Friday, April 25, 2014

Arrow - The Episode where Slade kills Moira

Sorry if you googled this and I spoiled it for you, but the episode is 3 days old, and I have some questions about this whole plot stream. While the flashbacks throughout this series have allowed for what seems to be displayed insight so far, this latest episode seemed thrown together, and I sniffed some continuity issues.

Now, I'm really not one of those fans that pays close attention to each detail and harps over it, I don't have time for that, and can suspend disbelief pretty well. I have written about this before though. Sometimes, the writers will completely disregard any precedents set. I'm wondering if Arrow didn't get close to that this last week.

It was a good episode all around, with Roy going ballistic because of the mirakuru, and Slade now making his next move to continue destroying Oliver. Within the episode, Oliver's mom begins making 180 degree turns, she wants to drop out of the mayoral race to try and bring back Thea, then doesn't after Oliver talks to her and explains that maybe if she showed that she was ready to do good, Thea would come back. They also show flashbacks about Oliver getting some anonymous girl pregnant, and how Moira gave her $2 million to go away and tell Oliver that she lost the baby. (Yes, watch out for 7 year old baby Oliver to appear soon).

She also tells Oliver that she knows his secret, never really laid out, but truly implying that she knew he was the Arrow. He asked her when she knew, and she said something like, "For some time now, I think I knew.."

But hey, did she know when Diggle kidnapped her as the Arrow and threatened to kill Oliver if she didn't reveal her plans with Malcom? That wasn't too long ago, and that was a big plot swing.

This is the continuity of which I speak. It could have all been wrapped up with a line, " I was even willing to play along with your charade with diggle..", but of course there was no time for that, because by the end of the show, she gets skewered by Slade.

I can let it all go, it's fine. Her character had sort of run her course, but it wreaks of desperate on-the-ratings-bubble plot twists. In one episode, a main character flips, dies, and a phantom child is revealed. AS far as I know, this is a safely renewed, and supported, show.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Meta4worldZ - Back to a Blog

Recently, I have begun writing again, and rediscovering these blogs I started what seems like a lifetime ago. I've decided to begin again.

As I remember conceiving it, this was the pop blog, where I wrote my miscellaneous media commentaies and reviews and things like that. I have another of the same name on wordpress, but that was directed more to my writing, and personal stuff. So when I wrote a review of Winter Soldier a few nights ago, it seemed weird.

As my last post said, I moved this blog and it's contents to a regular website and, and continued, somewhere that content is saved, but for now I will just continue with what we have here. As the theme says, blowing off steam to virtually nobody.

Here is the post I made on the other blog:

Winter Soldier – Coming out of hibernation

One thing I thought about the most as far as writing something again is that I wanted to write about Captain America 2: Winter Soldier.
I began doing reviews about the beginnings of the comic book wave of movies we have been able to enjoy now for more than a decade. I even totally fan-boyed over Spiderman 3 despite the rash of hate it got elsewhere on the web. I enjoyed them, and even at my age, seeing the stories I grew up reading come to life has been magical.
I am not alone as the old guy going to these movies, sometimes I will find a nephew or a date that will go, but mostly, these are my escape times, and this last weekend it was great. Because, now, it’s not as much about my childhood comics as those that I found a few years back when I started collecting. Winter Soldier is a fairly recent phenomenon that I discovered when I once again found a comic shop and looked for something to latch onto.
Mostly, I’ve felt like i used to, abused by the comic companies, stringing plots across titles, faking deaths as promos, yeah, they still do that, but the Winter Soldier plotline was a little better than that.http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/03/25/why-is-the-winter-soldier-cool . That post explains it much better than nI will biother to try, but I caught a lot of what he was talking about when I started following it some years ago. Like Venom in Spiderman, and Phoenix for X-men, these were the plotlines that Marvel really nailed. (Even if they abused the crap out of Phoenix and ultimately drove me away for a decade with the way they dragged that plotline on and on.)
The movie Winter Soldier is still fresh in my mind, I’m sure the luster will wear off, but by that time, the next one will be coming through, along with Guardians of the Galaxy and more Marvel stuff coming out this year. Best of all, and I have not yet even browsed to see what others are saying, is that this really is a set up for what I hope will be the Civil War Plotline coming to the screen.
That alone was the plotline that got me back into the store, after reading a release about it. And it is already being laid out in Winter Soldier.
Cap is questioning things, and nobody is better suited to maneuver Tony Stark through that than Robert Downey Jr. I can see this coming together over the next couple of summers.