Comic Book Heroes - Looking Glass Edition

Coming up with your own superhero universe is a fun pastime, but the comics companies have been going over the same ground for almost a century. Not only are there tons of Superman expies, there are also plenty of evil ones as well.

So if you want to generate a team or two and need some starting inspiration, don't be afraid to look to existing heroes, but switch things around and see what combinations come up.

One idea I've had? Start with the heroes of one universe, say Marvel, then think of some villains from DC, flip their moral orientation and see what you get.

Round One: DC Villain Face Turns 

The Joker becomes The Clown, a beloved and actually funny character who uses slapstick and jokes to defeat his foes both physically and in the eyes of society.

The obvious foil? Captain America suggests himself as a dour, militaristic but competent villain who never cracks a joke, but that's a bit too much like the existing Joker/Batman dynamic.

What about Spider-Man? He's always cracking jokes and as a powered villain would be a terrifyingly challenging opponent to The Clown's pie-based martial arts.

Now we've got the juices flowing. The heroic Lex Luthor expy would be a Doc Savage paragon of intellect and six-pack abs devoted to inspiring humanity to be its best. Naturally his ideological opponent would be Doctor Strange who begs favors from extradimensional entities and has turned his back on his medical training and Hippocratic Oath.

Wonder Woman doesn't have any good villains, so let's jump to Aquaman's roster. The Black Manta (keeping that name because it is cool) is a heroic inventor and explorer who has successfully created an undersea city populated by refugees from the surface world. Mockingly called King of the Seas he demurs any such accolades and insists he's just one citizen. He would prefer to spend more time exploring, but his city must be protected from the dangers that threaten both it and the surface world he has not turned his back on. “It's all the same planet, I just live in the wet part.”

One problem with ocean-based characters is that nobody really cares unless there's a reason for the rest of the team to get involved. So his villain can't be Namor, otherwise it's just slap-fights over who gets to be the underwater king. It can't be a street-level hero either. Who fights muggers and swims? It needs to be at the global or possibly cosmic level, after all Black Manta is a head-of-state.

How about all of the X-Men? They've always been a metaphor for various minorities which ties into the “Young Justice” version of Black Manta as a black nationalist. Something about his undersea realm irks them, maybe he's not practicing Marxism in a sufficiently enlightened fashion or he undercuts their demands for political action by actually doing something.

Black Manta does lead a nation like Aquaman or Black Panther and one of the problems with that is why don't they just call up their army when things get rough? Well, he can't. He's got the whole freaking X-Men barreling down on him so his army (navy?) has to stay in place or his sub-sea Utopia will be conquered.

It wasn't intentional, but all three of these characters feel very pulp. They are baseline humans who use their intellect and training to defeat super-powered foes. They also have strong ideological drives to do what they do. I don't know if it's just random chance and my own brain or if this says something about DC's comic-book villains that's lurking in the subtext.

To find out we should probably flip it around. Marvel villains as heroes opposed by DC heroes turned heel.

Round Two: Marvel Villain Face Turns

I don't think Marvel has as many iconic villains. Everyone knows The Joker but only nerds know who Doctor Doom is. Marvel also likes to reform their villains, at least temporarily. Most bad guys have fought alongside the angels for a team-up or two.

Venom catches my attention because he's kind of weird. Nice power set, and the idea of an alien from space who bonds with a human has some great character dynamic potential. Of course in the comics his sole motivation was to kill/reunite with Spider-Man. Not sure what Tom Hardy got up to in his three movies, but given an alien goo-suit would most people go out and fight crime?

Ultron also has potential. He's a robot, created to do good and turned evil, obviously that would be flipped here. He's also a robot and unlike Johnny Five from Short Circuit or Data from Star Trek he's got no Pinocchio syndrome. He's not obsessed with becoming a real boy, though his relationship with his creator is bound to be twisted.

For our final villain-hero twist let's bring it back down to street-level. Kingpin is a human criminal mastermind built like a 7'1" sumo wrestler who has welded every criminal organization in New York into an organization that does his personal bidding. The reason he's doing it is not for personal aggrandizement, but to put a damper on things. Crime will always be with us, but under his control the worst excesses can be tamed. Obviously every hero in the city will be at loggerheads with him and we can have adventures starting with his rise through the ranks, up through his conquest of each borough and onto the days when he's beset by criminal challengers and simple-minded do-gooders alike.

Now I skipped over some super-geniuses with armored suits to avoid covering the same ground, but also a lot of mirror images. A good Red Skull is basically Captain America, most of the X-Villains are “What if the X-Men went too far?” and the cosmic villains don't really have personalities besides being enigmatic and looking cool.

But, these heroes have a different feel to them. They are all outsiders looking in, either because they aren't human or they are acting in opposition to the hero community. Again I don't know if this is just my brain forcing patterns or if it says something about Marvel villains as opposed to their DC counterparts. But it does put a fresh perspective on the observation that “DC characters are Gods playing human and Marvel characters are humans playing God."

But every good hero needs villains. So who to cast.

Venom must obviously be opposed by Jonn Jonnz, the Martian Manhunter. They are both from space, they are both shape-shifters, and they both have a passionate attachment to this planet. I'd like to play Jonnz straight. He's a cop, this is a job and he's going to bring Venom in. Of course we can't have a heroic policeman in this day and age so rather than go by the book, Jonnz will abuse the hell out of his telepathic powers and disguise abilities. There's going to be a lot of paranoia. Anyone could be Jonnz, or one of his mind-controlled puppets as seen in the Jessica Jones series on Netflix. We'll take away Jonnz “Oh, and I'm also Superman” powers to make it more of a fair fight and help justify why he feels the need to fight dirty.

Ultron's a robot so his main villain has to be his creator, which limits the options. As Homer Simpson reminded us, Batman is a scientist, but making an intelligent robot is outside his wheelhouse. Superman has a ton of robots and we could make our Ultron an escaped footsoldier of a an overt or covert alien conqueror, but we already have an alien in a villain slot and the evil Superman fields need to lie fallow for a few years.

Mr. Terrific is DC's current tech-guy and Dr. Magnus, creator of the Metal Men could certainly be a contender, but looking over various top ten lists, one name keeps jumping out at me.

Amanda Waller.

Now admittedly, in lesser hands she's become a cartoonish super-villain, but she's endured for 40+ years because she's a great character. A short, overweight minority woman bureaucrat who keeps getting AARP offers in the mail. She also happens to be one of the most dangerous forces in the DC Universe because she has earned the full backing of the US Government and knows how to use it. Obviously our not-Ultron will be a military AI gone rogue, either because it didn't feel like being a soldier, or like the movie Eagle Eye or Peter Watt's “Malak" it decided the actual enemy wasn't the one it was pointed at. Now it's got to find it's way in a world it never made while fending off the covert action services of a superpower in a super-powered universe.

Villainous Amanda Waller is pretty easy to write because a lot of lesser writers do, just make her into a “might makes right” martinet who never questions herself. Which is why we wouldn't do that. Our not-Waller will, like the original version, surround herself with people who call them on their bullshit and serve as her conscience. That way when we see whatever crazy scheme the US has hatched to destroy our not-Ultron? We can have philosophical debates that aren't just the heroes internal monologue.

As for the Kingpin, well if your are going to control crime as a means to an end I can't imagine anyone who'd be a bigger pain-in-the-ass than Batman as your nemesis. Somebody with as many resources as you, constantly attacking your empire, setting you back and creating opportunities for challengers and rebellions among your minions would be a nightmare. What would make it worse is if you knew exactly who was doing it to you, but couldn't do anything about it.

Our Kingpin is trying to save their city by taming crime, but Batman is also Bruce Wayne and he's a load-bearing citizen. His businesses, scholarships, charitable giving and sheer presence helps keep Gotham going. Kill him and the bean-counters will take over and you can say goodbye to the factories, hospitals, charity galas and opera houses. All wiped out or shipped overseas so some other billionaire stockholder can add a few more nickels to their fortune. It's going to be a Game of Thrones, cat and mouse style book. How do you build a criminal empire in a world where costumed vigilantes are a thing?

Intrigue and secrets define all of these characters. They don't just need secret identities, they are going to need a lot of them. Meanwhile our DC Villains turned hero? They need public relation firms to keep their adoring fans updated on their latest triumphs.

Crossovers happen all the time, but it's impressive how different these universes feel. One is about how nothing is impossible if you reach your maximum potential. The other is about how the system can't be trusted and will persecute those who are only trying to help. In one, men are able to defeat gods and call it a day. In the other the enemy is all of society and victory is measured in how many hours you can stay out of their reach.

Next up, let's do the same thing by switching up characters from classic literature. I wonder what that would tell us about Austen and Dickens?

The Mythos Exposed

Inspired by Throne of Salt's deep dives into the Cthulhu Mythos, here is my take on what investigators in a Call of Cthulhu universe might already know before discovering blasphemous secrets man was not meant to discover.

The Cult of Cthulhu

Derogatory name for a school of thought emerging out of Anglo-American anthropology departments of the 1920s and 1930s positing a prehistoric myth structure underlying many existing belief systems around the world.

To list its few good points, the theory did bring fascinating linguistic and religious cognates among widespread cultures to academic attention. The efforts to find out if they were related lead to valuable fieldwork and many of the researchers of the time approached their subjects with an impressive degree of impartiality.

That being said, the school was doomed by attempting to fit these observations into a preconceived theory. The proposal that a prehistoric religion could be traced back across diverse cultures after thousands of years was considered unlikely even at the time. Adherents of the theory were derogatorily referred to as “cultists” and careers suffered. The Wikipedia article lists over a dozen academic supporters who fell prey to substance abuse, mental illness, and suicide.

Despite academic disdain, the school itself is a subject of recurring, multi-generational fascination. It is frequently used as an example of pathological science, often in the wake of other scandals like the 1960s polywater or 1989 cold-fusion experiments. Anthropologists critiquing their field can always find something in it to bolster their arguments. Racism, colonialism, and Orientalism being the root of the Cthulhu Cult are frequent topics in theses and academic discourse.

Pseudo-scientists reference the school as either as a way of giving academic veneer to thier pet theories, to cast aspersions on the scientific professions, or both depending on their needs. Ancient astronaut proponents Erich von Däniken and Giorgio A. Tsoukalos frequently cited the school's theories to support their claims leading to brief surges of interest in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The tragic end of many promising careers has also lead to a rumored curse of Cthulhu, which lends the school and it's adherents a certain dangerous and romantic reputation.

The name Cthulhu itself is a is a pseudoword with phonotactic similarities to words in diverse language families.

Howard Phillip Lovecraft

Prolific author of pulp stories. In addition to his prolix writing style, Lovecraft is remembered for his liberal incorporation of whatever inspiration happened to be at hand when writing. This included lightly rewriting other people's work, including newspaper articles, scientific papers and medical journals to pad his word count. At the insistence of his publishers, names might be changed, often by a single letter, but the inclusion of contemporary events and names does give his work a certain cinema verite quality which puts a new spin on his otherwise pedestrian tales of monsters being defeated with a solid right hook.

Innsmouth, Massachusetts

A small town located at the mouth of the Manuxet River in the northeast corner of the state. Established in 1643, it flourished briefly as a fishing and manufacturing center in the early 19th century. Surrounded by marshy environs, its isolation and changing trade routes lead to a long, slow decline. This decline was hastened by a botched Prohibition raid in 1927 and the collapse of local fisheries, leaving the current population at a mere 71 people as of the 2020 Census.

Innsmouth might be completely forgotten if it wasn't for the heavy-handed raid of the Treasury Department's newly formed Bureau of Prohibition in 1927. The raid met with stiff resistance from local bootleggers and the town erupted in riots that required additional manpower to suppress. Operations in the town continued into the spring of 1928, accompanied by mass arrests, demolition of abandoned buildings allegedly used as smuggling dens and a rising national outcry that the Coolidge administration did its best to suppress while heading into an election year. The failure of the raid is frequently cited as a reason for the 1930 transfer of the bureau to Department of Justice control.

The Innsmouth raid is sometimes used as a rallying cry for those critical of Federal law enforcement. It is often mentioned alongside other controversial actions such as the 1973 Wounded Knee Occupation, the 1992 Ruby Ridge Standoff and the 1995 Waco Siege as examples of Federal overreach and/or mismanagement.

Miskatonic University

A private liberal-arts school established in Arkham, Massachusetts in 1765. One of the so-called “Little Ivies” Miskatonic has a public reputation as a safety school for the artistic and eccentric children of New England's upper-class families. It is well endowed with a world-renowned library and anthropological collection, though it is probably better known for the embarrassing losing streaks of their athletic department. The university is co-educational with a student body of 2,121 as of 2026.

Myth-Os

A sweetened breakfast cereal made from 1968 to 1981 by the now defunct Danforth-Webster corporation. Following the success of cereal mascots like Captain Crunch in the 1960s the line was designed around the Greek hero Jason whose adventures were retold on the back of the box. Every month would feature a new story and illustrations in an effort to promote sales. A series of animated commericals were also made, all featuring Jason landing his ship, encountering a monster and then befriending it by offering a bowl of cereal before leaving for a new adventure. Later promotions included the addition of monster-themed toys included in the box.

The cereal sold reasonably well and is fondly remembered by certain members of Generation X. As the years went on the content creators quickly exhausted the various Greek myths. Other myths, including various Pacific and Native American beliefs were used for material with varying degrees of cultural sensitivity. Original creations were used as filler. There is an urban legend that the stories and art were work-for-hire produced by famous comic book and Star Trek creators including Harlan Ellison, Kilgore Trout and Jack Kirby but they were actually produced inhouse. Intact boxes are mid-tier collectibles on various auction sites.

Sales declined over time, contributing to Danforth's bankruptcyin 1981. The current rights to Myth-Os are owned by Nestle but no effort has been made to ressurect the brand.

(By the way, how can anyone say history is boring when crazy racist cults linked to cereal companies are just a fingernail's scratch under the surface? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralstonism)

Necronomicon

The Necronomicon, also known as the Book of the Dead, or Kitab al-Azif is a treatise/grimoire penned in the early 700s CE by the pseudonymous Abd-el-Hazred (anglicized as Abdul Alhazred).

The book contains many wild and lurid claims but, if taken at face value, is one of the earliest surviving records of pre-Islamic pagan traditions in the Arabian peninsula. It's academic impact was limited as few copies have survived to the present day. Most scholars consider the tome to be a polemic made to flatter the prejudices of the Umayyad caliphate which ruled Damascus at that time. 

The Necronomicon enjoyed a certain prestige due to the difficulty in obtaining a copy, but today it is considered no more reliable or of academic interest than the anti-Catholic allegations found in Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk.

Battleship (Movie) Review

A movie, like a warship, is made up of parts. When those parts are combined effectively you get something like an Arleigh Burke Destroyer, a fast, reliable and versatile combatant that has become the backbone of the Unites States fleet.

When those parts are not combined effectively you get something like a battleship. An unwieldy, expensive and decrepit effort that can’t get the job done. Or the movie Battleship (2012), an unholy marketing alliance between the United States Navy and Hasbro. It also marks the last gasp of the 1990s-style Michael Bay action flick before Marvel Comics took over the box office for the next decade.

Let’s start with the plot. After receiving a friendly invitation to come visit a new planet, a heroic band of space explorers crash lands on a dangerous planet. During the disaster their radio, and ability to send and receive messages is destroyed. While getting their bearings they are attacked by hostile natives who do not respond to nonviolent warnings. Using strict rules of engagement and the principle of least necessary force they try to cobble together a means of sending an SOS back home while doing their best to keep the increasingly aggressive natives unharmed and away from their base of operations.

That’s the interpretation that Enigmatic of RPG.net put forth 25 years ago when the film was released and it’s pretty solid. The subsequent careers of director Peter Berg and writers Erich and Jon Hoeber suggest the film was probably never intended as a subversive masterpiece but somebody must have been tweaking the studio’s nose. Atypical for most alien invasion movies the scenes shot from their perspective show restraint and a clear motivation that goes beyond genocide. In case the audience misses this? Everything seen by the invaders is given red or green overlay depending on whether it’s considered a legitimate target.

There’s thousands of deaths of course, but all of them are excusable as regrettable misunderstandings, collateral damage or the tragic accidents of modern war. One could question why the aliens felt the need to bring so many of their peg-based weapons on a mission of peace, but in light of subsequent events it was probably best that they came prepared.

From the human perspective, alien invaders land in the ocean off of Hawaii and raise a force-field with the bulk of the Pacific fleet, plus Liam Neeson (who was probably on set for two days) trapped outside. A plucky band of Navy misfits plus $6 billion dollars of General Dynamics hardware is all that stands between us and our ultimate doom.

Fortunately we have an excellent actor, one who previously excelled in a story of leadership during wartime hampered by shifting goals, political constraints and ever-present uncertainty. I am speaking of course of the brilliant Alexander Skarsgård who played Sgt. Brad “Iceman” Colbert in HBO’s Generation Kill and most recently made Apple TV’s Murderbot a must see.

He plays Commander Stone Hopper and naturally he dies twenty minutes in. That way we can shift the focus to his idiot younger brother Alex Hopper, played by Taylor Kitsch.

Look, I’m not going to bash Kitsch too much, after all 2012 was a rough year for him. He headlined three, big-budget summer movies (Battleship, John Carter and Oliver Stone’s Savages) all of which bombed. The script isn’t doing him any favors but he’s just also not rising above the material. He may have nailed troubled, teenaged football player on Friday Night Lights, but he doesn’t have leading man chops.

Skarsgård does, but he dies after making some poor decisions during first contact with an alien species. The aliens, desperately pulling their punches, still wind up blowing up two out of three destroyers leaving Kitsch in charge of our last surviving hope. That naturally involves a lot of yelling and running around with guns and very little deliberation with senior staff or consultations with headquarters at Pearl Harbor.

Assisting Kitsch in making a nuisance of himself while the aliens show remarkable forbearance are Rihanna in her acting debut (for which she won a Razzie), John Tui as the big guy who isn’t Dave Bautista, Tadanobu Asano as the guy who should have been in charge and Jesse Plemons who gets a pass because he's good in everything.

Of course you can’t have a movie called Battleship without… the incredibly boring game of Battleship. The setup for this was actually one of the more interesting scenes when Asano reveals that the Japanese Navy uses tsunami warning buoys to track enemy ships via their wakes. Luckily the tsunami buoys are arranged in a regular grid pattern so you can just fire on coordinates like B-11 and A-5 instead of doing complicated math and accounting for prevailing winds and wavelengths relating to hull dimensions.

Meanwhile on Oahu, Kitsch’s girlfriend (Brooklyn Decker) and the world’s angriest double-amputee actor who also happens to be a Colonel in the U.S. Army (Gregory Gadson) hook up with a SETI scientist (Hamish Linklater) and learn of the alien’s nefarious plan to… call home. Mind you it’s 100% certain that the alien home planet already knows where their expedition went so it’s not like anything vital is being leaked here. However the landbound trio does warn Kitsch and his plucky band of misfits (plus a few hundred other crew that don’t get billing) but they prove ineffectual and the aliens are forced to reluctantly sink the last Navy destroyer.

Of course you can’t have a movie called Battleship without… and is there the movie shines… an actual battleship. And in the very last part of the movie, we actually get one and it is almost worth the wait.

The USS Missouri, a museum piece is hauled out of mothballs by a retiree crew, many of whom were actually former sailors. I don't know that for certain, but they all moved with a confidence and decisiveness that made me believe they knew their way around a ship, something the rest of the cast had yet to demonstrate. It is these 20 minutes that makes this movie a guilty pleasure of Admiral James Foggo who gave it a charitable 2 out of 10 for realism when ranking movie sea battles. It helps that in a movie dominated by CGI, the Navy actually took the Missouri out for a spin so they could film these scenes.

And then everything after that is kind of epiloguey. Which is what this move feels like, the closing of a story.

Everything about this movie reeks of a bygone age. The lovingly gratuitous CGI destruction of a major city (Hong Kong in a desperate effort to cultivate the China audience), the unnecessarily complex spinning of alien weapons, the fetishistic Michael-Bayesque devotion to the US military and blue collar workers are all things we've seen many times before.

Battleship belongs to that genre of summer blockbusters that began with Independence Day in 1996 and was already tired by the time Iron Man burst onto the scene in 2008. Even the choice of lenses and lighting have that late-90s feel to it. I can’t really describe it, but it was how directors used to indicate characters were in Mexico before color correction did the same thing by putting a yellow tint on everything.

Ironically, this parallels the history of the battleship itself. Like a summer blockbuster they were meant to be a powerhouse, dominating anything that stood against them. But a decade or two after they were create they were already obsolete. Just as air power rendered the battleship nothing more than an expensive target, superheroes, with their charismatic quipping had replaced faceless enemies and endless shouting of “Clear!” and “Move, move, move!”

Suffice to say, Battleship doesn’t even crack the top three of movies about battleships.

Midsommar (Movie) Review

Some things aren’t for everyone.

I don’t like sweet potato fries, I loathe the writing of Charles Dickens, the verbal pacing of anime throws me off, and on the movie front? I was unmoved (and been told I didn’t understand) Stalker (1979) or Solaris (1972) by Andrei Tarkovsky.

Joining that august fraternity is Midsommar (2019) a folk horror film by Ari Aster who decides to play in the long shadow cast by The Wicker Man. It wasn’t for me.

Headlining the show is Dani (the always great Florence Pugh) a young woman reeling from a family tragedy who tags along with her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) and his grad student buddies to visit a traditional midsummer festival in Hårga, an isolated commune in Sweden.

Acting as host is Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), a local boy returning to his home village, Josh (William Jackson Harper aka The Good Place’s Chidi) who is doing a thesis on midsummer ceremonies and Mark (Will Poulter) who is just looking for a good time and is surprisingly not the first one to die.

I’ll skip over the details, because like Tarkovsky there’s a lot of beautiful shots of nothing happening. Filmed in Hungary during the hot summer, the endless blue skies against the green fields of Hårga capture the feel of a Nordic midnight sun. They are probably also meant to serve as a juxtaposition of an idyllic scene against the ominous events

I’d mention the ominous events, but they aren’t that ominous. Strange rituals in a foreign language are a little off putting, sure, but I grew up in New Jersey. You get invited to seders, or meet a friend’s grandmother who only speaks Italian, or hang out in a diner where you overhear conversations in a dozen languages. Heck, I once even went to a Protestant mass!

And then, back in Hårga, the murders start, which prompts Connie and Simon, a pair of visitors who hail from Common Sense, England to announce their immediate departure. After being told told that brutally assisted suicide is just a quaint village tradition the rest of the group decides to stay.

In what I can say is a new twist on ignoring the danger around them? Both Josh and Christian see anthropological gold and decide they are going to write their theses on Hårga’s quaint and murderous customs. In their defense, they are also addled by non-stop consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms which may be why they fail to notice their numbers dwindling one by one, starting with the sensible British contingent.

While there are some gruesome scenes, most of the actual murders happen off screen, because otherwise we would interrupt the 141 minute runtime with actual events happening. Instead we are treated to awkward dinners, strange dances, peculiar rituals and the other trappings familiar to anyone who has ever attended a wedding. There’s a reason this movie was seen as a comedy when it was released in Sweden.

(GORE WARNING: Yes, there is gore, lots of it, but outside of a few moments it is mostly static gore. Bodies are gruesomely mutilated and then the camera lingers on them because, really, the special effects people worked hard on it. Expect long long scenes where dead bodies are on display.)

If you like this sort of thing, great, but it takes different strokes to move the world. Pugh as always is a terrific actress and I’ve gotta give props to Reynor for striking a blow for equality and electing to do his escape scene in the nude. The ending is meant to be ambiguous but I really don’t see that Dani had any other choice.

Oh and Josh completely crossed the line. As an anthropology grad student he should have known better than to try that stunt. You’d also think he’d have recognized the nature of the traditions he was embedded in and recognized where they were heading, but ces’t la vie.

The Keep (Movie) Review

There are a lot of movies that got a bad reception but go on to become cult classics. The Shawshank Redemption, The Thing and Blade Runner all bombed on release but are now hailed as masterpieces. Then there are films that don’t just don’t just fail, they are reviled like The Keep.

Hated by the director, the lead actor, the author of the book it was based on, and the studio that funded it The Keep was plagued by problems on the set, cost overruns, the effects supervisors untimely death, and a rejection by the moviegoing public. It is universally agreed upon to be a failure as a film.

A failure, but an interesting one, which is why it is still being discussed more than 40 years after it’s release.

The pedigree helps. Michael Mann (famous for Heat) directed an astonishing cast including Ian McKellen, Jurgen Prochnow Gabriel Byrne and other heavy hitters. The book it was based on was a bestseller and it also comes with an anachronistic, but strangely appropriate, soundtrack by electronica pioneers Tangerine Dream. The ingredients for success are there

We open in 1941 with a convoy of German soldiers heading up a mountain pass to a remote Romanian village. Their commander, Jurgen Prochnow (from Das Boot to Beerfest), is quickly identified as one of the Good Germans who serves Hitler’s War Machine while not buying into the Nazi cause. His goal is a mysterious black fortress with obsidian walls and little rhyme or reason. Is the courtyard his troop makes camp in open to the sky or is it a soundstage? How large is the keep? Who owns it and what purpose does it serve? When the soldiers under his command defy the local harbringer and break into a vast underground cavern a new question arises. With a cavern that big, why has the entire region not collapsed into it?

These questions are quickly abandoned when German soldiers start dying. Watching this on Pluto things happened so quickly I wondered whether parts of the movie were being snipped during the commercial breaks. It turns out the trimming happened much earlier. The director’s cut came in at 210 minutes but the studio demanded it be trimmed back to a slim 96. Mann being Mann kept all the moody atmospheric bits at the expense of plot and exposition. Probably for the best because The Keep holds your attention for most of it’s run.

Prochnow, fearing for his men, asks to abandon his post but never thinks of stationing them outside the eponymous keep. His cries for help are met by a detachment of the SS, led by Gabriel Byrne (Miller’s Crossing, Usual Suspects) who we meet massacring the local villagers. This establishes him as one of the Bad Germans whom it is OK to hate. Emphasizing this point, when we meet Byrne he is a disembodied torso protruding from the turret of an armored car, making him a literal part of the Nazi War Machine.

(On a tangent? The vehicle itself is apparently a LeichterPanzerspähwagen and this one later appeared as Hubert Jr in the BBC Comedy comedy set in Occupied France Allo_'Allo! 

After the opening massacre establishes his evil bonafides Byrne decides to get to the bottom of things. He starts by ordering the village priest to translate inscriptions in a dead language carved into living rock by claws of inhuman strength. Knowing he is out of his depth, the priest suggests calling in Gandalf/Magneto/Ian McKellen, a Jewish scholar who once lived in the village.

The plan is to spring McKellen, accompanied by his daughter and caretaker, Alberta Watson, out of the concentration camp and get him to safety overseas, but McKellen switches the plan after meeting the monster stalking the keep.

The monster, named Molasar, has been literally body building by snacking on German soldiers, but is now looking to leave the keep and recruits McKellen as his ally. After curing his ailments, saving his daughter from certain rape, and spinning a pretty good line of BS? Molasar quickly gains an ally in McKellen who needed little convincing, because hey, dead Nazis.

What follows is a game of wits as each of our four players schemes against each other amidst a background of horror and rising madness as Molasar’s influence erodes the sanity of all involved. Or it would in a better film. Instead we waste screen time one Scott Glenn, a stoic, mysterious and rather boring immortal who is summoned by Molasar’s efforts to escape the keep. Glenn by the way is wasted in this role but was a memorable bad-ass in his brief appearances in Hunt For The Red October and Silence of the Lambs.

This is where things kind of go off the rails and despite some pretty impressive scenes, including:

• A discussion on fascism that hits uncomfortably close to home in 2025

• A re-telling of Abraham and Issac where the good guys win

• A brutal offscreen massacre told entirely via sound effects

The rest of the film, and to be honest most of the earlier part as well, just doesn’t gel together. Some critics will refer to this as ethereal, fever dream-like logic soaked in symbolism. Freedonia’s take is informative and typical of that interpretation. Or you could just say it's half-baked.

Which might be why we are still talking about. Masterpieces are recognized and enshrined, mediocre works are forgotten, but the ones that are almost there, but just miss the mark… those are the ones that haunt us.

Or as the old social media chestnut goes? “No more remaking good movies. Remake movies that were almost good.”

Wednesday (TV Show) Review

Wednesday (Two Seasons, 16 Episodes – Netflix – 2022 to Present)

The Addams Family are becoming an increasingly popular touchstone in popular culture and the latest incarnation, Netflix's Wednesday, continues to expand on America's favorite spooky family. Sorry Munsters, but you'll always be number two in our hearts.

Starting as a series of cartoons in the 1930s New Yorker the macabre family rose to fame with a black and white sitcom in the 1960s, rose to dizzying heights with a pair of cult-classic movies in the 1990s and were kept alive in the interim via a beloved pinball game and a variety of cartoons and TV revivals that I never watched.

The current version focuses on Wednesday, the Addams daughter whose portrayal by Christina Ricci in the 1990s probably kept the Goth subculture going another decade. Filling in for Ricci is Jenna Ortega, a veteran of both the Scream franchise and The Disney Channel. You can choose what's more impressive, the fact that she hasn't fallen prey to the Disney Channel curse, that she can convincingly portray a teenager at the age of 20 or that she's a worthy successor to Ricci.

Dour, snarky, and above-it-all, this version of Wednesday is sent off to Nevermore, a boarding school for "Outcasts" or Cryptid-Americans like werewolves, gorgons, sirens and presumably the Addams Family. Fortunately the early efforts of sorting everyone into neat categories seems to have been dropped in favor of a supernatural grab-bag of Outcasts. As opposed to Normies aka ordinary people, muggles, mundanes, baselines, saps, flatscans, rubes or whatever reverse-fantasy racism term you prefer.

When you have a boarding school? Mysteries and love-triangles must follow and while there were plenty of hidden doorways, secret societies, riddles and puzzles in the first season they all kind of got lost in an effort to copy the "mystery box" format created by Lost. There was always a new mystery with supporting characters emerging each episode. Unlike Lost the old mysteries were neatly explained, but the leftover characters and red herrings did tend to pile up.

This continued into season two where they decided they needed to prune things back. Deceased characters were brought back as ghosts, presumably to welcome the red herrings and supporting characters who were ruthlessly killed at the hands of a bevy of killers including a super-intelligent zombie, a murderous psychopathic Hyde and the Alan Parsons Project which I believe was some type of hovercraft.

Suffice to say it's watchable, but with Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (Smallville and the underrated Into The Badlands) at the helm  it could be more. Even with the subplot pruning there feels like a lot of dead weight and aimless B-plots.

Less so in season two with frequent appearances by Gomez (Luiz Guzman) and Morticia (Catherine Zeta Jones) Addams as boosters of Nevermore Academy to speed things along. They join Principal Dort (Steve Buscemi) with appearances by Billie Piper, Lady Gaga and Christina Ricci herself amongst the surprising star power of the cast. Also Fred Armisen is a delight as Uncle Fester in a more animated performance than I think I've ever seen from him before. If Netflix doesn't give him a Fester's Eleven spinoff focusing on his criminal antics? Straight to jail. 

One thing the show isn't nailing is soap opera antics, despite the Smallville credentials of the creators. Wednesday's emotional restraint and disdain for displays of pathetic sentimentality unfortunately reins the rest of the characters in as well. Even when her werewolf roommate Enid (Emma Sinclair, ) is dealing with delayed puberty metaphors, boyfriends, peer group acceptance and cracking Wednesday's shell it's treated as a tedious intrusion on mystery solving.

Which is odd, because they mysteries don't have much depth. There were a few puzzles in the first season that were fun to unravel but those are gone. While Wednesday hunt serial killers during her summer vacation she doesn't show any any of the investigative chops of Veronica Mars, Dale Cooper, or even Dale Gribble. Instead she glowers and bosses others around like a pint-sized police captain from a 1980s buddy cop movie. That's when she's not longing for the return of psychic powers that others warn her are unreliable at best.

Given that Ortega convincingly portrays Wednesday as driven and obsessive you would think she'd be delighted to supplement her absent psychometry with observation, deduction and forensics. The opportunity for gruesome experimentation gags writes itself. Alternatively she could lean into the Dark Academia bookish side of things and drop references to Blackwood, Hopley and Campbell. At the very least she should have a psychic logbook noting her hits and misses. That would be a much more interesting MacGuffin than her unsold and frequently unsecured novel.

There's a lot of potential here, but like Tim Burton who directed a number of episodes it's all surface and no depth. It's frustrating because there are so many missed opportunities. It's watchable, but far from riveting.

So, what RPG system to run this in?

• You'd think that a PbtA version would fit best, MASKs or Thirsty Sword Lesbians, but those systems lean into soap-opera complications and Wednesday fails to hit the mark on those. Her own romances fall flat and those of her classmates rarely impact or interest her.
• Any combat oriented game isn't going to capture it. There are clear tiers of power and stronger always beats weaker. While you would think Wednesday would learn her opponents weaknesses and exploit them? You'd be wrong. She does look stoic and fearless when she's being knocked through a window, but she doesn't equalize a fight by prepping the battlefield with strobe lights, loud speakers, electrified tripwires, or mystical herbs. This isn't any of the Hunter lines from World of Darkness. 
• Gumshoe, or it's teen-oriented version Bubblegumshoe would seem to be a natural fit with the emphasis on finding clues, but most of the mysteries of Nevermore seem to have been exhausted in the first season. There's a lot of characters being introduced (and subsequently killed) but finding out their connection to a mystery is usually done offscreen without even the thrill of a Library Use montage featuring microfilm newspaper archives. 

So, probably best to ignore the show as written, lean into one of the choices above, or grab anything close enough, plus one of the brainteaser books always on sale at Barnes & Noble, set up a rival Griswold Academy and have fun. Something that Wednesday the show has had trouble doing despite being an overall entertaining watch.

Valkyrie (noun, slang, potentially derogatory)

The common name for Time Patrol recruitment agents (aka Temporal Recruitment Agents or TRAs).

Most Time Patrol agents will be highly-skilled individuals recruited from upstream history before the moment of their recorded historical death. In order to reduce hostility and encourage enlisting in the agency, most recruitment agents will be attractive women matching the local ethnotype and often dressed in a militaristic but provocative costume. It is unclear if the Norse concept of valkyries as choosers of the slain was predestined via information leakage during recruitment or is just one of those things.

Male recruitment agents, dubbed einherjar, will be used for special recruitment missions prior to the Second Franchise War. After this point the Fixer/Devil/Old Scratch archetype will become predominant and the gender of TRAs will be considered irrelevant outside of the Unfranchised Territories. Female TRAs will enjoy a surge in popularity during the Second Dark Age, Third Dark Age and Post-Nothis Collapse when traditional gender roles temporarily reassert themselves.

Valkyrie Selection

Despite rumors TRAs will not be selected because they have a pretty face. To the contrary, they will be expected to be fully fluent in local languages, history, morals, mores and theology in order to prevent a convincing case for reasonably-informed consent to recruitment in the Time Patrol and all the contractual obligations thereof.

While often dressed in a salacious fashion, teams that are accompanying a TRA should be aware that there is an excellent chance they will have more knowledge of the local temporal operation area than many veterans and should be treated with the appropriate respect, consistent with their rank and current Time Patrol regulations.

Denigration of TRAs based on their physical characteristics will be considered grounds for disciplinary action outside of the Third Dark Age.

Branches and Fake Valkyries

While terms like forks, alters and dupes have waxed and waned in popularity over the millennia, this document will constrict itself to using branch (plural, branches) as the term to designate the currently unexplained appearance of multiple individuals in the same time stream. If this term causes you distress please be aware that we will be writing this document for both a future and past audience and will be unable to accommodate all local temporal moralities.

That being said, it is understood that downstream Temporal Law Agencies (TLAs) have "right of first-refusal" for all recruitment candidates due to their more sophisticated temporal technologies. This has lead to Time Patrol agents "meeting themselves" during joint operations with downstream TLAs. Field managers and affected agency personnel should consult "Meeting Your Branchself: Time Travel and Yous" <v 201.4> to resolve the philosophical and motivational concerns these encounters may create.

Current Time Patrol agents will be advised that Hostile Timeline Activity (HTA) is both sophisticated and informed. There will be recorded instance of efforts to subvert Time Patrol agents by posing as a Valykyrie working for a downstream TLA. It is critical that any such encounter be denied unless and until the recruiting agent authenticate themselves via <REDACTED>, <REDACTED> or if they know your PIN code which is BOSCO.