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CBM: X-Men '97 finale; My Adventures with Superman S2 May 25; The Boys S4 June 13

so, i tried watching Man of Steel on HBO on demand last night. does it get better? after an hour plus, nothing had happened and they kept having drawn out fight scenes. it really sucked. should i finish it today?
 
isledeac said:
so, i tried watching Man of Steel on HBO on demand last night. does it get better? after an hour plus, nothing had happened and they kept having drawn out fight scenes. it really sucked. should i finish it today?
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The fights do get tiresome. I liked it, but it wasn't great.
 
Link to the second Batman 75th anniversary short set in the Batman Beyond universe.
https://movies.yahoo.com/video/batman-beyond-short-film-192211473.html

Batman Beyond is an animated series that ran 3 seasons from 1999-2001 and spawned the heralded Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker animated film. Batman Beyond is set 40 years in the future of Batman: The Animated Series in which an elderly Bruce Wayne mentors a futuristic Batman.
 
Tonight's Agents of SHIELD was good. The show does not mind killing off characters. I liked the fact that the only person May could trust to call was her mother.
 
I really want to like AOS, but to me it's basically the opposite of every other joss wedon project: boring characters and poorly written dialogue. I can't tell if coulson is a terrible actor or the writing is just that bad. Maybe I'm the only one.
 
The show still needs work, but the plot gets better from week to week and it does a great job of expanding the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The lie detector was basically Fury's check against Black Widow. They introduced another supervillain (a boring one, but he didn't need to be interesting). They took a throwaway line from The Avengers and build a storyline around it and an excuse to bring MY GIRL Amy Acker into the show (formerly my favorite Amy until Adams passed her a few years ago). Nice Banner reference with the tech used to take out Blackout. May is continuing her mission for Fury by trying to find Maria Hill, who could very easily join the show as full-time cast in Season 2 which will lead directly to Age of Ultron.

I was afraid the Ward-Skye plot would either be hokie or resolved too quickly or strung out unnecessarily. The latter may still be the case, but it made sense and Skye knows. She was going to play Ward and Ward played her. That was a good exchange.

Somewhat spoilerish preview of the May 13 season finale of AOS.
http://www.tvguide.com/special/finale-preview/PhotoGallery/Must-Watch-Finales-1080432/1080715

I'm sure "May 13" doesn't have a dark meaning about the fate of May but it would be crazy if they threw that in there.
 
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I was fine with last night's episode. It ratcheted up the tension some more, and I like the idea of leaving Coulson to find Dead Patton Oswalt and question the loyalty of the three missing team members. I want Fitz to stop being such a goddamn beta and profess his undying love or whatever to Simmons, but whatever.

But after I finished the episode, I wandered over to the AV Club and found myself agreeing with a lot of their criticisms of this episode (and the season as a whole, by extension). The writing still sucks, and someone over there highlighted that using just two scenes (the introduction of the cellist and the woefully fucked lie detector scene).

Scene: Amy Acker is doing a little bit of stretching before she goes for a run. Earbud goes in and she is off, we see(clearly) a man is walking behind her causing the lights around him to go out. After two seconds of running her music dies and she turns around to see(again, clearly) the guy coming towards her, more lights are going out. SHIELD swoops in and points some lights at the guy.

Now any other show, and I mean any other show, would've used that scene to build tension. We would have seen Ms. Acker stretching and running, passing numerous lights, establishing a general feel for the area. There would certainly be some wide shots so we could see the lights ahead and behind. And then we would slowly start to see the lights going out behind her as the darkness is closing in. And she would be unaware of all of this until the darkness is about to envelop her as her music dies. We would only see the man at the very last moment, if at all.
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also what bugged me: the interrogation of fitz and simmons. it went like this:

"what's in the box?"
(other agents' answers)
fitz: how big is the box?
"just say the first answer that comes into your head."
fitz: simmons.
simmons: that's a hard one. let me think. the tardis.

any thoughtful writer (or editor) would've put that together thus:

"what's in the box?"
(other agent's answer)
fitz: (argues about the size of the box)
(other agent's answer)
simmons: that's a hard one. let me think.
"just say the first answer that comes into your head."
fitz: simmons.
simmons: the tardis.
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The lie detector held a little bit of suspense for me, because I saw the comment here about the show "not being afraid to kill off characters" before watching the episode today, so I thought that maybe Ward would get got there. In retrospect, that scene was pretty cheap and poorly done. Not a whole lot of suspense there, and certainly not as much as there should have been. The second they dropped the line about it being built to withstand Romanov, it was doomed. And the payoff of "THIS MACHINE GAVE ME SOME RED FLAGS WHEN I MENTIONED HYDRA BUT IF YOU'RE JUST HERE TO BONE SKYE WELL HA HA OKAY YOU'RE FREE TO GO" was so fucking dumb.
 
The show established with Lorelei and last week that he does have some affection for Skye so there was some truth. It was lame that he was able to use the old fingernail trick though. I thought he was going to break out of the chair and take down Koenig.

The end product works with Coulson left to pick up the pieces.
 
PhDeac said:
The show established with Lorelei and last week that he does have some affection for Skye so there was some truth. It was lame that he was able to use the old fingernail trick though. I thought he was going to break out of the chair and take down Koenig.

The end product works with Coulson left to pick up the pieces.
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I mean, I obviously understood that Ward wasn't lying when he said that he was there for Skye. That was true on multiple levels. We know from last week that he obviously has feelings for her, and hell, the rest of the team. On that subject, I thought Ward's scene with Fitz was a nice reminder that he's got shades of (very dark) grey in him.

My problem was more with the execution of that lie detector scene, and logic of having Patton Oswalt question him with a gun, and then drop all suspicions because NAH HE JUST WANTS TO FUCK THE GIRL. The dude's vetting people for access to a beyond-top-secret underground SHIELD lair. You're telling me he let his guard down that easily? If the line of questioning includes "Are you associated with Hydra?" and the response is as weaselly as Ward's was, you don't just stop there when he says he's there for another agent.

And the show can't drop lines like "this thing was built to withstand Romanov" if it wants to be believable (I realize I'm talking about a show based on a comic book universe). The fingernail trick is great I guess, but this chair had OVER 90 SENSORS!!!111!!!!11!! I'm sure Ward is well-trained and everything, but in the confines of the established MCU, he's no Black Widow.

It was a really terribly executed scene.
 
They've been setting it up from the beginning that he's just a step below Black Widow and Hawkeye.
 
a regular SHEILD agent is a step below the Black Widow? "Robin's just a step below Batman"
 
Holy. Shit.

Arrow is setting up one hell of a season ending arc. Again. Tonight's episode left me genuinely in shock.
 
:facepalm

everyone's a superhero!

Value-Participation-Soccer-Trophies.jpg
 
ImTheCaptain said:
a regular SHEILD agent is a step below the Black Widow? "Robin's just a step below Batman"
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They've been beating us over the head that Ward isn't a "regular SHIELD agent."
 
ImTheCaptain said:
a regular SHEILD agent is a step below the Black Widow? "Robin's just a step below Batman"
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He's not a regular SHIELD agent though. He's a specialist so he's supposed to be "a step below" those guys. The same is supposed to be true for Malinda May. That's why Ward was able to take on more than a dozen regular SHIELD agents by himself a few episodes ago.

I do wish they would make the SHIELD agents more competent though. How Agent Koening handled the interrogations, all of the love interests, how inexplicably trusting they can be and so on needs work.

The show has a lot of room for improvement. Everything from the dialogue to character development needs to be improved. Hopefully, they work out a lot of the bugs with a few more seasons under their belt.
 
WakeForestRanger said:
He's not a regular SHIELD agent though. He's a specialist so he's supposed to be "a step below" those guys. The same is supposed to be true for Malinda May. That's why Ward was able to take on more than a dozen regular SHIELD agents by himself a few episodes ago.

I do wish they would make the SHIELD agents more competent though. How Agent Koening handled the interrogations, all of the love interests, how inexplicably trusting they can be and so on needs work.

The show has a lot of room for improvement. Everything from the dialogue to character development needs to be improved. Hopefully, they work out a lot of the bugs with a few more seasons under their belt.
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It's annoying but it makes sense given how they were easily infiltrated and taken down by HYDRA. People like Koenig didn't act when they had reason to do so.

It reminds me of some of the criticisms I heard of the Jedi in the Star Wars prequels. Yeah, they were clueless and arrogant. That's why in Star Wars, they're in hiding.
 
I can give them a pass on the Hydra infiltration because of how long it took to implement and the parallels they made to real US History recruiting Arnim Zola into SHIELD like we did Wernher Von Braun into our rocket/space program.
 
Deadbolt said:
Holy. Shit.

Arrow is setting up one hell of a season ending arc. Again. Tonight's episode left me genuinely in shock.
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That was a great episode and took several turns that I didn't see coming. I'm really excited for the final three episodes of the season (and sad that there are only three left).
 
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