People who read this may know that I periodically post episode reviews and essays about the Disney animated series Gargoyles on my other blog, Monsters of New York. Recently, though, I wrote an essay not for my blog, but for the fine feminist critique site Bitch Flicks. Like the title of this post says, it’s about how the show’s attempts to be tell a story about oppression are undermined by the creators’ privilege, and it goes something like this:

…Gargoyles is also a fantastic showcase of what can happen when creators possessing privilege write stories about the oppressed without their input. Weisman and his staff had good intentions, and yet that didn’t stop them from writing “Heritage,” a perennial contender for the award of Most Racist Story That Tried Not to Be Racist (Television). In the episode, Elisa essentially tells the chief of a failing First Nation village, whom she’s only just met, that he’s performing his identity wrong, and is proven correct by the narrative. While that episode is an outlier, it is not alone — despite the show’s attempts to be about oppression and about being the Other, it falls down in multiple and consistent ways featuring more than one episode where the message they wish to send is not the message they are actually sending.

Yay me! Once you’re done, the sit also has many other fine posts by awesome writers about various films and TV shows for you to read, so please give those a look. Thank you!

Chapter One of Dreamfall Chapters was first released in 2014. Development of the game officially began in 2013, after the developer’s Kickstarter was fully funded, and the story was based on ideas that were first kicking around since the original Dreamfall: The Longest Journey’s 2007 release, or maybe even 1999 when the first game in the series, titled simply The Longest Journey, was first published.  And yet, as I replayed the game earlier this month, the game felt very specifically about another year entirely: this one, 2016.  While I can say with a fairly high level of confidence that Ragnar Tørnquist and the other fine people at Red Thread Games were not in possession of a time window into this year, and that they were not attempting to write specifically about the latest U.S. presidential election, the game, mixing together cyberpunk (via the future Earth called Stark) and fantasy (in the magical world of Arcadia) invokes the past and future to say a whole lot about now.

Dreamfall Chapters mainly follows two characters, Zoë Castillo and Kian Alvane, who are both on journeys that began during the first Dreamfall. Zoë, from Stark, is a college dropout who is now attempting to put her life back together after she spent a week successfully stopping a corporate conspiracy and getting a year-long coma and amnesia for her trouble.  Kian Alvane, from Arcadia, is a former Apostle (read: faith-based assassin) for the Azadi Empire, until a chance encounter led him to doubt his faith and mission, eventually resulting in him defying his masters’ orders and getting branded a traitor and arrested.  Also, he is gay, which I mention because it is awesome.

It is through Kian and Zoë’s eyes that we experience two very personal stories about, faith, renewal, acceptance, denial, and talking birds.  It is also a story about change, and how it can come about in very sudden, scary—but not necessarily unpredictable or surprising—ways.

Note: Spoilers Below

Elections Matter

Much like in the real world, a lot of time and space in Dreamfall Chapters is spent on elections. In Stark, the city-state of Europolis—“the filthy bowels and bloodied entrails of Europe”, comprising what were once Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as parts of other countries—is in the midst of a four-way election for the chancellorship: there’s the incumbent Dieter Gross of the center-right Alliance of European Democrats for Freedom and Liberty, whose tenure has been noted for scandal and mismanagement; far right Konstantin Wolf—“Kaiser” Wolf, to his opponents—of the far-right European Dawn; Lea Umińska of the center-left Unity Party; and the Marxist Marta Ribas of Manifesto, a coalition of far-left entities. Of the four, only Wolf and Umińska are seen as actual contenders, meaning it’s a fight between, according to various people, a racist, reactionary fascist and a woman whose main appeal, according to many, is being the least worst choice.

(All of the election elements were introduced as early as the first book, in 2014.)

The opposition to Lea Umińska has absolutely nothing to do with her gender.

In Arcadia, one of the recurring cast members is Onor Hileriss, who is running for leadership of the City Watch, the internal administrative body of the occupied city of Marcuria.  Where the Stark candidates exist behind the scenes, Hileriss is visible and in-your-face; you get to see him around town, and even listen in on his campaign speeches, where we learn that his platform is a familiar one. Representing the National Front for Faith and Family, his platform is centered on the expulsion of the various magical peoples from Marcuria and collaboration with the occupying Azadi Empire, who are essentially Nazis.

From a certain perspective, Hileriss’ open hatred of magical races could make him seem “refreshingly” frank—or at least they would, if he weren’t also consistently mendacious.  When asked about the Azadi’s attempts to stamp out all religion besides their own, a lynchpin of their occupation efforts, he lies and calls it a mere token gesture, something they don’t actually care about. Also edited from his stump speeches is his misogyny. Women, when they feature in his speeches, are to be protected and looked after. During a one-on-one conversation with Zoë, he is quite open about how his ideal world is one in which women are shut out of all but the domestic realm—a sharp contrast to the way Marcuria actually operates.

(Again, this was all established before 2016 came along.)

While important world-building elements, neither election is vital to Dreamfall’s core plot, which suggests that they exist because they allowed the writers to explore things they considered important—among these, how situations like these come about.

Normalization is the default:

The first Dreamfall has Zoë, who has arrived in Arcadia under mysterious circumstances, enter a conversation with a man called Ary Kinryn, a supplier and merchant who has seen his business delayed by the closure of Marcuria’s Magic Ghetto, which he needs to traverse. Gameplay-wise, his role is to be part of a fetch quest; as part of the story, he tells us a very important thing about how Marcuria has changed in the decade since the events of The Longest Journey: people, or at least a certain kind of people, have gotten used to Azadi occupation, even when it means there’s now a Magic Ghetto where there wasn’t one before.  Sure, he’s not happy about no longer being able to publicly express his belief in his god of choice, after the Azadi forbid the practice of all religions save their own, but he’ll begrudgingly accept making the necessary token gestures, as long as they allow him to go by his day.

Kinryn is mostly singular in Dreamfall, but by Dreamfall Chapters, he’s become one of many, and the way Marcurians slowly but progressively accept their changing status quo is one of the subtler, and yet most important stories in the game. While the situation was bad in the first game, it gets even worse as the game progresses, as Kian and the other rebels witness the eventual closing of the Magic Ghetto and the expulsion of most magicals from Marcuria. Not even this is enough to spark a true national uprising, however: while the sudden lack of magical is a popular topic, it exists only as a topic of conversation—as Kian and later Zoë walk around the city, you hear people talk about how there used to be magicals, sounding as if they were talking about something that occurred decades ago instead of months.

Perhaps the clearest indication of how normalized anti-magical sentiments become can be seen in the way Onor Hileriss’ campaign intersects with the story. When we first see him, he is giving a speech in what is a private, invitation-only meeting held at night, where most of the attendees wear hoods. Kian, who has infiltrated the meeting, notes that it doesn’t bode well for a movement when its members are afraid of being seen. When next we see Onor, however, it is three months later, and his speeches have shifted venues: while the substance of his campaign has not shifted, he now gives them in public, in broad daylight, to people who have no problem being seen. Roughly a week later, he is staging the public burning of a magical being, and the event is treated largely as entertainment.

In many ways, Dreamfall Chapters is not subtle, at all.

And yet the disparity between the two scenarios is never commented upon.

While the occupation of Marcuria and its transformation into Vichy France was a drastic shift in its status quo, the various characters in Stark have always lived in corporatocracies; complacency in the face of oppression, then, isn’t something we see people grow to adopt, but something people have grown up with. In the original The Longest Journey, protagonist April Ryan speaks casually of the way Bingo! Soda obtained its monopoly by destroying its competition in a literal war, and how people in debt or with no resources could “choose” to enter into indentured servitude off-planet, in colonies owned by megacorp Bokamba / Mercer, which is also co-owner of the city of Newport’s police department. Zoë, in the first Dreamfall, is understandably troubled after spending a night in the custody of the EYE, the global corporate police, but she is also quite used to the way it keeps track of her every move. All of this, in turn, leads them to deal with the increasing oppression seen in Dreamfall Chapters with a casualness that should feel shocking but isn’t. As players traverse Propast in book 2, they can see newly empty streets that were teeming with life a week ago, a slew of new EYE checkpoints, and increased protests and arrests. Zoë herself gets stopped on the way out of her apartment building, and is only allowed to continue with her day after the EYE agent confirms that she does indeed have an appointment with her therapist, and yet there is a very notable lack of anger. She can identify that something is fundamentally wrong with the world, and yet she cannot see a need for radical change; the best she can hope for is a candidate that won’t fuck people over as hard, which is why she volunteers for the Umińska campaign.  She is not the only one to feel that way: after all, Martha Ribas, the candidate explicitly running against the status quo, is still hopelessly behind in the polls.

The people who fight

Still, things can only be ignored until they can’t, and Zoë has always been a hero. In the original Dreamfall, her attempts to discover the whereabouts of her missing ex-boyfriend Reza Temiz lead her to WATICorp, a standard cyberpunk megacorporation known primarily as a toymaker. Reza, it turns, out, had been investigating WATICorp, and was at the cusp of uncovering a scandal related to their upcoming product, which secretly served as a backdoor into people’s minds, allowing WATICorp a way in and allowing it pluck information at will. Although Zoë is unable to prevent the product from being released, she manages to close the backdoor, in large part because she had help: if she succeeded, it’s because Reza paved the way, scientist Helena Chang sent them both on the path, friends like Olivia DeMarco and Charlie provided time, resources and kindness, and WATI employees Daniel Cavanaugh and Rio Kuroki decided to do the right thing and turn against their masters.

WATICorp returns in Dreamfall Chapters, both independently and as part of the larger corporate machine, and once again, Zoë works to stop them. This time, she is aided in her efforts by not only Reza, but also local Umińska campaign manager Baruti Maphane, community leader Queenie, purveyor of food and Marxism Nela Vlček, teen gang member Hanna Roth and her girlfriend Abby, journalist Süleyman “Sully” Sadik, and programmer of quasi-legal software Mira and her partner Wit.

As all of these names and weird punctuation suggest, white people are not prevalent among Zoë’s allies.  Reza and Sully are Turkish. Baruti is from Botswana. Queenie is Chinese, while Helena and Hanna have Chinese parents. Mira and Wit came from India. Zoë herself is from all over, being born in India and having Chinese, Argentine, and Indian heritage. This diversity, while visible in the first Dreamfall, becomes more notable in Chapters, in part because of the game’s European setting. Propast could have been portrayed as an uniformly white city without drawing much in the way of complaints; that it isn’t is not only notable but also provides context that allows the game’s world to better parallel ours. Of course European Dawn is doing well; as we’ve seen this election cycle, nothing will bring out the supremacist in white people more than suggesting that people of color deserve to be centered. This, in turn, explains why it is mostly women and people of color who take part in the fight against WATI and the corporatocracy: like here, they’re the ones with the most to lose.

While axes of oppression in Arcadia can’t be intuitively mapped onto our own as one can with Stark—like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, it is a place where white and black have settled their differences in order to deal with the blue, and neither of the human cultures in the game are monolithic in terms of their population’s skin color and appearance—Dreamfall Chapters still finds way to explore the various layers of oppression and prejudice. A key element of Kian’s story is that while every Marcurian is in some way oppressed by the Azadi occupation, they are not all oppressed in the same way, and thus react differently.  The game notes on more than one occasion that the demographic makeup of the resistance has changed since the events of last game, with the human membership dwindling. They’re not getting sent to ghettoes, after all. The storytelling bears this out: in the first game, there existed only one named magical among the rebels, Na’ane; in Chapters, most of her human companions are gone, and the focus shifts in a very noticeable way to characters like the Enu, Likho, and Shepherd, who become Kian’s most visible companions through the journey. The most poignant moment, however, comes courtesy of the Mole, a smuggler in Arcadia, who hates the Azadi and has seen them make her people all but extinct, but still needs coaxing in order to provide the rebellion with weapons and resources. Kian asks her why she doesn’t take a more direct role in affairs, and she replies.

How quickly they forget how [magicals] treat the Banda before. How they look down on us, call us mole-man, mud-dweller, stub-snout and soil monkey. The magical treat Banda much the same as human treat Banda. Like muck underneath toe nail. Like filth.

The Mole refuses to aid the resistance unless she herself benefits, and it’s not hard to see why. Like the women of color—and black women most directly—she parallels, she’s seen what unconditional loyalty rarely rewards the least privileged. The rebels may be operating in good faith, but she has no reason to believe that that is the case. Loyalty has to be earned.

*             *             *

The Longest Journey has always been political, and not quite in the same way all genre fiction—even Star Wars—is political. The first game, in addition to mining the standard cyberpunk setting and its concerns about corporations, also included queer portrayals that still feel nuanced and humanizing by today’s standard, the sort which are often seen as divisive, controversial, and pandering by people who’d rather not have those portrayals. The same is true of Dreamfall Chapters, and would have been, even if Red Thread Games hadn’t openly and unmistakably used game iconography to implore American Facebook and Twitter followers to vote for Clinton on election day, which they totally did.  People complained about that; presumably, they found the appeals because they enjoyed the game, which raises the question about what exactly they got from it.

It is precisely because Dreamfall Chapters is political that the game is worth playing. Sure, it’s got fun characters and dialogue, and is one of the rare videogames to push back against the belief that women are only interesting when they can be sexual, but in the end, the game is most remarkable because it saw what was happening to the world, and nakedly and unabashedly decided to do something about it. In the process creating one of the most interesting, real worlds in videogames.  We’re going to need both things, in 2017.

Given its minuscule budget; its dependence on footage, costumes, and stories taken from the Japanese Super Sentai meta-series; and its primary role as a conduit to sell action figures, Power Rangers has always had an air of compromise to it. No matter how much kids enjoyed and continue to enjoy the series, the preponderance of moving parts has always been hard to arrange in a way that is consistently satisfying. The very first season of the original series, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, made by people who had to create a playbook for a game no one had played before, and had to do so as it went along, managed to be appealing despite a complete lack of consistent character development, sketchy-as-fuck plotting, and actors who on average were more earnest than good, thanks to a solid formula, the strength of the Japanese material, Ron Wasserman’s music, and un-self-conscious goofiness. The second season famously mixes material from two (three, depending on how you count) different sources of Japanese footage, alongside American material that was not at all ready to carry the increased weight it was forced to carry, and had to deal with things like the covert disposal of half its cast.  Even more than twenty years later, getting a version of the Power Rangers that manages to fire on all cylinders—cast, story, aesthetic—and manages to do so consistently often feels like a crapshoot.  And so, enjoying Power Rangers as a fan has always been a matter of managing expectations; Power Rangers in Space may not be the truly epic culmination of everything that had been set up before, as the Rangers faced the combined forces of all their past enemies, but taking all the difficulties it faced, it still manages to be pretty darn epic.  And so, it feels somewhat appropriate, if disappointing, that despite its high-budget construction, the newest Power Rangers film still feels like a compromise.

Make no mistake: there is a lot to like about the film, enough to make it compare favorably against the better seasons of the show and the super-hero film genre in general, and surprisingly, the good things come from a direction where the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers most often failed—the characters.  Whereas the original Jason, Trini, Zack, Kimberly, and Billy are beloved, that love owes more to familiarity, nostalgia, and their original ranger status than to the way the characters actually came across on the screen. In reality, whatever attitude made Alpha recruit these particular teenagers rarely made it to the actual show, as the only real dimension the rangers showed—at least when their minds were not being manipulated by Rita or Lord Zedd, which happened quite often—was an unshakeable belief in the collective and an ever-present interest in extracurricular activities. While their utter earnestness made them hard to dislike, it was only ever in fanfic that they managed to feel like real, breathing people.

That’s what the new Power Rangers feels like: that sort of fanfic written by someone who loves these characters immeasurably, and is still a teenager or was one not long ago, and is writing out of experience. These aren’t the teens we got in the original series, but they aren’t the sexed-up and quippy ones we’d get on a CW show, either. Rather, the earnestness from the original show mixes with some interesting character beats to create something far more akin to  The Outsiders or even The Breakfast Club (detention plays a prominent role in bringing the characters together, and in pushing the narrative of them as weirdos). Whatever their actual ages, the rangers are still kids, who have all this energy and no idea how to use it, and seeing them grow closer based on their shared journeys is easily the best and most compelling part of the film—and made more so by how relatively low-stakes their personal journeys are. A good amount of time is spent on Kimberly’s angst, and on how her recent actions have alienated her from her social circle, and made her begin feeling a measure of self-hatred. When we’re told what the inciting incident to all this is—she maliciously shared a nude pic of a classmate to humiliate her, it feels a bit out of proportion to her response, but that’s just me an adult and official old person.  She believes this makes her horrible, and that’s what matters. [Addendum: After reconsidering, I’ve written more about this particular moment, and why the preceding two sentences are wrong, here.] Similarly, Billy’s sadness over missing his dead father never becomes overbearing, and yet feels vital and important.  He’s dealing with it, as best he can, and it’s very easy to feel empathy for him.

And honestly, the kids are just great fun to watch. A whole bunch of the film follows them as they try to figure out the whole Power Rangers deal, and while this would probably be unbearable in MMPR, it shockingly works here, thanks to the actors and their very good chemistry. While the original original five exuded this air of having being friends absolutely forever, these guys have only just met, and yet, they very quickly manage to develop a bond that feels just as strong—stronger, even: I don’t think these guys would take Jason, Trini, and Zack suddenly leaving with anywhere near the ease the original versions did. Much kudos to Dacre Montgomery (Jason), Becky G (Trini), Ludi Lin (Zack), Naomi Scott (Kimberly), RJ Cyle (Billy), who in two hours manage to become one of the best Power Rangers casts in history. I want the absolute best for all of them.

Frustratingly, the films falls down hardest in the areas where original MMPR tended to succeed most reliably: its super-hero aesthetics, monsters, and action sequences. That the series spends most of its time with the kids unmorphed turns out to be a blessing: once they actually morph, storyboarding takes over, and the film’s flaws all come to the fore. This is not a good action film.

To a certain degree, it’s hard to blame Power Rangers for wanting to follow the zeitgeist.  Sure, its version of the costumes and Zords are bulky, ugly, over-complicated messes lacking in any sort of personality, but that’s the way the genre operates. On the other hand…no. Comic book adaptations at least have the excuse that they’re translating something from one medium to another; Power Rangers (or Super Sentai) on the other hand, started out on the screen.  While it makes perfect sense to take advantage of a film budget to make the iconic costumes not look as if they took a $100 each to make, there’s doing that, and there’s stripping away everything that made the originals appealing. And really, there is nothing to like here. There’s a case to be made that the original MMPR costumes and Zords have never actually been equaled in Power Rangers history, and that there have been plenty of ugly iterations of both, but still: these can easily claim the bottom spot in that regard. Terrible stuff.

The same applies to the monsters, only moreso. The new Rita, although lacking much of the original’s visual character, survives thanks to a decent script and Elizabeth Banks’ performance. Nobody else has that opportunity. The Putties, the original series’ iconic mooks, across which a bunch of its most initial successful attempts at humor and eeriness came through, are turned into utterly generic rock monsters. Goldar, who among the original series’ Bad Guy Squad holds a rather large estate in my heart (particularly after he meets his boyfriend Rito) gets made into a generic, silent…thing. While an argument can be made that there were already too many characters to be able to give him focus (probably also why Bulk and Skull are absent from the film, a disappointing but understandable creative choice) that’s what good designs are for. If we get a sequel, this is the thing that most needs correcting.

Finally, there’s the action scenes, which despite a couple of cool moments aren’t terrible as much as uninspired and uninspiring. There’s very little of the theatricality that defines the original series, and it’s not replaced by anything else that gives helps give it its own identity. It doesn’t help that the big action set piece largely takes place on Zords, which is traditionally the least interesting part of a Power Rangers episode. Points for faithfulness, I guess?

It’s not as if the writers and producers didn’t understand what fans wanted.  There are a couple of alterations made to the canon which I find MIGHTY INTERESTING, as well as some fan-service moments and cameos which, while incredibly obvious, are no less satisfying. And visually, the film works…until the Rangers morph. All in all, it really feels as if the TV people should have had some input on this, and there’s little reason why it shouldn’t have been requested (I in no way believe it was.) There is no reason why a cover of the original theme should sound as tepid as this film’s does.

One thing that the series did keep from the original which is worth noting is the series’ commitment to diversity.  While it’s been overshadowed by the largely toothless, if valid, “why is the Asian ranger Yellow and the Black Ranger Black?” observation, it’s still worth noting that the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers team attempted to make Zack and Trini just as prominent as their white counterparts—something that still sorely lacking in current super-hero cinema—and that the various Power Rangers series collectively remain among of the more racially diverse shows in television. The practice continues in Power Rangers with four out of the five rangers being played by people of color, which is absolutely fantastic and all films should do. Also notable is their explicit acknowledgment that their version of Billy is on the autistic spectrum, and their less explicit portrayal of Trini as queer. While I’m not in a position to claim how satisfying or accurate these portrayals are—although I will say I love both characters more than life itself and would happily adopt them as my own—I’m more willing to give the film props than I am, say, a Marvel or Disney film, because again, this has been something Power Rangers has been trying their hand at for decades now. It’s hard to see the scene where Zack asks Trini if she has girlfriend troubles as cynical when Power Rangers Turbo, back in nineteen ninety-fucking-seven, featured three rangers of color in its five-ranger team, including an African American Red Ranger (Turbo / Space Rangers forever). If nothing comes out of this in subsequent films, it will be hard to see this in an entirely positive light; if the things established hear are developed more—say, by making Tommy a girl and making her Trini’s love interest, hint hint, Saban—then fuck yeah.

We’re at the point in the history of the super-hero genre where it is very easy to make a decent superhero flick or show, and we all know what that looks like. This film is not that. It is not a good superhero film, and the things it does well are not the things a decent superhero film does well, and curiously, that works in the film’s favor: Power Rangers is much more interesting than I ever expected it to be, even for something that is already as interesting as Power Rangers.  While I would have loved for the film to have gotten the Speed Racer treatment, marrying a commitment to the original aesthetic with story and characters that feel heartfelt and honest and good, if we were going to have to make a compromise—and Power Rangers is always about compromise—then I’m glad it compromised in the direction it did. The world needed a film about misfit teens of color being decent and goofy and questioning far more than it needed another super-hero film. Teens and Power Rangers fans—or at least the sort that write sweet, shippy, sometimes-angsty but often-fluffy fan fiction about it—will love it.

(Spoilers for Power Rangers ahead.)

So in my Power Rangers review, I happened to write the following:

A good amount of time is spent on Kimberly’s angst, and on how her recent actions have alienated her from her social circle, and made her begin feeling a measure of self-hatred. When we’re told what the inciting incident to all this is—she maliciously shared a nude pic of a classmate to humiliate her, it feels a bit out of proportion to her response, but that’s just me an adult and official old person. She believes this makes her horrible, and that’s what matters.

It got some critical feedback, which is good, not only because it means that somebody read the review and cared enough about it to disagree, but also, because there’s a lot worth criticizing in the statement, notably, the suggestion that sharing a nude pic of a friend–a female friend, at that–is no big deal.

Yeah, no.

To be absolutely clear, what Kimberly did is objectively terrible, and Kimberly is right to characterize herself as terrible for having done it*. I know this, I knew it when I watched the film, and I knew it when I wrote the review. Despite this, my main takeaway from that scene, while watching it for the first time and writing about it, is “Kim, you sweet, beautiful overdramatic child.” The terribleness of it doesn’t really come across on any emotional level, and I’ve spent some time since then thinking of why that is the case.

Part of it is my own damn fault, of course, for not immediately seeing all the angles even when made plain and empathizing more about the character I cared about rather than the ones she’d harmed. Another part of it, though, is the way the film deals with that moment and how it characterized Kimberly in comparison to the people she betrayed, and, more in general, with the film’s portrayal of Kim as a mean girl in the larger context of mean girls on film and TV. If Kim’s actions don’t feel as the big deal they are, it is because as terrible as Kimberly’s betrayal of her friends and general slut-shaming (and, technically, illegal distribution of child pornography) are, they are positively dwarfed in that larger context.

Pretty Little Liars starts out with the girls having blinded a classmate, and is steeped in blackmail and murder. Riverdale is headed in that same direction. Mean Girls has Cady manipulate Regina George into altering her body in unwanted, possibly irreversible ways. Heathers was all about murder, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer had its characters slut-shame as casually as they breathed. And it’s not the antagonists that do this–or rather, it’s not only they who do it. It’s (also) the heroes, the ones we’re made to root for, while being all glamorous and pretty and sympathetic, without the self-recrimination Kimberly displays during her confession, in stories where the effects of their actions tend to be downplayed, victims tend to be less affected the more time we’re meant  to spend with them, and forgiveness is granted with disturbing ease. Taken together, it has a definitive desensitizing effect, making the terrible feel not so, or even awesome at times. Mona Vanderwaal may be a killer and blackmailer, but damn if I don’t love every bit of her.

And really, the film itself doesn’t help. Kimberly’s victims aren’t really characters, they’re extras whose main quality is being catty in a way designed to draw sympathy away from them and towards Kimberly; they are pissed, and rightfully so, but they do not seem harmed.  And we really don’t get to see pre-epiphany Kimberly, which means we’re left to draw our conclusions from the version we see on screen.* All of which makes the confession scene feel unbalanced, with only Naomi Scott to sell it. As mentioned in the review, she succeeds, to some degree, but perhaps not all the necessary ones.

The thing is, though, that none of that should matter. Kim is clear about what she does, and what she does is terrible. And yet it does. There are a lot of dimensions to Kimberly’s story, and those dimensions all got the short shrift in my review, and my thoughts were expressed in the worst, most dismissive and harmful form–one that I, for all it’s worth, apologize for.

—-

* There’s one moment in the film where we get an unvarnished hint of what Old Kimberly may have been like, and that’s the moment when  she takes pleasure at seeing her former friends’ car wrecked during the Goldar battle, perhaps not considering that she and her friends were a few feet away from being squashed. There are a lot of arguments that one could make about that scene, as it goes on to suggest a whole lot of things about Kimberly’s story arc that don’t really get elaboration, and make it feel as if its missing some necessary pieces rather than simply unfinished, as, say, Trini’s. That said, I’m not sure I see that ambiguity as a flaw, and I hope it’s something the writers either intentionally included or noticed after the fact, and that it gets more development in subsequent films.  It deserves to.

If there is one thing that consistently disappoints me about the CW’s super-hero fare, it is its inability to harness the genre’s capacity for soapy DRAMA.  Set in worlds where aliens are real and there exist people in possession of powers that turn them into gods, it somehow often manages to fall flat.  Perhaps it has something to do with a lack of commitment: a world with superheroes should be drastically different from our own, and yet showing us what that world would actually look like is a step the genre rarely takes, with its most famous creations. Due to their existence as both CW shows and super-hero shows, there’s a certain baseline for its characters and stories, which often leads them to believe that fighting equals drama.

A lack of DRAMA has never been Reign’s problem. Developed by Laurie McCarthy and Stephanie SenGupta (although the latter left early in production, leaving McCarthy as showrunner) The CW’s exploration of the life of Mary Stuart left no stone unturned in its search for plot, using every tool available in order to spice up the lives of their characters. Some of it is taken from real-life history and the tumultuous reigns of its characters.  Some of it is taken from ye olde book of period dramas—lots of political marriages up in here, even for characters who did not exist in actual history. A lot of it just soap opera, with a 16^th century bent: somebody being a secret protestant is a plot twist here, which is just fantastic.  Reign, in general, is a lot, which gives it a lot of the appeal of a good Pretty Little Liars episode or one of the better Lifetime movies, where you’re left wondering just how it is the characters arrived at this point.

It turns out that life at court is unpredictable, which is also perhaps the single word that best describes Reign. Thanks to a rather delightful lack of concern for consistency, the world of Reign is one where almost anything can happen, and where plots can turn on a dime.  Life in court is one of plagues, poison, pirates, hallucinations, poison, DEATH HORSES, marriages to pepper merchants, widowhood, vacillating between which child of  yours you’ll have to kill, creating emotional bonds with your enemies, torture, fucking people to death, having sex with ghosts, tennis, secret Protestantism, witchcraft, death by hair accessories, surprise prostitution, false identities, syphilis, jousts, treacherous servants, castration, supernatural detective work, blackmail, regicide, sex, attempted polyamory, sex journals, sexy bathing, treacherous clergy, prophecy, witches for hire, rapid social climbing, rapid social descent, espionage, mother / daughter spats, dances, pretty dresses, hostage-befriending, friend beheading, and having three different opinions about the same matter in the space of an episode.  It is, in short, the closest television has gotten to replicating Twitter.

That said, Reign couldn’t have survived entirely on fizz. Shows like Alias and Pretty Little Liars have tried it, and eventually fell flat, as unattended soda must.  What really helps Reign, then, is its commitment to a single unifying thesis: no amount of power will eliminate systemic oppression. Mary may deny her trash husband Darnley (Will Kemp, convincingly sympathetic and hateful as the script requires) political power, but he can still undo her with a simple lie. Greer, Kenna, and Lola, Mary’s ladies, marry during their teenage years in large part because they need to or are made to by circumstances. Existence as a woman, in this show, means having to consider at all times what all the men around you think. In this way, Reign served as a thematic counterpoint to series like Supergirl, and its message that women can do it all.  Being good and moral and heroic is a privilege, in the world of Reign, and one that none of its women can afford, not even a queen. This is not a world where strength is indicated by one’s ability to directly inflict violence (although there’s plenty of that); in a world where sexism is systemic, just surviving and finding a measure of happiness for oneself is often enough.

Given the show’s flights of fancy, it often up to the actors to imbue their characters with weight, and thus, it is fortunate that most of the series’ cast is up to the task. The cast is led by Adelaide Kane (Power Rangers R.P.M., arguably the best season the show has ever had, and which also gave us iZombie’s Rose McIver) who capably embodies Mary and her attempts to remain good in the face of sexism, government work, and constant threats.  The show’s true M.V.P., however, is Megan Follows (Anne of the Green Gables) who plays Catherine De’ Medici, and the one who best understands that survival is a game that doesn’t often admit scruples or hesitation, and that attempting to kill your living children at the behest of your dead ones doesn’t mean you don’t love them.  She and Mary start off as enemies, as they must in this kind of story, but eventually their relationship evolves, as Mary realizes that she’ll need Catherine’s cunning if she’s to survive, and Catherine realizes that Mary could really use the help.  Rounding out the trio is Queen Elizabeth Tudor  (Rachel Skarsten of Lost Girl), who has been defined by court intrigue and now finds herself Queen without the benefits that would be granted to her if she were a man, or the legitimacy of a proper royal bloodline. Together, they buoy a story that manages to feel, despite all the artifice and deviation from history—and there’s quite a lot of that—essentially honest.

Then there’s everyone else. There’s Aylee (Jenessa Grant) Kenna (Caitlin Stacey), Lola (Anna Popplewell) and Greer (Celina Sinden) who begin as Mary’s ladies, but are split apart by circumstance and forced to make their own lives; Francis II (Toby Regbo), Mary’s first husband, who proves to be a match but can only be so for far too short a time; the ambitious and often vengeful Stéphane Narcisse (Craig Parker), who is the sort of slimy that only really works on TV; Bash (Torrance Coombs), Francis’ bastard half-brother, who is made into the only detective on France’s police department so that he can disappear for episodes at a time; Princess Claude (Rose Williams) who is the sort of spoiled brat you eventually come to love anyway.  This is only the tip of the iceberg: this is the closest the CW ever got to Game of Thrones, which means there are about a million characters, and together, they live, love, kill and fuck in ways that are often surprising and almost always entertaining.

It’s worth noting that Elizabeth doesn’t make an appearance until Reign’s season 2 finale, before then becoming the show’s third protagonist, in what is in many ways a spinoff existing within the original show. It’s perhaps the best example of one of the show’s most interesting features, its willingness to drastically shift its cast and focus.  In a medium where the trend is towards cast stability, Reign cycled through cast members in such a way that only three characters who have been around since the beginning have managed to stick around until the end—and this is a four-season show!  While the initial iteration of the show takes place largely in France, where Mary and her ladies dealt with growing up in court in what has been described as Renaissance Gossip Girl, the series, by the time it ended, had split its focus between Scotland (where Mary now resides) England, and France in order to keep up with the three women who strive to lead them. Mary, notably, is now actually a ruling Scotland with only one of her friends or loved ones at her side; everyone else has either died, remained behind, or gone their own way. To a degree, this is a reflection of history: their interactions may consistently be the show’s most interesting, but Mary Stuart and Catherine De Medici’s paths real-life paths diverged, after the death of Francis.  Part of it is simply a function of growing up and growing older. Part of it is a sign that, again, these are women whose ability to control their destinies is in many ways theoretical.

Reign ends tonight, after an abridged fourth season, and while there is in theory plenty of stories that could still be told about Mary, Catherine, and Elizabeth (moreso the latter two than the first), its fate feels appropriate. In ending this way, Reign shares the fate of my two favorite complete CW series, Nikita and Hart of Dixie, which also lasted far longer than their dismal ratings would have suggested and managed to become some of the most solid fare the network’s produced, and which became favorites in large part because they in many ways felt singular. While Reign is nowhere near as consistent as these two series were, it does a bang-up job of being like nothing else on television. Sure, I could compare it to lots of things—recently, it has been brought up quite often in relation to Still Star-Crossed, the story of a post-Romeo & Juliet Verona—but it also most definitively not like those shows. Other shows may have blasé attitudes towards history; no other show has combined it with an uncompromising unwillingness to be anything but what it wants to be: a marvelous, lovely, ridiculous soapy mess, with modern-day fashion passing as 16^th century couture, court balls set to instrumental versions of pop hits, and everything the creators wanted.  And that’s worth quite a lot.

From the very start, Reverie was primed to catch my attention. Between starring Sarah Shahi and being super-reminiscent of my videogaming sacred cow Dreamfall, there was no way I wasn’t going to be interested in the series about lucid controllable dreams, the people who become addicted to them and consequently slip into comas, and the hostage negotiator who attempts to save them. That it looked gorgeous only helped, as does the fact that its primary cast is overwhelmingly composed of people of color.

That said, the more time passed between that first trailer and the show’s actual airing—about a year—the more apprehensive I became. While that trailer did a good job of selling the show’s concept, it made far less of an effort to sell the characters—never a great sign. Furthermore, there was no guarantee that the series’ potential could be met: for every Person of Interest, a series that smartly analyzes the implications of its premise, there’s a Designated Survivor, which despite being about the people tasked with rebuilding the U.S. government, still somehow finds little to say. And sadly, the first episode of Reverie seemed to resemble the latter more than the former, spending too much time on mechanics, and too little time on their implications, or making a case for why the audience should care. The second episode, although a considerable improvement, largely followed suit. And that’s a shame: if I’m never going to get a Dreamfall series—and that’s never going to happen, even though Chloe Bennet and Melanie Scrofano are right there to play Zoë and Saga, respectively—then I’d love to see this become the next best thing.

I’m adding pics from Dreamfall because I already have them, and they describe the series just as well as anything from the actual show.

At the beginning of the show’s second episode, “Bond. Jane Bond”, we see how one becomes a Reverie user: one finds about it (Rachel, our client for the week, capably played by Ahna O’Reilly, does so online) and then goes to Onira-Tech, the company behind the dream machine / VR system, where one is screened for physical or mental issues (how…responsible), implanted with the necessary tech, and trained on how to use it. Only then is one able to dream out one’s fantasies for as long as one wishes. Reverie, this suggests, is not only commercially available, it is accessible and affordable. It’s perhaps not an investment you’d make on a whim—maybe akin to a new gaming console or iPhone—but it’s not something that’s likely to break the bank, either. It’s also entirely possible that it’s even cheaper than that—it’s really not clear. It all seems natural enough, except that once you think about this for more than a few seconds, though, the more impossible it all seems.

Consider how much it must have cost for Reverie to get developed and made market-ready, in a world that is otherwise apparently much like our own. It could easily be in the billions, even if you ignore things like marketing costs. Given the expense, anything less than overwhelming success would probably be a failure. It would probably have to be more successful than the most successful movie franchises, and just about as ubiquitous, to stand a chance, and if Reverie were anything less than a complete game changer, that’s a standard it would probably fail to meet. Fortunately, it is a game-changer, immediately rendering much of the existing entertainment industries obsolete. Even if it cost hundreds of dollars to be able to use Reverie, there’s no reason for the user base not to reach millions, very quickly. Being the next Star Wars would be perfectly within reach.

And yet…nothing we’ve seen indicates that’s the case.

When Mara Kint (Shahi) is first approached by Onira’s security consultant Charlie Ventana (Dennis Haybert) with a job offer saving people who have become addicted to Reverie-induced dreams, she has no idea what her friend is talking about. While this detail exists in part so that Charlie can then explain the show’s premise, it’s the very worst kind of exposition bait: the sort that seems almost impossibly contrived, given the setting. No matter how personally uninterested Mara may be in virtual reality, there is still no way she would be completely ignorant of Reverie, given the revolution it is supposed to represent and the fact that Mara’s ability to be observant and empathetic are supposedly why Charlie is interested in her in the first place. Unless she’s been living under the proverbial rock, how does she fail to realize that the entertainment industry is now completely different?

This is Reverie’s problem, writ large: they seem to have missed the implications as well. The show acts as if the system that exists at its center is something that can exist publicly without completely upending the way the world looks, feels, and acts—that you can still have a world that resembles our own when there’s perfect virtual reality (and the artificial super-intelligences required to run it) around. And so we have a world in which nothing, aside from possibly the dreamlike reveries, makes much sense.

To be fair, the show appears to have two long-term storylines about Reverie’s effect on the world. The first involves Onira-Tech’s backers, which include the Department of the Defense, represented by Monica Shaw (Kathryn Morris). It has also given multiple hints that Reverie is a privacy advocate’s worst nightmare, keeping not only track of users’ activities, but also the activities of people close to those users. When Mara asks Dylan, the A.I. that manages Onira’s systems, about a person tied to a Reverie user—Reverie, despite its high concept, operates using detective procedural logic—Dylan immediately responds by noting where she is, based on a status update on her social media. Furthermore, Onira appears to keep remote track of users’ activities and vitals: when Rachel is brought in for heart irregularities that popped up while she was busy playing out her fantasies, it is noted that Onira discovered those irregularities as soon as they occurred. While the company appears to have no knowledge of what exactly peoples’ reveries consist of, this is apparently the only concession to privacy in the whole system, and doesn’t prevent the company—and especially the two employees closest to the software, Alexis Barrett (Jessica Lu) and Paul Hammond (Sendhil Ramamurthy)—from exuding a subtle air of menace.

So not like this, as far as we know.

While these elements hint at promising directions and the creators’ thinking—and feel consistent with a world in which Reverie is a more niche product than it should be, as the show suggests—their actual execution feels lacking: there’s a lack of shading and detail that makes me think that, again, not enough thought has been put into them.

Consider the military angle. If the system is available to anyone willing to pay for it, what exactly does DoD hope to obtain from it? What’s stopping potential enemy combatants from figuring out how to game Reverie, or from creating their own versions, nullifying its advantages? A world in which the military-industrial complex was using the system before it became commercial makes sense; the opposite just raises too many questions I’m not confident the show can answer. Meanwhile, the show’s hints that Reverie is Facebook (but VR), while less immediately baffling, feel too large to be played as subtly as the show does. Even in a world in which the sense of privacy as a right has been eroded by technology, Mara, as our outsider POV character and skeptic, should be asking many more questions about Reverie and its implications than she does; instead, her questions feels performative—there to facilitate the plot, rather than to develop her character and help make the setting more complex—and it contributes to a world in which it feels as if Reverie doesn’t exist outside the walls of the Onira-Tech building.

As world-changing technology, Reverie can’t exist in a vacuum: it’s big enough that its footprints should be seen everywhere, in a way they currently aren’t, and means that the show is arguably focusing on its least interesting aspects. At this point, it’s hard to really care about random dream addicts, which we may never see again. The waking world feels much more interesting, and yet we’re barely spending time in it. Heck, consider that a world in which commercially viable perfect VR finally exists suggests the existence commercially not-viable, imperfect VR. An episode about Onira’s rivals, or the not-quite Reveries for people who can’t afford the real thing, interest me far more than Mara’s hostage negotiating, and it’s only been two episodes.

(On a similar note, the show’s Turing-test-passing artificial super-intelligences are also quite distracting. Is this technology that every technology firm has? Is it something only Onira-Tech has? Is it commercially available? If not, why not? As is, the series treats Dylan as both perfectly normal and extraordinary, depending on the effect it wants on a particular scene.)

The most interesting thing about Reverie should not be the questions it raises. There should be questions, true, but they should arise because the ideas the show presents are interesting in and of themselves, not out of a perverse desire to see to what extent one can break the show. And while it’s perfectly fine if Reverie just wants to feature Sameen Shaw being a crisis counselor in various virtual worlds—the series doesn’t have to be Dollhouse or Person of Interest or Westworld if it doesn’t want to be—that isn’t incompatible with a world that makes sense. One doesn’t need to explore a concept in depth in order to give an indication of how it affects the world. It doesn’t have to be plotlines—it can just be lines. One doesn’t need focus to indicate ubiquity—that’s what ubiquity means. Have people who aren’t Reverie users be curious about it. Treat it as if it were the actual big thing people say it is. And for God’s sake, don’t have allegedly smart people who created a way for people to indulge in perfect escapism be surprised when perfect escapism turns out to be addictive, or that people may prefer it to the real world.

(Note: Spoilers for Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and The Americans ahead. And for Alias, obviously.)

I’ve never understood why Irina Derevko is so beloved.

No, scratch that. I do understand why she’s beloved. What I don’t understand is the belief that the character on-screen actually had anything but the most superficial likeness to the character than exists in the better-than-the-actual-show fandom headcanons.  Like, season 2 is overwhelmingly considered the best season of the series, and Irina is often credited as one of the main reasons, and…I can’t see it? [*1]

Similarly, I don’t understand the hate for Irina’s final story. Yes, the missiles and mass murder specifically were stupid, and the final fight with Sydney is seriously lacking in “oomph”, but these are execution problems, and most of the complaints appear to be about the concept—as in, fans believe Irina wouldn’t put her ambitions above Sydney, especially after season 4. To which I say…really?

Sure, I can buy that Irina loves Sydney, and Jack, and Nadia, in her own, destructive way; what I can’t believe is she cares for them more than she does her agenda, whatever that is at any given moment .  Like, I don’t believe anything she does in season 2 actually works, if the idea is that she’s somehow doing it for a greater good. Maybe if she were operating from a position of weakness, but that’s not the case—she remains the strongest piece in the game throughout the season. [*2] Why, exactly, is all this convolution and emotional manipulation of the people she allegedly loves needed, if her goal is a sympathetic one?  Furthermore, the series glosses over, if not outright ignores, the various details which indicate that Irina was not on the level—first and foremost: why go to the C.I.A., i.e. the United States, in the first place, unless she wants something only they can provide?  She’s not American!  Her work as the Man was global!

(Speaking of agendas, I know that it’s taken as gospel by at least part of the fandom that everything Irina did in season two was in order to be able to find Nadia again. Fair enough: even if it’s not quite canon—I don’t think they ever explicitly say this was actually the case—there’s enough actual in-show evidence (a rare thing, in some respects) to make it plausible [*3]. That, said, I’m not sure “trying to find my daughter” justifies much of anything she does—not enough to make her more sympathetic than, say, Sloane.)

I also don’t think Irina’s presence does a whole lot for the series’ larger narrative, as evidenced by the fact that, for all her importance, she doesn’t actually change a whole lot. It feels like she should, but between the SD-6 take-down being way emptier than it should have been, and the fact that neither Sydney nor Jack end the season any different than they started it, she ends up feeling largely inconsequential. [*4] It is also equally hard, if not impossible, to say how the events of the season have changed Irina, given how opaque everything about her is designed to be.  Later, Irina ends up being largely incidental to Nadia’s discovery, and Nadia’s story is arguably better with Irina as the unsolvable dead mystery, in part because it helps differentiate her from the possibly evil possibly repentant figure that already exists in SpySkipper’s life.

And that’s one of my other issues with Irina as a character: while there is in theory a lot to distinguish her from the rest of the cast—her upbringing alone!—the way the show uses her de-emphasizes those differences and emphasizes the similarities to such a degree that she often ends up feeling redundant.  The “whose side is she on” beat, in particular, had arguably already become overused when it came time to use it play it to her, and by the time SD-6 was done and she explicitly joined Sloane, there were too many similarities between the two to make the dynamic between them compelling, particularly since the show made it verboten for either of them to speak about their motivations.  Furthermore, if one believes that Irina did it all for her family, then what is there to distinguish her from Jack, who’s already ready to torture as many people as necessary for that very thing?

To be clear, there were ways Irina could have realized her potential to be Alias’ version of Metal Gear Solid’s the Man The Boss or The Americans’ Elizabeth Jennings—or rather, a version of those characters that actually works as well as they do.  That’s certainly what her fans seem to want. Unfortunately, those ways rely on Alias being…not like itself.

I am not the first person to note the similarities between Irina (a.k.a. Laura Bristow) and Elizabeth Jennings (a.k.a. Nadezhda): they’re hard not to notice, given that they’re both KGB spies and assassins embedded in the United States and operating under cover during the Cold War, and forced to select between loyalty to their country and the family they’d made (although it’s worth noting that Elizabeth’s husband, unlike Jack, is in on the scheme and also a KGB spy/assassin) [*5]. The Boss, meanwhile, parallels season 2 Irina: at the beginning of Snake Eater, where she appears, she betrays the C.I.A. without explanation and defects to Russia, and she spends most of the story running rings around everyone, including her protégé Snake (the game’s protagonist, who’s been assigned to kill her and stop her sponsor, a Russian colonel named Volgin) until her actual motives are revealed. She also exists in a universe which combines semi-realistic espionage with frequent batshittery, including psychics, hornets as a weapon of choice, impossibly old snipers with the power of photosynthesis, and a ridiculous amount of reversals and double-crosses.

MSG 3 images obtained from Metal Gear Solid 3: The Movie, a re-edit of the game’s cutscenes by KefkaProduction. It can be seen here.

That said, despite the similarities, there is one chief difference between either work and Alias, which is crucial to making their stories work: neither is naive about the world they’re presenting, both understand, in a way Alias does, that one can’t be a spy and keep one’s hands clean. Being a spy, for the Boss, meant betraying her old friends and everyone she ever loved, allowing herself to become an international pariah, and ultimately dying, because that’s what the mission required.  Elizabeth Jennings killed innocent people, ruined friends’ lives, blackmailed countless people, manipulated her daughter into following her footsteps, and ran herself ragged for years, all because she believed in the cause.  It’s not a great life, being a spy.

(Sydney, meanwhile, often just has to lie a lot.)

The thing about this sort of work is that it breaks down one’s ability to claim the moral high ground. Once you’re doing terrible things on the regular, it’s easy to see enemy spies are just other people who are also doing terrible things for their mission—potential comrades who just happen to be on the other side. Snake, The Boss’ protégé in Snake Eater, develops a relationship with Ocelot, a Sark-like soldier working for the Russians.  Elizabeth and Philip Jennings develop a friendship with Stan Beeman, an F.B.I. counter-intelligence agent living right next door, which turns out to be every bit as genuine as it is an effort to cultivate a source.

Alias, however, spends much of the series unable and unwilling to strip Sydney of her moral high ground, once she obtains it by working for the C.I.A.  What should have been the beginning of her moral journey—after all, how different is SD-6 from the C.I.A., if the people working for the former can’t tell they aren’t working for the latter, and their missions largely work out the same way?—is instead treated as the end. As terrible as U.S. intelligence proves to be, it never actually makes Sydney question her loyalties, or even her feelings about it all. This, in turn, utterly undermines Irina’s potential as a storytelling element.  What good is a temptress if there’s no potential for the person being tempted to change?

(Similarly, if we’re not allowed to know what Irina Derevko wants—a key element of character-building, as many people will tell you—how are we meant to know how she herself is being changed?)

Given what we got, it’s no surprise that Irina’s season 4 return is so uninspired, consisting largely of fan service moments, and very little in terms of character progression, or sense that the Sydney’s relationship has moved forward in any way that feels natural—what else was there to do? [*6] It’s inoffensive to the point of being really annoying.

While Irina’s season 5 appearances are in a way a step backwards, Irina was always more interesting the closer she got to villainy. Her appearance in “Maternal Instinct” is a hoot, and allows her and Sydney to play roles only they could play.  Their final battle, while not really satisfying—in part because it’s the fourth ladyfight in as many finales, and none had come even close to matching the original—feels necessary for Sydney’s story, which had finally begun progressing again after seasons of stalling: there is catharsis to “I am through being disappointed in you” that feels utterly necessary. Could it have been better?  Sure, but then, so could 80% of everything having to do with Irina.

Footnote footnote revolution!

[*1] I remain convinced that season 2 is actually the worst season, is the one that irrevocably ruined Alias, and that Irina actually had a fair amount to do with that.

[*2] Well, it depends: the status of Irina’s organization following her “defection” is…unclear. If we accept the idea that the organization is in shambles, as the season suggests, then there’s really no reason why, exactly, the C.I.A. actually needs her cooperation, given that they…uh… didn’t need it in order to actually grievously ruin it in the first place.  And yet, here we are.

[*3] To a degree, anyway. The Nadia story gets us as far as explaining why Irina would need The Telling, but doesn’t tell us why she’d need The Circumference, even if we ignore its eventual canon purpose.

[*4] No, their season 3 belief that Irina can be worked with doesn’t count, as it is spun out of whole cloth, and can’t be directly tied into anything that occurred the previous season.

[*5] The Americans also features an enviable wig game, which should feel very comforting to Alias fans.

[*6] Although to be fair, that’s partly because, again, the series isn’t really concern with having Sydney evolve as a person since season 1.

Okay, so this may just be my favorite pic of myself to date—top three, at least. Good lighting, a solid angle, my hands aren’t just hanging around awkwardly with nothing to do…and of course, it features a fantastic view of my squeezed-the-fuck-out-of waist, courtesy of Puerto Rican designer Innova Corsetry.

(Yes, I can breathe.  No, I’m not causing permanent harm to myself.)

Of late, I’ve been pondering whether or not to speak in more detail (i.e.: any detail) about why I’ve been wearing corsets on the semi-regular for about a year now. On one hand, there isn’t a whole lot that demands explanation: I love how they look and feel, and that’s all the explanation that’s needed. On the other hand, that also feels unsatisfying–in part because corsets are so fraught a garment, and in part because just saying “I like ‘em” feels like an incomplete answer–sufficient, but incomplete.

Back when I was three-to-fiveish-years old, my aunt had a blue one of those neoprene exercise belts that are supposed to help sweat oneself thin. I don’t know exactly how I came to know this information, but I was obsessed with that thing. The feel of the materials. The color. The pleasant resistance felt as I pulled the Velcro, accompanied by a sound I still find satisfying. I don’t recall if I tried wearing it, but I do know that I would carry it around with me–there’s pictures. Years later, when I realized that my grandmother also had one of these belts—also in blue, and as far as I could tell identical—the process repeated itself (this one I definitely wore). Eventually—mercifully—I figured out that these were actually extremely easy to buy and got my own, which I would covertly wear wrapped as tightly as possible (which wasn’t much—they’re rather flimsy, and not really designed to be tightened to extremes, despite what their all-you-can-cinch designs suggest).

But that isn’t the whole story. As a kid, my dad would regularly read selected comic books to me, which was an excellent way of getting characters and images to embed themselves in my brain forever. One of these comics was an issue of Pinky and the Brain, which included a story featuring a corset as its central element. In the story, Brain sought to become Henry the VIII’s latest wife; in order to sell the disguise, he is made to don a corset, one which Pinky repeatedly (and correctly) worries may be too tight, and which proves to be Brain’s downfall. Suddenly, the thing had a name, and I had a fixation.(*1)

Yeah, what can I say?  I’m as confused as you are.

It’s hard to say what about corsets appeals to me so, then or now. I can give explanations, having to do with their structure, all the various connotations they’ve accrued, the way women look in them, the indescribable appeal of watching them slowly alter the body’s physical appearance as they’re laced…but they feel, to a degree, unconvincing—a way to explain the ineffable. I didn’t have concepts for things like structure and fashion and aesthetic or things that were sexy as hell, as a kid—all I knew is that corsets were super-neat, and I liked the exes in the back.

Context matters, of course. When the aforementioned comic book came out, in 1996, the internet had yet to become ubiquitous, and corsets had yet to obtain the relative prominence they received in the aughts, so encounters were sporadic and almost always surprising. A Titanic here. An exceedingly random (and still baffling) episode of failed sitcom Zoë, Duncan, Jack and Jane there. The rarity of these instances made them notable, with a hint of the forbidden, which caused them to inevitably become seared in my mind.

In my thirty-three years on this Earth, there are a handful of things I would say I’ve been obsessed with, many of which have featured prominently in this blog.  Alias, for one—I have not been able to stop thinking about the series since I really got into it in 2005, and things have only gotten worse (by which I mean better) with time, what with the podcasts, and the epic fanfics, and the conversations with what remains of the fandom. I will be complaining about the series until the day I die. Nikita is just as near and dear to my heart, the thing to which I compare all other fiction. My fascination with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lasted from 2003 to 2015, and that’s it’s you don’t count my childhood love for them, back when they first became popular. If this space isn’t positively flooded with essays on all of these, it’s because I can’t focus enough to bring most of what I begin to write to fruition.(*2)

If you like action, you owe it to yourself to watch Nikita.

In another universe, this blog would contain as many posts about corsets here as there are about any of the above—God knows I’ve written, or started to write, enough about them. An interest in corsets, though, doesn’t feel nearly as innocuous as a fandom does.  They’re too associated with non-innocuous things—sex and femininity and queerness and fetishes and oppression and insecurity and vanity, to ever not be weird. Talking about them feels like Sharing Too Much.  And so, with some exceptions, that stuff gets compartmentalized—which is, when you get right down to it, ridiculous. Hence this post.

Given everything, it should perhaps come as no surprise that my mind eventually went from being fascinated by corsets on women / women in corsets (*3) to being intrigued by the idea of wearing them myself. Things that stopped me: Being unsure about how they’d look. Being afraid that it’d be as uncomfortable as detractors said. The whole “being a dude” thing. Eventually, though, my curiosity won, so I plunked down eighty dollars for my first model, from Mystic City.

I don’t regret it, at all.

Corsets, assuming you’re wearing one suited for your body, feel fantastic. Uncomfortable isn’t the word; it’s more accurate to say that they demand consideration—they make you aware of the way you breathe, the way you stand, the way you eat, the way you sit, and how you dress (boots before corsets) in a way nothing else I’ve worn does (*4). It is a constant stimulant, the opposite of casual.  Also, between the metal structure and the way they force one to stand up straight, wearing one makes me feel a bit like a cyborg in a very cool way.

And have I mentioned they make me look fucking amazing? Because they do. Before I started wearing them, I would have never thought a wasp waist would suit me, but Jesus Christ it does.  They also do wonders for my confidence—I’m an often-homebody with antisocial tendencies, and wearing my corsets just makes me want to go out to see how many people agree with me about my utter hotness. Logistics and what insecurities I have not been able to shed prevent that from happening—probably for the best—so instead I take pictures. And here’s the thing: I tend to dislike having my picture taken: I rarely look good, or natural, and there’s rarely the opportunity to take a dozen pictures just to keep the one that sucks least.  After I started wearing corsets, though, my selfie-taking skyrocketed. This, inevitably, has caused taking-pics-of-myself skills to improve, which in turns allows me to feel even better about myself. To paraphrase Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, I’ve grown accustomed to my face.

Corsets have shaped me in other ways, as well.  It was my interest in them which led me to discover one of my favorite fanfic writers and people, whose Narnia fics—most of which feature no corsets—are absolutely fantastic; everyone should read them, no matter how you feel about Narnia. It’s also led me to meet other corset-wearers, many of whom are really interesting and cool. A jokey essay about corsets in the contexts of fetishes also got me a perfect score on a semiotics test, which then led to the professor asking me to read the essay in front of the whole class, which in turn reminded me that I can be impossible to embarrass, sometimes. Spending time on the internet and being in the presence of other corset aficionados played a direct role in helping me better understand consent and that finding corsets sexy is not an excuse to be a creepy, entitled ass.  In short, corsets have been important—perhaps more important than a single item of clothing should be, I sometimes fear.

Part of me wishes corsets were more like jeans—that they could be worn without eliciting comment. However, that’s not often the case: their very presence invites opinion, whether derision, concern, or admiration, (*5) but quite rarely shrugs. On the other hand, I’ve never been one to care about jeans. They can be comfortable, and the may look good, but I’ve never been excited by them. I’m excited by corsets. I like being excited by corsets, and context has a lot to do with that. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I want to be able to share my excitement without people going, “Really? This is what you’re fixated on? Also, are you sure your organs are okay?”

The answer, in both cases, is yes.

—-

Footnotes:

(*1) Probably not coincidentally, another Pinky and the Brain story focused on go-go boots was responsible for my fascination with those. What were the writers thinking, I wonder.

(*2) I’ve sometimes considered the possibility that I’m on the autism spectrum. It would explain a lot. That the psychologist I saw on-and-off for several years didn’t diagnose it is a rather large strike against that hypothesis—they seemed more focused on discerning if I had ADD—but nevertheless, I have my suspicions.

(*3) The fact that men in corsets really do nothing for me is one of the strongest pieces of evidence to suggest that my sexuality is nowhere near the middle of the Kinsey scale, and closer to the exclusively hetero end than anywhere else.

(*4) It’s worth noting, though, that I tend to favor comfort in my clothes selection, so I’m very much grading on a curve.

(*5) Sometimes of the creepy kind, which is one of the reasons why lady corset wearers who are perceived as feminine don’t necessarily have an easier time of it than the men those who aren’t, even if corsets are more acceptable on them.

So I’ve been wanting to do something like this for years. I like working on fanvids, but it’s also one of those things I don’t get to do a lot, and not at all since my last video, several years and one computer ago.

Thanks to a confluence of events–the purchase of an external DVD drive, which replaced my busted internal one; the unexpected opportunity to install a video editor, which came with the aforementioned drive (alas, it’s only a temporary trial version); and some fortuitous timing when it came to the obtaining footage–I finally managed it, and I couldn’t be happier with it.

What’s it about? Well, Alias, Nikita, and Person of Interest, of course.

I don’t know much about multi-fandom fanvids, but I know they are a thing, and a not-uncommon one, at that. Given that, I remain quite surprised at how few of them feature any of these three shows together, given all the storytelling devices and themes they share.  By my count, there are four Alias / Nikita music videos (one of them also using Dark Angel footage, which okay, makes sense), one Nikita / Person of Interest vid (focusing on Ryan and Root?), and one Alias / Person of Interest vid which is actually an Amy Acker video. Given those slim pickings, the world, by which I mean me, definitely needed something like this.  And so here it is.

Now, some things about this video:

1. A lot of elements in this video come about as a response to things I’ve seen in other videos–for example, the short shrift often given to characters of color and especially black characters. While they’re still not as prominent as they could be, I tried my best to make their presence felt.  This might be the only Person of Interest fandom creation to argue that Alonzo Quinn is equal to Greer in importance (he is, darnit!).
2. While how much a character appears on the vid depends a lot on how prominent they were on the show, there are some obvious exceptions. Katheryn Winnick shows up a lot for someone who guest-starred in two episodes out of a collective 281, and Rachel Gibson is not usually considered to be one of Alias’ primary cast members. That they’re both white blondes is probably a coincidence.
3. That said, Katheryn’s appearance in the Nikita strut sequence is coincidental–2.04 just happens to be the one episode where Nikita is most obviously disguised.
4. On the converse note, there are a bunch of important characters who barely appear in the video.  The major baddies are one. Vaughn is another, because this is a video I made, and it’s what he deserves.
5. While I tried to showcase actors who played different characters across shows, Sterling K. Brown, the one actor to appear in all three, is seen nowhere on this video. Part of it is because two of those roles are minor, and part of it is because it’s hard to find parallels between the three roles. While there’s one place I could have put him in, it would have also been a spoiler.
6. I really, really wanted to include footage from “The Telling,” but for some reason, the DVD with that episode proved impossible to rip.
7. Also, you can sort of tell I had no Person of Interest season 1 footage handy.
8. People who’ve heard me talk about Nikita know I love Jill Morelli, and I was this close to including her in the big hug montage, no matter how shoehorned it felt. Unfortunately (fortunately), the footage wasn’t cooperative, and in the end, there just wasn’t enough space to include her and characters who actually mattered. So in the end, I shoehorned her into the news segment transition instead.
9. I am so, so happy that the half-second of footage of Jaden is the bit that represents the video. She’s awesome.
10. It really didn’t occur to me that placing the footage of the Alias 5.08 skeletons next to the footage of Kara t-boning Donnelly’s car would make it seem as if the skeletons were all passengers in her truck. Still, it’s a happy accident I’m happy with.

So, speaking in terms of the world at large, 2019 was not great, with many many catastrophes great (global warming, the authoritarian terrorists currently in power) and small (Jesus, what a disappointment Star Wars was).

And yet, speaking on a personal level, I have to say, 2019 may have been my best year in memory, in large part because it’s the first year in a good long while where I feel that I’ve made steady progress in living the life I want to live.  Among the things that happened:

• I obtained my master’s degree in translation
• I moved out into my own apartment
• I’ve found steady, fulfilling work, and begun making inroads into making money as an interpreter

• I’ve obtained practical health insurance for the first time in forever
• I’ve made new friends
• I’ve begun dating again
• I’ve made progress in some personal projects, including finally making fanvids again.

• I’ve allowed myself to be bolder re: my fashion choices

It hasn’t been all great–I’ve had to say good-bye to my pupper and to daily domino games with my grandmother–but those are things that needed to be left behind in order for me to move forward. My life in 2019 has become better, and I’m really hoping the trend continues in 2020.

Publisher: DC Comics

Cover Date: November 1989

Writers: Keith Giffen, Tom Bierbaum, Mary Bierbaum, Al Gordon

Pencils: Keith Giffen

Inks: Al Gordon

Colors: Tom McCraw

My first taste of what became known by the Legion fandom as the TMK run—so called because of its chief writers, Tom Bierbaum, Mary Bierbaum, and Keith Giffen—came somewhat accidentally. I’d been reading and enjoying the reboot Legion as a teenager and, not knowing anything about the franchise’s history, reached the very logical conclusion that its story began with issue #1 of the title they’d called home. Fortunately for me, my father, an avid DC comics collector, still had that issue within easy reach, so I pulled the issue in question out and immediately realized I had no idea what was going on.

As I would eventually learn, I was not the only one to feel that way.  The first issue of Legion of Super-Heroes‘ fourth volume is both dense and unfamiliar. As the first bit of text notes, it is five years later, and things have changed quite a bit, not only in the world the Legion inhabits, but also in the very way their story is told. There are no action set pieces or super-heroics. There is arguably no real plot—at least not any with a beginning, middle, or ending. Most importantly, there is no Legion.

What we do have, however, is a series of vignettes, told in a nine-panel grid that I’m told is meant to be inspired by Watchmen, but whose pacing actually suggests webcomics, beginning with a brief recap of who the Legion were, and then taking us to the situation on Earth, including a catch-up moment with Dirk Morgna (née Sun Boy) to show us that his loyalty is no longer with the Legion. We then head to the actual start of the story, as another former legionnaire, Cham (née Chameleon), decides that it’s time to bring the band back together, which he then proceeds to begin to do.

Most of the rest of the issue is spent on Rokk Krinn (Cosmic Boy), Cham’s first recruit and the closest thing to the protagonist of the story—and a somewhat peculiar one, at that. Prior to this run, Rokk often felt like The Other One of the three original legionnaires. Whereas Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl got the early flashy stories and a romance which solidified them as crucial to the Legion’s identity, Cosmic Boy was often just there, and only notable because of that.

Here, however, TMK do quite a lot in a short period of time to give Rokk some real weight and humanity, revealing that he is married (to the former Night Girl, who in previous stories had harbored a crush on him) without superpowers, stuck in a homeworld occupied by another planet and which has clearly seen much better days, and dealing with the emotional fallout of the war which got Braal occupied in the first place.  And yet, to the book’s credit, the writers don’t use this as an opportunity to re-imagine Cosmic Boy as a late-eighties / early nineties anti-hero. Rokk isn’t angry, or at least not primarily so; mostly he’s tired. Even then, it’s not all dark clouds. His marriage to Lydda is as happy as it can be, under the external circumstances, and when he encounters Cham, there’s joy in the reunion.

This balancing act of light and dark is a crucial part of the book, and of the series. For all that this run is superficially akin to Watchmen, this is ultimately a hopeful story about hope. The Legion may be gone—the result, we’re told, of an organized and ultimately successful years-long government campaign to undermine them at every turn—and most of what we see of the world suggests that it ultimately failed to prevent galactic collapse, but people are more resilient than structures.  Salu Digby (Shrinking Violet or just Vi) may have spent years in military prison, after turning against her superior officers (she’s a soldier now, and a veteran of the same conflict as Rokk, if on the opposing—and ultimately victorious—side) but now she gets to say goodbye to all that and reunite with her beloved Ayla (formerly Lightning Lass, not seen in this issue). 

The last few pages of the book, meanwhile, are largely concerned with world-building. We get three consecutive text pages elaborating on what caused the Great Collapse that ruined everything and how the Legion ended up disbanding, and a final one showing and advertisement for high-end apartments located in what was once Legion headquarters.  Altogether, they do quite a bit to show us the new status quo, the Legion’s place within it, and why it might be necessary for it to return. We also get a page consisting entirely of black panels with three unidentified—if villainous-seeming—speakers, which is the sort of thing that really fueled accusations that the book was often impenetrable. 

All told, if one was hoping to find a Legion book featuring, well, the Legion of Super-Heroes, there is reason to be disappointed. Not counting flashbacks to past stories, we get Rokk for ten pages, Cham for four, Vi for three each, and Dirk for two but really just one and change—barely a squad and far from a Legion.  But then, this is not a book that it as all aimed at giving long-time fans what they expected or hoped for. It’s certainly not what I was expecting or hoping to find, as a fan who knew next to nothing about the preboot. 

And yet, this is also not not the Legion. There are a ton of references to past stories and lore. The cast is by and large recognizable, even outside of costume—the old characters outnumber the new.  Keith Giffen is an old hand with the property, and the Bierbaums are fans, and it shows. More importantly, the series isn’t hostile towards the fans: it doesn’t look back at the series’ earlier days with disdain, as the flashbacks to the earlier days are depicted with genuine affection and respect.  And while there’s no real super-heroics, there is still bravery, and determination, and even heroism, such as when Vi refuses an honorable discharge if it means being silent about the war crimes her planet apparently committed. 

It is also simply a well-made book. Keith Giffen and Al Gordon’s rough art is perfect for the harsher world of 2994, and the nine-panel grid allows for some extremely efficient storytelling.  Every page (with the probable exception of the first) tells a story, and reveals something about the world, the characters in it, or the tone of the story. Additionally, it has aged astoundingly well. The word may look far too white, even for a book published in 1989 (compare it to, for example, Suicide Squad, which at the time featured three Black characters in its core cast and several other people of color in its extended one), but as a story, it continues to be just as enjoyable and poignant as when I was teen—moreso, really, now that I’m actually the same age as Rokk, Vi, and their peers. Additionally, it is still a story unlike few others. While super-hero comic books are drowning in nostalgia for the writers’ and fans’ favorite stories, this is a book where it forms the backbone of the story, and one of the very few where it actually rings true. The world of the Legion had always been more dynamic than the rest of the DCU, the flow of time and change affecting its characters in more lasting and permanent ways than their present-day peers. This story, then, takes that idea to its conclusion; if it feels like everything is different, it’s because it actually is.

When I first heard that the TMK run was being collected, I was somewhat hesitant about buying it, and not just because it would mean plunking down $150 just to have these stories in a more easily accessible package. It’s been a solid decade, if not more, since I last read this run, and I fear the possibility that I am no longer a person who can enjoy it, and that their physical selves cannot compare to my memories. In addition, the TMK run was controversial, and not just because they took existing characters in new directions: one of the issues I most clearly remember is memorable because it tries to say something positive about queerness without the tools to properly do so, and I’m not at all sure how I’ll feel about it when I get there.  Going by this first issue, however, I feel much more optimistic.  

As my corset pressed tighter against my midsection, I felt increasingly more comfortable and ready for the time to come. Without it, my existence felt precarious and uncontrollable, like the wind; with it, I felt solid. My energies could be marshaled in whatever direction became necessary instead of uselessly and chaotically dispersing every which way. And it didn’t hurt that I loved the way it made me look.  I would never be willowy like my older sisters, but then I didn’t need to be.

“A little tighter,” I instructed my maid, Aria. Presently, I needed as much help as I could get. Like the rest of my family—at least those who still lived at home or in the city—I was expected to be in attendance at tonight’s party, which meant many opportunities for me to inadvertently embarrass my parents and siblings. Once upon a time, that would have happened with some regularity—my father’s work and position meant there were many parties, many dinners, and many social events. 

I’m not good at talking to others. I take things too literally and am bad at identifying the deeper meanings behind words. I go on and on about whatever subjects interest me, hardly ever letting others get a word in edgewise, which I’m told many dislike.  I’ll often say whatever comes to mind, without really understanding how it might be insulting or offensive. In order to prevent those things, I eventually found it safer to say nothing at all.  

And then I began tightlacing. Buoyed by my stays, I had the presence of mind to remember to follow all the rules of proper social discourse. It didn’t make parties easier—they are, in fact, exhausting—but at least I am no longer as likely to regret them afterwards. Sometimes, under the right circumstances, they can even be enjoyable.   

“Thank you, that’s enough,” I said, and Aria, with her usual dexterity and speed, tied the excess lace into a bow. The pressure around my waist, the sensation of my lungs expanding and contracting against the whalebone and cotton, my unalterable posture, all felt more constant and reassuring than any hug. Any tighter, however, and the corset would be just as distracting as if I weren’t wearing it at all. It would still be a while before I was fully prepared, but the most important part, at least, was over. 

• Being able to cook breakfast
• Being acknowledged by a dog or cat–preferably both
• The consumption and purchase of good cheese
• Buying a new comic book
• Having just enough work to feel productive, while not enough to bring exhaustion
• Getting just the right opportunity to use the phrase «your mouth is a fountain of LIES!», i.e., when you have been misinformed about something utterly unserious and harmless.
• The opportunity to take a walk that is neither too long nor too short, in pleasant weather, while listening to your favorite music
• Doing a thing you’ve been neglecting, such as sweeping your room
• Talking to a friend or two

Today was a good day.

The first disappearance of a Supreme Court Justice judge did not terrify people. It unsettled them, to be sure—how does one of the most protected people in the country just vanish? But it wasn’t the sort of thing anyone could apply to their lives—so she’d disappeared; what does that mean for me, personally? 

Which isn’t to say that change didn’t happen. As the fifth vote in a conservative court, Joy Garrett had been essential part of Republicans’ efforts to roll back the last century’s worth of progress. Now, the (barely) Democratic Senate, along with the Democratic White House, had a chance to turn things around—at least if Garrett were to ever be declared dead. And so, many people, including Jackie Joyce, just shrugged and tried to keep their schadenfreude in check. Sure, it was weird as hell, what had happened, but wasn’t the world a better place now? 

One month later, just as people seemed in the verge of forgetting, the second judge disappeared. 

After the disappearance of Rufus Wainwright, a fixture of the Supreme Court for over twenty years, all hell broke loose. There wasn’t a pattern quite yet, but the extremely low bar for speculation had been cleared, and so a million new theories arose, many of them centering on the fact that, like Garrett, Justice Wainwright had been a staunch—Jackie Joyce would say radical—conservative. If this was a recurring act of God, it was starting to seem as if it had an agenda.

And so impulsive action was taken. Security measures were beefed up, and investigations begun, for all the good they did. Gun sales jumped, and this time Jackie Joyce had to admit to her girlfriend that she couldn’t blame people for it; if people could just disappear like that, then paranoia seemed, if not quite logical, understandable. They were also starting to see more people at church, although their pastor indicated that she did not expect this to last. It was what always happened, during a crisis, and these always eventually ended or were forgotten.

In the Senate and in the networks, Republicans, realizing they had no real leverage, began speaking of conciliation. Given the tragic disappearances of two justices—not deaths, they always emphasized—it would be impulsive and disrespectful and downright irresponsible to even think about rolling back recent decisions. The White House, with its customary fecklessness, seemed to be suggesting the same thing, although according to some sources, steps were being taken in the background to move forward with nominations, and not altogether terrible ones.

One day before Justice Garrett was set to be declared dead, three senators—two republicans; one, a democrat in name only—went missing.  

The madam’s office stood in stark contrast to the rest of the estate: while tastefully appointed, it reminded Adam of his father’s office, rather than anything to do with sex work. Madam Twilight in general reminded Adam of him, for reasons he couldn’t quite explain. It wasn’t her demeanor, which, while authoritative, was also not lacking in warmth.  She was also neither the most fashionable of the women he’d seen over the last half an hour, nor the most deliberate in her sartorial choices.  In short, if he hadn’t met her at the office, he would have believed her just another of the house’s residents. 

“So, I understand we have you to thank for our Mary Jane’s safe return, doctor. Are you usually in the habit of strolling through the forest at night?”

“Sometimes,” he answered. No reason to give explanations he didn’t need to, yet. “Is she?” Against all logic, Mary Jane had acted as if were the most natural thing in the world for her to be at the grotto. Although he supposed it actually made more sense for her than for him, given that night brought as much—or as little—visibility as day did. 

“Well, our Mary Jane has always been independent. Clients appreciate that about her. And, as you’ve no doubt concluded, her instincts sometimes border on the uncanny. It’s not the first time she has managed to leave like that.” She said this without bitterness, almost amused. “But I didn’t call you here to talk about her.”

Adam ignored the sudden knot in his throat. “I can leave if you want. I didn’t mean to intrude.”

“Oh, you’re adorable. No, please, stay for dinner. It’s the least we could do for you for your services. And the girls enjoy having someone around they don’t have to please. No, what I want to talk about is the fact that when she left last night, Mary Jane was, as she’d always been—what’s the technical term—vision impaired? This morning, she is not.”

“Well, the way she explained it, that was the whole reason she’d left was to find St. Agnes’ pool.”

Adam removed three years from his mental estimate of Madame Twilight’s age, as she theatrically rolled her eyes. “Let’s not act stupid. You and I both know the only miraculous thing about St. Agnes is that it’s still usable. It wasn’t the hot springs that healed Mary Jane. And so it must have been something else. After all, just because something isn’t magical doesn’t mean magic doesn’t exist.”