Laurel, your feral sister asked you something. It’s her first real communication to you since she emerged from the Lazarus Pit. Why would you ignore her, turn your back on her, and not even answer a simple question? I’d be upset, too.
Detective Lance can act! (Well, the actor playing him, Paul Blackthorne?)
My wife and I really popped on the preview.
Constantine! And using the same actor from the series!
Sarah’s back, Ray’s back, weepy Felicity’s back. Hooray!
Why is OK to kill bad guys with fast-moving projectiles, but not OK to snap their necks with your bare hands?
I think we’re supposed to believe that the arrows do not fatally injure their targets.
But what about pistols, which various of Team Arrow were using?
It just doesn’t make much sense, but I guess the difference is that it was clearly no longer kill-or-be-killed at that point.
Can I just say that that was one of the laziest, cheapest, most half-assed warehouse scenes ever made? They go through all of the usual elaborate bullshit to break into the super-important warehouse to, by the way, just flat-out steal a “quantum manifold” that they need, and when they get in, they find a half-dozen shelving units that looked exactly like some I picked up from Home Depot a few years back, with general junk just tossed on them willy-nilly. I’m pretty sure the “quantum manifold”, which didn’t look anything at all like the one in the blueprints, incidentally, was sitting next to some spare fluorescent bulbs and a radiator.
I laughed about that too.
I’m getting really burned out on three aspects of the show:
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The schizo “O Arrow, I <3 U” / “Arrow U Suxxors” flip-flops Captain Lance keeps making. He’s switched points of view like 2 to 3 times per season. It’s getting sad.
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The fact that no-one…literally no-one can learn anything. I mean, after Merlin brainwashed Speedy and betrayed her a half-dozen times, she still trusts him to do what she says? Good lord, why?
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The totally bizarre fetishization of THIS CITY. “You have failed THIS CITY”. “I will save THIS CITY”. You can’t go a single episode without THIS CITY being mentioned as though it was a magic artifact. You could actually turn it into a drinking game.
All I want to know is, after the crossover event, what is going to be the plot contrivance for why the characters that are going to be on the new spinoff have to leave immediately, as opposed to sticking around for another week, and helping Ollie and Barry take care of Darhk and Zoom?
I’ve seen several complaints about this … it’s not a complaint I agree with. For a number of reasons.
Comic book history. I’ve always been more of a DC fan than a Marvel fan. This is partly due to the fact that I was exposed to DC heroes as a child in the 1970s (watching reruns of the Batman TV show, watching Superfriends on Saturday morning cartoons) long before I was exposed to Marvel heroes (saw Spider-Man on The Electric Company, but otherwise didn’t get into Marvel characters until I started collecting comics in 1987).
DC, being a much older company than Marvel, has always had a different focus. In the early days of superhero comics (Marvel wasn’t there), there was not a “DC Universe”. Each superhero existed in his or her own universe. And each hero was based in a particular (fictional) city (as opposed to Marvel’s approach, where every single goddam character is from New York). The stories were all about this particular hero doing what he or she could to protect the residents of that city. Because the hero lived in that city, and wanted to make things better for the city.
Good grief, they’re people looking at their surroundings, realizing how much things suck, and deciding to do something to improve the situation. Instead of running away. Actually, that bit has been depicted in the show: people are moving out of Star City because it sucks. Oliver and friends are staying there, trying to prevent their hometown from dying.
Tribalism. This is my tribe (city), and I will protect it.
Family It ultimately comes down to protecting the people you love.
This is actually one of my favorite things about the show.
The “science” technobabble between Felicity and Ray hit an all-time low this week, which is really saying something. I cringed like a motherfuck when Ray broke out with the “some sort of chemical CRISPR/Cas9 thing” line. Let me translate the conversation into roughly analogous layman’s terms so you can all appreciate it:
“Huh. Half of the words in this newspaper have been cut out, which, incidentally, should have turned it into a worthless pile of nothing, but somehow it’s still a fully functioning newspaper. I wonder how they did that?”
“Oh, look. They used some sort of scissors, except these scissors seem to be made out of gummy worms, obviously.”
“Well, how can we figure out the missing words?”
“I know this place that sells gummy scissors. If we get ahold of some, we can reverse engineer the words that were cut out.”
“Sweet. Let’s go.”
FWIW - I took it that the compound was somehow “hiding” them from the tools - and that by having the compound they could “unhide” them (by understanding how it hid them).
So - more like using whiteout and trying to remove the whiteout leaving the paper below intact.
Well, except that that’s not how CRISPR works, which was specifically namechecked there. CRISPR is a tool for cutting DNA in specific spots, hence the scissor analogy.
I realize this is a case of being too educated for my own good.
I see - I ddi not know that.
You left out, “The publicly accessible database entry containing full technical specifications and manufacturing instructions for gummy scissors was filed by DuPont so that they could maintain the right to sell them on the open market. Therefore, the only way to find out how they work is to break into the local DuPont offices and steal some at gunpoint.”
Oh, and “The tooth we found has traces of sodium fluoride, the active ingredient in every major brand of toothpaste in the world.”
“Oh my god! How could that have gotten on a tooth? If we knew we track down the tooth’s owner!”
“Besides toothpaste, sodium fluoride is also frequently added to municipal drinking water.”
“That’s it! I found a building that was condemned because their municipal water supply had too much fluoride!”
“The owner of the tooth we found last week must be there right now! Let’s go!”
That didn’t even need to be changed for laymen. That was pretty much the script. :smack:
Yes! All that too. I mean, I realize the need for technobabble. I guess. But words MEAN things! Writers should know that.
I don’t object to their goal, but the way they talk about it. THE CITY is not a person. It isn’t a damsel in distress. And the people aren’t Ollie’s serfs or cattle. There’s a weird…fetishisation about THE CITY when Ollie talks about it. Even Batman, during his most retarded phase* wasn’t as obsessive about THE CITY as Ollie is.
It’s one thing to say “Let’s rally the people of Star City and together we’ll make a difference and clean this town up” vs “YOU have FAILED THIS CITY. Only by the power of MY GROUP will we HELP THIS CITY!”
In one case, he’s recognizing that the city is primarally about the people, in the other, he sounds as if he believes the city…pardon me THIS CITY is a living, sentient entity. It’s just weird.
Also, I can’t get around the little Urkle-looking guy they gut to play Mister Terrific. Who is a world-class boxer, triathalete, successful businessman, professional football player, etc. The twerp they got looks like a strong wind would break him in half. If you happen to catch Jessica Jones, the guy they got to play (no spoilers) her boyfriend has the look, the demeanor and the presence to be Mister Teriffic. Urkle just doesn’t.
*Mid '90s, especially the “No-Man’s Land” story arc where he kept trying to stop humanitarian aid to get food/medical supplies to the people illegally trapped in Gotham because…reasons
Agreed. One of the most embarrassing Treknobabble moments on Next Gen was when Picard ordered the bridge cleared of “baryonic matter”. Um…Cap’n Baldy? Everything on the deck…including the air, the deck itself and your own snotty self is “baryionic matter”. If you cleared the deck of all baryonic matter, you’d have to dismantle it and then (somehow) use a force-field or something to get all the free-floating hydrogen out of the now empty space.
Moral: Don’t use a real word for a made-up thing.
So who is in the grave? Thea? Darkh said he would go after family.
Guess Felicity is going to be Oracle.
Brian