Also…and we never even see this get so much as lip service in Star Trek or Star Wars…Goff is an ALIEN. She’s another species. If we could fully communicate with dolphins and told them “Its evil to kill fish for fun”…they’d probably say “The fuck you talking about?”
I haven’t been this happy for a director since (ironically*) Robert Rodriguez and when Spy Kids made a shitton of money.
Gunn did something he loved, had a lot of fun, and it did gangbusters in the ratings. Good for him! I’m sure this will translate into a lot cache/cred/opportunities for him.
*Ironic cause we were recently talking about RR because of Boba Fett.
And possibly “so long and thank you”.
His idiot father was the one making them, I think? So was his father some kind of loser, but actually a genius in designing technology?
His dad made himself an Iron Man suit with multiple integrated scifi technologies.
For his kid, who he loathed, he made a bunch of ridiculous helmets that could only do one thing at a time.
Seems to track.
Too bad the scabies helmet wasn’t used…
There was a blink-and-you-miss-it line about how the cow would keep the butterflies alive “for a hundred years”. Since they were only able to bring one cow with them, this seems to suggest that the butterflies had a built-in end date to their scheme. So, it seems they may have said, “One hundred years of us secretly ruling the humans, in order to save them from themselves, at which point we all just starve to death, is a good deal.”
Might make them slightly less evil.
If it’s “obviously” a necessity, then, why does it it need to be a complete secret? Spending years building up military forces in England for the invasion of Nazi occupied Europe was obviously a necessity, and no one felt like that had to be kept completely secret. Certain operational details might need to be secret, but the general knowledge that this program exists? We all know the FBI, CIA, NSA, and other such organizations exist, without being privy to the details of their internal operations. Just saying, “Yeah, we’re weaponizing these superpowered criminals for operations that have a high probability of death for those involved” shouldn’t be a problem. If you really need such a program, the majority of people would understand that.
Are you talking to me or are you talking to The Butterflies?? I mean…we’re talking about the planet? Right? Why don’t the Butterflies come clean? We don’t need to know all the details, but the general public will understand “Aliens come down to save us.” Hell who is going to miss some dumb politicians anyway?
Did I miss the “totalitarian dictatorship” part? (I admit, I may have.) My impression was that they were planning to infest a certain number of politicians — and probably captains of industry — in order to bring about an end to climate change. That’s really neither totalitarian nor a dictatorship.
N.B. I’m not necessarily defending their plan. And comments above about infesting the senator’s children and not even trying to communicate with humanity first are clearly valid. I’m just trying to figure out if the goalposts have been moved or not.
Frankly, being accused of moving the goalposts in a discussion of a goofy fantasy show makes me disinclined to continue the discussion. But here goes:
I don’t think the details of the Butterflies’ plan are ever made clear. But I thought they were very clear that they thought humans were unable to make the “right” decisions, so they were going to make those decisions for us. They are actively murdering and surreptitiously replacing elected officials and others in order to impose their own plans.
Mere humans won’t be able to select their own leaders - any human leaders that don’t toe the line will be murdered and replaced by a Butterfly. Mere humans will have no meaningful say over government policy - the Butterflies will use murder to block any policies they don’t like and impose their own preferred policies. If that’s not a dictatorship, what is it?
And the Butterflies are actively implementing a regime of literal thought police. If you think the wrong thing, the Butterflies will murder you and infest you and replace your own thoughts with their own. That’s about as totalitarian as I can imagine.
There is a practical limit to that element, since there are only so many Butterflies, but we don’t really know just how many there are. Judging by the heat map we saw at the end of - I think the first episode? - there are at least thousand, maybe millions, heavily concentrated in the U.S., but distributed worldwide. I guess the average human is probably statistically pretty safe, but any thought leader that wrongthinks is going to be murdered and replaced. And literally anyone might be murdered and infested if it’s convenient for the Butterflies.
The bit I’m interpolating into the material and which isn’t clearly established is that based on their casual murders and the urgency they seem to be operating with, I’m just kind of assuming draconian measures to end wars, famines, and climate change.
But do you think it’s actually credible that we the audience are intended to think the Butterflies’ plan is to commit mass murder, and then gently nudge government and industrial policies in the right direct through moral suasion?
If anyone cares…an interesting thought experiment is “What would Batman do if he discovered the conspiracy? What would Superman do if he’s just tooling around with his Xray vision on and he sees a ****ing fist sized bug in someones head”
I think Batman would use those wonderful detective skills and get captured not realizing the massive amounts of Butterflies. Superman would contact Batman.
Remember, this is the crapsack universe where Superman and Batman are both douchebags. (And Superman, at least, did know about it at the end, at least.)
I think that was the single best part of the whole series - calling out the Justice league for being a bunch of dicks who were late to the party.
Pre-Dawn of Justice, Batman would only care if the Butterflies showed up in Gotham, and/or infested a WayneCorp employee. Still, seems likely he’d be a target as Bruce Wayne, so he’d probably investigate. Whedon’s Justice League Batman would figure a lot of it out, and organize a team to deal with it. Snyder’s Justice League Batman would get told about it and call in Superman, realizing that literally everyone else in the DCEU is superfluous if you have Superman on your side.
Superman would laser-vision face-melt everyone infested by a Butterfly, while screaming about it in existential angst at the sacrifice of his purity.
It’s remarkable how divergently different people can experience even “a goofy fantasy show.”
To me a clear major theme of the show was the fact that pretty much everyone was some degree of bad guy, willing to do very bad things, to kill innocent people in pursuit of their goals, with varying degrees of justifications for doing so and various levels of redeeming features. Taking charge of making the choices for the rest of us. Augie and gang, and Locke I guess, at one pole, (with Waller and Vigilante close in the next level), Sophie as close as anyone to the other, and all other players in between, same in kind. We know what is best and we will kill however many we need to to make that happen … for the greater good.
To me thinking of The Butterflies as Teh Evil misses a major part of what makes the show enjoyable to watch and even think about. But others’ mileage varies!
We are talking about the same humans who live on Earth, right? Because those humans can’t agree whether they should wear masks or take vaccines to save themselves from a virus.
We can’t even agree in this thread on a make believe TV show whether Goff was being completely truthful about their plans.
@Cayuga and @gdave - I think the confusion is based on the butterflies taking over the bodies of all those white supremacists. They just used them because they were a convenient source of bodies to act as guards / workers (and possibly because they were evil). They also occupied a lot of cops, but that was probably for practical reasons (they have a lot of guns and it makes it easier to hide from law enforcement if you control the local police).
In any event, I think it was less “totalitarian dictatorship” then “pulling the strings behind the scenes”.
If Batman believed with confidence that without this intervention humanity was doomed (and I could see him thinking that, he has little confidence in our collective wisdom to make good choices) then I could see him helping the Butterflies as the utilitarian least poor choice. He’d likely also get them to minimize the damage of the plan.
A perhaps larger theme is one of relationships (which is consistent with other works of James Gunn). I rewatched The Suicide Squad recently. If you follow Peacemakers story arc, he starts out as someone who is so obsessed with following his own ideology that he is willing to take the lives of his team mates to do it (Flag and nearly Ratcatcher II and whoever else would have gotten in his way). By the end of the show, his decision is not about some abstract notion of “right or wrong” but based on the real and immediate concern that the Butterflies will harm his friends.
It’s the same model James Gunn follows in The Suicide Squad and the Guardians of the Galaxy film. Basically taking an eclectic group of weird, selfish, broken people and watching them connect and become a family to overcome some fanatical idealists.
I guess the moral is idealism is great, but you have to put real relationships first so you don’t become…you know…murderous.
I’m not sure what you mean by “confusion”. But now I’m a bit confused.
I don’t remember the Butterflies taking over the bodies of any white supremacists. They took over the bodies of everyone in the jail, which included some white supremacists, but most of the prisoners didn’t seem to be part of White Dragon’s cult. And they took over the bodies of everyone, and the prisoners seemed incidental to taking over the cops.
And, yes, they infested the cops for practical reasons. But deliberately and casually mass murdering innocent people, and going out of your way to maximize the body count, I dunno, maybe it’s just me, but that seems pretty evil, even if it’s for “practical” reasons.
And I really don’t get the distinction you’re trying to make here. Sure, the Butterflies are going to be “pulling the strings”, in that they’re presumably going to keep concealing their existence as alien murder bugs. But they pretty clearly want to remake human society into their own vision.
I guess, maybe, they’re just planning on controlling large scale industrial and political decision-making through murder. And the little people will be allowed to go about their daily lives, as long as they don’t interfere. Or become inconvenient. So maybe not a totalitarian dictatorship, just an authoritarian one.
But the implication to me seemed to be pretty clear that Goff’s plan was to remake human society and civilization, which would by definition be totalitarian. But, I admit, I’m also interpolating into the material a bit there. So, again, maybe just an authoritarian dictatorship.
Well, yeah, I guess my mileage varies. Although I don’t think of the Butterflies as “Teh Evil”, whatever that’s supposed to mean. I think they were evil. They casually committed mass murder. They killed children. Bug!Murn was the only one that even seemed to have the slightest compunction about that (note how Bug!Fitzgibbon reacted with shock when Bug!Sophie killed Bug!Murn’s bug form, contrasted with how he reacted to her killing his human form). They wanted to take over the world, and impose their vision of how the world should be run by force. And they didn’t even make the slightest attempt at peaceful contact. That seems evil to me.
They did apparently have broadly good intentions, but, well, the road to hell and ends and means and all that. And, as usual with the “villain with valid grievances”, not coincidentally, the first, last, and only option they consider to achieve those good intentions just happens to involve them being in charge and everyone else being subservient.
At the same time, there really weren’t any “good guys” (other than Sophie and Fitzgibbon, who seemed like decent cops). Vigilante is a psychopath. Harcourt murders an innocent man. Economos and Adebayo, the nicest members of Team Peacemaker, do some fairly awful stuff themselves, and willingly work for a pretty awful organization. And Peacemaker himself is an outright supervillain, at least at the beginning of the series.
I still found the show enjoyable to watch and even think about.
I think I agree with pretty much all of that.