momentarily back to the webstrip scribbling before I return to sci-fi robotty stuff for the next Omnivistascope. Can I draw robots? No I can not. Yet here we are.
Also, Com.X picked up Babble for publication, which I forgot to mention until now, organised as I am, and Fallout: New Vegas comes out tomorrow - Christ only knows how I'm going to organise my time when I put in 4-5 hour stints on that one every day.
Watching: Law and order: Los Angeles 1.4 - "Word to the wise: if you're gonna drop in on your friendly neighborhood meth lab, leave the kids at home." Yes, Law and Order, this is exactly the kind of comment your supposedly sympathetic main character should be making over the charred bodies of two children killed in their mother's car by a nearby meth lab explosion while she's screaming in anguish at what's happened to her babies. Who the fuck says something like that over dead baby corpses? Now it's coming back to me why I avoided this hateful, conservative, and reactionary misanthropic iteration of the cop show genre, and of course in this episode, like in all the episodes, it's the victim who is in some way to blame because she's a filthy, adulterous whore - no, really. I honestly cannot believe this franchise, with an attitude like that, is the one that came up with an entire series dedicated to capitalising on rape, and further problematic subtext arises when the father of the kids, upon learning of his wife's adulterous behavior being the reason his children are dead, laments that "I had a wife and two kids and now I got nothin!" because yes, the grieving mother and dead babies are objects whose sole purpose is to illustrate the pain of the stoic white male and the burden he carries because somehow it is all the Muslims' fault - I am not joking, adultery, dead children, the drugs epidemic and everything that is wrong with the traditional American family is here portrayed as literally the Muslims' fault. Blue eyed, blond female Muslims because women with opinions are the enemy too, and luckily, the Muslim is a woman so manipulating her love for a man is what saves the day and makes the court case. Oh, and then there's a whole plot thread that basically amounts to the main characters saying that the US military's programme of secret trials for illegally detained suspected terrorists doesn't go far enough because they require evidence for conviction, that this due process is denying the victims of terrorism justice, and then one character comments upon what a wrong-headed nuisance the ACLU is, while another later describes as terrorists getting their day in court as "a terrorist pep rally."
Fuck you, Law and Order.
The Defenders 1.5 - here's a much more trashy and glossy look at the field of crime and the courtroom, and all the better for it in my opinion. Going down the route of having a poontang-crazed lawyer represent a stripper/cat burglar while his wanger is practically hanging out of his pants pretty much makes your show above such critical appraisals as might ruminate upon subtext, mainly because there is precious little subtext in a plot that flat-out tells you it's a story about a lawyer wanting to bang a stripper. It's shite, but because of that it's hard to get annoyed at it - nobody's forcing me to watch it and it's not like it's springing any surprises on me by telling me what a bad idea human rights are. There's even a bit in it where a philandering senator is suspected of murdering one of his young female aides and my initial response was that it's still a bit rum to do that story in a trashy show like this, but it's heartening when the resolution is that it's all a misunderstanding and there is no grieving family or calculating ex-wives masterminding murder frame-ups and even irredeemable scoundrels are basically decent on a level that's not too hard to plumb. It's a humanist and gratifying message to see in days where televisual fantasy is dominated by the adolescent cynicism of CSI or Law and Order, but it is a terrible pity that it's only present in the trashiest of offerings.
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