One Piece 870 Review: Fighting Big Mom

One Piece, Chapter 870: Farewell

Cover page... Bartrolomeo straight-up shanked a dude to death with a wooden stake! Yeah, he's the "Cannibal" and don't you forget. I do like that the manga, while mainly portraying Bartolomeo as a Luffy fanboy, doesn't completely forget that the dude was initially introduced as a psychopath who cuts off people's tongues. Even if he's on the side of our heroes it's not like that automatically means he's a good guy, he's still a psychopath.

So the chapter was pretty cool. Big Mom's forces are arrayed out, and they promise to massacre every single person in the castle as Big Mom herself rampages. Everyone stops Luffy from going out, because they're a strike team that's there to get Sanji and the poneglyph, and it's time to bug out... it's not like they have their full force (well, mostly Zoro) with them. Bege then gives this speech about how he doesn't give a shit about the Straw Hats, but he's going to stand firm for his own family (Chiffon's basically disowned by Big Mom at this point, too) and crew, and decides to dispel his Big Father form, allowing Caesar to fly him out of there while everyone else is still within his body.

Caesar shoots the plan down and while he's a pussy he's also got a point -- everyone there can use Haki, so they'll get shot down pretty easily.

At which point Judge confronts Sanji and asks him why he saved them, and Sanji's answer is pretty cool. His boss, Zeff, wouldn't have liked it, and Sanji talked about how he's never going to live in a way that will make him too ashamed to see Zeff in the eye, and Sanji laughing at his family's death is something that Zeff will be ashamed of. He then goes on a rant to Judge, saying that Vinsmoke Sanji is dead, and demands Judge quite confrontationally to "TELL ME YOU'RE NOT MY FATHER!" Judge decides to never approach Sanji or East Blue, and decides to have the Germa be the scapegoat to hold off Big Mom, because he 'won't be indebted to a failure'.

Caesar and Capone barely make it away from Big Mom's sun fire attack when the castle mode is released. Ichiji's a gigantic dick who tells Niji that he's a fool for showing concern to a wounded Reiju... but of course, while Capone and Caesar make a getaway, Luffy and Sanji jump out  and unleash a Diable Jambe/Elephant Gun combo that blocks Big Mom's lightning strike... yeah, these guys are too stupid and bullheaded to obey orders. Well, one thing that's for sure... next chapter's going to be hella interesting. 

Legion S01E08 Review: The King

Legion, Season 1, Episode 8: Chapter 8

So, the first season of Legion ends, and it ends pretty amazingly. I don't think anything can really stand up to the trippiness and the masterful, genre-bending bit of the first few episodes, but it's still a pretty bizarre ride.

How does the episode start off? Well, by showing that Clark (a.k.a. mr burn-face) is a loving family man, which is a bit of a weird, cheap way to build up sympathy for Division Three just to make David's decision not to go murderkill everyone more meaningful. Which... okay? It felt a bit unnecessary, but on the other hand Clark does have so much more to do in this episode as a minor character than the Eye did, being a creepy stalker and all. We still see David create this hilariously creepy stuck-together-tower of Division Three goons, helplessly held together with psychic powers. Now, the question is to what to do with them. A nuclear strike is being ordered on the compound, apparently. Ptonomy wants to kill Clark and go to war. Melanie wants to read his mind and steal the secrets. David wants to act like his daddy and reason and try to coexist. Cary, the only sane man in the room, doesn't really give a shit about this missile malarkey, because he really wants to rip the fucking Shadow King out of David's head before he breaks free.

But he already has. Somewhat. Syd gets a mental visit from Lenny (Shadow King, Lenny -- Aubrey Plaza's performance is so strong that I kind of view Lenny as the primary being), who justifies it as their minds being connected after the body-swap thing. Lenny tells Syd about how she's been within David's mind since infancy, and ripping her out is something that will kill or irreparably damage David. Syd doesn't trust Lenny, but talks to Clark about the details in hopes of earning the Division's cooperation.

David is strapped into a machine that will identify all the brain waves in David's head and suck them out. Okay, science mumbo-jumbo stuff! No idea when Cary had the time to build all this, but since he produced the mental headband out of nowhere I guess part of his mutant powers is to create insane-looking sci-fi plot devices? This allows David to relive the opening of the first episode via a trip down the memory lane as the Shadow King's influence is burned away, before meeting Lenny once more. "Who am I without you?" David asks Lenny. Throughout the season Lenny has been compared to a disease, a tumour, a parasite, inner demons and an alternate personality.  And, yes, the question remains, and it's something that's chillingly similar to what people with mental problems may have -- will I be the same person after this part of my mind is literally exorcised?

And then Syd does something rather stupid, and gives the Shadow King that way out, by sucking him out with a body-swapping kiss. The Shadow King, now bereft of David's full powers, makes use of his/her own and jumps from Syd to Kerry. Ptonomy shoots the place up, but Kerry's martial arts skills allows Lenny-in-Kerry to whack Ptonomy down. We get an awesome bit when Lenny-in-Kerry and David charge each other, causing David to push Lenny out of Kerry... but the only other host Lenny can jump in? Oliver.

Oliver, who's mucking around the central power chamber helping to fix things, and just to be extra-cruel, he gets possessed just as he regains some memories about his wife Melanie... but possessed he is, and before anyone realizes what's happening, Oliver and Lenny are gone, driving down the road and going to get... something. Again, if there's one thing that I will criticize heavily about this season is that the Shadow King's motivations are never made super-clear when she does something that isn't just a power play for David's body. I guess they're now just hunting down Professor X, driving down the nice mountain roads on a sexy sports car?

Division Three leaves with some talk of possible cooperation (and the threat that shit David strongkt), and if nothing else Clark seems convinced that these dudes aren't completely evil. Besides, they have 

a common enemy to hunt in the form of the Shadow King now. The story ends -- the Shadow King escapes with Oliver, but at least he's out of David's mind, he's mostly sane, and Division Three are frenemies instead of outright enemies. In David's awesome ultimatum: "War is over... if you want it."

But this is a Marvel show, and Marvel shows have end-credit teases, and in one of the most bizarre ones ever, we have a giant silver floating Pokeball fly in and quite literally shrink David down and capture him and flying away. Is the villain for Legion's second season going to be Mewtwo? I highly doubt it. Is it going to be Mojo? God, don't let it be Mojo.

Still, despite some bits that feel like they could have been treated a little better, this absolutely bizarre show has quickly grown into one of my favourite stories. Once more, it's not for everyone, but it's definitely one that is worth checking out.

Movie Review: Teen Titans - The Judas Contract

Teen Titans: The Judas Contract (2017)

I know I should've been excited for this, but the end result is honestly a bit underwhelming. I've watched two adaptations of the Judas Contract now, the epic storyline that pushed the New Teen Titans title in the 80's into prominence. It was the plot that the second season of Teen Titans (relatively recently I reviewed every single episode of it) was loosely adapted on, and it was also one of the first graphic novels that I read. As part of an ongoing, and as part of a storyline that really sold Deathstroke as this master manipulator, it was an amazing experience.

Yet this DC animated movie adaptation felt... I don't know. Lackluster, I guess? It acts as a sequel to Justice League vs. Teen Titans, and is therefore also in the same New-52-based animated movie continuity spearheaded by Justice League: War, and its cast of Titans follows the format of that continuity. Starfire and Nightwing as the trainers, and Damian Wayne/Robin, Blue Beetle, Raven and Beast Boy to round up the Teen Titans. Oh, and, of course, Terra. Who, in this movie, is just quickly introduced as this weird new addition to the team that almost as quickly shows that she's a rather unpleasant girl. Even when bonding with Beast Boy, she's more brusque than friendly, and I never really bought just why the Titans really felt at ease with Terra so much that they'd let their guard down that much. Though I guess Damian Wayne is such a Grade A douchebag that they're obliged to do so?

I realize comparing it to both the source material and a different adaptation isn't exactly fair, but in the New Teen Titans comic, Terra was a recurring character even before the Judas Contract storyline, and she's obfuscating niceness to Beast Boy (or, well, Changeling as he's known in the comics at that time) so even though the audience knows that she's a sleeper agent for Deathstroke, the reactions of the Titans to her betrayal is something I'm invested in. Ditto for the cartoon, which took a different approach and have Terra actually be an innocent that the Titans befriend, and later corrupted by Deathstroke with promises of acceptance and power, and then sent back in. 

Here? Here is where an adaptation tries to adapt all the big moments and the broad strokes of the Judas Contract storyline, but loses sight of what makes it so appealing. If anything else, it treats the Brother Blood storyline of draining the powers of the Titans and becoming a god as more of the 'main' storyline, and not just a peripheral subplot that happens to intersect. The voice acting is pretty amazing (with Deathstroke and Terrra being particularly well-acted ones) and I love seeing some classic comic book panels and action sequences reproduced on-screen, but at the same time it just lacks... I dunno, it lacks oomph, I guess?

Part of it is that the movie tries to tack on a lot of things. The Terra/Raven rivalry and Terra/Beast Boy romance was always part of the original source material, as is the creepy Terra/Deathstroke romance (which they thankfully changed to Deathstroke declining Terra's underage advances), but at the same time not really enough is spent to dwell on any of the relationships that when Terra turns on Beast Boy and later on Deathstroke it just seems like an 'eh, makes sense' plot twist that doesn't really push the emotional buttons that it did a decade ago when I first discovered and read the comic for the first time. Add that to things that they didn't really do enough of but tacked on anyway -- like Blue Beetle's father issues, or Nightwing/Starfire moving on to the next step in their relationship, or the (admittedly very enjoyable) Nightwing/Robin dynamic where they've developed from their antagonistic headbutting in 'Son of Batman' into something brotherly.

A good chunk of the characterization screentime is, thankfully, delivered to Terra herself, so while the scripting and pacing isn't as well done as I would've wished, the voice acting and the script does put a fair amount of focus on Terra as a dark, tortured and confused character. At the end it kind of reduces her into a screaming angry girl instead of the more complex incarnations that the 00's cartoon or the original comic book versions, but she's at least somewhat enjoyable.

Deathstroke in particular, despite the excellent voice work, a point of contention for me. I don't mind, really, having a reduced role for the likes of Raven or Nightwing, and even Beast Boy getting reduced roles as a satellite love interest definitely works if the timeframe is relatively constricted. But Deathstroke suffers from the burden of the strange decision to change him from an independent mercenary with an obsession for control into a disgraced League of Assassins member. And unfortunately, thanks to his motivations here being set to just having revenge on Damian, it makes the character look way too petty and one-dimensional. And while removing Deathstroke's backstory or the admittance of his son Jericho into the Teen Titans would bloat up the movie even further, at least one of these two would've worked in nicely with some of the surplus filler material for the lesser Titans being cut out. 

Of course, it's still a superhero action movie at the end of the day, and it still has enough appeal on terms of that. Terra's powers, as well as those of Raven and Brother Blood, look relatively fantastic. But other than Terra, Robin and Deathstroke, it might be a little mean to say that the rest of the voice work are... merely perfunctory. None of them stand out as being annoying, but here I am, two hours after watching the movie, and I can barely remember what Blue Beetle or Raven sounded like -- something I have no problem remembering with a stronger voice cast. I'm severely underwhelmed by what really should have been a great triumph, but cutting out too much things from the original source material, adding unnecessary plotlines and the lack of buildup all hurt the movie from being good to being merely watchable. It's worth a decent look, but don't expect the same level of greatness that these 'greatest hits adapted into movies' things should be.

(No DC Easter Eggs Corner for these movies, I think -- they are more or less huge love letters to the original comic book arcs that the movies are based upon, and there's no point in listing every single thing there.)

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure S01E15 Review: Wedding Rings and Piercings

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Season 1, Episode 15: A Hero's Proof

[updated 10/2018]

This episode mainly focuses on the fight between Joseph and Wamuu. Well, it was two-on-one at first, but after shooting some rather sub-par CGI bubbles at Wamuu, Caesar sort of just got himself knocked out. It's kind of okay, honestly -- I've always thought that this particular leg of Battle Tendency was always paced a bit oddly in the manga, and it's about the same feeling watching it in the anime. There are so many moments where it's evident that Wamuu just stands around doing nothing, while Joseph pulls off increasingly nonsensical crazy shit. And it's certainly entertaining, don't get me wrong, but even considering the usage of Hamon, it really stretches the suspension of disbelief just how fast Joseph can set up his traps and all that nonsense. Even considering the fact that Wamuu just stands still a lot.

Thankfully, both Joseph and Wamuu's voice actors are insanely bombastic and hammy (Speedwagon gets a couple of similarly hammy lines, but he makes the best out of them). Joseph throws in a lot of fun English words, with "OH NO!" and his... "Cracker Volley", whatever the hell those bolas are supposed to be, and just why he's carrying those around.

Wamuu, for his part, ends up recognizing Hamon as an ability that is able to truly hurt him, and we get to see his powers -- where all three Pillar Men here seem to have Santana's wacky body-contortionist powers, Wamuu is able to create little whirlwinds with his hair bangles, and his arms can spin to create what the subtitles call the "Holy Sandstorm". The voice actor and line are a lot more bombastic about it.

There was a weird moment where the anime tries to be too faithful to the manga and has some random bloke read a narration about how "Joseph is still the hero of the story and he's not actually running away", which I thought was just weird. Definitely took me out of the episode. Maybe it would've worked better if it just showed up in actual writing, instead of some dude narrating it.

Anyway, the battle ends up with Caesar's face fucked up, and Joseph's silly mine cart trick accomplishing nothing. Joseph manages to bullshit an excuse about how he's going to get stronger and eggs Wamuu to fight him in a month and not kill him, and... and for some reason, these Pillar Men that thinks of humans as nothing but bugs decides to humour him.

And then he leaves a ring that he very coincidentally has on his person, a ring that has the very, very specific ability to eject a lethal poison in a month. How bizarrely convenient! Wamuu puts it in Joseph's aorta, making it the little insurance that Joseph will come back -- because he has the antidote in a different ring. ACDC, apparently not wanting to be left out, puts a second ring in Joseph's wind-pipe. While I do enjoy the setup for a typical shonen "fight me after a set amount of time" trope, it is kind of bullshit to have these magical timer-poison rings conveniently on their person.

And the Pillar Men leave, leaving Caesar cradling a wounded Joseph, and it's... ultimately the episode's still entertaining thanks to the voice acting and the competent animation, but I do think that it's nowhere as good as it could have been.

Legion S01E07 Review: McAvoy or Stewart?

Legion, Season 1, Episode 7: Chapter 7

Hoo! Last episode was a bit of a slight misstep, but this one finally brings us back to speed. If anything, it's actually brilliant in integrating both the exposition and world-building parts of David Haller's backstory in conjunction with the mental image of him literally putting himself back together after the damage that Lenny did to him.

The Clockworks fascimile in David's head has gone rogue. In addition to the Eye stalking poor Kerry, and Lenny interrogating Amy for 'that man' that brought David to her family, the other inmates, basically NPCs in a game, have gone amuck. Syd's still asleep, I'm not sure where Ptonomy is in all this mess, and David's stuck in his personal coffin. Things are dire, and I am struck by how thematic that the final battle is literally a battle in the mind. Of sorts. 

Cary and Oliver, meanwhile, are still in that iceberg lounge thing and they have a conversation about the true identity of Lenny, where from a bunch of other clues (including the dog) they figure out the identity of the parasite in David's mind, a powerful mutant called Amahl Farouk. Known to Cary and X-Men fans worldwide as the villain Shadow King. Actually knowing who Shadow King was, it's a nice little bonus -- especially since the dude has never felt or looked as terrifyingly unsettling as he does here. Oliver and Cary are the more pragmatic problem-solvers here. They want to use Cary's weird head-band thing to do two things -- isolate the Shadow King and David, and to stop the bullets from hitting David when time resumes. It's not clear if he stopped time or if it's moving normally and the whole Clockworks stuff is just going at the very very fast speed of thought, and considering David's powers it could go either way. But to do either of that, they need to free David.

That's all a discussion in the brief flashback, because in the present time Cary shows up inside Oliver's scuba suit to rescue Syd, they communicate and Cary gives several pairs of 3D glasses that will help them see through Lenny's illusions? Okay then. That bit didn't quite made a lot of sense, but I suppose so.

Melanie is also running around the Astral Plane, but I'm not sure if she does anything before meeting up with Oliver and Cary, and Oliver has spent so long in the Astral Plane that he doesn't even remember Melanie. (Someone should've given him a quick crash course -- if David isn't aware of Melanie's backstory, Cary certainly damn well does). We also find that in the real-world, Rudy is dead and has been Mystique-replaced by the Eye.  Does anyone remember Rudy? I actually forgot he existed at this point of the show. The death isn't dwelt on for too long, and neither is the real-world parts because they still can't do much.

Oh, and we get to see poor Rudy's soul-mind thing in Clockworks, reduced into a comatose drooling man in a wheelchair as Syd and Kerry run around. But that's not where the big revelations are, no. The big revelation is David... who has a conversation with himself. The British, rational, confident version of himself. Rational David reminds David Prime (that's what I'm going to call him) that, hey, they're not trapped in a real coffin, so let's make a big-ass lecture room with huge chalkboards. Then we get one helluva load of introdumps done in hilarious chalk-stick-men animation. It gives a full storyline about what David himself remembers, and while part of me is annoyed that I'm treated like a kid and shown the same information twice, the revelation is more like a summary of what the Shadow King has been doing, which different characters uncover different parts while David is just remembering. We also get some all-but-outright confirmation about Legion's parentage, if the brief glance of a wheelchair with an X-sprocketed wheel isn't enough. This also allows David to flex his 'manipulate the world my mind created' powers, and I do like how the British-accented Rational David is the most hilarious guide ever. Great job, too, to Dan Stevens for selling the various aspects of David Haller not just in this episode but throughout the season. Also the scene, I think, is necessary because of how David has never been sure about many aspects of his life. Earlier in the season Melanie had to tell him that all the strange occurrences are because of mutant powers and not madness. And now, he has to tell himself that Lenny isn't part of his powers, but the parasitic Shadow King.

David breaks out of his prison in a very awesome scene -- which really shouldn't be awesome, because it's just a man screaming and blowing up a CGI coffin, but the fact that David has finally, for-reals-now, taken control of his life and his mind, is well done. I'm not entirely sure just why Lenny killed the Eye first, but kill him he did, and in the real world the Eye's body is crumpled into a disgusting cube of body parts. As Lenny runs around and chases Kerry and Syd in a hilarious voiceless section set up like the old-timey movies,  she also realizes what Team Oliver is trying to do, and speeds up time in the real world. Meanwhile David runs through some weird mental shit as he runs around the same series of corridors before he has enough and blows the illusion up with his powers. 

Melanie and Cary put the headband on David. Rudy (who's apparently dying, not dead) manages to use his powers to stall mental Lenny a bit longer. In the Astral Realm, David charges Lenny. And when boom everyone returns to their proper bodies in the real world, David is once more in full control of his powers, vaporizes the bullets, and we get a glance of Lenny/Shadow King stuck in the mental coffin. Everything looks to come up sunshines and smiles. David and Amy make up, Rudy isn't dead, Oliver is walking around from his years-long slumber and making breakfast...  but then Division Three shows up, lead by the burnt-face dude that David supposedly killed back in episode one. Which... is weird? I really don't buy that these guys are a threat to a Phoenix-tier reality-warping mutant like David, so back when I was watching it was absolutely weird and a bit of a downer. If anything else, the real threat here is Lenny busting a crack in her mental prison-coffin just as Division Three is about to fire.

Regardless, though, episode 7 of Legion is still a huge climax. Yes, what exactly happened -- Lenny dicks around and only manages to kill the one person the audience isn't rooting for is a bit suspect, and then David wakes up after the revelation and just wins -- isn't the most interesting thing in the world. But the battle in the mind, with David going through the themes that has been set up throughout the series, to embrace who he is, embrace the truth amid the lies, learn about his enemy's backstory... I thought that we probably could've intermixed the Oliver/Cary and David/David introdump to make it less repetitive. But the rest of the episode is kind of amazing. Add that to the amazing and insane lighting choices, silent-movie bit that actually worked, and the amazing, amazingly intense score? Yeah, I really like this episode. 

Legion S01E06 Review: Dance Number

Legion, Season 1, Episode 6: Chapter 6

So yeah, we spend nearly the entire episode in the mental institution. It's the most stupid 'obligatory episode' ever and it never ever really works, not for the least that it's never going to be the big grand revelation for all the fantastical things that has happened in the show. Like, no, no one's going to believe that Smallville or Supernatural will end with the revelation that everything you cared for is just mass schizophreniac minds at work. But Legion? It's a show that has a justification for it, and the fact that it's quickly established to the audience as an illusion in David's headspace is definitely well done.

In a neat twist of one of my most disliked tropes, Lenny, under the guise of the lead psychiatrist, tries to convince everyone present that,  yeah, they're all mentally ill. But, of course, as powerful as Lenny is, she can't give a perfect representation of something because it's David's mind after all. Syd feels like she's in a dream but not really, she sees David's bedroom door and weird stuff manifesting at a particular point in the Clockworks hospital (accompanied with eerie music). But Syd -- who gets to be main character of the episode, has trouble convincing David of anything at all because no mutant powers are active in the imagined Clockworks, and David's just wanting to get better and get through his therapy, because he has gotten a balance between his mania and depression. So, uh, he apparently has bipolar disorder in addition to schizophrenia? I'll buy that, he's had some mood swings over the past few episodes. Lenny-induced mood swings, still, but hey, Dream!David doesn't know that. In any case, Syd tries to figure out that they're in an alternate reality while David keeps telling her that, no, don't let the delusions win. 

Everyone gets a therapy session with dr. Lenny, which is entertaining but ultimately doesn't go anywhere. Lenny just dismisses all their delusions, and poor Ptonomy doesn't even get to do much in this episode after the interview with Lenny.

Oh, also, after that moment when everyone goes to sleep (including a sad moment where Cary and Kerry are puzzled as to why they literally stick together all the time without any real justification) Lenny pulls off all the stops and goes into an insane dance number. Whyever for? I dunno, but it works in the context of the show. Madness is the name of the game. 

Oliver Bird, having spent the past few episodes in the literal periphery of both viewers and characters, apparently can travel into people's dreams with his Scooby Doo scuba suit, and I'm not sure if it's his mutant power (I'll assume it is) or that he's also a psychic like Lenny and David, and manages to successfully spirit Melanie Bird and Cary away to try and help things out in the physical plane -- where they find that everything's frozen in time, but at the same time they can't Quicksilver their way out of this.

This leaves Kerry alone, and god, in one of the creepiest yet simplest moments of the show, we have the Eye in all his glorious creepiness starting to stalk Kerry. Also, Syd sees this gross-ass weird... organ... thing and this causes the Devil in Yellow Eyes to transform and kidnap Syd and shove her into the bedroom and put her to sleep with earphones, but not before David notices and notes that something is wrong. 

Lenny starts giving a monologue to David about how she is a fungus, a parasite, clinging to David, not caring about anything but the power David can grant him. Usually she'll move on from one host to the next, but with David the sheer power he has makes her want to cohabitate, something she's quickly losing patience for. Lenny tells David huge hints about his father, a holier-than-thou type that hides him away to keep him safe, and apparently Lenny's just sick of all this cloak and dagger stuff. She doesn't care anymore about David's self-esteem, his desire for love, his desire for relationships, and in her words, "all I need you for is your body." She shoves David into this strange coffin in the deep recesses of his/their/her mind. With everyone in trouble, the episode leaves at a cliffhanger. It's a bit unclear just who is responsible for this bizarre Summerland bit, whether it's David or Lenny, or a little bit or both -- Lenny's motivations are a bit muddy, which I think is one of the weaker bits of the episode. But more importantly, Lenny has taken the advantage, shoving David down and taking over. I guess the reasons she's not done it before is because it's easier to allow the host to keep doing what it thinks it wants to do? I dunno. It's a bit weaker than previous and upcoming entries in my opinion. So.

Gotham S03E21-22 Review: Owls, Freaks, Policemen, Assassins, Gangsters and Butlers

Gotham, Season 3, Episode 21: Destiny Calling; Episode 22: Heavydirtysoul

Hoo, finale! It's technically two episodes, 'Destiny Calling' and 'Heavydirtysoul', but it aired as a two-parter and honestly worked better as a two-hour long mega episode, so I just kinda want to do it all in one go. 

So, yeah, where to begin, really? There's a lot of things that went down in this episode. Of course, the rage virus ends up being solved by Lucius Fox synthesizing an antidote offscreen, which is what everyone expected, but the wrinkle is that you need Hugo Strange to do that, and thanks to Alfred's hilarious interrogation of the poor man last episode (which I neglected to mention, but I have to just note that it's pretty freakin' awesome) Hugo Strange is out in the wind. It's a race between various parties -- Fish, the League and the GCPD -- to get Strange, and we still have the problem of brainwashed Bruce and evil Leslie to contend with.

Oh, and there's also the drama between the Barbara/Butch/Tabitha to settle, as well as Penguin versus Riddler. So yeah, where to start? Let's start there, actually. Penguin versus Riddler. I genuinely don't understand what the showmakers were trying to do, involving Fish in the finale only to quickly kill her off via angry raging Gordon. But while we'll talk about Gordon and the general Hugo Strange plot later, apparently Fish is back for the sole purpose of being killed by Gordon and serving as yet another parental figure to galvanize Penguin's return as the King of Gotham. Which... I'm kind of okay with? I've always been annoying at how Fish stuck around like a bad penny especially after her resurrection last season, but after escaping early this season, she ends up kind of making nice with Penguin, before disappearing for the entirety of the season until last episode's return. I'm not sure just why Penguin is so ready to be subservient to her, and no mention to her cuttlefish take-over-people's-minds power is made so, uh... yeah. Fish is dead.

And that's fine, because Oswald quickly traps Riddler on the back of his car, leading to a very awesome bit of outsmarting each other that both actors sold well. Riddler picks his own lock and takes over Penguin's car, wanting to lead him to the same pier where he once failed to kill Penguin. Oswald's rant when Riddler first took over, that his whole persona is based on the lie that he's killed Penguin, ends up causing Riddler's obsession to resurface, and as in any Riddler story, it's this same obsession and compulsion that ends up biting Riddler in the ass, because Penguin actually expected Riddler to take over, leaving the pin that Riddler used to pick his own lock and giving him a fake gun. Penguin turns Riddler's own gimmick against him, playing Riddler like a puppet on a string and getting him to go on the convoluted, far-reaching plan to fix his failure like he knew Edward would. And in the Penguin-vs-Riddler fight? The Riddler lost soundly, being turned into an ice block by Mr. Freeze...

And, in a clever twist, gets turned into the inspiration for Penguin's Iceberg Lounge. The fact that Penguin wants to keep this sign of his weakness around as a reminder is totally fitting his character, giving their rivalry a clear victor and conclusion while still leaving the door open for Riddler to return in the future, because shit, I do want him back. 

The other villains that get to fight each other and I'll just tick off here is Tabitha, Butch and Barbara. Butch and Tabitha are basically getting even more and more pissed off at just how little Barbara even respects them, and Tabitha, whose weird relationship as dual-lovers with Butch and Barbara has been a constant this season, ends up choosing the side that respects her. Barbara ends up confronting Butch first and shoots him in the head, because Butch is definitely disloyal. And when it comes to Tabitha confronting Barbara in their hideout, honestly if I was a betting man, I'd say Barbara would win. She's the long-running actress and the one whose character is based on a canon character compared to Tabitha's in-name-only adaptation of the Tigress.

But alas, Barbara and Tabitha ends up fighting, and Barbara gets electrocuted to death after a violent scuffle, leaving Tabitha the unexpected victor, and while she's not up to being Gotham's new crime boss (though definitely the next contender to be Penguin's rival next season) she's apparently here to serve a different role. As Catwoman's mentor. And I cannot believe how 'Tabby' has been there right under our noses. A sultry female character dressed in black, with a whip, who isn't afraid of using sexuality as a weapon? Yeah, Tabitha teaching Selina how to use the whip, and Selina being pushed away by Bruce, will definitely end up moulding Selina into something far more evil down the line. 

Oh, and apparently, this isn't the end of Butch, because the surprise reveal  at the end of the episode reveals that he's actually... Solomon Grundy. Okay, then! That's pretty awesome, and Butch's actor does have the physical bulk to play Solomon Grundy and I kind of enjoy his actor too, so why not?

Now, let's talk Bruce.

Again... it's a little convoluted, but the gist of it is that Ra's al Ghul wants someone to be the cleanser of Gotham City, and he's moulding Bruce into some sort of evil Batman to do so, and up until the confrontation in the Lazarus Pit, Bruce seems pretty much enraptured with all the talk of destiny and whatnot. Alfred, of course, isn't going to let his adopted kid get fucked over by this assassin lord, but Bruce's conditioning is apparently so powerful that the kid is willing to run Alfred over with a sword. The sight of a dying Alfred breaks Bruce out of the conditioning, though, and for some reason... Ra's just shrugs it off and lets Bruce use the waters of the Lazarus Pit to stabilize Alfred's mortal wounds?

It's a bit messy, to be sure, but one thing that I'm going to say is that the actors absolutely nailed that scene when Alfred and Bruce were just crying respectively, with Alfred giving Bruce that heartfelt, tear-jerking speech about how he loved the boy the moment he held the little kid in his arms, and while the proceedings of the plot is kind of muddled, it's definitely well-acted as Bruce breaks free from his confusion. The moment when he apologizes and cries in Alfred's embrace in the hospital is a lot of d'aww.

Of course, he pushes Selina away, but after all the Batman Begins stuff that the poor kid's been through this season, well, the idea of being a protector of Gotham City ended up sticking in Bruce's mind, and it's amazing to see him finally don a proto-Batman suit and beat up a random mugger, stopping the exact same kind of crime that took Thomas and Martha Wayne from him. Which is a scene that got me giddy, that's for sure. We'll see if Ra's plan will make sense in the long run, though the casting choice is definitely one I can get behind and his brief scene is definitely impressive.

And now, let's talk Gordon and the main 'rage virus' plotline. So yeah, the big plotline of our supposed main character involves him running around town with Bullock, trying to keep his rage intact, trying to hunt down Hugo Strange and Jervis Tetch to get their plot devices to Lucius to synthesize the antidote, while simultaneously dealing with his crazy ex. And while Jerome's Night of Terror was more 'hint not show', here we have the imagery of Gotham City torn apart by crazy people as shown by the scary old woman who wants her savings back, and then cutting away to a montage of other scenes including the hilarious image of a bunch of girl scouts pursuing a poor man while screaming at him to buy cookies. 

Gordon's run with Bullock was honestly pretty procedural, going from one epic scene to the next. The huge villain-vs-villain shoot-up as they each fight over poor Hugo Strange (the dude just wants to get on the train, and his 'aw come on' expression when Fish Mooney catches up to him is hilarious) is pretty epic, with assassins fighting people with machineguns while Firefly and Mr. Freeze unleash their beam guns at the assassins. We also get the pretty cool bit of Gordon using his super-strength to smash through Freeze's ice wall, rip off a car door, and make a huge dent on the side of the train, which are all pretty cool bits that make the superhero fan in me happy. 

Gordon's brutality reaches a maximum point with him draining the blood from Mad Hatter and just kind of leaving him behind with a duct-taped wound, and later reaching a climax with killing Fish (yay!) and almost killing Bullock. As much as I enjoy Evil Leslie, it is kind of annoying that the ultimate fate of the arc ends up hinging on Gordon trying to cure Leslie, which is why the Oswald/Edward and Bruce/Alfred confrontations felt so much more interesting to talk about. Gordon ends up fighting through the effects of the rage virus because Bullock tells him he's a good cop, and manages to inject both Leslie and himself with the antidote. Leslie ends up leaving the city anyway, likely out of shame, and, well, that's kind of the end of season three.

Overall, I really enjoyed this finale. Yes, while sitting down to review it a fair amount of the plot doesn't make full sense, it's still an engaging run while I watched it. I'm not sure if Gotham will get a season four, although if it doesn't the ending for this season is pretty awesome with Penguin, Selina and Bruce all rising to be one step closer to their future selves. Several show regulars are dead or written out, and the looming threat of just what the fuck Ra's Al Ghul is planning is a nice enough cliffhanger for next season. So, yeah. Flawed but definitely enjoyable to some degree.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Butch Gilzean's birth name is revealed to be Cyrus Gold by the doctors who receive his body. Cyrus Gold is, of course, the original name of the gangster who in the comics would be transformed into the powerful zombie Solomon Grundy.
• Ra's al Ghul makes his first full appearance here, and I honestly don't think he needs an introduction. Leader of the League of Assassins, obsessed with making Bruce Wayne his heir (not at the moment, though) and immortal due to the magical waters of the Lazarus Pit... which appear here to heal Alfred's mortal wounds, but not named specifically.
• Tabitha teaching Selina how to use the whip is, of course, a reference to how Catwoman's signature weapon is the whip.
• With the aid of Mr. Freeze, Penguin makes use of the frozen Riddler as the centerpiece of his club, which he rechristens the Iceberg Lounge, the name of his club in the comics. While hints to the Iceberg Lounge's name has been sprinkled all throughout the last few seasons, this is when the name is finally spoken out loud.
• Bruce saving the family from the mugger dressed up with a ski mask is a reference to how Bruce Wayne's first attempts at being a crimefighter had him basically wear a civilian getup with a ski mask before adopting the bat motif. It also tends to result in less successful attempts with what little Bruce did here. He's even perched on the side of a building!

Gotham S03E20 Review: Gordon's Crazy Exes

Gotham, Season 3, Episode 20: Pretty Hate Machine

Apparently episodes 21-22 are both considered a two-hour finale, so this episode kind of acts like the penultimate episode of the season. Which, as far as I've seen, is a tricky business. It tends to be where the action ramps up for the finale, partially setting up the finale and partially resolving some of the lesser plot details. By this point it's clear that at least some plotlines -- Barnes' escape and Clone Bruce in particular -- aren't going to be touched upon for the finale, or if they will, it won't be as major as what's been built up in this episode.

Oh, and the Court of Owls? They're all quickly dispatched of by Bruce's teacher, apparently not Ra's Al Ghul (who any self-respecting Batman fan at this point would figure out as the mysterious master he's working for), but his lackey, the Sensei, who quickly gains the loyalty of Hugo Strange as well. The other members of the court other than Gordon's uncle, Kathryn and Talon are all nobodies anyway, so while, again, seeing Gordon, Oswald, Barbara and/or Riddler take down the Court from the inside would've been more satisfying, I keep forgetting that the Court is the mastermind behind the deaths of Bruce's parents, and so having him be involved in seeing its downfall is amazing.

Of course, Bruce doesn't give the order despite his heavy conditioning that left him barely a shell of his former self, and it's Sensei that gives the assassins the order to slit the throats of every member of the Court. It does mean that Bruce does have some measure of closure, though, seeing first-hand the people who ordered the Wayne assassination all murdered. And after the past two episodes forcing him to bury his emotions in that emotional safebox, it's a pretty safe bet what the Sensei wants to mould Bruce into the ultimate Talon. Or, well, a version of Batman, anyway. It's a pretty tear-jerky moment as Alfred rushes up towards Bruce, only for Bruce to keep choosing to follow the Sensei, leading to the confrontation as Sensei wants to ultimately corrupt Bruce, making him responsible to push the button that would detonate the rage gas in Gotham's train station. It's a little fucked up, that's for sure, and honestly I don't see what the point of it all other than trying to overlap the 'purge Gotham City' agenda with the 'corrupt Bruce Wayne' agenda. But Alfred's confrontation with the Sensei, him shooting the Sensei, the bomb being set off anyway and Bruce going ballistic and punching Alfred (ineffectively), is easily a pretty awesome setup to a pretty despairing moment as Alfred realizes that Bruce has been well and truly corrupted by this bastard.

Alfred isn't the only one who failed in this episode. See, Lee, having injected herself with the Alice Tetch virus (and giving herself a makeover that made the already unattractive actress like five times hotter), is convinced that she's attracted to Gordon's self-destructiveness, and wants to liberate said destructiveness from within Gordon... but wants him to choose. To this end, crazy Lee buries Gordon in Gotham's huge park, leaving him with a way out -- the virus. Lee wants Gordon to infect himself by his own choice, and as Team Bullock has to deal with both the virus bomb and rescuing Gordon, he ends up injecting himself to break free from his grave... which I guess will be the big Gordon problem for the season finale. Both main plotlines ended up in failure -- Gordon injected himself anyway and the virus bomb goes off -- and other than recovering Bruce from the clutches of the Sensei it's a loss for our heroes. And Bruce's brainwashed anyway, so it's a bit of a hollow victory.

Also, let's acknowledge the fact that Leslie Thompkins suddenly becomes so much more engaging once she goes off the deep end and becomes an antagonist. Leslie was never as irritating or hypocritical as Season One Barbara was, and the worst was her weird one-woman crusade to paint Jim Gordon as a villain (which honestly didn't go anywhere other than to lead to this development) but both Barbara and Leslie end up being evil and being so, so much entertaining.

While all of this is going, we've got the gangsters plot. Reality ensues with Firefly and Mr. Freeze apparently being bored of not having Penguin to tell them what to do and just buggered off, and Freeze finds that his only ally is Ivy Pepper, and she's not quite the plant-controlling supervillainess just yet. Oh, and Ivy's naivete means that she quickly gets suckered by Selina into telling Team Barbara where Penguin is -- with Selina's condition being that Ivy doesn't get harmed.

Now it's obvious that Team Barbara is going to self destruct sometime soon. Tabitha and Butch hate that Barbara's keeping Riddler alive. Riddler's more concerned about killing Oswald than helping Barbara. And Barbara's continued angry outbursts for the past few episodes is starting to alienate Tabitha, and has already alienated Butch -- who's only playing ball as long as Tabitha is. Of course, they're willing to put their differences together to take out their common enemy, Penguin, and as Riddler makes a long-winded point (oh, Riddler), Penguin is saved by the unexpected deus ex machina of... Fish Mooney!

Wait, what? Yeah, your guess is just good as mine, but Fish's big dramatic entrance with two huge men armed with assault rifles is the only time in the show's three-season run that I legitimately found Fish Mooney as the mob-boss-no-one-fucks-with that she tries to be. In the past she honestly has been more hot air than anything, but her just waltzing in, threatening everyone with rifles (and that goofy grin on Butch's face!), taking Oswald and leaving, is just amazingly done. It's weird to introduce her this late in the game, though, and I honestly thought that Butch and Tabitha have put their cards with Fish and betrayed Barbara, but apparently not.

So yeah, things are looking for a multi-way fight. Yes, the League's cryptic plans and what they're meant to accomplish is anyone's guess -- the gas hit like a single station and as horrific as it is, it's not much different from what the unleashed metahumans from Indian Hill or Jermone's one night of chaos will do. And the rather convoluted way that the League has to operate just to set it off, including corrupting Bruce (with a convoluted bait-and-switch bit with a clone) and the whole Court of Owls business means that it's unnecessarily complicated... though honestly, I'll be honest to say that I don't care about the main plot, not really... it's a fun wild story that they're telling and I'm more invested with the stories of the individual characters than whatever the fuck the League's planning.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The identity of Bruce's teacher (credited as 'the Shaman' throughout the episodes he showed up in) is Sensei, as Hugo Strange called him that. Considering his role and his talk of a greater master, and his almost-certain ties to Ra's Al Ghul, I'm pretty certain that it's specifically him that the character is supposed to represent. The Sensei was the supposed leader of the League of Assassins, although the leader of the League is later revealed to be Ra's Al Ghul. Sensei exact role and relationship to Ra's is unclear, with some stories portraying Sensei as Ra's father, while others showing him as a rival in leadership. 
• The Demon's Head that Sensei tells Bruce to find is, of course,  Ra's al Ghul, which is Arabic for just that. 

Movie Review: One Piece Film Gold

One Piece Film Gold

I have a confession to make: I'm not big into watching anime movies. I watched Spirited Away, sure, who hasn't? And I watched a couple of Pokemon and Digimon stuff as a kid. But I tend to shy away from watching anime movies, especially ones that are a tie-in to a concurrently-running anime. Because at the end of the day, these things tend to be like filler arcs in an anime. You get a villain, a plot, a bunch of movie-only filler allies, and the villain loses at the end. Moreso than just watching an anime or reading a book or watching a live-action movie, it really felt like the stakes don't matter, and all I'm hoping is that at least the villain looked cool. After all, they aren't allowed to change the status quo.Which is why the most enjoyable I've been when watching an anime movie was the Digimon Adventure Tri stuff, which was telling brand-new stuff that have lasting impacts on the next movie. Hell, even the newer Dragon Ball Z and Naruto movies ended up being so much better compared to their previous counterparts, in that the events that happened aren't exactly set in stone, so things might actually happen that change the chronologically future events, and not just 'hey, look at this filler episode, isn't it pretty?'

So bearing that in mind, I'm not going to be too hard on Film Gold. As far as these movies go, it follows the same identikit formula that a vast majority of other anime movies go. Our heroes go into this exotic location (a mega-casino golden city), meet a bunch of bizarre characters and quickly go through their powers in an opening fight to introdump them to any new viewers, establish the main villain, have some ham-fisted moral (here it's about how money isn't everything) shoehorned in, then have a final battle that takes up one-third of the city.

Oh, and even moreso than the other two newest One Piece movies that's spearheaded partly by manga author Eiichiro Oda, this one just throws canon out of the window. It explicitly takes place after the Dressrosa stuff, but the straw hat crew are all together, which didn't happen considering the crew was split up before they met up at Zou, and split up almost immediately afterwards.

Still, though, for a movie, it was a decent flick as far as these things go. The animation budget is pretty decent, shown most obviously in the huge extravagant shots of main villain Gild Tesoro and Nami's old-enemy-turned-ally Carina doing this huge musical number, following smoothly into a great panning shot of the gigantic casino-city, and then into the fast-paced action montage of the Straw Hats taking out a rival pirate crew.

The main character who gets the most focus here is Nami, and focuses more on her cat burglar days as she meets Carina, her rival from her old days. The crew are sucked into the fun gambling bits of Tesoro's town, but quickly fall into debt after some Devil-Fruit-assisted cheating, causing Tesoro to reveal that he's sprinkled gold dust onto every single person that comes, and if they can't pay up, he'll hold them hostage. And he holds Zoro hostage. Of course, there are huge, huge holes in the logic of Tesoro's business model, especially when we're shown that he apparently entertains the Tenryubito and even has CP-0 (well, one member -- Spandam, specifically, who I am pleased to see has a relatively huge role) dance around in his fingers.

There's a bit of a montage when our heroes try to make a heist to steal Tesoro's money, which I found to be the most entertaining and funniest part of the movie, but then it goes to Luffy and Franky meeting the most bland character ever, Raise... Raise something. That little man trapped underneath the sewers, and the rest of Tesoro's prisoners, and ham-fistedly talk about how money is power, and Luffy trying his darnadest to unleash the power of determination, and there the movie was the most flawed, with the conversations and dialogue not landing as well as I would've liked, certainly not as well as the Nami/Carina stuff (and even then the payoff to both the revelation to the conclusion of their backstory and the revelation that Nami and Carina have been tricking Tesoro all along).

The final battle is... okay. Tesoro creating a gigantic JoJo-Stand-esque golden avatar titan of himself and then empowering his minions (Luck Lady, Weird Dive-into-Things Cat and Masochistic Muscle Man), allowing our heroes to defeat them. Luffy defeats Gild Tesoro with Gear Fourth, which is cool since I never saw that form in animation before. But the rest of the battles kind of felt... perfunctory? Gild Tesoro was a threat, yes, but I never got that impression from any of the others.

Also compared to Film Z's more nuanced backstory for Zephyr, Gild Tesoro's backstory felt... oddly delivered. We see flashes here and there, and we see how he tragically lost his wife/girlfriend when he has no money to get her from the Tenryuubito, but we learn the full extent of the backstory too little, too late, and he acts so one-dimensionally mwa-ha-ha-evil in the present day anyway and thus it makes me really hard to care for him. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to read more to the fact that he's entertaining the World Government when they were the ones who took his wife away from him, because he's honestly not that interesting of a villain.

I suppose I have to acknowledge Sabo and Rob Lucci, who are hyped up in the promotion (and in the movie when they appear) but ends up being peripheral characters more than anything. And I think this is the first we've seen post-timeskip Rob Lucci's design in its entirety? It's definitely the first we've seen his leopard mode, anyway. Sabo briefly shows up with a gigantic Hiken to stop the marines from interfering, and Lucci hilariously gives no shits about the Tenryuubito as long as Gild Tesoro is taken down. The two fight and clash, but we don't even get to see that.

Overall, though, while it was enjoyable (hearing Brook and Franky's Japanese anime voices is always worth something, in any case) it's certainly not a movie I really consider to be super-amazing, and you won't lose any sleep if you skip this one. It's perfectly average, but doesn't really tell that interesting of a story or deliver any particularly super-duper-awesome battle scenes.

Legion S01E05 Review: Ancient Parasite

Legion, Season 1, Episode 5: Chapter 5

Welp, this episode. Last episode ended on a huge cliffhanger -- Lenny managed to make David unleash his powers to save his friend, but in doing so she manages to exert her influence on David. And David's arrival to save his friends saved the wrong person. The Summerland Team manages to get back relatively okay (Eye-in-Sydney aside, though since we know from previous displays of Syd's power this is temporary and didn't last very long into this episode) and while Kerry survives by Cary absorbing her, it's clear that the twins aren't going to be super-productive any time soon.

Meanwhile, David, having claimed to have mastered his powers, is suddenly calm and confident, a great contrast to the more fritzy personality he has in the past four episodes. Even without Lenny's influence, exerting that much power, added with the revelation that he's not crazy but instead is a man with godlike abilities, has to be one helluva power trip, and he will break his sister out of Division Three's prison, especially when Lenny convinces David to sneak out and do it on his own.

David's confidence worries Melanie Bird, but doesn't do so for Syd in no small part due to David's increasing control of his psychic powers, allowing him to create this mental room-space where they can finally have sex without any... unfortunate power explosions going off. Doesn't help that David's aura of confidence is definitely soothing and calming. "I'm the magic man!" It's a nice, tender moment before everyone panics the shit out that David's disappeared, thinking that the man has gone half-cocked on a suicide mission and is about to get his ass handed to him by Division Three only to discover that, shit, someone with telekinetic powers? Really, really strong. We don't really see David unleashing his powers per se, but a combination of security recordings and Team Summerland discovering the after-effects amazingly details this, with gruesome bodies clumped together, bodies melded into walls and floors, that creepy-ass tower of limbs... it's body horror in full value. The only person left alive is the Eye who tries to fool our heroes by making himself look like the psychiatrist from Clockworks, but Team Summerland leaves him in his cell.

It doesn't paint David's rescue of Amy and his systematic horrendous slaughtering of every single person in the base as anything but horrifying, and the glimpses of the Devil with Yellow Eyes in security footages make it even creepier. One of the Division Three bosses, Brubaker, dies in front of Ptonomy and Syd, warning them that "it wears a human face", hinting that he might actually know more about the mysterious Devil's identity and nature.

Cary, meanwhile, sitting out the supposed-rescue mission (Rudy, the telekinetic mutant from episode one, takes over for Kerry as the group's main fighter) also finds disturbing findings after looking into records of David's brain scans, and discovers the real truth of the parasite. It's always annoying when different characters in the same show have to race to same conclusions and revelations, but here it's done well. Cary gives us even more information as he reports this information to Doctor Bird, about how this monster isn't part of David, isn't an alternate personality created by David, isn't the mental manifestation of David's dark desires or anything. It's an older, powerful consciousness that, in Cary's words, 'burrowed into David's brain' and has been sitting there for the past 30 years. It explains why David's memories is so hard for Ptonomy to transverse, it's because every single memory where David realizes that the Devil (or, well, Lenny since that's the form that he/she takes most of the time in this episode) exists, it makes him forget. Locks away the memories. Which is pretty cool. This seems to cause Ptonomy in particular (who doesn't view David as a friend per se) to vouch for a more... drastic undertaking, though other members of Team Summerland shut him down pretty quickly. 

Syd, meanwhile, connected to David after a brief meeting in their White Room (a.k.a. the psychic sexy times bedroom) realizes that David has taken Amy to their childhood home, where it all begins. At which point, Lenny appears and unleashes his (David's?) power. It's horrifying because we really don't know what David wants to do with poor, poor tortured Amy. I don't think I ever thought that David would ever hurt Amy, but Lenny certainly is erratic and malicious enough to do so. Amy also drops a big bomb -- David's adopted! Which, in the excitement and originality that all of Legion has given us, makes me actually forget that David Haller is an adaptation of an actual character from the Marvel comics. It's always nice when a spinoff is able to do that -- still stay within the rules and works of the franchise, but makes itself stand so strong that revelations like these actually have a bit of a surprise factor to it. 

Amy's scene is delightful, isn't she? She didn't have much to do in the series before this beyond being the object to be rescued, and having some brief conversations with the Eye and the psychiatrist (who might not be captured after all and be the Eye all along), but on the other hand her scene about telling David that his being adopted doesn't change anything, she still loves his brother, it's just that she always thought that David was just ill because it was so much more sensible than the alternative. Just like Syd earlier when David shows so much confidence in his powers, both Syd and Amy are so ready to accept that things can be just that simple, ignoring some glaring warning signs here and there that things aren't what they seem. It actually applies to Doctor Bird as well, who, upon the revelation that David met her husband in the Astral Plane, shuts down Ptonomy far quicker than she probably would have had this question been raised to her a couple of episodes ago.

Team Summerland arrives at David's house for some mutant action (Cary pulls out this weird sci-fi headband to separate Lenny the parasite from David), but Lenny uses David's power to cause all sound to disappear in an amazing scene where there is absolutely no sound at all, a suitably creepy, tense and yet simultaneously fun and hilarious scene. The final conflict has the team show up and see Lenny and David, with Lenny making a big show of groping the comatose David in front of Syd -- Lenny's always been absolutely touchy-feely in their mental conversations, but the revelation that Lenny is actually an independent being makes this so much worse. Lenny blames Summerland for putting all the ideas in David's head, and she's taking all this personally, feeling threatened that David can actually be so confident about his powers.

Of course, everything goes absolutely fucking south as the Eye shows up and blasts David with a fucking shotgun. 

We get some slow-motion Inception shit as David and Syd hides into the White Room, where they are attacked by the Devil with Yellow Eyes himself, and boy, if Lenny groping David in the real world is creepy, nothing is quite as horrifying as the huge glob of creepy fat and wrongness that is the Devil with Yellow Eyes chasing Syd down and pinning her to the bed. It's also a great symbolic bit to show that David is helpless in the very room which he created with the purposes of being in control and being private, while this parasite in his head chases down the woman he loves. David screams.

And then everything stops. Which is weird because we get yet another mind-fuck. Syd wakes up, and she's back where we started -- Clockworks Mental Institute. Familiar sounds. Calming ping-pong background sounds and hospital muzak instead of the horrifying tense background music or the creepy visuals of David's house. Every single person from Summerland from personality-less Rudy to even the Eye is there as patients, and the doctor? Lenny. Obviously this isn't a "it's a dream after all!" plot twist or I'd be super cross, but it is neat that the audience has no idea what's going on beyond Lenny's in control. Is it an elaborate mental illusion-prison? Is it Lenny warping reality and changed the timeline? Fun stuff,  even if the ending is a bit too erratic for my tastes. 

There were a couple of weird bits that leaves me more confused than anything, such as why is Lenny-in-control-of-David so intent on knowing David's heritage? Why did they decide to return to David's childhood home, was that David's sentimentality or more Lenny manipulation? A great part of David's actions in this episode is that we're not entirely sure, post-magic-man scene, how much of it is David and how much of it is Lenny. Well, we'll see how we'll get through this as we go into the final act of the story.

Oh, and despite the review being already as long as it is, I still haven't covered so many smaller details in this episode, but let me just point out the absolutely unsettling story of Syd's first sexual experience, where she switches bodies with her mother just to do so. God, that's just so fucked-up, especially since Syd is absolutely right -- who's going to teach one-of-a-kind mutants like her how to live normally?

Movie Review: Dragon Ball Z - Battle of Gods

Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods (Kami to Kami)

Just like most big anime series released at that time, Dragon Ball Z has had its share of formulaic movies. I haven't seen any of them in full, but the gist of most of the movies are similar -- new threat emerges, our heroes fight it, threat is defeated. It's more formulaic than a James Bond movie, be it Naruto, One Piece, Bleach or Dragon Ball Z... yet in 2013, Dragon Ball Z, by then a series that had ended its run to bring up the cirrs on both manga and anime for a decade, created a canonical sequel for a movie. It would be a formula that would be picked up by Naruto a year later, which would release Naruto: the Last and Boruto the Movie, both movies that took place as sequels to the then-finished manga.

Suddenly, the stakes were high. The original writer was involved, the movie was explicitly rooted in canon, and is it going to be the model for all other big animes that has finished? Will they just continue on in huge big-budget anime movies every couple of years? As it turns out, Dragon Ball Z lasted another big-movie with Resurrection F, before adapting both movies into anime arcs for a proper sequel anime series, Dragon Ball Super.

But it's interesting to bring up the circumstances behind Battle of Gods before I begin into reviewing it, becuase it's not just a movie. It's also meant to be a self-contained arc in and of itself, one that would probably lead to more adventures down the line.

And, well, it's been some time since I finished reading the entire manga of DBZ, and while feeling very drained after the exhaustive Majin Buu arc, I returned to this with relative gusto. After all, a single two-hour movie is a lot easier to take in (and a lot prettier, too) compared to several hundred chapters of manga. And Battle of Gods, if nothing else, is a very solid movie.

It's a movie that, as mentioned above, is your standard anime fare -- we get the new threats in the God of Destruction, Beerus, and we quickly set up the conflict. There are some comedic bits before we finally get to the big showdown between Goku and Beerus. That's what the plot boils down to, and the movie makes great usage of the 'Worf Effect' by having Beerus effortlessly take down the entire supporting cast from Tienshinhan, Piccolo, Android 18 and even Gotenks and Majin Buu without literally breaking a sweat. No, there's no real sense of threat that the Earth will be destroyed again or that any important character will die, but Beerus is such a compelling and wacky weirdo of a character. And it's always telling when a character is going to just be important for this arc, or if he's going to be built up as a recurring character down the road... and despite him going into a hibernation, Beerus and Whis are definitely characters that aren't built to be disposable filler, giving them so much more charm than other movie-exclusive characters.

Beerus is a weird fucker. He's this weird purple dog/cat-man that seems to be styled like an Egyptian god, clothes wise, and he lives in his own dimension. He also has the lofty title of the God of Destruction, literally able to blow up planets and the mere whisper of his name has badasses like Vegeta and King Kai pissing their pants. Goku's latest form, the Super Saiyan 3, barely causes Beerus to raise an effort more than a flick of his wrist. But for all his talk of the God of Destruction and his very awesome voice, Beerus also  has the mentality of a child. He's so, so easily enticed by amusing things and delicious food, and is easily distracted from his threats of destroying the Earth when given food. Whimsical is, I think, the best way to describe him, because he just decides to spare and/or destroy Earth on a whim.

Maybe the slapstick that Beerus and Whis engages, or the food jokes that they make, causes them to be taken less seriously than the likes of Cell or Frieza, but at the same time it's not like Beerus is all talk. In a sense, I think he's actually one of the more interesting enemies in that he embodies everything Goku normally is -- unbeatable, childlike, obsessed with food and insanely freaking strong. It's just that the problem being that Beerus gets pissed off and about to destroy the fucking Earth just because Majin Buu is a stingy little shit who refuses to share pudding.

The middle bits where they're having a party for Bulma, crash-landed by Beerus who's looking for the mythical 'Super Saiyajin God' (again, literally on a whim), has the movie's most hilarious bits but also at the same time the movie's least hilarious bits. Who gives a shit about the whole Pilaf plotline where he and his two cronies try to steal the Dragon Balls and gets involved with little Goten and Trunks? Certainly not me. But Vegeta trying his best to pacify Beerus by, at one point, getting up on stage and fucking dancing and singing about Bingo? That is hilarious as all hell. And how he gets absolutely insanely angry and powers up to throw down with the God of Destruction when Beerus (more accidental than not) pushes Bulma? Amazingly awesome.

The actual fight scenes are fine, though definitely super-duper gorgeous. Goku returns back to life and manages to unlock a new form, Super Saiyan God (with red hair!) and fights Beerus. And there's not much I can say other than the fight scenes were enjoyable. Perhaps the most striking thing is that Goku doesn't actually beat Beerus, only manages to impress him enough that he decides to bugger off from Earth with Whis, with the private note that he barely used, what, 60% of his strength? It's definitely a sequel hook.

The movie's a great, fun watch for me personally, though, insomuch that this is the first time I've heard the Japanese voices of anyone that's not Goku or Vegeta. There's a large amount of in-jokes to be hand among the script, too, which is nice considering the series is relatively fresh in my head. It's nothing super-duper spectacular, but I enjoyed it more than I expected I would, and Beerus is a far more entertaining character than I thought he would be.

Movie Review: Blade (1998)

Blade [1998]

Often, when people talk about superhero movies, they talk about how it went into a really bizarre 'dork age' phase when the likes of Batman Forever, Batman & Robin and Superman IV hit the theaters in the late 80's and early 90's, and then crediting X-Men and Spider-Man for reinvigorating a more serious, but still fun and faithful, take to the comic book movies, further reinforced in subsequent years when the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Nolan Batman movies proved themselves to be commercial and critical successes. 

But Blade came out in 1998, two full years before X-Men. And it was... okay! It was pretty dang good. I'm not going to pretend that I know a lot about Blade a s a character, how he's supposed to be like, whether this is a faithful adaptation of the character, et cetera. I'm not very good on Marvel  comics lore, with my only real experience regarding the Marvel universe outside of the movies being the Marvel: Ultimate Alliance game. Blade was a playable character there, but beyond being a vampire hunter I knew nothing about that.

But the movie doesn't waste our time. We quickly get a backstory to Blade's origin stories (a mother bitten by a vampire gives birth to a child that's a Daywalker, as the vampire community calls him) and we're then thrown headlong to a time period when a fully grown Blade, played here by the amazing Wesley Snipes, is a hunter of his own kind, blowing people up while looking awesome with a leather jacket, a dapper haircut and sunglasses, swinging around silver swords, shooting people with silver-bullet shotguns and reducing them to burning skeletons. Which, yes, might look a little suspect now that we've got far better CGI in a TV show, but eh.

The plot's simplistic, of course. After establishing the setting (vampires go to raves, and there's an ancient council that's prejudiced against non-purebloods), establishing our leading characters Blade, love interest slash audience-surrogate dr. Karen Jenson, and mentor Abraham Whistler, we establish our main villain, one Deacon Frost, who's like this classy vampire gangster boss, and his main mook (whose hands keep getting sliced off by Blade) Quinn, played here by Donal Logue, better known to viewers of Gotham as the actor who would play Harvey Bullock. Deacon Frost wants Blade's unique blood to help him complete a ritual which would transform him into La Magra, the vampiric blood god. And that's more or less what you need to know. 

The rest of the movie is just a whole lot of vampire shooting, with Blade unleashing a crapton of hurt on the vampires. The movie itself is serviceable, but very, very solid. We get a perfunctory love interest between Blade and Karen, we get somewhat of a character arc with Blade trying to find his purpose and the completely hurt look he has on his face when he finds out his mother has been turned into Frost's thrall, we get a couple of awesome world-building courtesy of things like vampire raves, the council of Erebrus or things like the vampire bible...  there's the very weird dude, Pearl the record-keeper, who is this fat, screechy-voiced thing that makes Snorlax look lean in comparison. There's the sub-plot of Karen trying to find a cure, both for herself and for Blade's worsening condition and resistance to a serum injection to help him control his bloodlust.

And I do love how the show builds up on the mythology while never being too burdened by it. There's a sense of weight between the scenes that Deacon Frost and his rival on the Council of Erebus, Dragonetti, about tradition, about purebloods and half-bloods, even if it doesn't really matter to our hero specifically. 

Of course, it's not the best superhero movie now, not with titans like the Dark Knight or Captain America: the Winter Soldier to compete with. It's an action flick first and a superhero flick second, and there are some gory bits and cuss words that are thrown around that I honestly didn't expect this movie to have. "Motherfucker, are you out of your damn mind?" is just one of the many hilarious one-liners that Blade has to say, and I find that beyond the simplistic plotline and a flat villain in Deacon Frost (Quinn is far more charismatic, and that's before I realized who his actor was), it's actually a freaking enjoyable movie. There's a certain level of B-movie quality to be expected, yes, but the movie is so slick and bereft of padding, yet at the same time it's not a clinical, emotionless picture either with just enough scenes to make you care about Blade as a character instead of just a lean badass vampirekilling machine.

So yeah, I enjoyed myself a lot more than I expected when watching this movie, and I really should start checking out superhero movies before the big titanic explosion of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its contemporaries.. 

Gotham S03E19 Review: The Jell-o Escape

Gotham, Season 3, Episode 19: All Will Be Judged

By rights, this should be a boring episode. Oswald and Edward do a team-up to reverse the developments from last episode. Jim Gordon gets his ass kidnapped by Barnes and is subjected to the same thing that Mad Hatter subjected him to a while back. There were some internal reveals about Alfred and Clone Bruce. Leslie goes insane. But at the same time, the cast is just so much fun to watch that I honestly didn't really mind. Yeah, the episode wasn't as solidly done as the Riddler episodes, but it's still very entertaining to watch.

The main Jim Gordon plotline shows a rematch with Barnes, who has embraced his supervillain persona with an insane axe-hand and some mascara, and I guess we can call him the Executioner now? And yes, Barnes is the worst type of villain with an insanely long monologue that allows for reinforcements to arrive, but at the same time the actor is just so insanely hammy that I don't care, it's just so fun to watch him rant about justice and all that jazz. Yes, the plotline is a rehash of something that Gotham has done so many times before: 'Jim Gordon gets kidnapped by evil villain' and 'the GCPD precinct gets fucked up by a villain', but at the same time Barnes's scenery chewing makes it absolutely work.

Kathryn sics Barnes on Gordon, and things backfire and she finds herself arrested. Meanwhile, thanks to Selina, Alfred finds out about Clone Bruce's real identity, and Clone Bruce gives some cryptic warning before buggering off. It's a bit weird and rushed, but okay, because we get the very awesome scene of Kathryn not flinching at the good cop bad cop treatment, only to have Alfred go for the 'I'm a fucking butler' route and stabbing Kathryn in the hand.

Then Barnes arrives to fuck things up and throws cops around like ragdolls, while Kathryn thinks that Barnes is just a brainwashed pawn like Talon, demanding that he get her out of here RIGHT THIS INSTANT, leading to the absolutely hilarious bit with Barnes slicing off Kathryn's head off with his axe-hand. It's sudden, it's a rather poor exit and a poor final showing for Kathryn and the Court in general (since, shit, that means all the other members of the Court that mattered other than Bruce's mysterious kung fu master is dead). But it's still all in good fun, mostly because the Court plotline has definitely run its course, and it's clear that the main threat for the final three episodes is going to be Bruce's Master, Mr's Ra's Al Ghul In All But Name.

Yeah, I really kind of wished the Court of Owls storyline could've been wrapped up a little neater. Maybe have Gordon, Ed and Oswald expose the whole secret society thing from the inside? But at the same time, I honestly didn't quite mind what we got. They even tried to justify having the silly crystal owl stuff from earlier this season to matter again, which isn't super necessary but it didn't take much screentime so I didn't mind.

The revelation that Barnes escaped again after his capture "we just captured the guy five minutes ago!" was a bit odd, and I'm not sure if I want Barnes running amuck as a wild card for the finale (because Selina, Penguin, Riddler and Barbara aren't enough wild cards?), but hey.

Speaking of Maybe-Ra's, he's a curious bit. Sure, he's helping to break Bruce out of his trauma, seemingly turning him into an emotionless version of the Dark Knight he will become into the future, but what his endgame is, and just how tied he is with the Court (he seems to have alternate plans for the Court than being a loyal member as previously implied) is ambiguous. And, yeah, just how Bruce Wayne plays into the Court's master plans when they literally have a spare loyal to them is a bit dodgy, but hopefully we'll get some answers by the end of the season.

Leslie has been inconsistently written all throughout this half-season, especially after Mario's death, but his talk with Mad Hatter was unexpected and a welcome bit of great acting from both characters, really showing Hatter's insane penchant for fucking with people's heads and his own warped view on the world, and Lee's own now-warped view on her relationship with Jim and Mario. And can you blame Lee for giving in to the madness, stealing the virus and injecting herself with it? Gordon and Bullock basically brought everyone from Lucius, Barbara and Alfred into their small ring of conspirators about the Court, but not Lee, who's actively digging up dirt about Gordon's activities. And in the fucked-up city of Gotham, well, even someone like Lee's got to succumb sometime, yeah? Add insane Leslie to the number of wild cards running around for the finale.

But easily the best part of the episode is the Penguin/Riddler truce and team-up. Robin Lord Taylor and Cory Michael Smith are easily two of the best acting talents that Gotham has, and constantly pairing them up is amazingly done. I still loathe the stupid librarian storyline they did earlier in the season, but if the pay-off is this hilarious bit of attempting to murder each other and teeth-clenched teamwork as they try to one-up each other "I have an army of gangsters!" "Well, I have an army of Indian Hill monsters!" and the sheer hilariousness of Oswald using Jell-O to escape from prison is amazingly done.

(And the fact that the Court, for all its fabled scariness, was unable to keep two unhinged lunatics equipped with nothing but Jell-O and a butter knife from escaping is testament to their utter incompetence)

Where we go from here I'm not sure. Presumably Penguin has to track down Ivy, Freeze and Firefly (the latter two haven't been doing much at all, yeah?) while Riddler has to deal with the fact that Butch and Tabitha are starting to chafe under Barbara's increasingly insane priorities, maybe leading to a falling out between the four of them. It's amazing how much Barbara, Butch and Tabitha have improved since their respective debuts, haven't they?

But, well, despite the rather choppy episode, it's still pretty entertaining to watch and that's been a recurring theme for Gotham this half-season. It's just so fun to watch that I can't help but smile while watching an episode that should, by rights, be a bad one. 

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure S01E14 Review: Epic JoJo Poses

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Season 1, Episode 14: Elite Ancient Warriors

[Revised 10/2018]

So after that whole Santana arc is over, we get transported to Rome with a brief time-skip as Joseph and Speedwagon follow a lead there and meet the descendant of William Zeppeli. It's basically the same segment as that part in Phantom Blood after Jonathan's defeated Dio the first time, but then has to meet with a mentor to train him in Hamon.

Not actually knowing what Zeppeli's grandson looks like, Joseph ends up accidentally picking a fight with Caesar Zeppeli himself, who insults Joseph when he was... well, Joseph was being a gigantic ass regarding that squid-ink spaghetti, let's be frank. And then trying to bully Caesar with hamon, of course, ends up with Joseph embarrassing himself. As Joseph puts into words in English, "OH, NO!" It's not quite the bombastic OH NO that Joseph would come to have as his catchphrase later on, but it's still pretty fun.

Caesar Zeppeli is... he's a pretty fun, if slightly flamboyant, character. As Joseph points out, "did he have to grand-stand just to sit down?" And by grandstand, I mean Caesar straight-up leaps three meters into the air to pirouette just to sit down on a cafe's chair. Caesar and Speedwagon give us a bit of a backstory about the Speedwagon Foundation's creation to find out information about the Stone Masks. We get the little bit of revelation that Santana's stone corpse is placed within a UV light prison, and the carvings on a wall show that Santana is actually of a lower caste compared to three other faces on it.

We get one of the less entertaining fights between Caesar and Joseph, as Caesar uses his Hamon kiss to take control of a girl, and Joseph uses his hamon to shove a pigeon into the girl's mouth... which honestly feels rather weird. We do see Caesar's so-called ultimate attack, which is using hamon bubbles to blast people. The animation in this scene reverts back to Phantom Blood's "change the colour palette randomly", something we haven't seen a whole lot in Battle Tendency. 

Speedwagon is apparently in cooperation with the Nazis (who are not referred to by name) and we meet their contact, Mark the nice soldier. And, well, Mark is obviously going to die a tragic death because 100% of the scene establishes that he's a nice guy, and he's going to get married, and he's such a nice guy, all right?

"AWAKEN MY MASTERS!"

The three of them wakes up in this episode, because some Nazi moron is too stupid to look directly into a hole that appeared on the wall, and, of course, the Pillar Men wakes up. A long, long tentacle-like horn shoots through the front rank of the soldiers, and the blood cakes the UV lights, and the Pillar Man emerge to fantastic music (Pillar Men Awaken), and immediately strikes series a glorious pose. We get an extra-nightmarish bit where he dance-moves through the Nazi soldiers, sticking everyone's hands together with the Pillar Men's "move to flesh" ability, and then drains everyone up like a straw.

I'm not quite sure why he has to hammily shout out his name as he revives his two masters and prostrates himself before the turban-headed Kars and the funky-haired ACDC (Esidisi, technically, but this is funnier). Kudos to the anime for making all three distinctly different from the get-go -- I knew I had trouble telling them apart in this part of the manga, and it's not until later in the story that I appreciate the three as distinct characters.

They have a tendency to strike hilarious JoJo poses, too, and Wamuu quickly makes himself subservient before ACDC and Kars -- I forgot that ACDC outranks Wamuu! They talk a bit about the Great Red Stone of Aja, our new plot device, as well as the Pillar Men's role as rulers of the world... and we cut back to our heroes, who basically go through a bit of a horror show.

Joseph steps on something gross, and the group discovers that it's the husks of the soldiers drained by Wamuu. The three Pillar Men walk past them and ignores them completely. Poor Mark gets bumped into and half of his body gets eaten, and his family picture locket clatters down to the ground. It does drag on a bit too long but it does make Caesar and Joseph's rage of justice so much more poignant.

Amidst Joseph and Caesar's screaming, though, the Pillar Men go through this weird unfunny-funny scene where Kars steps on Wamuu's shadow, causing Wamuu to reflexively kick Kars in the face before prostrating himself and apologizing. Kars is forgiving of this assault, instead apologizing himself for forgetting that Wamuu is very, very sensitive to people stepping in his shadow. This entire exchange adds nothing significant, isn't even funny or really relevant to the story, and it genuinely stands out as being a bit too bizarre without the mixture of hammy-but-scary deal that the Pillar Men had before.

The episode ends with the iconic Joseph/Caesar pose as they promise vengeance, which is shown up above. The entire episode is just introductions and a huge setup, and it's kind of clear that this isn't going to end particularly well for our heroes.

For my part, this was, I think, when I realized how much I would love this series when I came across it in the manga. The whole shadow bit aside, I really ended up liking just how... just how utterly out there the concept of the Pillar Men are. The fact that these Elder Race monsters are built like Mayan-Aztec bodybuilders with less clothes than a Victoria's Secret Model, have unsettling flesh powers, and, best of all, are called Wham, Cars and ACDC (yes, Wamuu, Kars and Esidisi, but it's really hard not to hear the actual bands). This usage of Western bands as character (or superpower) names is going to be a hallmark of JJBA, and, as ridiculous as everything is, this just adds a whole layer of fun into it all.


The JoJo Playlist:

• Wamuu is, of course, a reference to the UK band Wham! though the katakana is apparently slightly corrupted compared to how you would normally say 'wham' in Japanese (without a prolonged u, I think?) Wham! is responsible for some iconic songs you may have heard of like Careless Whisper, The Edge of Heaven and Last Christmas.  
• Kars is a reference to the Cars, a 70's rock band. I'm not as familiar with the Cars' work as Wham or ACDC, but Drive is a pretty good song by them.
• ACDC (well, AC/DC, but I'm to lazy to put in the slash half the time) is a rock band that's also from the 70's, and I'm kind of a huge fan. Selected works from AC/DC include Highway to Hell, Back in Black, Shoot to Thrill.
• While I'm sticking to the official English transliterations seen in JoJo guidebooks for how to write Wamuu and Kars' name, I like the idea of a character just named 'ACDC' so much that I hope you'll forgive me referring to him as that instead of Esidisi.
• The Red Stone of Aja is a reference to Aja, a jazz album by the band Steely Dan (who's going to referenced for a villain in Stardust Crusaders), as well as one of the songs within said album.
• I'm not sure if Caesar Anthonio Zeppeli is a reference to anything in particular (beyond sharing the Led Zeppelin reference with his grandfather).

Legion S01E04 Review: (Not So) Creepy Twins

Legion, Season 1, Episode 4: Chapter 4

So this episode is the halfway mark of Legion's eight-episode long first season, and it's at this point that the show has to start balancing between psychological mindfuckery and all the X-Men mutant superhero stuff. And while most of the previous episodes lean so much more towards the weird mindfuckery, this one balances both sides of the coin beautifully.

This episode gives us the first real appearance of Melanie's missing husband, Oliver, who has made several cryptic appearances last episode as a dude in that old-timey diving armour suit thing. His soul/mental self/spirit is trapped in a huge iceberg room in his mind, however, even as his body is kept alive by Melanie and Cary. Oliver kind of sort of breaks the fourth wall as he gives a monologue into an empty room about the two different kinds of stories that parents teach little children -- those that teach empathy, and those that teach fear, and his performance in this scene immediately tell me that the dude's going to be a personal favourite in no small part due to the amazing actor they found for the role. 

So let's talk about Oliver first. He's the main source of David's scenes in this episode, because the rest of the cast go on their own detective hunting for the real facts, while David finds himself stumbling into the Astral Plane, where Oliver has a conversation with him. The 'parasite' (definitely the Devil with Yellow Eyes, but it's unclear if this means Lenny too) can't reach David within Oliver's trippy iceberg room, and while Oliver's borderline insane himself in that 'easily distracted, what are priorities' way, Oliver tells David about a fair amount of things, like the whole parasite thing, and that David is feeding the creature... somehow. And it's kept delightfully ambiguous just how much is real and how much is in David's head. For all we know, "Oliver" could be yet another manifestation of David's fractured personality. But the takeaway from this scene is that David, in part, is responsible for enabling the demons in his own head, which is similar to how many people enable the same psychological demons that plague their daily life. Only, unlike real-life demons such as depression, David's Devil with Yellow Eyes doesn't just fuck up his life, it fucks up the reality around him as well. 

This episode also shows us, through various ways (at this point I realize it's futile to recap every single thing that happens in the episode without sounding way too clinical) that David's memories that we've been exploring for the past few episodes is actually unreliable. They're not falsehoods per se, but the Devil has been altering them. Most importantly, the fact that David's druggie buddy Lenny? It's not actually Lenny, but instead a man named Benny, which is absolutely interesting. Did Lenny ever exist? Is Lenny just a personality in David's mind that assigns herself to replace other 'hey, embrace yourself' people in David Haller's life? Lenny herself, in-between creepy mania and vulgar dialogue (the actress they got for the role is pretty phenomenal), is amazingly awesome at being vague as to what her big game plan is, and by the end of the episode she ends up causing David to break out of the comatose state he's in, embrace his mutant powers... at the exact wrong spot. But we'll cover that later.

So yeah, Lenny's definitely acting independently in David's head, which is bad for him, and the jury remains out at this point if she and the yellow-eyed devil are the same being or if they're competitors, or if they are allies. Piecing together the pieces that we know from this episode, the Devil is definitely the parasite,  and if he's been appearing to David in the form of the provocative Lenny (the literal angel/devil on your shoulder spurning you on to do things) then it's a clever way to get David to do what she wants to. The shot that juxtaposes Lenny's grinning face and the Devil with Yellow Eyes's own face seems to imply that they're the same being after all.

There are also so many different memories in David's mind that seemed altered. As Amy tells doctor Kissinger... they never had a dog (never has these five words feel so chilling), so that dog that keeps showing up in David's childhood memories, the same dog he chased last episode before the World's Angriest Boy confronts him? Yeah, that's probably Lenny or the Devil in a previous form. And the fact that some evidence like the tapes of David's old interviews have seemingly been destroyed really lends credence to Lenny/the Devil actively doing things to cover his tracks.

And as Syd, Ptonomy and Kerry try and figure out just what parts of David's life is real and what part is not by visiting the people and places in David's mind -- Philly, dr. Kissinger -- the mysterious weirdness of David's memories unspools and it's definitely amazingly done. Moreso than any series, I pity the fact that Legion isn't released in the Netflix format of an entire season at once, because, shit, watching these episodes when I did as they were released weekly, I had to keep loading up previous episodes to see how these scenes were presented in David's mind.

And amazingly so, the episode even works in the whole "what's real what's not" bit for the present day too because halfway through our heroes' talk with dr. Kissinger, they realize that it's actually the Eye and Division Three, which leads to a bit of mindfuckery too. Philly has been telling the trio that 'they're watching', so yeah. 

Also, after all that heavy talk on parasites, this episode gives us a larger focus on Cary and Kerry, who previously just seemed to be two bodies in Summerland that are likable enough but didn't  have anything special other than a strangely similar name. This episode reveals that they're not necessarily split personalities like David, not per se. They're more like conjoined twins but since this is the X-Men world, they share the same body, in that Cary and Kerry 'flip' around to transform and take control of their body, although this episode also shows that they can actually spend some time apart.

It's a bit of a sad backstory, too, where their parents apparently divorced when a baby that should've been a Native American girl was born as a white boy. This explains their difference in age, too -- whoever is in charge of their shared body ages, which is why Cary, who nominally takes control of their body for all the boring stuff (studying, eating, bathing) is so much older than Kerry, who only goes out for all the kickass action scenes. It's an interesting relationship, and seeing as the Eye shoots Kerry at the end of the episode we'll see if Cary gets the brunt of it as well -- he seems to be in pain, but whether that's just psychic backlash or if the injuries translate to each other remains to be seen. Also great is how even when they're separated, when Kerry beats up Division Three agents, in the Summerland lab Cary ends up mimicking his sister/other half's actions.

Also, in the more superhero-y elements of the episode, Syd ends up switching bodies with the Eye, unfortunately causing David to whack Syd-in-Eye away and rescue Eye-in Syd when he sees, what, to him, was the Eye preparing to shoot Syd (unaware that it's Syd's attempt to kill the Eye's "soul" if at the cost of her own physical body). It's a great final scene that alternates between the, y'know, actual action to the Kerry/Cary stuff to David and Lenny's arguments in their head, a wonderful blend of the trippy themes of the series as well as the mutant-powers-flying-everywhere action scenes... ending with David  having unleashed his power, a traditionally 'aw yeaaah badass'  moment for any superhero story, but the devilish Lenny creeping out from his back, showing who's in control (even if it's manipulation instead of outright 'assuming direct control') makes it so much more foreboding.