this panel taught me one of the most fascinating:

It seems irony wasn’t invented until sometime after 1948.

I Don’t Understand William Hurt’s Plan

When it was recently discussed on theAvod episode 85, the Divemistress and myself were careful not to spoil all of the plot twists that the film ‘The 4^th Floor’ had to offer. Unlike theAvod, though, Castle Vardulon is an all-spoiler zone, which makes this the perfect place to address the film’s unbelievably convoluted plot.

Actually, it’s not the plot that I must object to – it motors along effectively enough, propelled by the stupid, unbelievable decisions of the main character. No, my real questions are with the way the film collapses under the convolutions of its own logic once the second twist ending (William Hurt did it!) is revealed.

For most of the film’s running time every single character acts in a preposterously suspicious fashion. In practical terms this serves to create a spate of red herrings to distract the audience from the real killer, Juliette Lewis’ downstairs neighbour. Of course, since he’s the only character in the film who doesn’t act incredibly suspiciously (other than a Korean grocer), the attentive viewer will tap him as the murderer almost immediately, since he’s the only character for whom the revelation would be a (theoretical) surprise. The basic plot of how JL is terrorized and almost murdered by the man downstairs is serviceable enough, but then the twist appears, and when the rug of mystery is pulled away the rest of the film comes crashing down, the shoddily contrived construction being unable to support its weight.

Yes, the 4^th floor is another one of those many, many movies that would have been far better if you’d just left off the final minute's ‘stinger’.