One Piece 781 Review: Law Pulls off an Aizen

One Piece, Chapter 781: Long Cherished Desire

Doflamingo reveals that the Birdcage is really shrinking because he wills it too do so in an hour, and he changes the rules of the game all Hunger Games style. We get a rather nice visual of the strings slicing through a building and the slices of the building just collapsing. We get a couple of panels showing the other people in the city, but not too much so that it becomes a distraction. I'm sure if stronger people like Fujitora, Zoro, Sabo and the rest try their best they can punch a hole through the Birdcage -- don't just freaking stand around there! Doflamingo continues to just mock Luffy and the 'dead' Law, and talks about how he can just make another country.

So I guess he's going to kill all of his 'family' and all his talk about how his executives are family is bullshit? Or is he going to spare them somehow?

Luffy goes in to punch Doflamingo... but suddenly SHAMBLES and Law is there instead, alive and well and holding this big energy blade he calls a Gamma Knife. Law stabs Doflamingo straight in the chest (why not rip his heart out and crush it?) and apparently the Gamma Knife burns all of Doflamingo's internal organs. Trebol asks how the fuck Law is able to do that without using a Room, but Law counters it with 'why did you think I don't have a Room active' all Aizen style, and Law's apparently created a gigantic Room bubble and have been clinging to it all through the battle.

He also reveals that after the first time Doflamingo shot him, he switched places with one of the random Doflamingo mooks who happens to also have black hair and be the same height as him, and that mook, teleported into Law's clothes, was the one who got shot multiple times. And apparently that telepathic message or whatever from last chapter? It's just Law fucking whispering to Luffy.

Doflamingo looks like crap after the Gamma Knife, vomiting blood everywhere, and Trebol is all like 'Dofy you're royalty don't let your knees touch the ground' instead of, y'know, helping with his snot powers. Doflamingo tries to string-cut Law in the face, but Luffy shoots a Jet Stamp straight at Doflamingo's gut. Law then creates a small room and explains his Gamma Knife -- really should've taken Doflamingo to a hundred different slices or ripped out his heart or something.

Trebol tries to jump in but Luffy just one-shots him no problem. So much for being an executive.

Law then, sadly, chooses this moment to talk even though he himself used Doflamingo's own monologue to pull off a trick. Man, Law, why do you do that? Doflamingo continues to goad Law, which I guess is his specialty -- to goad people so he can buy time for himself -- and talks about how Corazon is useless, how Law is the same level as him and everything. Law Counter-Shocks Doflamingo before falling down exhausted...

And then Doflamingo stands up all ominous like. I was desperately hoping that it wouldn't be another String Clone situation. And apparently Doflamingo just pulled off a Sani and used his strings to perform emergency medical treatment. He can't fully cure himself, but he can stabilize his wounds enough so he can stand up and kick ass. Law is all screaming in rage and shit, and Doflamingo is about to stomp down on Law's face but Luffy stops his foot with hi own and the two face off.

So Luffy is going to be the one to end Doflamingo in a fight, which is what everyone expected. But Law really made a good show of himself and despite being a big Law fan I am honestly okay with Luffy taking it over from here. Law isn't knocked out yet, and he can help out, I'm sure. It's overall a pretty great chapter, and a well-paced one too compared to many recent One Piece chapters.

The Jinbe cover story is reaching its closing stages at last, showing that the Sea Kings are cooperating with the dudes they kind of fucked up and are allowing the fishermen to use them as fishing boats.

The Flash S01E16 Review: Captain Cold is Awesome. Also, Family Problems

The Flash, Season 1, Episode 16: Rogue Time

The previous episode was awesome. This episode? Really not that great. I mean, it's not a bad episode by any means. Captain Cold was absolutely stellar, and I really liked the developments with Cisco as a character as well as the nice parallels between this episode and the last. There are no shortage of great scenes here, but a really weak B-plot revolving around Barry confessing his love to an Iris who had no memory of the last episode was really cringe-inducing, even moreso than all of the previous Iris and Linda scenes put together. The sudden shift from stopping a big tsunami and Cisco's sudden death to dealing with the Rogues' return and Cisco's family problems is also extremely jarring. But this episode does find its footing relatively quickly, annoying romance plot tumour aside.

For how cringeworthy the Iris stuff are, though, I do like how much of a slap to the face that was to Barry and how it solidifies the time-travelling rules of the universe. We get some hints here and there from both Barry exploring things and Harrison Wells' cryptic explanations that time can be changed. But overall not really much happened due to the time travel beyond Barry completely ignoring Wells' instructions and arresting the Weather Wizard like a bitch. Also, as Barry himself have tried, he cannot just try and time-travel on the fly and he needs to be under some kind of emotional pressure or some specific condition .

The Barry-Linda relationship was simply just... called off for no good reason. Poor Linda, existing only to be the third wheel. And I'm still not a big fan of the Barry-Iris plot. Iris hasn't really been annoying me as much as Laurel Lance did before her, but I am just so done with this super-forced borderline-incestuous relationship plot. I did like the scene where Eddie punches Barry straight in the jaw, as well as the ridiculously funny explanation ('lightning psychosis'?) that Caitlin provided Iris and Eddie with. Also liked Joe's little advice to Iris to be honest with herself and not force her to go either way.

Captain Cold and Heat Wave return once more for some excellent campy and over-the-top awesomeness, though this time Heat Wave takes a back seat for Lisa Snart, Captain Cold's sister and otherwise known as the supervillain Golden Glider. It's just brilliant, campy fun. Heat Wave does get a few fun moments just admiring flames on a cocktail and generally being a loose cannon, but otherwise he's just there. Golden Glider does get a few 'fun crazy family' moments with her brother, but likewise she's just kind of there. She does get a revised power, though. Instead of skating on a pair of wacky ice skates that can generate their own ice, Lisa Snart now wields a gun that shoots gold at people. Um.

Not quite the most impressive power, but at least it keeps with the 'golden' theme...? They could've just shot everything in that mansion and get a shit-ton of gold, but I guess they're just thrill seekers. And that's a big point of Captain Cold's conversation with the Flash. "Get a new job!" -shrug- "Don't wanna." Captain Cold makes it clear that he's doing this for the simple thrill of the job, for the adrenaline rush, and to just show that he's that good. He's awesome. He also manages to maneuver events so that he discovers the Flash's secret identity, though Barry manages to appeal to his ego to not kill while on the job. I do like Captain Cold and Flash's to-and-fro, they're pretty fun.

I am kind of on the fence about the revision of Cisco's death and the discovery of Wells prior to it. The reporter who is on to wells, Douchebag McJackass, gets put through a horror show by the Reverse-Flash at the end of the episode and stabbed with a vibrating hand through the chest, and really who expected him to live? Barry does get suspicions thanks to living through the reporter's warnings in the first episode... but Cisco's death does kind of feel cheapened.

I mean, we did get Wells bringing Cisco down to the forcefield machine and talking about how Cisco is like his son and everything -- minus all the power display and killing -- and I get that it fits with how shitty Cisco feels after dealing with self-worth issues and having to reveal Barry's secret identity... but I dunno. That was an awesome death scene and I'm sad that this episode isn't about Barry trying to prevent Cisco's death without previously having known that it happened.

Cisco does get a good scenes this time around, though, as we explore his relationship with his brother Dante... who is handsome and loved by their parents because he's a concert pianist and a pianist can be shown off and paraded in front of family friends. Whereas being a super-smart engineer really doesn't amount to much in some parents' eyes simply because they don't understand what their children do. We did get some hints of Cisco having friction with his family and I do like that it's explored. Compounding Cisco's self-worth is that he was kidnapped by following a disguised Lisa Snart (she's an actual blonde in the comics, by the way) home from a bar and that a guy like him can never get an actual pretty girl.

And as much of a douchebag his brother is -- calling him a dog and telling him to fuck off and get a job -- Cisco, of course, ends up succumbing to Cold's demands to create new guns and I do like how Cold is savvy enough to have memorized the design of his gun (already repeated several times in the Rogues' last outing) as well as get Cisco to tell him Flash's identity. Do like the little reconciliation moment between Cisco and his brother, as well as having what is normally the comic relief guy getting put through so much emotional shit this episode.

Another nice detail is how Cold's gun isn't always in 'encase people in ice' mode and causing frostbite on people is also a possibility.

Overall it's still a pretty great episode, don't get me wrong -- I'm just a bit disappointed in the lack of timey-wimey stuff and the abundance of the Iris plot that I really don't care about enough to talk much of.

Agents of SHIELD S02E13 Review: Cal's Brotherhood of Mutants

Agents of SHIELD, Season 2, Episode 13: One of Us

There's a rather big X-Men vibe coming off from the whole Inhumans plot that Agents of SHIELD is running, though that's not a bad thing. And it's only coming off in vibes and not an actual ripoff, which is nice. There's the whole discrimination and arguments about containing powers versus freedom, an inherent racism against anyone who even has powers, the secret organization teaching Inhumans to control their powers, a brotherhood of angry oppressed Inhumans who are racist toward normal people... stuff like that.

Comparisons aside, though, this episode is kind of a nice one that I think is one of the better episodes SHIELD has had for quite some time. While I wasn't quite sure about Cal's inclusion, this episode does build up on Skye's transformation some more after the past two episodes. I thought that Cal's attempt to build his own little army of misfits from people that SHIELD has 'contained' was an interesting concept, but the strong story in this episode is Skye learning about herself and her little consultation moment with a psychologist. That was easily the strongest part of the episode, Skye and Gardner's conversations -- we get some acknowledgement that Skye is trying to run away from her problems by shutting them in, and she can't do that now that her internal nightmares are literally going to shake the world. She can't just push them away, but she really needs to face them. It's just a temporary fix and she's going to learn to control them.

As we see at the end of this episode, her internalizing her problems has caused them to manifest by her quake powers causing a shit-ton of hairline fractures from her clavicle down to her hands, so Simmons crafted these sweet Quake-gauntlets for her.

Melinda May gets pushed into a larger spotlight role, which is nice. She did get some screentime teaching Skye to be calm and all that, and the fact that she calls in her ex-husband (we didn't know she had one, says half the cast and the entire audience) is pretty great. Her role as badass high-ranked fighter has been kind of eaten up by Bobbi lately and it's nice to give her some screentime of her own without compromising Bobbi's.

Cal's story is less interesting. We do get to see him gather these colourful characters -- a super-smart fellow with no moral compass, this super-strong brainless guy, crazy woman with razor fingernails and this dude with a creepy ass mouth that can cause catatonia to anyone who hears him scream. Out of all four, apparently only Michael Angar is an actual Marvel villain and the others either only borrow their names from the comics or original throwaway characters. On the surface Cal gathering a group of people 'oppressed' by SHIELD and the possible future conflict of Skye choosing between her biological father and SHIELD is quite interesting. However, it's kind of handled rather choppily, with the conflict of hating SHIELD within Skye... not really being there. Skye's big problem is learning to get a grip with her emotions and her powers, and really it's the other people in SHIELD that are super jumpy. I also thought that Cal going around recruiting random people took away too much screentime from all the more interesting stuff involving the main characters.

It does help to humanize some of the people SHIELD has arrested, but really none of them are developed that much beyond being one-trick ponies. Angar the Screamer does have a nasty-looking visual effect when he activates his powers, and Karla does get some pity moments for just wanting to forget about SHIELD and just stop them from taking any more... but they're just such a bunch of nobodies that it's hard to sympathize or really care for any of them.

I do like the theme that SHIELD sometimes goes too far in 'containing' threats -- Gardner certainly thinks SHIELD hasn't changed from when he left it, and we did get to see some brutality when Coulson and May took down their targets -- but the message is kind of skewed since these bastards are, y'know, kind of monsters. And while Cal's big hammy acting is always fun to watch, I think this time around he's just kind of a disappointment. I expected something more... epic, even if Cal's little revenge scheme was meant to be just filler material.

May's scenes in this episode were really nice, though. I do like how May still has emotions despite trying to be a supercompetent agent all of the time, and the fact that May's internalization tactic hurts Skye is a possible hint to May herself running away from her problems and feelings -- she does seem to actually enjoy Gardner's company and is visibly crestfallen when she learns that he's found someone else. I do like how we're kind of dealing with May's own repression tactics in the background when the main focus is on Skye doing the same thing. "He listens for a living and she doesn't speak." is a great observation from Fitz-Simmons. We get some acknowledgement that May is Skye's mommy-figure which is always nice.

Simmons has a girl-talk with Bobbi about how secrets can destroy a relationship -- Simmons considers Fitz falsifying results to be a big betrayal because 'science was sacred' between them. It's a nice little mirror to Bobbi's own relationship with Hunter, both of them kind of fucked up by keeping secrets, but Bobbi-Hunter isn't the only relationship that Fitz and Simmons echo. I do like how despite everything that's going on between them, Fitz and Simmons aren't above gossiping about May and Gardner and lampshading that despite everything that went between them, they still like each other and stuff. I do like how they're both progressing as their own characters, whilst not being all cold war and throwing hissy fits and stuff. Simmons is developing more powerful Icers and stuff, and while she still really likes Skye her racism against metahumans is still very much present. She even goes as to divide the 'Gifted' metahumans into two sub-types: 'Enhanced', which is normal humans who receive powers like Deathlok and Angar, and a second one who has their powers from birth. Y'know, 'Inhumans'.

I do like that despite there being friction between them -- Simmons abandoning Fitz and Fitz lying to Simmons -- they do manage to bond over gossiping May and I think Simmons kind of realizes that she kind of did fuck Fitz over. Fitz was going all 'we're even now' in either this episode or the previous one, and I do like the post-fight relationship they have. Simmons is kind of angry and confused, but she isn't above making jokes with Fitz and Skye on separate occasions. Certainly a lot nicer than the badly-paced clusterfuck we had for them after the whole Simmons-is-Hydra-but-not-really stuff earlier this season. It's not quite the same Fitz-Simmons dynamic as the first season, but it's something similar and I do quite like that.

We get Bobbi, Mack and Hunter doing their own thing while all this Inhuman stuff is going on, with Mack stuffing Hunter in a random safehouse, and the end of the episode reveals that Bobbi and Mack are working for the 'Real SHIELD'. It's nice to have these new guys actually play a role beyond kind of being suspiciously-similar-but-slightly-different replacements to season one main characters like May, Ward and Triplett while decreasing their screentime. I'm still rather ambivalent about all three of them, but I am interested to see where their plotline goes. Ten to one that Maria Hill is running the "Real SHIELD'.

Also, Gordon the Eyeless Man suddenly shows up and teleports Cal out of the conflict before Team Coulson takes out the rest of Cal's little group, before bringing him to the Inhumans' hideout. Gordon brutally shoots Cal down, telling him that he's just a freak science experiment and not an Inhuman, something that's finally made clear by Cal -- he gained his Hulk-esque powers by experimentation and not actual Inhuman powers, which is why he was so afraid to touch the Diviner back then. He isn't an Inhuman, he just knows a lot about it. Gordon sends Cal to meet with the other Inhumans and he's rather disturbed by the thought, so I'm interested in that.

Overall a pretty great episode in my opinion. A bit choppy on the Cal side, but the Skye scenes really make up for it. Dr Gardner is a really fun character, and we get some nice progression on the Simmons front and the whole "Real SHIELD" and Inhumans society thing is really interesting as well.

Agents of SHIELD S02E12 Review: Sif's Amnesia & Kree

Agents of SHIELD, Season 2, Episode 12: Who You Really Are

A bit of a shorter review because I got a lot of stuff going on. This episode was a bit m'eh, honestly. We've got the big internal reveal to everyone else that Skye has been turned into an Inhuman, and we get the return of Lady Sif, and the arrival of a Kree (which I honestly did not expect), and some development on the front of the whole Mack/Bobbi conspiracy front, but I felt that this episode really felt like a filler from the previous to the next. It's not as bad or messy as the earlier episodes of season two, but I still find it rather... bland.

It's always nice to have characters from the larger MCU make an appearance in Agents of SHIELD, and this time we get Lady Sif's second appearance in this episode. Except not really, because for most of the episode she's lost her memory and is just kind of around to be funny and get the characters to try and figure out what her original goal of coming to Midgard is. And I do admit, 'Son of Coul' and Sif being confused about just what these odd Midgardians learn as a child did get a couple of giggles from me, but I thought the whole amnesia stuff was at large a bit of a distraction. It really felt like a weak excuse to introduce the Kree and possibly a bit of a publicity stunt to get people watching SHIELD after a choppy first half and a big break.

Vin-Tak the Kree was also a bit weird. I do like how unconventional of an antagonist he was, and how happy he was to divulge information to both the cast and the audience about the background of the Kree and the Terrigenesis. Apparently some sects of the Kree did Terrigenesis all over the galaxy, but it was failed or stopped by other Kree because it's deemed to barbaric and the effects of Terrigenesis are basically feared by everyone from Kree and Asgardians as pretty horrifying biological weapons. Vin-Tak's big gimmick is that he has this miniature Ronan hammer that causes amnesia to anyone he clonks with it, and while he does get a great fight scene against Bobbi, I think we really could've gone without the rather distracting gimmick hammer.

I do like revelations and tie-ins to the larger MCU, but the tone this episode took was too happy and campy throughout the first two-thirds, and then delves into introdumps and discussions about metahuman-racism in the final third. Which kind of makes for a choppy episode. At the very least, though, I think it's for the better that they didn't milk Skye's secret for far too long, because at the end of this episode everyone knows. And the little point about Fitz hiding Skye's secret at least manages to function to drive a wedge between him and Simmons.

I also do like how everyone treats Skye like a dangerous weapon, though. While Vin-Tak the Kree completely freaking out and having to be beaten down, the fact that Lady Sif, a nominal ally and friend, is ready to drag Skye back to Asgard if she hadn't shot herself with an Icer, really speaks volumes about the degree of discrimination people have for these Inhumans. I do like how Sif eventually relents and leaves Skye with Coulson's SHIELD.


That conversation where Bobbi and Hunter calls Fitz out on him keeping secrets, as well as Simmons and especially Mack throwing a tantrum over Fitz hiding it because Skye could be dangerous and should be 'handled' properly, is a nice little discussion that feels very familiar in Marvel settings. It's got a bit of a Civil War vibe and an X-Men vibe. I do like Simmons' more gradual development. She is kind of horrified, of course, but she's not quite as extreme as Mack because above all she still considers Skye her friend. I think she and Fitz will be quite frosty for a bit, though.

I do like how Fitz finally manages to bring up the fact that his trust in Simmons is kind of shaken after she abandoned him after his accident, and I am a big fan of this little development. Fitz and Simmons have been kind of poorly written and is happily dancing around discussing this big thing ever since the beginning of this season, and I really want them to do so.

And Skye can't be all that mentally healthy by the end of this episode. Fitz is still fighting for her, even arguing with his supportive friends Mack and Simmons in defense of Skye, and both Coulson and May were ready to fucking throw down with an Asgardian to protect her, but you could see the tension. I'm a big fan of how May was finally pushed to the spotlight once more because holy shit she hasn't really done anything this season. As Skye's quasi-parental-figures, I do like them getting the most screentime in defending Skye, even if they have doubts about their decision after Sif leaves them behind.

Also, Fitz fucking shot the Kree dude in the face with Coulson's giant alien gun from the Avengers. Apparently nicknamed the 'Bambino'. Okay then.


There's a B-plot running with Bobbi, Mack and Hunter. And, well... it's kind of like the whole Barry-Iris plot in the Flash or the Bruce Wayne stuff in Gotham. It's not particularly bad so I don't hate it, but I don't particularly care until the big payoff, so I don't necessarily like it either. Bobbi and Mack has some big conspiracy going on (though they flat-out say they aren't Hydra, like what basically everyone thought) and Mack tries to get Bobbi to push Hunter away to keep him safe or some bullshit like that. Whatever their plan is, Hunter is savvy enough to understand something is going on, but when he confronts Mack he gets knocked out. There's really not much to go on beyond the irony and hypocrisy when Bobbi and Mack were ranting about keeping secrets to Fitz.

Also Coulson points out how over-qualified Mack was for being a grease-monkey, hinting that he might be hiding his true super-spy skills or something. Which he shows when he knocked Hunter out, I guess.

Overall, I really liked the Skye stuff and the Fitz stuff, but this episode is just kind of oddly paced with the whole Lady Sif thing, while being cool, felt kind of oddly written in. Well, let's hope next episode does a bit better.

Arrow S03E16 Review: Emotional Strings & Chessmastering

Arrow, Season 3, Episode 16: The Offer

Like its sister show, this week’s Arrow has its main plot be about another villain of the week but the main focus is elsewhere. Unlike the Weather Wizard, however, Murmur isn’t really that big of a deal or much of a threat to really engage. Nominally a Flash villain in the comics, Murmur (a.k.a. Michael Amar) is just this a generic serial killer who sewed his mouth shut. And while I appreciate the usage of obscure villains every single time, Murmur just…was kind of a weak villain. He’s got a plot going on, with a simple revenge-against-corrupt-cops vendetta and diamond bullets helping to pad out the episode’s plot, but he really isn’t all that relevant beyond being creepy. You could’ve replaced him with any random generic thug and it will have the same impact.

Likewise, the Hong Kong flashback scenes are really just distractions. Oliver being a big brother to Akio is fun but definitely unnecessary, them just running around pointlessly in Hong Kong is likewise banal. The big reveal that Shado (or a doppelganger) is alive… I honestly don’t care.

With that away, we can talk about the nicer stuff. Shame that so much is devoted to them taking down Murmur’s little organization, because there’s a fair amount of great stuff to be had in this episode.

There’s the overreaching theme this episode on Oliver considering Ra’s Al Ghul’s offer to become, well, the next Ra’s Al Ghul. We see Oliver clashing with Quentin Lance and realizing that Felicity has moved on and is with Ray now (something that Felicity herself points out) and all the stuff going on made him reconsider his commitments and the reasons he set up this cause. Because, you know, when Ra’s pointed out how little difference he really made with his crusade and how much he’s lost (Tommy, Sara, Moira) you can’t help but really think about it and consider it.

I mean, I don’t think there’s any way that Oliver Queen is going to ‘beat’ Ra’s Al Ghul by becoming the new Ra’s Al Ghul, but it’s nice to see Oliver just angsting about how thankless of a job, how he’s making ‘a dent’ instead of ‘a difference’, and it kind of ends up showing how uncomfortable with how… independent Team Arrow has become after his ‘death’. I do like them having their cake and eat it – we don’t really kill off Oliver, but we get the ramifications to other characters which a death would cause.

I do like seeing how Felicity was the biggest voice of reason for Oliver, and despite all the inconsistent writing surrounding Felicity after Oliver’s return, I do like how she kind of settles back into her role of emotionally slapping Oliver back to his baseline when he gets too extreme. She’s still hanging out with Ray and in a nice little relationship with him, but I do like how, while she’s willing to help Oliver and considers him a friend, she also acknowledges that Oliver did push her away and has enough dignity to keep a distance romantically at least. She doesn’t really get that much screentime, though, because this episode tries to squeeze in as many stuff as it can.

We’ve got three girls basically dealing with their daddy issues – Thea, Laurel and Nyssa. And I think the first two were handled relatively well. Thea is basically all sorts of fucked up inside and the fact that she was ready to slit Merlyn’s throat and generally is confused about everything surrounding her… man, Thea is such an emotional wreck right now, but so much more interesting than her pre-season-3 character. I really liked how the big cliffhanger was resolved quickly with Nyssa going all ‘oh I don’t blame you’ just like Laurel did, and Thea’s conflict is going to be largely internal. The fact that she is forced to harbour Malcolm Merlyn – something I didn’t get, wouldn’t Oliver be better served just shoving him in a random apartment instead of further fucking up Thea’s mind? – probably doesn’t help matters. I do like how she’s emotionally grown beyond trying to push the blame on other people, though.

Quentin, on the other hand, is basically in conflict with everybody. He makes it clear that he loves Laurel still, ready to fight to defend her, but he is still fucking pissed and disappointed about the fact that Laurel went as far as to impersonate Sara to hide her death from him. And likewise Quentin is pissed off about the Arrow and basically told him ‘some variation of go to hell’. It’s a believable character growth for Quetnin, though, and I’m honestly really interested to see where the character will go from here. I do like how Quentin ignoring Felicity’s call lost him the few minutes of preparation he could’ve had against Murmur’s diamond-bullet-gang if he had picked it up.  

Nyssa’s conflict with Ra’s is a lot less interesting, though I do like Nyssa herself. She’s really pissed off at Ra’s for fucking her over by promising the title to Oliver instead of Nyssa, and kind of storms off to go hang out with Laurel. Nyssa gets a cool scene taking down both Roy and Laurel without breaking a sweat, and then helps out killing Murmur’s little army before kind of bonding with Laurel. The fact that she kind of promises to teach Laurel more martial art skills is going to make Laurel’s gradual growth into the Black Canary a lot more believable.

And I do like how Laurel, and to a lesser extent Roy, are still growing into their roles as Black Canary and Arsenal respectively, showing up a good fight against random mooks but still getting kind of overwhelmed at times… it’s a nice, gradual growth. Even if Roy really needs to do something beyond just walking around in that wicked-cool Arsenal getup. Diggle, likewise, doesn’t get to do much which is a bit of a shame considering all the buildup from last episode.

We get a bit of Ra’s Al Ghul and the fucking Lazarus Pit is confirmed! I was worried for a second that we’re not going to get the Lazarus Pit when Ra’s was talking about how he inherited the title from his mentor and I thought we’re going to get some bullshit ‘Ra’s Al Ghul is just a title passed down’ thing which, I won’t lie, will probably get me to rage-quit watching Arrow for a while. But the Lazarus Pit is indeed confirmed, and we got the knowledge that the Lazarus Pit is losing its potency on Ra’s Al Ghul because of how many times he used it. Ra’s lets Oliver, Diggle and Merlyn go free as a peace offering, though he really wants Oliver to take his mantle. And both Maseo and Merlyn point out that, well, despite Ra’s happy attitude, the fact that he makes the offer doesn’t mean that he is asking. He wants Oliver to become the Ra’s Al Ghul, and apparently at this moment it involves masquerading as the Arrow and killing people and spreading word that the Arrow has regained his killing tendencies.

Also if Ra’s was so adamant that Oliver be the next Ra’s Al Ghul, maybe he let Oliver live from that fall and the prophecy about surviving a stab is just bullshit?

I dunno. It’s a bit of a lukewarm episode, with more emphasis on character growth and Oliver’s self-exploration, and less on exciting twists and action scenes. But I still liked it for what it did. I still find Ra’s Al Ghul’s motivations and whatnot a bit weird but I really do like him quite a fair bit.

The Flash S1E15 Review: WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK

The Flash, Season 1, Episode 15: Out of Time

That was a bit of an awesome episode now, wasn’t it? I didn’t expect this episode to be focusing on Mark Mardon, the Weather Wizard, nor was I expecting, well, everything else that happened! The trailers teased Reverse-Flash, and I expected that to happen, but definitely not in the way that it unfolded. There is just so much going on in this episode, so much unexpected shit that went down that it took me off guard every single time.

First off, the big reveal – Harrison Wells is, in fact, Eobard Thawne, the Reverse-Flash of the future. Not a new character, not an alternate Barry Allen or Wally West or Jay Garrick or what-have-you from the future. That was one of the big guesses, but kudos to the makers of the show to keep someone who is relatively well-versed in DC lore still be on his toes.

Second, Cisco fucking dies. Wells-Thawne stabbed him straight through the chest with a vibrating arm, which took me truly off-guard. Because, well, holy shit! For one thing, I did not expect Cisco to get killed off this early on, especially with the prior knowledge that someone was cast as the actor for his brother. Cisco’s death really, really took me by surprise by that meta-knowledge alone. I mean, with the end of this episode there’s a highly likely chance that Barry will undo Cisco’s death, but man, the sudden stab really surprised me.

Thirdly, the fact that Barry just punched a hole through time… and I did not expect it to happen now, in this episode, while he’s fighting the fucking Weather Wizard. Yes, I expect Barry to travel to the past thanks to all the foreshadowing and buildup, but the build-up (and meta-knowledge) led me to thinking that Barry is going to do it with the Cosmic Treadmill and on… well, basically any other moment that isn’t “stopping a tsunami created by the Weather Wizard”.

Fourthly, Barry reveals his identity to Iris. Which is kind of tame compared to everything else that fucking went down in this episode, but that was kind of surprising too.

It’s really awesome that all these major twists – the Big Reveals of Barry and Wells’ identity, plus a major character’s death – happen in a seemingly innocuous episode. I mean, the bulk of the episode focused on yet another metahuman-of-the-week. Granted Mark Mardon is the Weather Wizard in the comics and one of Barry’s more prominent foes, and he’s got sufficient awesome powers and an actual backstory by proxy of his brother Clyde Mardon and a personal vendetta against Joe West, but he’s still just, y’know, a seemingly random villain.

But let’s talk about all that later, because Cisco and Wells’ interactions are the money shots of this episode. The reveal that Wells tricked everyone with a fucking hologram in the forcefield was something so mundane that I honestly did not think it was going to be the explanation. I expected two Reverse-Flashes, duplication powers, or something more… exciting, but this mundane explanation actually works pretty well because, hell, I didn’t even consider holograms!

Also, Wells kind of explains his backstory for a bit – traveled to the past to kill Barry (not Nora), accidentally strands himself in time for the past fifteen years. It’s kind of nice to hear it all said out loud, even if everything kind of clicks together for me the moment he reveals himself to be Eobard Thawne specifically. We also get to see him do a little Speed Mirage thing, which not only did we get a foreshadowing earlier in the episode (which turns out to be a red herring), it’s also a nice little explanation to how Wells was in two places at the same time back when he beat himself up with the Reverse-Flash encounter.

The fact that Wells is all about grooming Barry and making him into the Flash? Simply because he needs Barry's speed to return to his own time. Or maybe even ensure his own birth as the Reverse-Flash or something.

Also, I do like the tense moments where Wells seems to have an idea what’s going on while Caitlin brings him out to breakfast, and the sheer horror when Caitlin turns around and sees only Wells’ wheelchair. An awesome scene, I’d think.

The fact that Cisco was the one to discover that Wells is the Reverse-Flash and then gets fucking skewered with a vibrating hand is also a nice decision on the part of the authors. The relationship between Cisco and Wells handled really well throughout the season, as Wells himself pointed out -- Cisco felt like the ‘son he never had’. To hammer the point on home, Wells and Cisco even watch a movie together early in this episode. Wells has always been stern but not outright evil with Cisco, and even when he was about to kill Cisco he had the grace to actually sound sorry and be kind of sad, showing that despite bearing the mantle of the Reverse-Flash, one of DC’s cruelest villains, this particular incarnation of the character isn’t that heartless of a bastard.

We still have many questions, like why is he crippled speed-wise, but whatever the case (a battle with a time-travelling Barry?) that does explain why he can’t get back to his home time.

Also, the whole concept of Speed Mirages is a nice little thing to throw us off the ball. We see Barry meet… another Flash while he was running earlier this episode and I was like ‘oh cool it’s the Reverse-Flash let’s have Big Plot Stuff’, but no, it’s just clever foreshadowing of the Barry from the future travelling back in time.

The main villain of the episode is Mark Mardon, brother of Clyde Mardon, who has better control of his weather powers. We see him summon localized rain and thunderbolt, pull people out of buildings with wind, create little hail balls in between his hands and shoot it at people, create a fucking tsunami with wind… it’s a nicer, deadlier show of his powers than just giant typhoons and whatnot. Also the fact that he’s actually connected (and foreshadowed) to a previous minor villain is a cool factor in making him an effective villain too. I also find it really ironic that Mardon’s weakness in this continuity is a super-tech wand, when the Weather Wizard in the comics used a super-tech wand to control the weather.

Mark gets some cool lines acknowledging what a shit person his brother Clyde was, but he was still family. And 'if you can't protect your family, the least you can do is avenge them'. We do see how Mark was kind of a protective older brother to Clyde back in the short flashback too, which is cool.

Joe… Joe doesn’t really make sense this episode, though. And I think there’s a couple of pacing problems with the whole Joe/Mardon rivalry thing. First he doesn’t really recruit Barry to help him and expressly tells him to stay the fuck out several times even though Mark Mardon is, y’know, someone who can summon a goddamn thunderstorm. And when he goes up to hunt down Mardon with Eddie at the second half of the episode, does he bring the powers-cancelling wand? No he doesn’t. Plus Mark Mardon was totally hanging out behind Joe’s car before that one commercial break, so, what, he just drives off when his lightning only blew up Joe’s car? Barry didn’t carry Joe that far away.

We also get some relationship scenes which runs like how I feel about most of Bruce Wayne’s scenes in Gotham. I don’t like it at all, but it’s done pretty well so I don’t hate it. There are some nice little twists here and there, with Iris realizing he actually does have feelings for Barry and Linda calling her out on it. Again, it all really feels kind of creepy because multiple times have people pointed out that Iris is basically Barry’s sister – both Mason and Joe – and the BIG ‘I ACTUALLY LOVE YOU’ that happened? Really didn’t feel appropriate considering what’s going on all around them. Because when your father is being held prisoner by a weather-controlling maniac bent on killing you, you confess your love. There are some great scenes between Barry and Iris if you ignore the whole incestuous vibe, but the big kiss just feels kind of shoehorned in from another episode, is all.

Better than the big kiss is the big identity reveal, which was sufficiently dramatic.

Linda is still fun. I don’t particularly care for her, but I do like how she just shows up at all the worst times for Barry like when he and Iris are going off to rescue Joe. And I do like how she’s at least savvy enough to know about Barry and Iris… doesn’t really bode well for their relationship down the line. Thankfully for Barry, he’s probably going to get a do-over with it.

Eddie Thawne returns after being missing for several episodes, and I honestly thought that was going to be a clue to the fact that he’s going to play a big role in the whole Reverse-Flash thing. But no! Wells straight-up just cleared him off the board by calling him a distant relative which I’m going to take as ancestor. He also shows some kind of jealousy over the change in Iris and Barry’s dynamic – because that whole bowling thing was a definite attempt to get to Barry. I do like Eddie and the reveal that he’s most likely to be a good guy does keep my hopes up. He could be this universe’s incarnation of Hunter Zolomon (who’s a present-day cop that’s good buddies with a Flash), though. We haven’t ruled that possibility out.

Meanwhile, David Singh, the police chief, gets fucking electrocuted by Weather Wizard in the fight at the police station. He doesn’t die, but we do get some justification to why Joe wants to take the fight to the Weather Wizard alone. He gets crippled (Hunter Zolomon? I need to stop seeing Zolomon in everybody) and we see how heartbroken his fiancé is and how he possibly can’t return to the force and all that stuff. Man, poor Singh. At least Barry can undo things in the past.

Mason, Iris’… mentor? Boss? That douchebag from the news station, anyway. He’s a douchebag. Who goes up to someone and then goes all ‘hey I stalk your good friend and I am totally going to publish stuff saying he’s a murderer in paper’. I honestly don’t see Mason surviving really long in this show, especially if Harrison Wells/Eobard Thawne finds out. Maybe next week we’ll get Cisco back and Mason will be the one who ends up with a vibrating hand in his chest.

Shame that, y’know, all of this will get retconned out thanks to time travel, but be honest – who was expecting Cisco’s death, let alone time travel to happen? Plus Barry experiences the whole ‘Iris actually has feelings for him’ thing which will definitely impact Barry’s personality later in the retconned timeline… but for what it’s worth, we get strong performances from Cisco and Wells, and a shit-ton of truly excellent twists. The fact that time travel will undo everything is kind of cheap, but holy shit this was a roller coaster of an episode. 'What the actual fuck' was my reaction most of the time, and really the massive surprise factor in this episode really made me tense.

One Piece 780 Review: Bloody Cliffhangers

One Piece, Chapter 780: The Heart Curse

Jinbe's cover story has not ended, surprisingly, and apparently the Sea Kings are showing him the ruins where they found the Poneglyph. Okay then.

This chapter finally lets us see Luffy begin to fight Doflamingo, as well as show a bit of what happened while Luffy was fighting Bellamy. We see Trebol and Doflamingo beat Law, probably shortly after his arm got sliced off, and Doflamingo does what he does best -- talk shit. He talks about how Luffy will take time to deal with Bellamy because he considers Bellamy a friend (what) and talks shit about Law's life and backstory. Doflamingo then makes Law what is possibly the shittiest deal in the world: die instantly, or perform the immortality surgery... and then die. You know, Doflamingo, normally you want to make the option you want the other dude to take be beneficial so they'll pick it. Granted Doflamingo does say that he'll grant Law's wish, but do you really think he's a trustworthy dude?

Doflamingo's deal does allow Law to deliver one of the most awesome comebacks, though. It may be more PG in the original Japanese translation, but Law says something along the lines of 'bring Corazon back to life, and then go lick the asshole of every person in the country'. Law then fucking flips the bird at Doflamingo and then goes all 'the Straw Hats can work miracles' which is honestly a bit annoying because I want Law to freaking end Doflamingo but why not.

Doflamingo then shoots Law in the gut, which is a nice break from villains who just talk a lot and never do anything. I mean, Doflamingo did talk a lot, but at least he shoots Law too. He talks a bit about how Law had the word Corazon on the back of his jacket and he named his pirates the 'Heart Pirates' and shoots Law in the back, in the insignia, a couple of times before talking about how Corazon's heart curse ends today.

(From the title I honestly expected Law using some kind of awesome unseen-before-now power called the Heart Curse, really)

We get a totally pointless recap page with Viola, Tank and Riku and good god do we really need to waste an entire page to them again

Another short recap of Bellamy's caved-in face, and then Luffy bursts out of the ground and Doflamingo, being the dick he was, talks shit about Bellamy in front of Luffy. Luffy does an Elephant Gun, but Doflamingo blocks the giant thing with his Spider-Web thing. Luffy is shouting all about how Bellamy could never run and vaults over by grabbing Doflamingo's Web (you'd think the web would cut into Luffy's hand, but I guess Haki) and does a new attack -- Hawk Gatling. Which is nice, since I really liked Red Hawk. Doflamingo gets away easily, though, and summons this gigantic wave he calls 'Break White' which I don't think makes a lot of sense. It's like... a bunch of strings wrapped together like Robin's giant-hand-made-out-of-little-hands?

Luffy gets away and finds Law's bleeding (and apparently dead but I don't buy it) body. The chapter ends on people commenting that Birdcage is getting smaller, which could either mean Doflamingo has set the thing on a timer -- which doesn't really make sense since he could just do it in the first place and kill everyone without any real problem. Or maybe he just used a lot of string to do that weird Break White thing and that took some string from the Birdcage or something. Doflamingo (and Trebol) mocks Luffy about how Law died like a bitch or something, but apparently Luffy hears some telepathic message from Law...

Okay, let's be honest -- I'd be more surprised if Law actually did bite the dust in the following chapters. He's not going to die like this, especially not without taking Doflamingo out first. Plus, we have two healing devil fruits in play -- Law's own Ope Ope no Mi and Mancherie's healing fruit and really Mancherie and the Tontatta have been the odd thing out in this entire arc. But I still kind of like this development, and hope we wrap up this fight nicely in two or three chapters before moving on to other stuff. We haven't seen Sanji's group and Big Mom's ship in like a year now!

Gotham S1E18 Review: Deal with the Devil

Gotham, Season 1, Episode 18: Everyone Has a Cobblepot

It's a more cop-centric episode this time around, with the main premise of the episode being Gordon going up against the corrupt Commissioner Loeb. It's not a terribly exciting one, but there are some events that happened here regarding character dynamics that I liked. And we get a Gordon/Penguin team-up! I thought that there were a couple of pretty unnecessary filler moments, most notably the point where Gordon and Dent went to investigate the Chinese information network and wasted quite a bit just being chased by knifed Chinese punks before Bullock saves them.

But overall I do like the episode a fair bit. Not as much as the last one, but it was fun stuff. We start off with Gordon teaming up with Harvey Dent (nice to have him back) to hunt down Loeb, who set Flass free by pressuring Bullock to give a false testimony in the case. I do like how the fact that Bullock's more shady self hinted from the first episode gets explored here -- after all, he was ready to shoot Gordon if Gordon didn't shoot Cobblepot. And Bullock himself seems pretty troubled of the things he did by the end of the episode, though like he said, there isn't really a way to get through it without losing his head back then. Regardless, it was a nice little twist even if I don't really see Gordon and Bullock breaking up for too long.

And then Gordon and Bullock kind of ditch Dent and went to the Penguin for help, for a deal with the devil, as it is... with Penguin getting a favour with no-strings-attached from Gordon. Considering Penguin's role in giving Gordon information (via torture) back during the Flass episode, I thought this was a great angle to explore, and indeed while Penguin seems happy to help Gordon, he is also a businessman and I do like their little bargain. Granted for all the buildup to them finding Loeb's stack of files it all came up empty, but the revelation that they found out Loeb's insane daughter is a strange but nice little twist.

We've been led to believe that Loeb is the one responsible for killing his wife and that would be the predictable button for Gordon to push, but no. The one who killed Loeb's wife was his insane daughter, and I do like the unsettling scene with her talking about bird bones and stuff. Future Magpie perhaps? It also does humanize Loeb more in that he's covering up for his crazy daughter, and I do like how Loeb doesn't give up every single file and whatnot. Gordon gets what he wants and more, though -- Flass's trial presumably gets underway again, and Gordon gets Bullock's files from Loeb and a promotion.

Penguin was absolute fun this episode, with him making the conversation with the two housekeepers look hilarious, and the ending scene where he tells the happy married couple that there's only one ticket, causing the wife to kill the husband... and then Penguin cocks the shotgun and kills her because he wasn't even planning to help any of them. I do like this episode and it's a good one for Penguin, once more bringing back his devious psychotic tendencies of murdering people left and right, as well as pulling strings and pushing buttons to gain allies everywhere. Certainly preferable to seeing him fuck up while running a bar.

The B-plot that takes up the most space is, once more, Fish and the Dollmaker. I honestly don't fucking care. Oh, look, Fish got a new blue eye. Oh, look, Dollmaker puts Jeffrey Coombs' character's head on a Frankenstein woman body. Oh, look, Fish is running the underground operation and kind of backstabs her 'family'. I still don't see any point why Dollmaker would spare Fish and not kill her right then and there and seize control of the underground human factory himself other than just for the sheer hell of it. I don't fucking care at all. For all the buildup I really wasn't feeling the Dollmaker.

We get some short scenes with Riddler being a hopeless romantic with Kringle which I honestly don't see the point of either.

We also get some Bruce and Alfred, and while Alfred wants to just heroically pull off those medical tubes and whatnot and go hunt down Reggie, he's in no condition to do so. Apparently Alfred is going to hide Reggie's identity from the police out of a misguided sense of honour, and Selina is offering her services to help Bruce take down whoever did this to Alfred. I don't particularly have much interest in this side of the plot either, really.


Overall the Penguin, Gordon and Bullock stuff were pretty good, with some nice set pieces involving Loeb and his daughter. But all the other distracting stuff kind of bring down the episode a notch or two.

Agents of SHIELD S02E11 Review: It's Back

Agents of SHIELD, Season 2, Episode 11: Aftershocks

And it’s back! It’s been more than two months since the heavy mid-season finale, and Agents of SHIELD took a two-month break as they aired the first season of Agent Carter instead. But it’s freaking back now. And Agents of SHIELD’s season two, as annoyingly messily-paced as the episodes preceding the mid-season finale are, ended up with a really powerful mid-season finale. And this episode doesn’t really deliver much in terms of revelations, but as its title tells us, it deals with the aftermath of the mid-season finale, with Whitehall and Triplett dead, and both Skye and Raina transformed into Inhumans. This episode is certainly a solid one, and while it still suffers from the ‘too many characters and not much to do with every one’, this episode has been pretty good at giving everyone decent screentime. Granted May still gets way too little screentime despite being one of season one’s main characters, but that’s a rant for another time.

I still maintain that there isn’t really any point to killing Triplett off and I’m still rather bummed that we didn’t end up doing anything really interesting with him beyond killing him off as SHOCK VALUE to shake up Skye and Simmons.

This episode’s plot is divided nicely into two big threads and two smaller ones. The two big threads are SHIELD dealing with the aftermath of Skye’s exposure to the Terrigen mist and Triplett’s death, and Coulson waging a counter-strike revenge war against the crippled Hydra. The two smaller ones are some intrigue regarding Mack and Bobbi, and, sadly, the Inhuman stuff which I was the most excited about. Granted all the other character and Hydra stuff are really cool but after two months I wanted something concrete on the Inhumans.

We do get a fair amount of hints here and there, though, and we have a name for the creepy eyeless dude from last episode’s stinger. We see him as a child after having gone through the Terrigen mist just… teleporting around in a room all Nightcrawler-style while not having eyes. And then Skye’s mother, Jiawei, shows up and kind of takes him in to help him understand his powers. This whole Inhumans thing has apparently been going on for a while considering Skye’s mother’s immortality. She’s basically taking on a Professor X role to these, well, X-Men after they go through the drastic transformations from the Terrigen mist. And there seems to be an actual society built around the whole Inhumans thing which is cool.

Also Fitz totally went all ‘that’s inhuman’ when describing Skye’s heartbeat, which is a nice little nod.

And in the present day, it seems that Gordon has taken over that role from Skye’s mother, even paraphrasing a line she said to him. Again, getting a lot of X-Men vibes from this and that’s fine because I really like the X-Men setting. And this seems to be a rather more fucked-up version of it. We see bits of what Gordon can do in the present day, too, seemingly able to create this big forcefield thing in addition to teleporting Raina to safety and recruiting her to whatever big organization they’re connected to.

Raina herself has not taken her transformation into a thorny monster well, even though I kind of expected her to be over the moon with finally achieving her lifelong goal. She kills a couple of scientists rather brutally with her claws and she’s apparently immune to bullets, and she tracks down Cal. She’s absolutely fucking pissed at her transformation because she expected to be turned into an angel instead of this thorny Mystique, and not being all right in the head she naturally blames Skye, saying about how Skye took the gift meant for her. And she’s definitely suffering, describing how the thorns hurt and how it hurts to breathe and all that. It’s no wonder she later took Cal’s advice to kill herself pretty badly. It’s an interesting take on Raina’s, for sure.

Cal is over the moon over discovering that Skye has gone through the transformation and does this funny little happy dance, and then Judo-slams Raina down to the ground when she manhandles him, and basically tells her that there’s no reverse or cure to her condition and kind of mocks the irony that after her flower-dress obsession she now has a lot of thorns and leaves her out to dry. Cal is basically expecting Skye to come back to him to help her to get through her transformation, and wants to distract SHIELD by going through SHIELD's old index and recruiting a team of metahumans to fuck it up. Though I think we can safely say that we probably won’t be seeing Cal for a while. It’s a pretty cool development for both Raina and Cal’s plot points, and while I really wanted to learn more about the Inhumans, I guess this will do for now.

People have been talking about who Raina is ‘supposed’ to be with Skye being revealed as the MCU version of Daisy Johnson/Quake, and some people have been discussing who Raina is supposed to be. Raina from the comics (who isn’t an Inhuman), Ultimates Gorgon (who is) or whatever… I am honestly a bit annoyed about the whole ‘this person who seems like an original character is actually this other character from the comics who also goes by a different name’ thing that Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter like to do. Jeez, once or twice is awesome, but all the time?

Meanwhile Skye is still in quarantine and SHIELD has no fucking clue what to do with her, though they’re all acting like a supportive family and whatnot. Even if they argue a lot. Fitz and Simmons are just separately confused about what’s going on with Skye and if she has changed, and while it’s a bit annoying to see them (and not even all of them) catch up with stuff the audience already knew for a while now, they actually made it a pretty awesome process.

We get Skye interact with Bobbi and May, taking ‘big sister’ and ‘mom’ counterparts of their dysfunctional family, which is cool, and we see a bit that Skye’s powers are tied to her emotional state and while it does enable her to make that gigantic earthquake from the mid-season finale, it also allows her to create vibrations on stuff all around her. And it’s nice to see how she and Raina, like Gordon in the flashback, have little to no control over their powers and are just fucking terrified. Especially when she’s still dealing with flashbacks of watching Triplett turn into stone and shatter into pieces.

We also see Simmons and Fitz in particular get a fair amount of characterization which are unrelated to each other which is a nice thing to do. Simmons tries to deal with everything in a clinical way, just watching in grief as they cart away the broken-apart remnants of Triplett’s body before having her team massacred by the transformed Raina and failing to kill her even with three shots from a gun. Between both those incidents Simmons have kind of developed a rather… extreme view on super-powered people and kind of took a stance for exterminating all of them like a plague. And while it is interesting to see her get some development, I thought it’s a bit too sudden and rather odd. It certainly will put her at odds with Skye once things are revealed to her, and in retrospect it kind of made sense that Simmons, with all she’s been through, and her penchant for compartmentalizing things and having an overdramatic reactions to things she considers her fault (like jumping out of a fucking plane or going undercover into Hydra), would develop this bit of superpower hatred. She does have the justification of seeing so many metahumans go bad -- Blizzard/Donnie's death in season two probably hit her really hard too, come to think of it. I don’t particularly like it, but she’s lost Triplett and old-Fitz to this metahuman war, gone through a fair bit while being a double agent, and, well, I am sort of interested to see where they go with this especially when she has to choose regarding Skye.

Fitz, on the other hand, goes through the episode with the madness mantra of ‘there’s something wrong with the data in my head’, while tinkering with Skye’s bio-watch thing. He’s definitely improved his language and speaking skills rather significantly over this season, and he’s grown more comfortable with talking to Mack and trying to get him to open up. More on that later, but I do like how this episode is a climax over Fitz’s characterization throughout this season. He’s embraced his new brain-damaged self which is not the same with how he was before – and definitely different – but he knows he’s still the same person deep down. He’s embraced that there’s no going back to his old self before the whole drowning thing, and there won’t be that a cure for Skye either. I do like that scene where he tells Mack that he understands how it’s like to be trapped in his own body without much control over what’s happening.

And after going through the data on Skye’s vitals and blood and thinking that his brain is fucked up, he finally comes to the conclusion that, yes, Skye is changed drastically on a fundamental level, and blabs all of this to Skye and kind of causes her to flip a bit. Fitz gains enough control to cover up for Skye when Simmons confronts her, and it’s a rather big emotional moment how Fitz sympathesizes with Skye’s condition (it’s not wrong, just different) and how he truly understands her. Fitz’s reasons for hiding the truth also makes sense, what with Simmons being all caught up over Triplett’s death and the conflict between Mack and Coulson. It’s nice to see Fitz finally do something beyond just moping around and trying to handle his new state of mind.

There’s also a bit of a running theme of who is guilty for Trip’s death. We’ve got Simmons blaming her curiousity, we’ve got Skye blaming Trip going in to save him, we’ve got Coulson blaming the fact that he’s a leader and there’s Mack blaming Coulson for being so obsessed with alien bullshit in the first place. Mack has a rather valid point about how Coulson is basically turning into a ‘give orders’ leader and not the ‘daddy of the team’ he used to be, and he just came back from being brainwashed, but I dunno.

The main plot on the Coulson side involves him going off to crush Hydra while it scrambles for a new head on the wake of Bakshi’s death. And indeed we see several members of Hydra (including Dr. List, the dude that works for Baron Von Strucker in the post-credits scene for Captain America 2) gathering in a meeting talking about who takes over Whitehall’s operations, and they decide to give it to whoever crushes SHIELD. And I do like how it seems to build up to having these five people – Dr. List, Mr. Bloom, the Sheikh, the Banker and the Baroness – be the big organization for Coulson to take down over the course of the rest of the series, and maybe even be some comic-book characters I don’t know about, but even though they felt important, Coulson manages to take them out with a pretty awesome gambit.

He basically stages a prisoner transfer of Sunil Bakshi, who has been promoted to being moved into Ward’s old cell and survived his suicide attempt, and transfers him to Talbot. Or at least pretends to, because they pretended to be attacked and both May and Coulson “die”. I didn’t believe it for a second, especially with Coulson’s last words being the ridiculous ‘you’ll never take us aliiiiveeee’. May, naturally, lampshades what a terrible line that was.

Hunter pretends to be an assassin hired by one of the Hydra heads, and then lets Bakshi ‘recruit’ him. Hunter brings Bakshi to Mr. Bloom, and after a bit of talking with Doctor List through Hydra Skype or something decides it’s one of the other three candidates and orders pre-planned hits on them. And I do like how the final stretch of this arc plays out similarly to the Godfather with each one of the enemies being taken out. Hunter and Bobbi kills Bloom’s people with the machineguns strapped onto the trucks and then headshots Bloom, and Bloom’s people kill the other three nameless Hydra heads, rather ironically, with Whitehall’s old experimental weapons... a nice touch! I can’t say I remember the poison gas, but we see the stone-ification from the Obelisk used on the Baroness and Scarlotti’s disintegration grenades used on the Banker. Granted there’s no way Coulson will know that all the Hydra heads will get taken out (and they don’t, Von Strucker and List are still alive) but Coulson did deal a gigantic blow to Hydra by just throwing them a bone and expecting them to take each other up.

All this playing with dramatic music, and May talking about how Coulson respected Trip as the embodiment for all the good qualities SHIELD should be, and how Hydra lacks all of those qualities and that’s why they will fall.

It’s an awesome scene! I am unconvinced that Hydra has completely been crushed that easily (or that Whitehall has actually died permanently, really), but Coulson certainly did a huge blow against them. And Bakshi is still alive, handed over to the government and we know their track record with imprisoning Hydra agents have been pretty shitty. Ditto Ward and Agent 33.

Also Coulson has to deliver Trip’s stuff to his mother and good god that was a fucking sad scene even without words. People dying in fictional works never really got me, but these scenes of telling their families, fuck. In a more dramatic flair, a picture of the Howling Commandos is seen while Coulson comforts Trip's mother, and with May talking about how Trip symbolizes how SHIELD should be, I think it's supposed to represent that the old guard is really dead and buried now and all that's left is Coulson's new SHIELD.

Speaking of Trip’s death, we also get a bit in the beginning where everyone takes it out on something. May punching a bag, Simmons throwing herself into work, Hunter drinking beer and all that. And at the end they’re just reminiscing about Trip stories and, well, the sheer impact of Trip’s death hits home and why the fuck did he have to die beyond shock value really I’m so sad now.

But that last scene goes for a dark turn, as it appears that Bobbi and Mack have their own agenda. Mack gave Coulson this little model of Lola and it’s actually a scanner which locates Fury’s Toolbox, and both Bobbi and Mack seem to have something in store for them. I do sincerely hope this isn’t about Hydra again because we did that last season with Ward and it’d be just retreading stuff, but I’m confused on who would want that. Leviathan? Hopefully not because that was a bit dumb. Maria Hill? Some other thing? This little twist is really one of the few times that Bobbi and Mack felt needed beyond just taking some action screentime away from May and Ward (who, incidentally, doesn’t show up at all this episode).

These ‘new blood’ have some scenes which isn’t that distracting like how they were for most of the season. Hunter was rather cool with his acting and shooting Bloom in the head, and I do like how he pitches in like a jackass during the big argument between Mack and Coulson about how Mack has a point and whatnot. And there’s this ongoing thing about Mack wanting to know Bobbi’s secret and she reveals that it’s a therapy club thing? I thought it was a redundant waste of screentime which could’ve gone to revealing more Inhuman stuff, but no, it’s just Bobbi being secretive and bringing their relationship closer to destruction if/when Hunter finds out about her keeping secrets. It’s a nice parallel to the Fitz/Simmons situation too with one of them keeping and lying about a secret from the other.

Mack has taken a bit of a dip into the jerkass pool but thankfully it’s with good reason. All the big talking about how he’s questioning Coulson’s leadership finally comes to head in that argument, and he isn’t exactly being kind towards Fitz either. He at least has the excuse of being rage-controlled and kind of apologizes to Coulson later on. Of course, with the final scene, it might have some other more sinister meaning.

Overall a pretty solid episode. I don’t really have much expectations for Agents of SHIELD as a season, though, because the last time I had it kind of disappointed me. It’s definitely a chance to pick itself off the ground after a messy, extremely crowded first half of this season, though. 

One Piece 779 Review: Get to the damn final battle already

One Piece, Chapter 779: The Final Battle

Damn all these flashback and recap chapters, all I want is to get to the damn fight against Doflamingo! This chapter sort of ties up a lot of loose ends and basically just sets the stage for Luffy against Doflamingo, but it’s kind of annoying since, y’know, this arc has been going on for some time and a lot of the subplots – like the Tontatta or Princess Mansherie or Kin’emon or, as cool as they were, Sabo and Big Mom’s men and Burgress – felt really redundant and kind of led nowhere and could’ve been their own little side-stories instead of bogging down this arc.

We get a bit of Zoro watching on his sword not having a scratch and flashbacking to his training with Mihawk regarding coating his swords with Haki, and how every one of Zoro’s swords can be a Kokutou (Black Sword, which is Mihawk’s sword) and gets him to train and being forbidden to drink alcohol until he masters it. The whole black Haki Sword is, I guess, is how Mihawk is just so damn awesome and why he has a black sword… I honestly have no idea if this has been planned since the beginning, but if it has, well…

We cut to some other characters. Fujitora apparently took care of the rest of Pica’s giant golem body which was something I wondered about last chapter, and other people react to Zoro’s awesomeness. I think Bartolomeo just fangasms himself to death. Also, the Tontatta blew up the factory, which is nice progression because the last thing we needed was another chapter starring the bloody Tontatta. Trebol is just yammering about how Mansherie (or however you spell her name) can just restore the factory, while Mansherie and the other Tontatta catch up with Robin, Rebecca and Kyros and talk a bit about Mansherie’s healing powers.

Also, apparently Koala and Sabo are heading up to the castle, so Sabo I guess is going to, or at least trying to, fight Doflamingo? I dunno, as much as I want to see Sabo do something, I want Doflamingo to fall to Luffy and/or Law. Preferably Law.

And apparently in the time that Zoro, Kyros, Franky and the rest took out their opponents, another battle has been decided. Thanks to Viola, we know that Bellamy has been taken out, with his face caved into the shape of Luffy’s fist just like their first battle. We then get a flashback of their fight, which, again, ended like their first battle with Luffy delivering a fucking epic punch to Bellamy and driving his head into the ground. I thought I liked where they went with Bellamy’s characterization, how the obvious ‘he’s going to change sides because his boss is evil’ trope actually gets subverted… I liked that fact, and I liked how Bellamy is all ‘he’s scum but I’m scum too’ and all that, but I thought the way it played out was rather disjointed thanks to the large gaps inbetween scenes of seeing Bellamy.

At least the next chapter will be Luffy vs. Doflamingo, no holds barred… because apparently Doflamingo claims to have killed Law. Well. Fuck that, if that happened, although if Law actually did die, I’m sure he’ll be fine. Mansherie’s devil fruit or even Law’s on can probably get him back. I just want to get to the final fight already and see the aftermath of this mammoth arc.