Kiss My Wonder Woman

Last week I talked (at length) about BBC's The Musketeers and their surprisingly progressive portrayal of race in this new adaptation. I like it. They've done a very good job at not just casting non-white actors in lead roles, but in actually trying to address the idea of what it means to be a person of color in early-Enlightenment France.

This week, though, I'd like to tackle a related and also uncomfortable topic: how the BBC's The Musketeers handles sex and romance, and whether or not this is even remotely period-accurate.

To begin with, though, we have to admit that judging the historical accuracy of a portrayal of sex and romance is actually a lot harder than judging the historical accuracy of portrayals of race. This is simply because most historical records of "romance" are incredibly biased. Either they come from popular literature, which would be like ascribing historical legitimacy to the Meg Ryan rom-coms of the 1990s, or they come from personal diaries and therefore anecdotal experience.

Furthermore, all attempts to study sex and romance in prior historical time periods tend to butt up against the simple reality that most of history is written by men. Because men were the ones who were educated enough to be able to write. So any idea we have of sex is going to be extremely male in point of view, simply by virtue of who wrote down what was going on. In the rare cases where we do have a female perspective on sex and romance, it's usually an educated, upper-class woman, the only kind of woman likely to get an education (except nuns) writing. And she definitely has a different experience than your average peasant lady.

Suffice it to say that any discussion of historical romance or sex is really complicated because when it comes down to it, we just plain don't know. But we can guess. And guess we will. (By guess, I mean that we will make logical inferences based on historical evidence, because that's how we roll.)

The Musketeers is based on Alexandre Dumas'The Three Musketeers, as you have hopefully already surmised, and as a result it's pretty bawdy. The characters in Dumas' classic were always sleeping their way into and out of trouble, and the characters of the BBC show are no different. Every male lead (excepting Captain Treville, which is interesting) has at least one female love interest, and most of them have a couple.

There are love triangles, love quadrangles, and some configurations too complex to really suss out, which is all fun and games and really and truly enjoyable. Interestingly, though, the show has taken a rather different route with their portrayal of the women behind these romances. Instead of it all being bedroom eyes and come-hither glances from female characters who are, we are assured, as pure as the driven snow, The Musketeers wants you to know without a doubt that, yes, these women have had sex. Some of them have had a lot of sex.

And most of them, brace yourself, have had non-consensual or at the very least dubiously-consensual sex.

In any other show, this fact would bother me. A lot. But I was already charmed by the show's handling of race, so I figured I'd see how this all played out. I'm still not entirely sure where I land on it, but I think I'm more favorable towards it than not. Here's why.

As I ranted so eloquently regarding Game of Thrones this season, I'm not okay with the use of rape as a filler or background noise or as a tool for the character development of men, and I definitely hate it when it's done gratuitously to shock viewers. I'm really not okay with the dumbing down of non-consensual sex and the idea that "she really wanted it in the end". The Musketeers doesn't do any of these things. Instead, the rape scenes are never shown, only referenced, and, interestingly, cover a range of situations and consequences.

The two main female characters of the show, Milady (Maimie McCoy) and Constance (Tamla Kari), both have storylines that deal with sexual assault/harassment. But they're dealt with very differently. In Milady's case, she accuses her brother-in-law of raping her, and then claims that she killed him in self-defense. If you don't know the larger story, Milady was once a poor thief who married a rich nobleman, Athos (Tom Burke). According Athos, when his brother discovered Milady's past, she killed him to keep it secret. According to Milady, his brother raped her, and she killed him by accident, trying to get away.

What's really compelling here is that, while Milady has proven herself very untrustworthy over the course of the show, and murdered a lot of people, we don't actually know if she's lying here. She could be, sure, but she very well might not be. And what I find most notable is that the show doesn't tell us one way or another, but it does give her story equal validity to Athos' version. Later on, Athos even cops to the idea that he might not know all the facts. He takes responsibility for the fact that his rash actions (sentencing her to death) might have been wrong.

This is notable because of the atmosphere we live in now. Women are frequently accused of inflating rape statistics and making false rape claims, and society considers the burden of proof to be on the woman to prove that she was raped, rather than on the man to prove that he did not rape her. That Milady's accusations are given story weight, a weight that does not redeem her character, mind, or excuse the awful things she's done, is kind of awesome.

On the other side of the spectrum, however, we have Constance Bonacieux. Constance deals with a more insidious, and probably more historical, form of sexual assault. We learn early on that she is married to a cloth merchant, only ever identified by his last name, Bonacieux (Bohdan Poraj). He is older than her, and the show makes it clear that this was an arranged marriage, not a love match.

The show goes even further to tell us that Constance is deeply unhappy in her marriage. She has no physical interest in her husband but does make it clear that she has sex with him, because, well, she's married to him. She doesn't have a choice in the matter. As the show progresses, and Constance falls in love with their renter, D'Artagnan (Luke Pasqualino), she is torn between her duty as a wife and her romantic feelings. We get the impression that this is the first time Constance has been in love, and we know for a fact she's never been in love with husband.

No, Constance's marriage, as we learn in episode seven or so, was a pure transaction. Her family sold her to Bonacieux in exchange for a small sum of money. She was an extra mouth to feed, and they didn't want her to end up an old maid, so she was married off as a teenager to a man she'd never met. We discover this when Constance tries to stop all of this from happening to her young cousin, Fleur (Alice Sanders). She is insistent that Fleur get the chance to live a happy life full of love, and get to be educated, and not have to marry some man she doesn't know.

So while the story never explicitly tells us that Constance has been raped, we are implicitly told this from the moment she comes on screen. And that, to me, is the more interesting storytelling choice. Because while Constance's situation is dubbed by the show to be "normal", it's also shown to be wrong.

In fact, at the very end of the first season (SPOILER), when Constance has finally decided to leave her husband and run away with D'Artagnan, she comes home to find that he's attempted suicide. He then guilts her into staying with him, saying that if she ever leaves, he will kill himself and it will be her fault. Far from being just a crappy thing to do, this is actually textbook abusive behavior, and gives an alarming view into what Constance's married life must be. Presumably this will come up more next season. It better.

In fact, if there were one hobby horse the show hit on just as often as it hit on race, it would be the horrible results of a culture based around transactional marriage. It's a storyline that comes up time and again, not just in Milady and Constance's storylines, but in the storylines of every single other female character on the show. Seriously.

We've got the story surrounding Queen Anne (Alexandra Dowling), a lovely and kind woman married to an overgrown child of a king. Anne is deeply unhappy in her marriage, which we are shown was definitely for strategic purposes and not even a little bit for love. Her husband, King Louis (Ryan Gage) isn't super pleased with her either. She's so serious and boring and hasn't had a son yet. Her lack of a male heir (or any heir) leads to rumors that she isn't fit to be queen, and puts a strain on her already strained marriage.

To complicate matters, Anne falls a little bit in love with Aramis (Santiago Cabrera), the Musketeer who keeps saving her life. We get the impression that in another world, Aramis and Anne might have been very happy together. Maybe. Or maybe not. But certainly not in this one, where Anne had no say in her romantic or sexual future.

Aramis pops up again in another storyline alongside this where we meet the woman he nearly married, Isabelle (Alice Patten). Isabelle was his childhood sweetheart, and when they were teenagers, she fell pregnant and they planned to marry. Sadly, she lost the child, and shortly thereafter her father spirited her away. Aramis was never able to find her again until, out of the blue, he discovers her at a convent, a nun, now called Sister Helene.

He's a little surprised, but even more so when she reveals that she wasn't put there against her will. She chose to join the convent because when she lost the child, she realized that the two of them had no future.

Aramis tries to protest, but Isabelle is insistent. They would have made each other miserable. Her without an education, stuck raising children in the countryside, and him deprived of excitement and adventure, stuck farming and feeding hungry mouths in some little cabin in the woods. While Aramis insists that he would have been happy, it's most telling when Isabelle rebuffs him, and makes it clear that she wouldn't have.

Heck, even the minor romantic interest characters touch on this topic. Athos has squishy-warm feelings for the lovely Ninon de Larroque (Annabelle Wallis), a noblewoman determined to change the state of female education in France. Her ambition nearly gets her burned at the stake as a witch, but the more interesting part of her storyline is her stance on marriage. While she completely believes in romance, Ninon makes it clear that any marriage she could enter would be transactional simply by virtue of her fortune. If she married, her husband would become the sole executor of her estate, and she would have no control.

Athos, I should point out, agrees with her that it's a stupid system, and the two of them have a heady moment of "Will we fall in love?" until circumstances force them apart. But it's not the circumstances entirely that are doing the forcing here. Neither Athos nor Ninon is comfortable with marriage and both of their reasons for discomfort are shown to be completely valid. Marriage in 1700s France is a pretty awful thing.

The one character who really falls outside this framework, I should point out, is Porthos' love interest (or one of them, dude gets around), Flea (Fiona Glascott). Flea isn't a noblewoman, or a middle-class shopkeeper's wife, or even a peasant. She's a thief and a lowlife, living in the Court of Miracles - Paris' underworld. Heck, Flea doesn't just live in the Court of Miracles, she runs it, and she makes it clear how much she loves it.

Flea is notable not just because she's a new perspective on this whole issue, but because out of all the female characters on the show, she's the one least hindered by ideas of propriety or marriage. As the character with the least connection to societal norms, Flea doesn't care if she gets married or not. Even when she is in a relationship, she doesn't let her boyfriend boss her around, and is totally comfortable kicking his butt. Even more notable?

When given the offer to leave her life of squalor and become an upstanding Musketeer's wife (an offer made on screen and mentioned as having been made in the past), Flea declines. She likes being free, and she has no intention of being anybody's wife. Being respectable never did anyone any good that she can see.

The thing is, she's kind of right.

Don't get me wrong. I, personally, am a fan of marriage. At least in the hypothetical. I would very much like to be married one day, and I'm not suggesting that we all take a tip from Flea's handbook and toss all societal norms out the window. But I do think there's something to be said for examining what we mean when we talk about marriage. Because as the show points out, there are a lot of different types of marriages, and not all of them, in fact, few of them, are actually about love.

Historically this rings true, at least as true as it can, given the caveat stated above about lack of proof and unreliable historical narrators. It's telling that the only love marriage on the show (Athos and Milady) ends in utter tragedy and disaster. That's probably a gross exaggeration on the actual historical situation, but I think it would be dangerous to dismiss the whole topic as taken out of proportion or historically inaccurate. I don't think it's historically inaccurate at all.

I mean, think about it. In pre-Enlightenment France, what value do women have outside of their roles as wife and mother? This is a time in history when women are codified as sexually inferior, and their position is as vessels for the continuation of families, not as people. Women exist, as far as historical record shows, pretty much for sex and babies and maybe some housework. That's about it.

In the upper classes, it's well documented that most marriages were based around strategic or financial negotiations, rather than love. But even on a middle-class level, as we see with Constance, marriages were determined by the need for everyone to be fed and clothed, and basic needs for food and shelter took precedence over romance. This is factored alongside the social stigma towards unmarried women. In other words, if you weren't married, what was the point of you? You're just a drain on resources, and you're a shame on your family.

Real marriage is supposed to be about two people becoming one spiritual entity. It's meant, if we're talking about "Christian marriage", to provide a way for two people to become more like Christ in their ability to love another person and, by growing closer to each other, to learn more how to be in relationship with God. Trust me, I know this, I've been to a bunch of weddings this year.

But let's be real. Most marriages aren't about that. Most marriages are about financial transactions or legal responsibility or getting to have sex a lot with the same person. All of which are potentially valid things. It's just important to consider that love marriages as we think of them, well, they're kind of a luxury, aren't they? And while I don't think that everything about The Musketeers' portrayal of sex and marriage is totally accurate (for starters why are all of the love interests white?), I do think it's a step in the right direction.

While there is a clear connection drawn between transactional marriage and prostitution, since both consist of the exchange of goods and money for sex, the show steers away from blaming the female characters for "duping" their poor husbands. Really, in this situation, everyone knows the score. Bonacieux might be a manipulative jerkface, or even some sadsack who doesn't know any better, but he's fully aware that his wife doesn't love him. He knew that going in. So instead of blaming female characters, the show rightly takes aim at society, the real villain here. It posits that in a patriarchal system where women's only value comes from their reproductive function, no one, not men or women, can find uncomplicated love.

The show makes it clear that a society where marriage is primarily about a financial or social transaction is a broken society. It's not just that the show gives us examples of unhappy marriages or that it points out how most marriages in that society cannot be equal because of how the law is established. It's that the show tells us these things, and then makes us unhappy about it. It says, "This is wrong!" and then tells the story in such a way that you feel angry about how wrong society is. Constance shouldn't be married off to some random guy for financial reasons! She should get to be educated and marry for love.

Isabelle shouldn't have to choose between a shotgun wedding and holy orders, with those as her only two options. Anne should get a say in who she marries, and not just get passed around as a treaty with a woman attached. Milady should have the social freedom to be an equal in her marriage, and the right to be listened to when making a serious allegation of sexual assault. Ninon shouldn't be afraid her husband will rob her blind. Flea shouldn't have to think that the only way to stay free is to stay an outlaw.

None of that is okay. And we need to be reminded of that.

I really hope she's coming back. Love her.

I was so excited for Lucy, you guys. You have no idea. I saw that trailer and I could barely hold in the squee. I mean, here it was, the answer to my deepest movie-related desires: an independent, original female-lead superhero movie starring Scarlett Johansson, opening wide as a summer tentpole feature. It was just so...magical. Plus, the trailer looked rad as hell.

Sure, there was that problematic part of the trailer where it looked like Lucy (Johansson) was shooting a Taiwanese cabby for not speaking English, even though they were in Taiwan. That didn't look super promising. But the rest of it? Looked stinking awesome. Morgan Freeman was going to be in it, and it looked like at most there was going to be one white guy in this whole movie, a movie about a lady superhero kicking ass.

Plus, the plot, from what the trailer told us, was going to be a really compelling revenge thriller. Lucy, a naive party girl, gets kidnapped in Taiwan and has a bag of drugs slipped into her stomach. Against her will, she is made a drug mule, but then something goes terribly wrong, and the bag leaks, giving Lucy superpowers. She enlists some scientist dude (Morgan Freeman) to help her figure out what is happening while she tracks down the men responsible and murders them. Yay!

This is what we were promised, isn't it? Well, trust me when I say that it is not what we got.

I mean, if you want to be technical, yes, that is the plot of the movie. Sort of. Everything I wrote in that paragraph above does happen, it just happens very differently. Instead of being this cool thriller about a woman getting revenge on the men who infringed on her bodily autonomy, what we got was...something. I'm not entirely sure what. But definitely not what I was expecting. And I mean that in a bad way.

It's actually kind of hard to talk about the movie we did get because it was so so so different from what I was expecting. Like, different enough that I'm beginning to suspect that the marketing people lied on purpose in order to sell tickets. Because I cannot think of a single person I know who would have bought a ticket for this if it were accurately advertised.

Here's the gist, as far as I can express it in words:

Lucy (Johansson) is an American university student living abroad in Taiwan. She parties a lot, and one day her boyfriend takes her to a hotel and asks her to carry a briefcase upstairs for him. She refuses, and so he grabs her arm and handcuffs the briefcase to her. She is displeased. Inside, she goes in and asks for the man she's supposed to give the briefcase to, and the clerk calls him.

Cut to a shot of a cheetah stalking a gazelle on the Serengeti. Cut back to the hotel lobby. Some men come downstairs. Cut back to the gazelle. Cut to Lucy. Cut to the cheetah. And so on. Like a lot. A weird amount.

Lucy gets dragged upstairs, where she meets up with Mr. Jang (Choi Min-sik), the recipient of the briefcase. A terrified Lucy is forced to open the case while everyone else hides in case it's a bomb. It's not. Lucy hyperventilates, and Mr. Jang discovers that the briefcase is full of bags of some blue crystalized drug. He makes someone snort it. They get high.

Blah blah blah, Lucy gets knocked out and wakes up with a bag of the drugs inside her and a plane ticket to Paris. When her handlers take her to a cell to wait for her flight, they try to assault her. She fights back, and then they kick the crap out of her, breaking the bag. She then goes on a very trippy very literal flight up the ceiling as the drug pours into her bloodstream and BAM! Lucy has superpowers.

We cut to (probably, I only saw this movie once, so the details might be wrong and I'M NOT WATCHING IT AGAIN) Morgan Freeman lecturing to a packed hall about how we only use 10% of our brains, and what would happen if we could use more of it. Superpowers, apparently. We would get superpowers. The more of our brain we controlled, the more of the outside world we could control, because that absolutely is totally reasonable logic and not at all made of crack.

I don't feel like running down everything else that happens in the movie, so here's a rather brief synopsis. Please bear in mind that all of these plot-like things are intercut with audio of Morgan Freeman talking about evolution and video straight from a National Geographic documentary. At one point we had to watch frogs having sex. It was...different?

Lucy goes to a hospital and gets the drug removed from her stomach. It's apparently a synthesized chemical that pregnant women make that allows us to use our brains. She's got half a kilo floating around her body, so clearly crap is about to get weird. Also she's almost definitely going to die. But before that, she needs to figure out what is happening to her.

So, she beats up Mr. Jang, uses her superpowers to get a disguise, and calls Interpol to alert them of the other drug traffickers. The Interpol agent who answers, Pierre Del Rio (Amr Waked), becomes obsessed with the case. Then Lucy flies herself to Paris to meet up with Del Rio, grab the drugs, and then meet Morgan Freeman and figure out what's happening to her.

The bad guys, apparently a Korean drug smuggling thing, follow her. There is shooting. She passes out at one point. Later she kidnaps Del Rio, and drives through Paris in a really terrifying car chase that is ultimately pointless, only to get more of the drug and go off to meet Morgan Freeman. Del Rio thinks she's pretty. She kisses him. Then she and Morgan Freeman get down to figuring out what is happening to her brain before the drug cartel murders them.

Del Rio gets in a shootout with the cartel. Lucy shows off her superpowers and gives some incredibly profound sounding bullshit answers to a bunch of philosophical questions. Then she has Morgan Freeman inject her with the remaining 3 kilos of the drug because of reasons. I think.

Lucy absorbs the drug, the shootout continues, and then Lucy timetravels around a bit before slowly exuding a black goo that eventually absorbs her and becomes her and then becomes a flash drive full of the knowledge of the universe and made of stars. Literally made of stars. Del Rio runs in and is all, "Where's Lucy?" and she texts him, "I am everywhere."

End of movie.

And I guess there's a little part in there where she calls her mom and is sad that she might die, and a really funny exchange with her deliciously self-involved roommate (Analeigh Tipton), but most of the movie is just Scarlett Johansson doing her damndest to make you care about a walking plot device, and Morgan Freeman reciting incredibly inaccurate "facts" about evolution while the screen keeps showing you bizarre nature videos and scenes of vicious violence.

We all walked out of the movie theater completely baffled, not just by the emotionless ending or by the weirdness of the fact that our heroine literally turns into a flash drive made of the stars, but because none of it really meant anything.

See, the problem with this movie isn't that it's completely batshit, though it is, or even that it's kind of ponderously long and the characters aren't particularly compelling. Those are problems, but not the real reason why this movie made me so angry. And believe me, it made me very angry. It made me angry because I can accept loose characterizations and bad plotting and even really terrible science if it matters. If at the end of the movie I can look back and think, "Well, the rest of it was crap, but at least it was saying something interesting.

I cannot say that here, because as far as I can tell, the movie isn't saying anything at all. It's just weird.

Best side-eye ever.

Arguably, the point of the movie is the idea that the point of human life is to pass on knowledge. While that's a super lame and boring point, I'd be okay with it if it actually seemed to be supported by the story. But it's not. Throughout the movie, Lucy, who is supposed to be our first superwoman who can know the secrets of the universe, actually tells people almost nothing. She's cryptic or terse or otherwise unhelpful. If the meaning of life is to pass on knowledge, then Lucy isn't doing a very good job of it.

Even at the end, when she literally transforms herself into a repository of human understanding, it still doesn't make sense, because Lucy's dead/everything. She can't explain any of it to them. She just dumped a bunch of knowledge in their laps and then bamfed out of existence.

It's also problematic because Lucy appears to have, at first, a very strong sense of self-preservation, but later on she decides that she needs to sacrifice herself. For what? So we can know more stuff? Why?

It bothers me because that's fundamentally different from how I view the purpose of human existence. But it also bothers me because that's a terrible motivation for a character to have. Even worse, it turns a potentially epic female superhero into a blank slate that exists to further the ambitions of a man. Make no mistake, I don't think Luc Besson or Scarlett Johansson were trying to make that the point of the movie, but that is what happens. Lucy loses her self, and instead becomes pure information. The female protagonist is subsumed and deleted, her emotional fulfillment considered unnecessary and distracting. All that we are left with is questions, and a flash drive.

This movie had so much potential. So stinking much. And in the very beginning, it really looked like it was going to take advantage of that potential. You see, Lucy is a character whose bodily autonomy is violated in several different ways throughout the film. First, her boyfriend handcuffs the case to her. Then she is forced to do a series of actions. Then she is cut open and has something inserted into her abdomen. Later, a man sticks his hand down her shirt, and when she pushes him away, he retaliates by savagely beating her.

It made sense to assume that a movie where this happens, and then where the heroine gets superpowers, would be a rape revenge flick. You know, those movies where the heroine uses her powers to get back at the people who hurt and violated her. It felt like we were about to get a timely piece on the overwhelming anger that most women feel about the state of our bodily autonomy in the world. We live in a culture where the rape of a teenage girl was filmed and became a viral video. Hell yes I wanted to see Scarlett Johansson viciously attacking her violators. That's the kind of vicarious thrill that I, as a pacifist, really want in a movie.

But what I got was a bunch of really terribly researched and horribly outdated brain science, a wishy-washy plot, and an ending that makes no sense and leaves you cold. I am not okay with this.

I suppose you could compare Lucy to 2001: A Space Odyssey, because they are both intensely odd science-fiction auteur pieces about deep philosophical subjects with inscrutable endings, but I think that comparison really just highlights how cheap Lucy is, philosophically speaking. 2001: A Space Odyssey might be completely baffling and weird and slow and hard to love, but it says something deep and meaningful. I mean, you may not like it, but you definitely respect it.

By contrast, Lucy tries too hard for too little reward. At one point Lucy travels backwards in time by waving her arms as she sits in an office chair, and she manages to send herself to the exact time and space to meet Lucy, the first hominid fossil. But, you know, back when Lucy was alive.

They touch fingers like a Michelangelo painting that felt a bit too obvious for the moment, and I think we're supposed to be moved or something, but I just felt a bit irritated at the presumption. Besides, it's not like Lucy was about to go propagate her new species. That would have made sense. Nope, she immediately came back and then sort of died.

I guess what I'm saying is that I was expecting to love this movie, to find a few problematic race elements, to address them, and then to go back to loving this movie. It has all the things I should love. A kickass female protagonist, a weird but potentially cool concept, great actors, a predominantly non-white cast and international locations, and a director who's done very well by me in the past.

But I didn't count on this weird metaphysical crap, and I don't like it. Not because I dislike science or don't believe in evolution, either. I love science, and I believe that God created the evolutionary process because that's just super rad. I don't like all this weird crap because it's inaccurate and also metaphorically void. It means nothing. Blech.

So, very long story short: don't go see this movie. It's not fun enough to be bad fun, and it's not deep enough to be engaging it's just terrible. It's truly depressing to watch so many talented people try so hard and make such an awful movie.

WE COULD HAVE HAD IT AAAAAAAAAAAAALL...

If there's one story in Western culture that we've seen more adaptations of than The Three Musketeers, it's Peter Pan. Okay, to be fair, that's an exaggeration. There are lots of stories that we keep recycling over and over, and Peter Pan is just one of them. But it's an important one, because somewhere in there, this little story by J.M. Barrie, written in the late 1800s, became enshrined alongside the fairy tales our culture has been lugging along for half a millennium now.

What I mean is that it's funny to think about the relative newness of Peter Pan in relation to its cultural saturation. Sure, there are fourteen kajillion versions of Cinderella kicking around (and I should know, since my mother's hobby was to collect and watch/read all of them), but Cinderella has been in our culture for a very long time. Peter Pan? Not so much. So it's interesting that this is a story so incredibly pervasive in our collective unconscious.

I say it's interesting. What I actually mean is that it's creepy as hell, and probably deeply unhealthy.

Peter Pan seems to be one of those stories that everyone loves but no one really gets. Or rather, no one really bothers to think about. Because if you really think about it, Peter Pan is not a nice fairy story about a boy who wouldn't grow up, it's about the monstrous ways that a perpetual childhood can destroy the psyche. I mean, it's told in a loving and sweet way, but it's still a cautionary tale. And I think most of us kind of miss that part.

Not like that's a new literary tradition, the missing of the point. People to this day insist that Machiavelli was being totally straight when he wrote The Prince and that he was a sick son of a bitch. Not so, in fact, because even a cursory examination of his life history would reveal that he effing hated the prince he wrote that for, and he intentionally filled the book with bad advice on governance in the hope that the guy would become so hated the people would kill him. I did not make that up.

Or how about Thomas More's Utopia? Yes, it's the book most cited by Danielle in the lovely Ever After, and it's what we attribute her feminist leanings and general egalitarian attitude towards, but the book itself was meant to be a joke. Erasmus even commented on how funny it was, and More himself was a little baffled when people started to take it seriously. They didn't get the joke. And so too, have we completely missed the point of Peter Pan.

Look, when we come down to the brass tacks of the Peter Pan story, what do we know? What does every version stick with?

Peter Pan is a child who ran away from his life when he heard his parents talking about what he would be when he grew up. He decided that growing up sounded terrible and resolved to never do it. Therefore, he went off to Never Never Land, a magical island full of fun stuff where he doesn't have to get older.

Eventually he collects a herd of young boys to follow him around and think he's god, and they fight against pirates and racist Native American stereotypes, and everything is fine until one day Peter gets separated from his shadow and meets Wendy Darling and her brothers and then he takes them to Neverland and all hell breaks loose. Sort of.

That's the gist, though, right? Peter Pan is the boy who wouldn't grow up, and he lives an enchanted life among fairies and living in the woods and he has no responsibilities, but he gets to fight pirates all the time and never has to pay bills or go to school or think about his impact on other people at all. Sounds amazing.

Except for the part where that actually sounds like a hellish dystopia, and where Peter Pan is a sociopath in boy's clothing and a probable murderer to boot.

I'm seriously not making this up, you can check the book: Peter Pan actually kills the Lost Boys when they get too old. Really. As it makes clear in the book, being in Neverland doesn't actually stop you from aging, it just slows the process down a lot. So when the Lost Boys get too old, Peter "thins them out." Quote from the book, included right after it talks about how many people he's killed. So...yeah.

Also, I should point out, Peter Pan does himself age, he just ages much more slowly than everyone else. And notably, he only ages physically. Mentally and emotionally he doesn't grow up. But physically?

Think about it. In most portrayals of Peter Pan, the kid looks to be about ten or twelve, right? Well, by Peter's own account, he ran away from his parents when he was a day old. Now, this is a makebelieve story, so we can let that slide, but even if we assume that he ran away at an age where that was physically possible, like three, that still means that he has been aging this whole time. Not quickly, but definitely aging.

Which paints a much more complex and kind of frightening picture of our hero, doesn't it? Effectively what we can learn here is that Peter isn't a hero, he's a narcissistic sociopath building a cult around himself and murdering his followers. So, the most accurate version of Peter Pan put to screen is probably the one from Once Upon a Time where he's a villain.

More than that, though, the book seems to be trying to explain why Peter's life, cut off from civilization and from all notion of responsibility, is actually horrifically unhealthy. Peter has no emotional attachments to his Lost Boys. He can barely remember who they are. He can barely remember who anyone is unless they're in front of him all the time. Heck, he keeps on forgetting Wendy, and she's one of the only three women he knows in the entire world.

He can't tell reality from fiction, even going so far as to play pretend with the Lost Boys without knowing that he's playing pretend. He really can't tell. He'll make them pretend to eat dinner, and then punch them if they try to complain about wanting real food. Because, for him, this is real. Why wouldn't it be real? Eat your invisible steak!

There's other stuff too. Like, what actual motivation did Peter have to cut off Hook's hand? None is ever given. From what we can tell, Hook is hunting Peter because of the hand thing, but it's never explained why Peter did that in the first place. Based on his general character, I would have to say that he did it for no reason at all. Because Peter is a deeply damaged child with no sense of the outside world or of consequences in general.

Which brings me to the larger point. Peter Pan is a cautionary tale. He's not supposed to be our patron saint of lost childhoods, he's actually supposed to be grim picture of what it's like when we try to put off adult responsibilities and hold onto our youth. Peter is a picture of the horrific thing we would turn into if we disregarded all that painful boring ugly stuff called growing up. He has no empathy, he has no responsibility, he's basically evil. Peter Pan is a two year old id in a nearly grown body, and he is a monster.

So how did we get this so wrong?

If you look at the general movie interpretations of Peter Pan, they seem to be saying the same thing. Peter is a hero, and the grownups who insist that the Darling children come home and become adults are the bad guys. Yes, eventually Wendy and company do come home, but Peter never changes, and we should be glad of that! Yay for Peter Pan and his perpetual youth. May he never change.

The animated Disney version is a sweet, watered down vision of unfettered childhood, while Hook gives us a world in which growing up was the worst possible thing Peter could do. Heck, the IMDB summary for next year's live-action Pan says it's,

The story of an orphan who is spirited away to the magical Neverland. There, he finds both fun and dangers, and ultimately discovers his destiny -- to become the hero who will be forever known as Peter Pan. [x]

Lest we forget, Finding Neverland might have purported to be a biopic of J.M. Barrie, but it missed the boat most of all, concocting this fanciful man who loved being a kid and wished he could have never grown up, instead of the actual man who was trying to make a political statement.

Even my favorite version, the 2003 live-action Peter Pan, completely misses the point. Sure, it's closer than all the rest, portraying Peter as a screwed up snot of a kid who has no idea what he's doing and talks out of his butt most of the time, but he's still the good guy. I like this version best because Wendy is the main character and it's really a coming of age tale, but even so, they didn't get it. The tragedy is that Peter Pan will never grow up. That's not a constant or a comforting thought, it's stinking awful.

Why am I insisting on ruining your childhood right now? Well, first off because it's fun. But second, and much more importantly, because I feel like in missing the point of Peter Pan, we are in grave danger as a culture of becoming like him. It's fine if you like the story or want to dress up in a cute Peter Pan costume for Halloween. Whatever floats your boat. But I am not okay with the idea that Peter Pan, the boy who became a monster because he never grew up, is our cultural hero. And he is.

If you look at most sitcoms on TV right now, who are the main characters? Immature man-children who refuse to grow up and accept responsibility. That's our thing. Our cultural self-perception is of a guy in his late twenties wearing a hoodie and some Converse, complaining about how his girlfriend dumped him for not having a "real job". Whatever, man! He's not some sellout like the rest of them. Yeah, he lives with his parents and he spends all of his time working on his one-man show about My Little Ponies, but that doesn't make him a loser. That makes him deep.

Or you can look at the dozens of independent romantic comedies that litter Netflix. The sensitive man-child, who is quirky and sweet and refuses to accept the meaningful impact of his actions. Sure, he'll learn a little lesson about being nice to the pretty girl before the movie is over, but his overall actions, where he never actually goes out and gets a real job or attempts to do something with his life, will be lauded. They make him more authentic. More real. More admirable, because he won't grow up.

His refusal to grow up is supposed to be charming. Because there's nothing our culture hates more than an adult who knows they are an adult and that they have stinking responsibilities to deal with tomorrow. It's like we're all whining children screaming because we have to go to school, and even though we understand that if we stayed home we would be bored, we still don't want to go to school. Because it's haaaaaaaaard.

I honestly think that all this "never grow up" crap is part of why I so steadfastly insist on being a killjoy about everything. I've always loved rebelling, but in our culture, rebelling is kind of hard to do. I can't rebel by being an "artist". I can't rebel by ditching my job and following a band around for a year. Our parents did that. It's passe. So I rebel by working two jobs and doing this blog on the side. I rebel by working really hard and paying bills.

That's not really to make me sound good, either. It's to point out how messed the hell up our culture is. My character type is lambasted in the media for being boring and stodgy. I am the butt of a thousand sitcom jokes. The ideal woman is a girl-child who can't pay her bills or drive or remember her last name, but gosh is she pretty! Peter Pan has infested our culture, and we have got to root him out or he is going to devour us whole.

I'm not blaming Peter Pan for all of our problems, mind you. I'm a Millennial, and I firmly believe that we got the short end of a lot of sticks when it comes to the economic situation we were spat out into and the horrible lack of jobs and prevalence of debt. I think that sucks, and I think that it's hard. That's not the issue here. The problem is that our culture seems intent on claiming that there is no problem. That we're all just Peter Pans who won't grow up and don't want to and that's fine.

It's not true and it's not fine. I want to grow up, but the culture has created a lie that says that I don't, and then chosen to believe that lie over my screaming mouth. I want to grow up, but all I ever see are images on television and in the movies telling me that I shouldn't. It's like they're trying to cover up their complicity in my extended childhood by making me want to be a kid forever.

The ending of the story is always the part people ignore, but it's the part that matters the most in the telling of it. After Wendy and John and Michael have had their adventures in Neverland, after they have defeated Hook and saved Tiger Lily, after everything is set right again, they go home. Neverland is nice, but you can't live there. Childhood is nice, but it's only nice because it ends. If it didn't, it would become a hellscape of self-obsessed monsters and immature understandings of the world.

It's not fun growing up. It's never fun. But not growing up is much worse. And while I really did enjoy being a child, I'm not a child anymore. It was fun not to have responsibilities, but I do now. I know who I am in the world, and I know that a part of the world depends on me. I know that my actions affect other people, and that I want to affect them positively.

I know that even though it's hard, growing up is good. It's natural. And it's what we have to do if we want to survive.

Grow up, kids. It's the only way to save yourselves.

Yesterday and the day before were kind of heavy topics-wise, and tomorrow is promising to be a not super fun topic too, so I thought before we dive into more depressing stuff about our culture, let's take a minute and appreciate a trope that has appeared in a surprising number of shows now: the sexy brooding hunk of a hero who is an all reality a socially inept nutcase who isn't so much majestic and mysterious as deeply bad at interacting with people.

Can we talk about this trope for a minute? Because I love the stuffing out of this trope.

I love it because it puts paid to the idea of the perfect male character. All too often, writers, especially writers of female-driven shows (and this is mostly a television phenomenon) create these perfect male characters, the ultimate receptacle of the female lead's love. These men are tall, built, dreamily handsome, and yet somehow mysterious and complicated. They have a lot of feelings and emotions, sure, but they keep them locked away deep inside, a mystery for the right woman to solve.

You know what I'm talking about. A kajillion romance novels have been written about these guys, and they show up with alarming regularity on television, especially genre television. I mean, doesn't this describe half the male cast of The Vampire Diaries and True Blood? Or what about the most infamous vampire hunk of all, Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel?

Well, see, Angel is actually the one I'm really referring to here when I talk about how much I enjoy this particular trope, about the perfect guy who actually isn't mysterious, he's just a complete dork. Because Angel? Is a complete dork who has no idea how to talk to people. It's great.

For those of you not in the know, Angel is this character (played by David Boreanaz), who appeared in both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: The Series. He was (is?) a vampire, but he's a super special awesome vampire because a hundred years ago he was cursed with a soul. So he's moral, but also has eternal youth and is super handsome and strong and stuff.

He's very good at deep emotional conversations. Not.

He fights the good fight, and somewhere along in there he falls in love with Buffy, a vampire slayer. It's doomed romance, complicated by the part where he loses his soul and goes evil and tries to end the world but dies instead then comes back and they decide that maybe they should break up.

So Angel moves to Los Angeles (heh), where he becomes an absolutely terrible private detective (who has no license) investigating supernatural crime and fighting monsters and saving stuff. That's the gist of the character, in a nutshell. But what's important to understand is that in between being a drunken layabout of a human, then a vicious killing machine of a monster, then a heroic but stunted vampire with a soul, Angel never really got around to learning people skills. Like, at all. He's terrible at them.

Sure, when we first meet him in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he seems like this sort of perfect, mysterious guy. He's handsome and helpful but sometimes cryptic and vague. He has this deep and meaningful emotional trauma that he keeps very well hidden inside himself, and our heroine, Buffy, is always trying to draw him out of his shell, to give him that emotional stability that he seems to crave. She wants to solve the mystery that is Angel. It makes for a very juicy love story. But, arguably, not a very realistic one.

Which is why I found it so fascinating when Angel became the lead of his own show (Angel, in case that wasn't clear). Because now we were seeing Angel without the filter of Buffy's romantic interest in him, and what we got was...different.

Basically, without the Instagram filter of "romantic, mysterious hunk" laid on top of him, we can see Angel for what he really is: a socially inept dork who isn't mysterious, he's just really terrible with people. And that's great. Why? For starters because it's much more true to life and also funnier. But more because it skewers the idea that this man, this sexy brooding hunk who needs to be fixed by the love of a good woman exists. He doesn't exist, he's a myth. A myth that, I would argue, is as damaging to men as a lot of the myths surrounding female characters are to women.

He has a way with words.

The Angel we saw on Buffy was kind of the perfect guy. He was sweet, thoughtful, and generous, but also dark and mysterious and brooding. He was completely into Buffy, to the point that he couldn't even register attraction from anyone else, and he was willing to sacrifice greatly to be with her. He could help out in a fight, but he was always willing to let Buffy take the lead. Sure, he went evil sometimes, but he did it with such panache! And besides, his evil phase just went to show what a dark and complicated guy he was.

In Buffy, whenever the Scoobies wanted answers on something vaguely related to vampires, they would go to Angel, who would give them this cryptic answer that would (eventually) help them solve the case, but would first make them flail around a little bit. He never gave a straight answer, he was always being so. damn. mysterious.

Cut to Angel. All of a sudden we're seeing all of this from Angel's perspective, and it becomes clear that he's not being mysterious. At least, not on purpose. In all actuality, Angel is a ridiculously stunted person, and he just doesn't know how to talk to a human being. So when he gives those cryptic answers? It's not supposed to be cryptic. He just doesn't know how to convey information in a normal fashion. Or when he disappears in a swirl of his coat when he's done talking to you? Not dramatic, he just didn't know how to end the conversation and now he is running away.

Can you see why I like this version better?

And the thing is, Angel's Angel isn't less heroic than Buffy's version. He's not less brave or good at fighting or committed to battling evil. Actually he's moreso. Because in Angel, he's a person. Before he was a cartoon drawing of the perfect boyfriend. But now we see him for who he really is: a goober, but a goober with good intentions.

All those sexy brooding hunks are attractive and all, but they're not real people. Real people have flaws, and those guys only have flaws that make them seem more tragic and sexily damaged (which is gross and should not be a thing). They fight the good fight, but not because they have a moral obligation or because they chose to or because they have some meaningful reason to do so, they fight the good fight because the plot demands it. They're cardboard cutouts of a romantic fantasy, no more real than all those damsels in distress or those manic pixie dream girls. They're fake. And we don't need them.

He turned into a puppet one time.

Not when there are all these delectable goobers around! Angel is arguably the king of the goobers, but here's a quick roundup of other guys who fit this list: John Sheppard (Stargate: Atlantis), Derek Hale (Teen Wolf), Castiel (Supernatural), Steve McGarrett (Hawaii Five-O), Oliver Queen (Arrow), Batman (sometimes), Tuxedo Mask (Sailor Moon), Duke (She's the Man), and so on. I could keep going. The point is that all of these characters are big attractive men who seem to fit a feminine ideal of what masculinity is, who are mysterious because they don't say much and who are super heroic, but are actually just gigantic dorks.

There's something very comforting about this trope. The idea that that big guy over there in the corner who's not saying much and kind of weirding you out is actually not a scary murderer or some hitman or a potential rapist, but really a kind of inept man lacking the proper socialization skills to ask if he can get past you because you're blocking the vending machine.

The idea that the brooding hunk you can see sending glances your way is actually just trying to figure out why you look so much like his first grade teacher. The sexy dude staring off into space on the train isn't contemplating the meaning of life or his tragic backstory, he's trying to decide who would win in a fight: a shark or a polar bear with an oxygen tank.

What I'm saying is that I love the idea that everyone is people. Because everyone is people! Okay, that sounds super weird, but you get what I mean. Everyone has the right to be represented fairly and complexly in stories. We all benefit from that. If stories where women are reduced to being perfect girlfriends and wives, whose only conflict arises from their use as bait or character development for the male characters, are harmful to women, then can't we assume that mysterious brooding heroes who exist just for female character development are harmful to men?

I mean, clearly our society has more examples of this for women. Like a lot more. It's more ingrained in our culture to associate female value with male relationship than vice versa. But that doesn't mean we should give mysterious brooding hunks a pass. That doesn't make it okay for stories about women to create harmful stereotypes about men. Sexual objectification, and that's what this is really all about, is harmful to everyone, no matter who is being sexually objectified. Even when, I know, it's an upper-middle-class white guy being objectified. It's still damaging.

He always sings Barry Manilow at karaoke night. Always.

You could argue that the sexy, brooding hunk hero with a mysterious past is actually a male power fantasy, but I don't think it is. In fact I'm pretty sure it's not. Who wants to imagine themselves as emotionally damaged and reliant on another person for healing? That's a weird thing to fantasize about. And it's not a power fantasy if you're imagining that you need someone's love to heal you. I'm sure logically that someone fantasizes about this, but it's not the norm.

No, these are stereotypes created by and for women, and they don't just harm guys who can't live up to them, they harm women who see these brooding hunks as a romantic ideal and refuse to accept substitutes. That's problematic for two reasons: 1, perfect people don't exist, and 2, a lot of the sexy brooding hero traits are also traits belonging to not nice men who will be not nice boyfriends. Better to recognize the fantasy as a fantasy and get to know people for real.

Ultimately, though, I think the real reason I love Angel and his horrific social awkwardness is because it knocks him down a peg. It makes him relatable and real. Who hasn't been trapped in a conversation with someone, utterly pinned, and wished they could just run away instead of politely ending it? Who hasn't wanted to just answer, "Because of reasons!" instead of explaining their thought process?

Who hasn't gotten caught spacing and had to come up with a better answer than "Would astronauts or cavemen win in a fight?" when asked what they're thinking about?

Pretty people are awkward too, sometimes, and it's good to remember that. It reminds us that everyone is human, from the people on our screens to the people around us. And it also is stinking funny.

So have a video of Angel trying his hardest to dance like a normal person (because it's hilarious and I love you), and remember that representation matters. It seriously always matters.

Tris Prior is afraid of six things. Among them are drowning, being burned alive, birds, more drowning, being forced to kill the people she loves, and sexual assault.

It's funny (it's not very funny) because Tris is a soldier. She can take care of herself. She's a really good shot, great a throwing knives, and a solid hand-to-hand fighter. Heck, she even has mad strategy skills. She's a strong person, physically and mentally, so why is she afraid that her boyfriend is going to rape her? I mean, her boyfriend is practically a PSA on informed consent and respect, so why is she scared?

Divergent is, in a lot of ways, very similar to most other young adult dystopian novels/movies. It centers around one girl, Tris (Shailene Woodley), who is special in a certain way, and follows her as she rebels against her oppressive society and fights to change the rules so that everyone can enjoy a high level of bodily autonomy. Tris in particular is a girl who believes that the best way to protect people is to learn to fight and sacrifice for them, so she joins the Dauntless Faction - a pseudo-military group in her society. She goes through bootcamp (initiation), flies through her tests, and is eventually admitted into the squads of the Dauntless protectors.

The Dauntless initiation process is specifically interesting because of the way that the leaders test their initiates. The leaders believe that the sign of real courage, and the mark of a good soldier, is someone who can face and overcome their fears. So to test this, they inject the initiates with a serum that will simulate their worst fears, and then watch their neural responses. Each initiate has to go through their fears, and deal with them, while their brain scans and a representation of what's going on inside is viewed by the Faction authorities. Pretty nerve-wracking.

When it comes time for Tris to be tested we as the audience are pretty confident we know what her fears are going to be. We've seen them a few times at this point. Drowning, birds, being burnt alive, having to kill her family, etc. But the really interesting one is actually more simple than all of these: Tris' fears filter across the screen, and we see suddenly that she is scared, no, terrified, of having sex with her boyfriend, Four.

What?

Now, a lot of commentators were surprised by this scene, and a lot of them saw it as another case of a religious fundamentalist speaking out against teenagers having sex. Because Tris is afraid of having sex with Four, and because this becomes a plot point, we are apparently supposed to gather that Tris is afraid of her own budding sexuality or that she's a good girl and therefore is scared to lose her virginity, or even that she has this fear that Four "only wants her for her body".

I don't think any of these are actually the case, though. Because, to my mind, Tris' fear that her older, more experienced boyfriend will want sex with her whether or not she wants it with him aren't that irrational. I mean, they're not all that flattering to Four, but from Tris' perspective, they are a totally reasonable thing to fear.

If you recall, earlier in the story, before Tris and Four are really anything in particular, Tris is attacked by several of her fellow initiates. They know it's her, they target her specifically, and they try to kill her. Because Tris has been doing so well in her training, the other initiates decide to violate and kill her and thus remove her from the competition. It's a stated fact that they are going after her because she seems strong, and that they intend to at the very least make her weak.

That there is a sexual element to all of this seems almost a given, but it's important to note. Not only are her attackers trying to throw her over a very literal cliff, they're also pawing and pulling at her clothes and skin, pulling her hair, and groping her. It's less clear in the movie, but the book is completely clear on this fact.

It's made even worse when Tris pulls off one of their masks (they're wearing masks) to find that one of her attackers is a former friend, Al. The revelation of his identity shames Al, and then Four comes to the rescue and brings her back to his room where she can be safe, but it's clear the incident has shaken Tris.

And why shouldn't it shake her? She was just attacked by men, one of whom she considered a friend, who wanted to violate her in order to "bring her down a notch". They attacked her because she was strong, and they hated her strength. Obviously when she sees Al the next day, she flips out on him and yells that she never wants to see him again. That's not hysteria, that's a very reasonable reaction.

So with this context in mind, remembering that this happens at most a couple of weeks before her fears are broadcast for everyone to see, is it at all surprising that Tris is afraid of sexual assault? I really don't think her fear stems from a fear that Four is an inherently bad person, or even from a fear of sex. As far as I can tell, what Tris is afraid of is the idea that no matter how strong and prepared and able to fight she is, she could still be raped.

Tris has just spent a couple of weeks/months training with a paramilitary organization. She can throw knives, use a gun, deliver devastating punches and jabs, and she can probably poison you too. But Four is bigger, older, better trained and more experienced. In a fight, Tris might come out on top. Maybe. Probably not. In an ambush situation where Tris is without weapons or warning? Almost certainly not.

It's also important to remember here too that Tris doesn't have any faith in the power or sympathy of the Dauntless leadership either. She has no confidence that if she were to report an assault to her leaders they would listen or care. In fact, we know they wouldn't. When news of her assault reaches the upper levels, no one bats an eye. If Tris had been more harmed, we are told that she would have been blamed for not being able to fight back. In other words, it's always the victim's fault, so there's no use reporting anything.

Given all of this, then, is it so unreasonable to think that the specter of violence, and particularly sexualized violence, might loom large in Tris' mind?

“There is no accountability,” [Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, D-NY] said during a news conference on Capitol Hill. “Because the trust that any justice will be served has been irreparably broken under the current system, where commanders hold all the cards over whether a case moves forward for prosecution.” [x]

All of this probably does and should sound familiar to you. It's extraordinarily reminiscent (and I would assume intentionally so) of the current legal debate going on over how to handle cases of sexual assault in the military. In 2011, over 26,000 service members reported being sexually assaulted in an anonymous survey conducted by the Department of Defense Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office. But that's an anonymous survey. Only 3,553 sexual assault cases were actually reported to the Department of Defense in 2013. And I don't think that's because that's how few rapes there were. [From The New York Times]

This doesn't even try to calculate sexual harassment complaints or incidents either, this is just about sexual assault. And while the gradual increase in rapes reported probably reflects the increased attention paid to these cases and the slowly improving conditions for service-members who report sexual assault, that's still a massive gap between assaults and reports, and that's way too many assaults in the first place. I mean, even one is too many. This is a lot more than one.

What's really interesting here, though, is the fact that this the military we're talking about. These are our fighting forces. I would assume that a large proportion of the people reporting these sexual assaults as well as the ones not reporting them are trained combat professionals. And you know what? That doesn't actually mean you won't get raped. That sucks. I don't like writing that. But it's true.

I mean, just based on the statistics alone, the conclusion we have to come to is simple and horrifying: no matter how well-trained you are, how strong you are, and how many precautions you take, there is no guarantee. Someone could still hurt you. That's horrifying.

It's horrifying, but at the same time I think it's something that should come up more in our cultural discussion of rape and victim blaming. Too often people will mouth off about how the victim of a rape ought to have taken more steps to protect themself. Should have learned some form of martial arts. Should have carried pepper spray. Shouldn't have worn heels or talked on a cell phone or walked alone at night. We have so many ways to say that it's your fault for being raped, and that you should have taken better care of yourself.

But here we have layer upon layer of statistics about the massive, terrifying, systemic rape crisis in what should be the safest place in our country: the military. You can't argue that all of these service members were weak or needed to learn to protect themselves or shouldn't have been dressed so provocatively. They're soldiers. And in the end, that didn't make a single effing difference.

I'm not just trying to bum you out here. I have a point. While learning self-defense and being "strong" are very good and important ways to stay safe, ultimately they can't save you. Instead of insisting that people be strong and prevent being assaulted, we need to address the real problem. We need to make it clear that it is not okay to assault someone.

It seems so incredibly simple, but it's not. We need to create systems of justice and clear communication streams that make it easy and reliable to report incidents of rape and assault, and, yes, harassment, so that these reports can be investigated and prosecuted. We need to make it clear that assault is not the fault of the victim, but the crime of the assailant. We need to make it utterly true that assault - sexual or physical - will not be tolerated in our culture, in our military, in our world.

Look, I appreciate the fact that Divergent deals realistically with the fears of a teenage girl in a violent society. I like that we are totally clear on how she is afraid that no matter how strong she is she won't be able to stop someone hurting her. But I really, really wish that wasn't a story we needed to tell.

#metaphor

This isn't going to be a long review, or a particularly complex one either. I can sum it all up right here: Guardians of the Galaxy is great. You should watch it. The end.

Good? Okay.

Yeah, so, I saw the movie last night, surrounded by my friends and family, and I wasn't precisely what one could consider an impartial judge. I've been excited for this movie since it was announced, and even knowing that James Gunn (a director I'm not super enthused about) was attached, or seeing the trailer and all those long, lingering shots of Zoe Saldana could quite persuade me not to be hella excited. I'm glad I wasn't dissuaded, because the film did not disappoint.

From the acting to the writing to the stinking art direction, the movie was spot on. It's no Captain America: The Winter Soldier, sure, but it's not trying to be. It's a fun action movie about superheroes and space and hijinks and epic battles. It's the kind of movie where the hero can save the day, and be a snarky jerk the whole time doing it. In other words, it's super duper entertaining.

The basic plot (very, very basic) is that Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is human who was abducted by aliens when he was a little boy. The aliens raised him and trained him to be a "ravager" like them - a thief, basically - and he's kind of an all around likable scuzz-ball. His latest mission is to retrieve this orb thing from a dead planet. He does, but he has to fight for it, because it seems his bosses aren't the only ones who want the orb. Actually, everyone wants the orb.

Peter manages to make a break for it, but pretty soon he's being pursued by half the galaxy: his old boss who he's trying to rip off, Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) and Groot (Vin Diesel) who are after the reward they'll get for turning Peter over to his old boss, and Gamora (Zoe Saldana), a lethal assassin working to retrieve the orb for her boss, Ronan (Lee Pace). Just in case that's not complicated enough, Ronan himself is only trying to get the orb so that he can give it to Thanos (Pierce Brosnan), who happens to be Gamora's adopted father.

Got it? Yeah, well, don't worry about it. The movie is aware of it's own deeply complicated plot, and while the first twenty minutes or so are very exposition-heavy, they're still fun. You get through it.

Our heroes all end up tossed in jail together, and band up to escape, hoping to sell the orb to the highest bidder and split the profit. They also pick up Drax (Dave Bautista), a stereotypical tough guy who thinks that by sticking close to Gamora he'll get a chance to kill Ronan and avenge his wife and child who were murdered blah blah boring backstory. Sorry, not to seem callous, but Drax' backstory is hands down the laziest part of this movie. It's too easy.

Overall, though, the movie is an absolute freaking delight, and it's hard to call any part of it overdone or half-assed. It's just right. The humor is spot on (a friend commented that there's at least one amazing one-liner every five minutes - I'd put it closer to three minutes), the effects are impressive, and the story is cool and engaging. All of the characters get their little moment of understanding and emotional development, even Drax (though his is a bit dull).

More than that, all of the characters, even the non-leads, feel like fully realized people, for all of their alien-ness. Peter Quill is obviously the best developed, since he's our lead, but that doesn't stop the others from being pretty interesting too. Rocket and Groot have a genuinely beautiful relationship, and are each characterized with surprising depth and humanity. Drax has little quirks and tics that make him really fun despite the bleh backstory. Gamora has a general disdain for everything happening around her that I find quite nice.

They're all people, and they're all complicated, and the movie doesn't try to make that easier on you. Which is great.

The cast in general is lovely. Lee Pace does an excellent job thundering and glowering as the Kree terrorist Ronan, a genocidal maniac who has trouble thinking outside the box. Karen Gillan is positively vicious as Nebula, another of Thanos'"daughters". Her relationship with Gamora is complicated and twisted and a really great addition to the movie. Props to the writers on that.

Glenn Close and John C. Reilly are fabulous as the leader of the planet Ronan wants to blow up and its chief ranking police officer respectively. Benicio Del Toro is fantastically creepy as The Collector. Djimon Hounsou adds a lot of depth to his henchman character. Just generally? The actors are knocking it out of the park.

If you've noticed that this review is largely about surface stuff, then you're right. It is. Guardians of the Galaxy is super fun, but it doesn't have a whole lot going on metaphorically speaking. I mean, that's not a terrible thing. There isn't a whole lot of philosophical depth to this story, but that doesn't make it bad.

No, in complete contrast to last week's Lucy, this is a movie that know precisely how ridiculous it is and positively revels in it. This is a movie that's just rolling around in a pile of ridiculousness and inviting you to roll with it. There are Kevin Bacon references. Peter Quill challenges someone to a dance off. Nathan Fillion cameos. The Russian space dog shows up. Groot.

Guardians of the Galaxy isn't a deep movie, but it's not trying to be a deep movie. What it is, more than really even feeling like a superhero movie, is Star Wars. It feels like Star Wars. It's fun science fiction that doesn't really worry or care about how the science works, it's just here for the ride and the fun and the awesome characters. Peter Quill is very clearly Han Solo, sure, but what I'm getting at is the tone here. The tone is very "here's a giant universe full of weird stuff - let's explore!" And that's a very compelling tone.

I do have a couple of quibbles (Gamora is relegated too much to the love interest role and would be more interesting on her own, Nebula was under-used, Peter didn't have to be a womanizer, etc), but the real takeaway here is honestly that this movie is really and truly fun. And there are so many reasons to love this movie. Like, it's the first Marvel movie to be credited as written by a woman: Nicole Perlman. Or how its main cast is incredibly racially diverse (for a superhero movie). Only two of the leads are played by white actors. Yay diversity baby steps!

Also, somehow Vin Diesel manages to completely steal the show, and give the most compelling performance of his career while only saying "I am Groot." I'm not even kidding. He's the real star of the movie, and it's amazing.

The real upshot of this movie comes down to this: do you like fun things? Then you should go see Guardians of the Galaxy. Because if we want more science fiction that's weird and wacky and fun and cool, then we need to spend money on the properties we get that are weird and wacky and fun and cool. And also Groot.

Little Brother is the kind of book that you sort of feel like you should get arrested for reading. Not that you want to get arrested, mind. The book is incredibly clear on that topic, and completely without the usual bravado of the genre, in establishing that prison is horrible and disgusting and that no one stands up under interrogation at first. So it's not like it makes you want to be arrested. It just sort of makes you feel like maybe you ought to be. Or you're going to be. One or the other.

I should probably back up. For those of you unaware, Little Brother is the first young adult novel from Cory Doctorow. Doctorow has a history of writing books I have mixed feelings about, but overall I like him. He's amazing at the "novel of ideas" thing, and if that sometimes translates into less than stellar plot or character development, well, I guess I can forgive him.

In this case, though, the book suffers from neither insufficient plot, boring ideas, or even a lack of character development. It's a great book. It's also, and this is the main thrust of my point today, an inherently subversive one. Which is fine. Good, even.

The plot of the book is fairly simple, though I'm going to have to go broad strokes to avoid giving anything away. It's written from the perspective of Marcus Yallow, a seventeen year old hacker living in San Francisco. He and his friends all prefer computer and video games to real life, and they've become experts at getting past security protocols on their favorite consoles as well as in their schools. So it's no big deal for them to all ditch school one afternoon and tool around the city playing their latest favorite game. No fuss, no muss, just the four of them: Marcus, Darryl, Van, and Jolu.

And then the Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland blows up, killing thousands in a clear terrorist attack on American soil. Marcus and his friends race for shelter in the BART station, but in the crowd Darryl is stabbed, so they decide to take their chances on the street.

Bad move.

When they try to flag down a cop to get Darryl some help, they accidentally flag down an armored truck full of Department of Homeland Security special forces, and suddenly these kids have to explain why they are a) out of school in the middle of a school day, b) not in a shelter, and c) in possession of so much high tech encrypted software.

It doesn't go well for them. Marcus and Van and Jolu spend days rotting in cells in some underground bunker, being interrogated, and finally spilling their guts about their online habits if only to prove that they really are innocent. They forfeit their privacy and their dignity, and eventually, eventually they get to go free, with the understanding that they will be watched. But Darryl doesn't. In fact, none of them see Darryl again after they're taken.

Immediately upon getting home, Marcus realizes that he can't tell anyone what happened, because they'll never believe him. Homeland Security has his whole city on lockdown and even Marcus' parents have gone from well-meaning hippies to ultra-conservative supporters of National Security in the aftermath. There are cameras everywhere. Random searches. Citizens are tracked and tagged and taken in for questioning regularly. San Francisco becomes a police state. And Marcus?

Marcus fights back. With all of his technological powers and awareness of how to be sneaky online, Marcus and his friends create a way for freedom of speech in an increasingly hostile city, and try to show that if we allow ourselves to curtail freedom in the name of security, then the terrorists have actually already won. If we let them make us afraid, well, isn't that what they were after all along?

Besides, the government only exists so long as we the people deem it useful and necessary. Once it's stopped being those things, it's time to overthrow the government.

It's really no surprise why I love this book. I mean, sure, it's not the most subtly plotted thing on the planet, and I definitely do think that several of the plot points are a bit much, but that doesn't matter. Not really. Not in the face of how much I love love love the revolutionary fervor that streaks through the pages, or the ideological bent, or the fact that while this is definitely a novel, it's also effectively a handbook on how to use the internet as a platform for free speech without being caught by surveillance.

I love all of those things. So much. But most of all I love that this is a book about being subversive, and it's a book that actually believes in what it's selling.

If what I've said so far sounds interesting, then you should probably just read the book. Here's a link to where you can download it for free. Seriously. Cory Doctorow, the author, believes so firmly in the freedom of the press that he actually releases all of his books in print editions and as free ebooks. (He also has an option where you can donate money to his foundation to buy physical copies of the book for teachers and libraries, because he is a standup guy.) So we're already off on this whole, "the writer isn't messing around" thing.

But there's more. While a lot of Doctorow's books involve technology that doesn't yet exist but probably will soon, everything in Little Brother is actually real. It's not so much science fiction as it is science fact. While a lot of the stuff in there is put to a different use than we've ever seen before, and there are some liberties taken with brand names, it's not hard to realize that with a quick google search (probably put on a proxy before searching that stuff, for the record) you can find most of Marcus' hacks and howtos online for anyone to discover.

All of this is awesome and amazing, and is the reason why someone as terrible at computers as I am can actually manage to be somewhat secure online, as well as how I was able to go on Facebook when living in a firewalled country. I mean, that's one of the lamer uses I could have put all this amazing technology to, but still! Super cool.

It's interesting because in making the technology something that exists and is accessible, and then filling the narrative with plausible situations and clear directions on how to dissent, what Doctorow seems to have done is create a manifesto of internet privacy, a guide to how to implement it, and a handy little plot about what might happen if you do.

So when I say that Little Brother is an inherently subversive book? I really mean it.

One of the main themes of the book is that having secrets doesn't make you a bad person. Just because you like your privacy doesn't mean you are automatically a criminal. And, larger point, the protocols we set up to catch bad guys often have a really big problem: they catch too many good guys, and therefore the bad guys slip through in all the noise. If you want to fight fear, then the last thing you should do is make people more afraid. If you want to make people safe, you give them the tools to be empowered in their safety, you don't treat them as a risk.

This is important because we so often forget that a social contract goes both ways. On the one hand, we as citizens are required to partake in certain ways in our government as a repayment for the ways in which we benefit from it. Because we use roads and go to schools and enjoy police protection, we pay taxes that fund these things. Because we enjoy trials by jury, we are required to register for jury duty. Because we enjoy a representative government, we are (strongly) encouraged to vote. Etc. We are to keep up our end of the social contract.

But like I said, this goes both ways, a fact most government spokesmen seem intent on helping us forget. While we are required to pay taxes, we also get some say in how those tax dollars are spent. Because we are required to serve on a jury, we should enjoy the benefit of getting a fair and decent trial. Because we vote, we should be entitled to a representative government. It's easy to forget that these ideas go both ways.

It's all part of a larger problem: we are encouraged to see our government and ourselves as two separate entities. Like there's America and then there's the government. Or there's the people and then the government. It's us versus them. But that's not supposed to be how it works. Our government is supposed to be made up of us. We are supposed to be made up of our government. The instant we start drawing lines defining who is and is not part of the governance of our country, we have failed to be a democracy. And spying on your own citizens is a big part of that.

I think we all remember the NSA hacking scandals that came to light less than a year ago. But I think it's also important to remember some earlier problems we had with this. It's not a recent phenomenon. Take, for instance, my family.

My last name is Pless. It's a pretty bland last name, and up until a few years ago, we actually had no idea where it came from. Turns out, it's the name of a town in southern Germany. Here's the thing: that part of my family isn't German. It's Ukrainian. So where did our last name come from?

It came from fear and paranoia, it turns out. You see, my family is Ukrainian, and Ukraine was once part of the USSR. During the Cold War, my grandfather, who was a decorated veteran of the US Army, was trying to get a job as a pharmacist. But no one would hire a man with a commie last name. So he changed it. Changed it to something German and bland, then moved cities to start fresh. We don't really know when he did this, only that this is probably his reasoning. We don't even know for sure what his name originally was. (At least, I don't know.)

All we know is that the suspicion of being a communist was so strong that my grandfather literally changed his name and moved cities to avoid it. And it followed him. He lived with the stigma of communism for the rest of the Cold War.

That's pretty messed up, right? Well, it still happens today. A lot. Read How Does It Feel To Be a Problem? by Moustafa Bayoumi if you don't believe me.

Little Brother is a book about a white, middle-class boy facing the kind of discrimination usually felt by minorities and immigrants and anyone deemed less than desirable. There's a real sense in which you kind of want to shove his face in it a lot. But there's a bigger sense in which you want Marcus to beat the system. You want him to win. Why? Because if you're anything like me, you think we've already gone too far. We're already living in a dystopia. And I would rather be free than safe anyway.

I had an argument about this recently, about how a society can be both free and safe, and I came down this way: you can't. You can't be really free and also really safe. The key, then, is to find a different understanding of what it means to be safe. So, you can't enforce security protocols and force everyone to give up their liberties and say it'll make them safe. All you'll do is make people better at breaking protocols and sneaking things in. In college, we had a tradition of sneaking oranges into hockey games (long story). The campus police started searching bags and patting down students before the games. Did that work? Heck no! We just got better at smuggling.

The other way to deal with this issue is to come at it from a social perspective. In other words, instead of making a community paranoid, make it aware. Instead of enforcing rules on them, give them the tools to do it themselves. Not only will you get better results, since people will be using their big brains for you not against you, you'll also make them a tighter, better community. If people have a common goal, and that common goal is to protect freedom, then they will care more about the people who try to take their freedoms away.

You can't be both free and safe. The key is to realize that if you lose your freedom, you still aren't safe, you're just not free anymore either.

I say that Little Brother feels like a subversive book because I feel like it is a subversive book. In challenging our knee-jerk reactions to issues of national security and personal freedoms, the book seeks to shake you from your apathy, but it also kind of terrifies you. It makes you realize that the government isn't necessarily altruistic. But it also makes you realize that you are partially at fault for that.

Better still, Little Brother gives you the tools needed to actually do something about it. So you no longer have an excuse.

Imagine a dimly lit police station. Or a break room at a hospital. Maybe a bank of desks at a dot-com startup. It's night. The characters (a spattering of men and women, different races and ethnicities) are all huddled together, miserably contemplating their challenge. It's hard. They don't know what to do. If they don't get this right then they're doomed, but they have no idea how to tackle the concept.

And then, from the other side of the room breaks the voice of their savior. He (of course it's a he) strides across the room to them, oozing confidence and charisma peppered with a healthy disdain for their inability to see what's right in front of them. "Here is how we will solve the problem," he proclaims. "It's so simple, you should all be fired for missing it."

His coworkers object. His proposition is too risky, too out there. They could all get fired. A coworker, maybe a woman or a man of color, tells the hero, "We've looked at it from every angle. There's no way this will work."

"Of course it will. But if you want to play it safe and ruin everything then fine. Go ahead. I don't really care either way."

He sits back and sips his coffee while around him the office is thrown into chaos. They debate. They seethe. And finally, they choose his path. It works. Of course it works. His coworkers throng him with praise, thanks for saving them all, and he brushes it off. He doesn't care. "You should have seen it," he sneers. "It's so obvious."

Familiar, isn't it?

The scene I've just described, the scene that I could write from memory based on a dozen movies and television shows, has to be one of my all time least favorite narrative/character tropes: the smartest guy in the room. You know what I mean. That inevitably male character who spends the whole plot out-thinking everyone, but not just that, telling them how he's out-thought them and then sneering that they should have been able to do better.

Like, say, Shawn Spencer in Psych. Or Dr. House in House. Or Sherlock in Sherlock. Or the 11th Doctor in Doctor Who. Or Rodney McKay in Stargate: Atlantis. Or Topher in Dollhouse. Or Denny Crane in Boston Legal. Or Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (and probably real life). Don Draper (early seasons) on Mad Men. I can keep going, but I feel like you've gotten the point.

What really gets my goat is that all of these guys are the heroes on their shows. They're the main characters or close to it. They're the ones we root for. We like that they're the smartest guys in the room. When they cut everyone down to size, we're like, "Yeah! You tell them!"

And let me be clear about what "smartest guy in the room"is. It's when a character, usually male, usually white, is so far above everyone else in the scene or situation mentally that he can barely hold in his contempt/amusement at their pitiful fumblings. He's so far past them that it's hard for him to countenance that they don't see the totally obvious solution to all of their problems. He generally ends up solving the case or saving the patient or fixing the problem, sure, but he also belittles everyone around him while he's doing it.

This is probably the most important point about this character, actually. That he thinks because he is smarter than everyone else, better at solving the problem, he is inherently more valuable. That because he knows the answer, he is worth more. And that this gives him the license to be a dick.

I hate that.

I hate it for a lot of reasons, actually. First, I hate the assumption that because a character is smarter/faster in one particular area, he is more valuable as a human being. In other words, I hate the idea that analytical intelligence, say, is more valuable than social intelligence or existential intelligence or verbal intelligence or emotional intelligence. The assumption that you are worth more because your skills are more applicable in this one situation is, well, stupid. And an indication of low self-esteem elsewhere in your life. If all of your personal validation is based on being smarter than everyone else, you must really suck to be around.

Second, I hate that so many characters (and the writers who create them) think that being smart gives you license to be an utter dick. It doesn't. It really doesn't. Because someone who is genuinely intelligent, and not just over-compensating based on low self-esteem and a need for validation, realizes that their intelligence is just one facet of the world. If you really are smart, then you know that there are lots of people smarter than you. As Socrates said, "All I know is that I know nothing." Or something like that. It was a really long time ago, and he said it in Greek.

Lastly, and this is my real issue with the trope, the "smartest guy in the room" thing misses the point of why these problems need solving in the first place. Or, to put it slightly less weirdly, it misses the human connection.

So, Dr. House is really good at figuring out what's killing people, right? He's really, really good at it. Better than almost everyone else in the world. That's wonderful. Really. What's less wonderful, though, is how he treats the people around him. He treats them like crap. And he also treats his patients like crap. Which is kind of weird. He will go to ridiculous lengths to save them, but he refuses to have a normal, honest conversation with them. Like it's too hard or too taxing or not worth it.

Or how Sherlock Holmes finds it worth his time to solve murders and mysteries and all that, but he insists on doing it by completely humiliating the detectives at Scotland Yard. There's no reason why he has to do this, no particular motivation. It won't make it easier for him to solve the case if they're all pissed at him, and it doesn't do anything to improve press relations or spread the truth. He doesn't seem to care much about the truth getting out in any case. He just wants to solve some cases.

And that's fine. Or it would be fine if he were less of a dick about it. But he is a dick about it, at least in Sherlock, where the titular character spends about half his time talking down to people who are just trying to do their jobs. Not only does Sherlock appear to find their values determined by their analytical intelligence, he also seems to think that because he is smart he is worth more than all these "mundanes" and that their petty social intelligences or emotional values are stupid and boring and not worth anything.

Sherlock doesn't give two craps about the people actually in the cases he solves, unless one of the cases directly hits upon one of his friends. He seems to care much more about looking clever and making fun of the people around him than catching the bad guys. And you could argue that he's emotionally progressed past this in the most recent season, but, well, I don't think he has. He's still a prick.

Fundamentally what I take issue with is his priorities. I take issue with all of their priorities. Because when a character (or person) decides that they have the most value because they can see the answers faster than anyone else, they have lost sight of something very valuable: what they're finding the answers for.

If you value your achievement, but not the people who helped you or the people who you will help with that achievement, then what is the real value of your achievement? If I save the world, but have not love, have I saved anything at all?

Put another way. I could learn a dozen languages, word perfect, spot on, beautiful accent. And none of that means crap unless I actually use those languages to communicate with another person. Because who cares? Communicating with another human being (through conversation or by reading their works) is the entire point of learning a language. Without it, without regard for the people around you and love for them, then nothing you do has any point at all. If I learn every language in the world, but never use them to speak to another person, I have wasted my time.

What it comes down to is this: people are the point of any valuable human endeavor.

That's why I'm so disappointed in Steven Moffat's takes on Doctor Who and Sherlock. These seem to be shows that have disregarded the value of humanity in favor of cleverness. The Doctor and Sherlock are, yes, very clever, but they don't seem to care much about the human impact of their actions. And I hate that.

By contrast, some shows take this trope and tell it to shove off. Like Elementary, where the whole arc of the first season involves Holmes discovering the human value to the people he meets on his cases and coming to see the love needed to solve them right. Or Criminal Minds, where Dr. Spencer Reid might be an utter genius, but he uses his genius to save people because he loves them. And he never talks down to them.

I don't believe that anyone is fundamentally better than anyone else. I don't believe in that kind of value judgment, that one life is worth more than another life. We are not justified or made better by our intelligence or social value or money or anything else. We're all under grace. You can't earn grace.

When I was younger I used to get into arguments with people because I thought I was smarter than them. I was the terror of my church's Sunday School program, and I caused four teachers in a row to quit. At the time I was very proud of this record, because I figured that if I knew better than them, then they shouldn't be trying to teach me anything, right?

I realize now, though, that I was being a jerk. I made people miserable because I thought that it was more important for me to prove I was right than it was for me to listen and realize they had something to teach me. Or even if they didn't, maybe I should have shut the hell up and let someone else in the class learn something. I thought that my opinion and education and intelligence was worth more than everyone else in the room, and I acted like nothing they did mattered. I was a dick. And I'm sorry. I really am.

If this article boils down to anything at all, I think it can be summarized like this: Don't be an arrogant jerk. Which is philosophically simple, but frustratingly hard to do.

Because if there's one thing we know about people, it's that we're all trying to find a way to justify ourselves, a way to prove that we're worthy of being on this planet and breathing the air and eating the food. Well, I have news for you. There is no way you can prove that you are worth being alive. You just can't. Better to accept that now, and realize that everything we get is grace. You are not worth more or better justified because you can do math really fast or solve cases or cure disease.

We're all people. That's why I think that you should never be the smartest guy in the room.

Surprisingly well subverted in Brooklyn 99. I appreciate that.

Outlander is the story I didn't know I wanted, and now that I have it, I'm a little confused as to how I went so long without it.

Or, to put it differently, this show (and book) is pretty much exactly what I wanted Game of Thrones to be. I think of it less as the anti-Thrones (that honor still goes to Orphan Black, which, yes, I am still planning to finish recapping), but more as an alternate universe form of the same story. They're both fantastical stories full of fighting and betrayal and intrigue, set in Europe or Europe-ish locations, and they both boast of a hearty fanbase that are willing to claw through thousand page novels with dense plots and complex family trees and eagerly demand more.

But that's pretty much where the similarities end. While Game of Thrones takes place in an alternate not-quite-Europe, Outlander is rooted very firmly in historical fact. The story takes place in historical Scotland, with meticulous research and attention to detail. And even though there are definitely fantastical elements to the story, like time travel, there aren't any dragons or ice zombies or anything.

The biggest difference, though, can be found in the perspective of the story. Game of Thrones comes at you from the perspective of literally dozens of characters, shifting location and point of view like some people change socks. And even though a lot of the characters are female, it never feels like a story about women (at least the show doesn't), so much as a show in which women happen to appear sometimes.

Outlander is not like that. It has one perspective, that of a woman, and is inherently sensitive to her mentality and point of view. Heck, it even has voice over narration to get us even further inside her head!

Obviously all of this is to say that I really like Outlander, both the book by Diana Gabaldon, and the one episode of the show that currently exists, airing on Starz. The show is produced and written by Ronald D. Moore, who did Battlestar Galactica, and has Gabaldon's blessing, so I feel like we're off to a good start. And since I plan on recapping the episodes, you'll know if I change my mind.

Okay, now on to the recap.

We open on a view of the Scottish Highlands, and some deeply ominous voiceover from Claire Randall (Caitriona Balfe). She sets the stage for our story: this is about a disappearance. Her disappearance the day she looked at a vase in a shop window.

She's a former army nurse who worked on the front line in WWII, and here we are, six months after the end of the war. It's a poignant moment. Claire can only remember vaguely the day the war ended, but she can remember this day perfectly, the day that she decided not to buy a vase, because as it turns out, that day had a lot more impact on her life than the end of the war.

A couple of shots of Claire attending a patient in the war, and then discovering it was over. We see she's a competent, unflappable nurse, and that she's more than a little emotionally distant. At the news of peace, Claire doesn't scream and shout or cry, she just takes a swig from the bottle she's been handed, and gets on with it.

I like her.

Claire is in the Scottish Highlands on her second honeymoon with her husband, Frank (Tobias Menzies). During the war, Frank and Claire were separated for five years, with her working as a nurse, and him working in army intelligence. They both need some time to remember who they are now, and figure out how to live with each other before Frank starts his new job as a professor at Oxford, and Claire settles into being a professor's wife.

When they get to Inverness, though, and check into their hotel, both Frank and Claire are a little disturbed to find that most of the houses are smeared with blood - some kind of pagan ritual. It's their first sign that the Highlands, while very friendly generally, are still a place that hold fast to tradition, and that they are more than a little superstitious. With good reason, as we come to find out.

Frank and Claire settle into their hotel room, realizing that they can't get away without giving their innkeeper, Mrs. Baird (Kathryn Howden), a bit of a show, what with squeaky bedsprings and all that. We get a quick character moment for Claire when she jumps up on the bed and starts bouncing on it, determined that if Mrs. Baird think they're having sex, she'll think they're having interesting, athletic sex. After a moment, the laughter and silliness of what they're doing gets to Frank and Claire, and they actually have sex for real. Cute.

I feel weird calling a sex scene (non-explicit) cute, but there you go. It was cute, darnit.

Cut to Claire and Frank driving through the moors in a lovely old car. She reveals that they're in Scotland because Frank has recently taken an interest in genealogy, and he discovered that a certain ancestor of his, Black Jack Randall, was stationed there, working for the crown.

Randall was a notorious harasser of the Scottish population, and very much hated, a fact that Frank relays with some humor, and Claire receives with utter boredom. She does not care, but she likes that he does. If it makes him happy, she'll tramp around some castles with him. After all, that's what she did growing up, living on archeological digs with her Uncle Lamb.

He points out a few interesting historical facts to Claire. Like Cocknammon Rock, where the British can ambush the Scots from every direction, or Castle Leoch, a rundown ruin that was once the seat of Clan MacKenzie. It's overgrown and abandoned, which suits them just fine. He points out the kitchen, and various other rooms as they go through, finally ending in a room whose purpose cannot really be determined. They have sex there. It's unsanitary, but sweet.

It's also nice to see a married couple who genuinely like each other and enjoy having sex with each other. It's weird how rare that is to find on television, but there you go. Frank and Claire clearly find each other attractive and appreciate having sex with each other, and that's just kind of nice. That the sex is filmed in such a way as to be pleasant but non-exploitative? Well that's even more of a miracle.

Back in Inverness, Frank and the local reverend are digging through some records, looking for mention of Black Jack. They find that, yes, he was there, but also that he was probably on the payroll of someone higher up, possibly the Duke of Sandringham, because Black Jack never really got punished for all of the horrible things he did. It's like someone wanted him to be a jerk to the Scottish. Hmmmm.

Claire's vaguely interested in all this, but the instant that Mrs. Graham (Tracey Wilkinson), the reverend's housekeeper, invites her to the kitchen for a cup of tea, Claire's out of there. She and Mrs. Graham have a nice chat over tea, and Mrs. Graham reveals that she reads tea leaves, grabbing a hold of Claire's cup and offering to read them for her. Claire, bemused, lets her.

But something isn't right. Claire's tea leaves are confusing, and they suggest something very strange is going to happen to Claire, and soon. Mrs. Graham takes hold of Claire's hand and looks at the line on the palm - sure enough, it's a strange pattern, one she's never seen before. Mrs. Graham tells her that Claire has the signs of having two marriages at the same time, and that she's going to go on a long journey while staying in exactly the same place.

Needless to say, they're both spooked, and when the moment is interrupted by the reverend and Frank coming looking for cookies, Claire takes her leave.

This leads her to where we first saw her, standing in the street, outside a shop, staring in at a vase in the window, and realizing suddenly that she's never owned one. Should she buy one now, to adorn her home with Frank when they get to Oxford? And what the heck was all that prophecy about from Mrs. Graham?

She doesn't buy the vase.

Back in the hotel room, Claire struggles valiantly to brush her curly hair (a feeling I deeply sympathize with), unaware that she's being watched through the window. Frank, coming up the street, sees a Scottish man in full regalia standing below and looking up at Claire. But when he goes to confront the man, he disappears, like a ghost. Frank is shaken, and comes into the room like he's still not sure what's real.

After a moment, though, he recovers, and manages to ask Claire the question that's clearly been bothering him for a while: did Claire by any chance have an affair during the war? Claire is terribly offended by the question, even when Frank makes it clear that he wouldn't be angry if she had. Still, he saw that Scot looking up at her and wondered if she'd made a connection with one of her patients, and he had followed her up here, looking to reconnect. Claire insists it isn't true, and the two of them reconnect themselves, with sex. Like I said, there's a lot of sex on this show, but so far it seems to be kind of nice. After all, this is a married couple who just spent five years apart. They need to learn how to be together again.

The next morning, Frank makes them get up early, because he wants to go see the "witches". Claire's less than enthusiastic about waking up before dawn, but she is tempted. There's a circle of standing stones outside the village, and apparently some druids come up from the town and still observe the old traditions there. Mornings in Scotland. Cold, damp, and dark. Claire is not thrilled, but she's having fun with the adventure.

They hide themselves in the bushes and watch, spellbound, as a group of women in white robes, carrying candles, come up the hill and then dance in between the stones as the sun rises on Samhain. One of them is Mrs. Graham, actually, and she seems to be their leader. The ritual, such as it is, is simple, but Claire can't take her eyes off it. It's just a dance. A beautiful dance. And Claire gets the strongest feeling that she shouldn't be watching it.

But then the sun is up and the spell is broken. Claire and Frank want to muck around at the circle a bit more - Claire sees some flowers she wants to study, as she's become quite interested in botany - but one of the druid women comes back, and they scurry away so they won't be seen.

Later in the morning, Claire is still baffled by what the plant is. Frank encourages her to go get a sample, and since he's planning to go off and look at old boring papers with the reverend, she decides to leave him to it and go on her own. It's just a short drive away, after all, and the weather's nice.

She climbs up to the circle again, and quickly finds the flower, but now there's something else too. A sound. A terrifying noise like a war going on, and it's coming from the stone at the center of the circle. Claire is drawn forward and, almost without her will, she touches the stone. The sensation that follows, she describes as being like waking up during a car crash. She falls.

And then she wakes up, on the ground, alone still. But she has no idea how long she's been lying in the grass, and she dashes back to her car. It's not there. Neither is the road.

She's startled out of her confusion by a gunshot, and looks around in astonishment to see that she's being chased by Redcoats, and that around her are some Scottish men running for cover. Claire runs for cover too, stumbling and falling as she tries to figure out what kind of a movie production or historical reenactment uses live rounds! She staggers down a hill and stumbles on...Frank?

Definitely not Frank. Definitely not. Nope, this appears to be a Redcoat who looks just like Frank, but is most certainly not a nice person. He looks her over, sees her torn white dress, and immediately demands to know who she is and where she came from. When she refuses to answer, he calls her a whore. She's not having that, and he is. He pulls up her dress, but before he can get anywhere, he's clobbered from behind by a Scot.

Said Scot grabs her mouth and hustles Claire over to his horse. When she struggles, he clonks her on the back of the head. She's not having a good day.

She wakes up on a horse, thrown like a sack of potatoes, and riding up to a little cottage as the sun sets. Claire's shoved inside, and finds herself surrounded by big angry Scottish men. They also want to know what she's doing there, but there isn't enough time to properly interrogate her. She'll have to come with them.

In the meantime, the Scots have bigger problems. The leader, Dougal (Graham MacTavish), goes into the back to help one of the men, who's been injured. The man, Jamie (Sam Heughan), has a dislocated shoulder, and as Claire watches them getting ready to set it, she realizes that these men are going to break Jamie's arm. She steps in, forcefully, and demands that they let her set the shoulder. Which she does. Skillfully, because that's her job.

But there's no time to bask in her success, because she's thrown back on a horse, this time with Jamie, who gallantly tries to cover her with his plaid (limited success, since he's doing it with one arm). Claire is coming to the slow, real understanding that she isn't in the twentieth century anymore. They ride for a while, much to her discomfort, until she spots a familiar landmark: Cocknammon Rock. Claire remarks to Jamie what she remembers Frank telling her, that the English hide behind that rock and ambush Scots. Jamie immediately tells Dougal, and the men hare off to fight.

Claire's thrown from the horse (on purpose), and takes one look at the battle before deciding to try to hare back to the standing stones or Inverness or something. But she doesn't get far. Jamie rides up and corners her, pointing out that either she can ride with him, or he can throw her over his shoulder (the bad one), and mess up all her hard work. She grudgingly climbs back on the horse, anticipating a long hard ride.

It doesn't last all that long, though. As they're coming through the woods, Jamie starts to fall off the horse, and Claire realizes that he's been injured. She jumps down and fixes him up, swearing up a storm all the while, and the men look at her with awe. Claire proves herself a very capable nurse, and Jamie falls just a little bit in love while she cusses him out for being such an idiot and not saying he was hurt. She has to tear up her own dress to provide bandages for the wound, and everyone is completely shocked that she's willing to do so. But Claire is more focused on doing her job right than on appearing proper. Which is rad.

Finally, they come on the end of their journey: Castle Leoch, seat of Clan MacKenzie. Claire was there just two days ago, in the future, with her husband. She realizes with a jolt how very much her life has changed in two days. How much more will it change from here?

End of episode.

Dang but I enjoy this show. On top of what I've already mentioned, about liking the premise and all that, it's just really well shot, the actors are quite well cast, and the overall quality is high enough to let you lose yourself in the story. What a story it is, too. A twentieth century woman, a veritable proto-feminist, falls into the days of chivalry and war, and manages to force the men around her to take her on her own merit, to recognize how capable she is, and to think she's wonderful because of it.

I like Claire. She's practical, determined, fierce, stubborn, and fun. She's not some joyless matron, or a breathless ingenue. She's a woman, a real honest to goodness woman. She's amazing. It doesn't hurt either that Jamie is hot as hell, or that the whole story hits on many of my favorite tropes. That's just frosting on top of a delicious feminist cake.

Not much more to say than that I look forward to the next episode, and I really hope this show can keep its quality up for the rest of the season. It's the show we need to wash the taste of Game of Thrones out of our cultural mouth, and I am absolutely determined to do so.

Also Jamie is dreamy. Even when he clearly needs a bath.

Way back in February (so long ago, I barely remember those halcyon days), I mentioned that I'd gone to see a little movie called Vampire Academy. I wrote this whole review thing about how I really enjoyed it and it was very good and I still don't get why critics were hating on it so much.

I figured that since the movie kind of sort of flopped so hard you got sympathy pains, there was no way in hell we would get a sequel. But I was wrong!

Since the fan support for Vampire Academy has been really impressive, and the numbers eventually came out as being not-terrible (though not great either), it seems that the writer and director of the film have decided to go ahead and make a sequel. All the actors have signed back on, the script is done, and almost all of the funding is secure.

The only last part is that the producers have decided to crowdfund a small percentage of the budget, as a way of showing distributors how passionate the fans are, and how much these fans really want this movie to do well. Their goal is to raise $1.5 million, and so far they don't have that. But there's time!

I'm especially invested in this project succeeding because as far as I can tell, the first movie was scuppered simply by virtue of being a movie about teenage girls for teenage girls, a movie that most male critics (and studio executives, for that matter) could not relate to and didn't feel any particular desire to try. That's a damn shame.

Personally, I do plan on contributing, since this is the kind of project I really support. I mean, it's fun, it's genre, it's blatantly girl power, and did I mention that it's fun? I like to put my money where my mouth is and support female-lead projects, especially ones with female writers, directors, and/or producers, and this project? It fits the bill very nicely.

On Sunday, Elizabeth, Patrick, and I talked over our reactions to Guardians of the Galaxy, and then sprawled into a larger conversation about Marvel Cinematic Universe, where we think they're going with the next slate of films, what we think is up with the infinity gems, and how the next Captain America movie had better be titled Captain America 3: We're Up All Night to Get Bucky.

Enjoy.

I normally don't like Hallmark movies, just the same way that I normally don't like romance novels or fairy tales. In general, I find them to be saccharine and cloying and altogether unrealistic. Which is not to say that my preferred genres of science fiction and fantasy are more realistic, just that they tend have a greater emotional depth to them than your average bodice-ripper or made-for-TV romance.

However.

After watching Outlander this weekend and being utterly and completely blown away by it, I happened to check the cast list for the film, and discovered something odd. Namely, that Sam Heughan, who plays Jamie in Outlander, was also in another little movie I'd almost forgotten I'd seen: A Princess for Christmas.

You could say I was surprised. Baffled would be more accurate, though, and I immediately rifled through my collection and threw it on so that I could see for myself. It's true. Jamie is played by the same man who appeared in this Hallmark original movie about princesses and feelings and Christmas. He plays a prince who is so stiff he has to be taught how to dance to rap, in a scene that is both cringe-inducing and the most charming thing on the planet.

But that's not what really stuck with me. Sure, I originally put the movie on so that I could stare at Sam Heughan for a while, but then I found myself actually watching it. Why? Because even though A Princess for Christmas is a piece of complete and utter schlock, the sort of drivel that is supposed to make people feel "Christmasy" and fuzzy and willing to spend lots of money on presents in a wasted attempt to forge emotional intimacy through consumerism, I really like it.

Like, a lot. Way more than I remembered liking it. No, the plot isn't complex, there are no big surprises, or even little surprises for that matter, and the character have about the emotional complexity of a spoon (collectively). All of that is true. No, the movie doesn't feel real, it doesn't seem like the sort of thing that could ever happen, and no, it doesn't work very hard to make you feel like it has. That's okay. The glory of this movie isn't that it seems like it really happened, but in how badly you wish it would.

Allow me to explain.

The movie opens on Jules Daly (Katie McGrath, of Merlin fame) tinkering with a clock. The voiceover tells us that she's a dreamer and always has been, but that life has conspired not to fulfill her dreams, and so Jules is still living in Buffalo, New York, taking care of her niece and nephew, whose parents passed away in the last year. And then, in this same scene where we get all that information, we find out that Jules is losing her job because of budget cuts, and the two kids are in big trouble.

Said trouble comes in the form of rather predictable, but still affecting, emotional outbursts as a result of grief. In other words, these kids are a little screwed up, because their parents just died, and they're acting out. Milo (Travis Turner) has just shoplifted a DVD, and frequently gets in fights, while Maddie (Leilah de Meza) has a snack food addiction and frequently manages to cause chaos. In other words, both of them are pretty normal kids who are going through a rough time. Unfortunately, Jules has neither the money nor the time to give them the attention they need, and on top of all of this, the nanny has just quit. Oh, and Jules' car died.

Into this storm of grief and frustration waltzes the improbably named Paisley Winterbottom (Miles Richardson), butler to the Duke of Castlebury. Paisley is there to invite Jules and the children to Castlebury for Christmas, because the children's grandfather, the Duke, has decided he wants to get to know them now that his son is dead.

Jules reacts rather appropriately to this, and tells Paisley to shove it. The Duke didn't approve of Jules' commoner sister marrying his son, and he disowned him on the spot. He's never met the children. She doesn't want this guy thinking he can buy his way back into their lives.

On the other hand, they do really need the money. And it would be nice to go away for Christmas.

Cut to Jules and the children driving through Castlebury (or wherever this is supposed to take place - Genovia?). Not only does the Duke live in a nice house, he lives in a virtual castle, with a staff, waxed floors, a formal ballroom, and thousands of antiques that make Jules both salivate and sweat with terror (of the children breaking something).

At the hall, their reception is a bit dimmer than expected. It seems that the Duke (Roger Moore, in fine curmudgeonly form) has changed his mind about wanting to meet the children, and is being a jerk to them all. Meanwhile Milo is already trying to abuse his power of having a manservant, and Maddie filled her suitcase halfway with bags of chips. And Jules? She is the awkwardest awkward to ever awkward. Still, even if the Duke is a crankypants, the staff like them. They "liven up the place".

And, as it turns out, the Duke's son likes them too. Ashton (Sam Heughan), the Duke's second and least favorite son, has just returned home and is positively charmed to meet Jules and the children. He tentatively joins with Jules in her fight to get the children a real Christmas tree, and then to decorate it, and even goes so far as to give Milo some grief counseling via archery lesson. Ashton is a swell guy, and very cute. He thinks the world of Jules. If only he weren't dating the positively horrible Arabella (Charlotte Salt), who is obviously only after him for his money and title.

Like I said, it's not the most original plot in the world. Jules wins over everyone with her earthiness and charm and adorable clumsiness, and Ashton realizes that Arabella is terrible, but before this can happen, Jules has to mishear Ashton and the Duke talking about an "embarrassment" and think it's her and try to selflessly run away... Yeah. It's pretty cliched. But here's the thing. I don't mind.

Everyone in this movie is thinly characterized, to the point where one character, Mrs. Birch (Oxana Morevec), actually has an emotional breakdown and spills her entire backstory in answer to the question, "Don't you remember what it was like to be a little girl?" That's the level of character development we're talking about here. Everyone is sweet and lovely and honest and good or else mean and greedy. But no one is really very complicated.

I think the reason why I like it here, where I hate this sort of writing almost everywhere else, is because, in a very real sense, A Princess for Christmas is a fairy tale. A real fairy tale. It doesn't feel real, because it's not supposed to. Of course you want Jules to marry Ashton and become a princess, because she's so good and hard-working and sweet and giving. You want her to get a happy ending because you see how hard she's worked.

And in a very real sense, I think it's this that makes the movie a palatable alternative to the usual romance novel humdrum. Jules isn't appealing because she's beautiful. I mean, she is beautiful. She's played by Katie McGrath, and it's a little hard to buy that this woman has trouble finding a date. But her beauty isn't why Ashton (and everyone else) falls in love with her. People fall in love with Jules because she's good.

That seems overly simplistic, and it is. Jules is good the way that Steve Rogers is good. In a completely unrealistic, uncompromising, generous, ridiculous way. She practically farts puppies and rainbows. And even when she cries, she's always thinking about someone else.

When she thinks that Ashton is embarrassed of her, her first instinct is not to think that he's horrible, or that she's terrible. Instead, she realizes that she is out of her element, and maybe she better leave. But rather than this seeming like self-pity or a doormat woman, she comes off as, well, self-sacrificing. She figures that she's only there because the kids are, and that if that's the case, she should bugger off and let the family get on for a while without her.

Or how about this? When Jules loses her job, has a broken car, is faced with two completely unruly children, does she think for even a second about packing it in and going back to whatever her life was before she became a single mother? Nope. Not once.

Jules is a good person, and she's such a good person that she transforms the world around her. She makes other people good too. She insists that Christmas is magical, and so it is.

No, I don't think this is a particularly realistic representation of the world. But don't you wish it was?

I know people like Jules Daly, people who are so selfless and good and hard-working, people who strive to help others, even when they don't feel like it, and who give endlessly out of the abundance in their hearts. I wish that all of them could get the kind of beautiful happy ending that Jules gets. It's so human. We want the people we see who are genuinely good to be rewarded, don't we? And it's so rare to actually get that.

So while I would never call this movie well-written, or deep, or complex, or even surprising, I will say this: it's the story I wish were true. And I'm willing to watch it so that, for an hour and a half, I can believe it is.

Me too, girlfriend.

Let's talk about mother-in-laws in genre fiction. Not a beloved demographic, is it? It's the true hallmark of any romantic story, a mother-in-law who doesn't just disapprove of her potential daughter-in-law, she hates her with the fire of a thousand suns and is constantly plotting her doom. I mean, what better way to emphasize the way in which our hero and heroine's love is overcoming all obstacles than to pit their own parents against them? If his mother hates her, then we can see just how real and true and powerful their love is. Awwww.

Needless to say, I'm not a huge fan of this trope. I find the idea of using inter-generational female conflict as a narrative device to make the men look better and more heroic kind of deeply irritating. Sure, I love Sons of Anarchy a lot, but the tension between Gemma and Tara, or between Gemma and Wendy, really irritates me. They are two strong, awesome women. I want them to get along, and I love best the seasons when they do.

So looking at this, the frustration of this trope, you would think that I really hate Reign's Queen Catherine (Megan Follows). She is, after all, the quintessential poisonous mother-in-law. She is so sure that Queen Mary (Adelaide Kane) will bring disaster on France if she marries Catherine's son Francis (Toby Regbo), that she is willing to attempt assassinations, use magic and fortunetelling, and even hire men to rape Mary. She is not a nice person.

I think she's a brilliant character, though. In fact, I think that the show, without Catherine, would be virtually unwatchable. Mary is all well and good, but the show works because of the way that Mary and Catherine are cast as opposites. Instead of the real conflict between them centering around Francis, their true disconnect is actually about their similarities, and Mary's reluctance to recognize how similar they really are.

But first a little background. Reign is a highly fictionalized, highly soap-operatic, highly entertaining show about Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary, who was in line for the English throne (somewhere) after the passing of Henry VIII as well as possessing the Scottish throne, is portrayed as a late-teen, early twenties woman, passionate, romantic, and idealistic, who must grow into being a queen in her own right. She's the center of the show, and all of the show's action or drama stems from her and her choices as she tries to govern her country in exile, as well as prepare for a political marriage to the Prince of France, Francis.

The show does a lot with politics (Scotland and France are both Catholic countries, making them natural allies against the hated English, who are always on the verge of turning protestant under Elizabeth I), but the real strength comes from the characters and their interpersonal relationships. Mary, who has been living in a convent in hiding since she was a little girl, has finally come out and is preparing to marry Francis. But Catherine, Francis' mother, has been told of a prophecy that states that if Mary weds Francis, Francis will die and the nation will fall into ruin.

So, obviously, Catherine really does not want Mary to wed her son. For pretty legitimate reasons.

The problem, of course, comes from the fact that Mary and Francis are in love, and that the alliance of their countries could be very beneficial for both of them. Catherine has to figure out how to tear them apart, while still maintaining diplomatic relations, as well as keeping herself out of trouble.

And, complicating matters further, is the simple fact that Catherine doesn't actually hate Mary. She respects her, even. Catherine sees Mary as a version of her past-self, the woman she was before the rough duty of queenship made her cold and hard. Catherine views Mary as her protege, and that scares the crap out of Mary. Because Catherine? Is not a nice woman.

That's a huge part of what makes the show so interesting. Catherine, a cultured, refined, beautiful woman, is hands down the most ruthless character on the show. She makes no apologies for her ambition, nor does she pretend to be a nicer person than she is. Her relationship with her husband, King Henry (Alan Van Sprang) is strained, but functional, because Henry and Catherine both know that Catherine is indispensable for the running of the country.

Catherine is ruthless and terrifying and a great villain, but the show refuses to pigeon-hole her in that role. She's also a devoted mother. She's a patron of the arts, one of the greatest in French history. She's honest in a world where honesty can get you killed, because she is virtually fearless. I mean, the woman goes so far as to plan the decor for her own beheading, for crying out loud.

More shocking than all of this, though, is the fact that the show allows Catherine to be romantic sometimes too. She's all of these things, and still a woman who likes to be wooed and flattered and loved. Sure, her relationship with her husband is crap, but she isn't dead inside. The show lets Catherine be the kind of complex woman who can still have a private softness in her heart, even when she's ordering the death of hundreds of men in the hopes of preserving the nation.

A lot of props obviously have to go to Megan Follows for portraying Catherine with such sensitivity. She's an amazing actress. Seriously. She steals pretty much every scene she's in, and the ones where Catherine and Mary go head to head in queen-mode are the pinnacle of the show. But I also want to give credit to the show's creators, Laurie McCarthy and Stephanie Sengupta, for making Catherine such a wonderful, multi-dimensional character.

It would be so easy for Reign to fall off into its soap-operatic tendencies, or to become just about the love lives of its young attractive characters. Who has time for the fate of nations when we're all trying to figure out if Mary will choose Francis or Bash (Torrance Coombs)? Catherine keeps us grounded. She reminds us every time she comes on screen that the stakes here are much higher than the characters want to admit. That their love lives, important as they are, are not the main focus here. This is about the lives of hundreds of thousands of people whose futures hang in the balance. This is about politics, and nations, and armies, and thrones.

I just, I find it so interesting and so compelling that Catherine likes Mary. It would be terribly easy to make her a bitter angry shrew of a woman, whose lust for power and control over her son renders her a simple antagonist who highlights the purity of Mary and Francis' love. But that's not the case. Catherine respects the hell out of Mary. When Mary outmaneuvers her, you can tell she's pissed off, but impressed. Catherine likes Mary, but she still tries to kill her, because Catherine is beholden to a higher cause than her personal feelings about people. She is beholden to her country.

Catherine reminds me a lot of Varys from Game of Thrones, actually. She's willing to do terrible horrible things, but she does them because she believes that as a ruler she has a duty to do what's right for her country. Yes, she is ambitious, and yes, she does still sometimes connive for personal reasons, but it strikes me as kind of awesome that Catherine's driving purpose most of the time is her duty to her subjects.

It's also worth noting, as I did at the top, that Catherine and Mary are very much written as parallels of each other. Catherine exists both as an obstacle to Mary's path and also as a vision of who Mary will become in the future if she is not careful. We are left to decide for ourselves whether it would be a good or bad future. But the fact remains clear. Catherine was once a young girl just like Mary. And Mary is growing up to be a woman like Catherine.

She's smart. She's sarcastic. She's sexy. She's driven. She's ambitious, ruthless, honest, conniving, deceitful, vicious, and loving. She's a hell of a woman, and she really doesn't care whether you like her or not. That's just...I wish we had more character like her. More middle-aged female characters who are their own people, who are utterly essential to the narrative, and who are willing to do what needs to be done, without having to sacrifice their femininity to do it. I'd very much like to sit Catherine down with Mrs. S from Orphan Black one day, and have the two of them talk, woman to woman.

Catherine is something else. I love that she's a character on the show I enjoy so much, but when it comes down to it, I don't know if I actually like her. And I think that also is pretty cool. She doesn't have to be likable to be essential.

More than that, though, Catherine gives another idea of what women can grow up to be. I'm not saying I want to be Catherine d'Medici when I grow up, because she is terrifying and that seems like an unpleasant life, but I really appreciate the idea that she's an option. We are not limited to lives of being defined as mothers or teachers or carers or shrewish mother-in-laws who hate other women. We can be anything we want, even a ruthless, regal terror who has sacrificed her own happiness for duty. Don't we want more complicated female characters like that?

Ah good times. Plotting the deaths of everyone who annoys her.

After the tumult of time travel, WWII, and near-rape last episode, this episode was comparatively mild. We picked up right where last week left off, with Claire and her coterie of mud-caked Scots riding in to Castle Leoch, and Claire realizing that she has no idea where the crap she is or how to get back to the standing stones.

Claire, still in her dirty white dress, that reads to these 18th Century Scottish eyes as "underwear", slides off of Jamie's horse, and insists that Jamie get some medical attention inside before anyone bothers trying to "dress her properly". Mrs. Fitz (Annette Badland), the kind-faced keeper of the kitchens agrees to this order of events, and Claire is quickly escorted inside the castle.

She has trouble with the walk, as she keeps flashing back to last episode when she explored the ruins of this exact spot with Frank (and had some nooky on a table). But Claire shoves all of that down long enough to find a quiet spot where she can really dress Jamie's shoulder.

Of course, this is the first time we or Claire have seen Jamie's torso well-lit, and a couple of things become immediately apparent. First, that Jamie is incredibly muscular and dreamy and guh. Second, that Jamie's back is a veritable roadmap of scars. There's almost no visible skin on his back that isn't raised scar tissue. Even Claire, a decorated nurse from the bloodiest war in history (her history), recoils in horror.

Jamie laughs it off quickly, and comments that he got those scars because he was flogged. Twice. In the same week. Claire can't even comprehend this, but asks what he did to get that punishment, and Jamie reveals that the first time he was flogged was for trying to escape. The second time was for theft, a secondary charge tacked on because they didn't like him. An understatement if ever there was one.

A cute exchange happens when Claire asks why Jamie was trying to escape and he responds easily with, "Because I was being held prisoner!" And Claire is all, "Oh my gosh you goober, you're lucky you're pretty." I like him. He can stay.

Anyway, apparently Claire has reached the status of "level four friend" because she unlocks Jamie's tragic backstory. Heh. Back-story. I crack me up.

Jamie reveals that he was originally arrested for the innocuous crime of "obstruction". When the English came through the countryside four years ago, they raided local farms, collecting food and livestock for their own purposes. With his father away, Jamie was the man of the house, and he wasn't thrilled about the Redcoats stealing his family's food. Worse, they were trying to rape his sister, Jenny (Laura Donnelly). Worst, Captain Jack Randall was there (Claire's attempted rapist, and Frank's ancestor). Randall decided he liked Jenny's spirit, but he liked Jamie's more, and ordered Jamie flogged while Jenny watched. He also tore Jenny's dress open.

When Jamie resisted the flogging (a lighter one, but still does well to explain that plethora of scars) and didn't scream in pain like Randall obviously wanted him to, Randall decided that what the hell, he might as well rape Jenny. So he dragged her inside, and Jamie was knocked unconscious. He woke up miles away and hours later, strapped to a horse and being taken to Fort William to be imprisoned.

Claire is suitably horrified by this tale of woe, and Jamie awkwardly tries to make the mood light again by thanking her for patching him up, and then asking Claire where her husband is. This does not make the mood lighter, as suddenly she imagines what must be happening to Frank. That's discovered she's missing, without a trace, and has to try to find an explanation. Was she kidnapped? Murdered? Or did she just decide to leave him without any explanation? Claire breaks down crying, and Jamie is stuck trying to console this weeping woman in her underwear.

He draws the obvious conclusion, that her husband is "not alive" and, well, it's true, isn't it? He husband is not alive. It's just that Jamie means he's dead, and Claire means he hasn't been born yet. Details. Jamie holds Claire close while she cries (and while most of the female audience swoons a little, because dayum he hot and so sensitive), and then tells her that while he's here she doesn't need to be afraid. But he ends with a warning. Never forget that she's English in a place where "that's not a pretty thing to be." Claire nods her agreement.

And then finally, finally, someone shows Claire to a room where she can get some incredibly necessary sleep. Unfortunately for her, she's in an agrarian society, and morning comes early. Mrs. Fitz bustles in to chastise Claire for sleeping the day away. I mean, it's almost 5 o'clock! In the morning! What's Claire doing still in bed?!

She drags the realistically bedraggled Claire out of bed, tutting at her all the while, lets her get two bites of breakfast in her mouth, then insists that the time has come to get her into some real clothes. Time to assimilate, it seems. But this turns out to be one of the funnier scenes of the show, since Claire has no idea how 18th Century Scottish clothes work, and Mrs. Fitz has no idea what to make of Claire's decidedly foreign underwear.

Staring agape at Claire's demure (and rather pretty) silk underthings, Mrs. Fitz asks what kind of corset that is, and Claire defensively tells her, "It's a brassier." At Mrs. Fitz's look of utter incomprehension, she adds, "It's from France." So, it's from France is clearly going to become Claire's explanation for everything she can't reasonably explain. Good to know.

Anyway, Mrs. Fitz takes great relish in thrusting the still-unwashed Claire (and her frizzy snarl of hair) into a chemise, and a corset, and then a weird hip padding thing, and then an overdress, and then some stockings, and then another overskirt, and then some arm-warmers, and then shoes, and then I am exhausted just watching this. Suddenly I find myself eternally grateful for the ease and pleasant comfort of a world where I can throw on some underwear, a dress, and a pair of leggings and call myself not just dressed, but dressed modestly. Also, I like showers, and I have a feeling that Claire would like them too right about now.

The point of all of this clothing becomes clear momentarily, though, as Mrs. Fitz declares Claire acceptable and sends her off to meet "The MacKenzie". As in, the Laird of Clan MacKenzie, and the ruler of this particular castle. It's not like the Laird wouldn't be interested in the strange Englishwoman his men picked up on their land. So Claire goes off to meet him. Colum MacKenzie, the ruler of Castle Leoch.

She takes the opportunity to snoop a little and figure out when precisely she is, and judging by a letter on Colum's table, the news isn't good. Claire is stuck in 1743 Scotland, just a few years before the Rising crushed Scotland's hopes of independence for two centuries. Not a good time to be English in Scotland. Also, Colum catches her snooping, and it does little to make him like her more.

Interestingly, Colum is not what Claire imagined as the Laird. He's physically disabled with some kind of wasting bone disease, but his brain remains incredibly sharp. He proceeds on what is absolutely and unequivocally an interrogation. Why was Claire in the woods? Why was she almost naked? What's her deal, anyway?

Claire draws on Frank's stories of his work with MI-6 and interrogation tactics in order to survive. She makes up a story about being a sweet widow on her way to meet relatives in France when she was attacked first by highwaymen, and then by Captain Jack Randall. Colum is dubious, but he reserves the wealth of his skepticism for her report that Randall tried to rape her. He insists that Randall is an officer and a gentleman and wouldn't do that. Which is funny, because that was the only part of the story even a little bit true.

Then Colum really steps in it by telling Claire that he finds it hard to believe that Captain Jack Randall, a man bearing the King's Commission, happened upon a lady traveller and decided to rape her for "no good reason". Claire's death-glare grows in intensity, and she just stares at Colum while asking calmly, "Is there ever a good reason for rape?"

Shots fired. Burn. Snap. Oh yes. Go Claire go!

Colum looks a bit like he wants to wet himself after that and immediately apologizes. He then admits that he doesn't really believe her, but in a week, the tinker will be there, and she can catch a ride back to Inverness (and therefore the stones) with him. Claire thanks him and leaves.

She winds up on the castle rampart, looking down on the life of the people below. It seems different but familiar, and even a little heart-warming when she sees Dougal MacKenzie playing with a boy she figures must be his son. Cute.

Later that day, at lunch or dinner or something (dinner, probably), Claire enters the great hall with adorable new kid on the first day of school awkwardness. But she needn't have worried. Colum invites her up to the high table and gives her Dougal's seat. He's very nice, constantly refilling her glass and asking her lots of questions. On second thought, maybe she should worry. Since Colum is clearly continuing the interrogation and getting her drunk to do it.

Claire doesn't reveal anything too bad, until she spots the little boy from earlier and tells him how nice it was to see him playing with his "father." The table goes silent. Claire knows she stepped in it, but she doesn't know why. Apparently said kid, whose name is Hamish, is actually Colum's son, not Dougal's, and everyone is really really uptight about it. Weird. Because it's not like it would be hard to say, "No, that was his uncle, but thanks." Claire is overwhelmed with awkwards and leaves the hall immediately, determined to do better next time if she wants to stay alive for the next week.

The morning finds her once again prying herself out of bed far too late for Mrs. Fitz's taste, and then asking for a little bit of food and some bandages to take down to Jamie, who's been relegated to the stable. He's trying to break a horse to ride when she gets there, and while Claire does accidentally screw up what he was doing, Jamie's thrilled to see her and accepts lunch gratefully.

During lunch, wherein Jamie eats everything quickly and Claire watches in astonishment because damn can he pack it in, Jamie reveals a little more of his sordid history. First that he's using an assumed name, and second, that he's wanted by the English not just for escaping, but also for the murder of an English soldier who died during his escape. Jamie insists he didn't do it. Also, he admits that he's eaten grass because he was so hungry before, and Claire doesn't even know what to make of that.

Fortunately, she doesn't have to goggle for long, because Jamie's got to go back to work. She tells him, "Try not to get flogged or stabbed today," and he replies happily, "Now no promises, Sassenach!" Because Jamie is incredibly cavalier about his physical well-being. He's the hero in a romantic story. Of course he's going to get beat up a lot.

As Claire's leaving, she notices (finally) that she's being followed by Rupert, one of Dougal's men. He's there to make sure she doesn't run off, she finds, and also because they think she's a spy. She immediately confronts Dougal (who doesn't deny it or care) and tells him she is very angry. Not your best move, Claire-bear.

For the next few days, Claire tries to keep her head down. She goes out foraging food for Mrs. Fitz in the kitchens, and while out there she meets a nice (?) lady, Geillis Duncan (Lotte Verbeek). Geillis is the kind of woman who starts off a conversation with, "I know who you are," and "Those flowers are good for getting rid of an unwanted pregnancy." Also she jokes about poisoning her husband. Geillis is a little unsettling. But then, she is the first friend Claire has made aside from Mrs. Fitz and Jamie, so Claire's not gonna be super picky.

Claire should probably consider being a little more picky. Geillis is unsettling, creepy, speaks in a sing-song, and calls herself a witch. Uh, Claire? Maybe don't befriend the nice lady. Maybe walk away slowly.

That night Claire attends "The Hall", where Colum sits and passes judgment on disputes between his subjects (people sworn to Clan MacKenzie). Claire has finally figured out what Colum's degenerative disorder is - it's Toulouse-Lautrec Syndrome, or Pycnodysostosis - a wasting disease that shortens the lifespan and causes the bones to collapse under their own weight. Colum is not a young man, and Claire realizes that he must be "living on borrowed time".

Geillis and Claire stand in the back so that Geillis can thoughtfully translate the Gaelic for Claire. But the business is mostly trivial and dull until it gets to a father dragging his very pretty daughter forward. He accuses her of "loose behavior" and asks that the MacKenzie punish her. Colum agrees, but before they can get to it, Jamie steps forward. Claire is confused. Jamie volunteers to take the punishment himself, for reasons unknown, and Colum seems totally okay with this.

But something is off. The punishment, which consists of a beating (Jamie chose for fists instead of the strap) goes on a bit longer than it should. It should have ended when Jamie's nose was broken, but it doesn't. Dougal keeps nodding at the enforcer and telling him to keep going. Jamie ends up getting punched in the bullet-wound and then knocked unconscious.

Claire rushes out the back to care for her continual patient. She tries to suss out why he volunteered, but he just insists that he really is that gallant. And then she tells him that he's to stop doing stuff like this, because she's leaving tomorrow and this is goodbye. Jamie seems quite sad to hear it, and bids her farewell, before bracing himself to meet Laoghaire (Nell Hudson), the pretty young girl he saved. She wants to "thank him." Heh.

The next morning Claire is totally ready and prepared and about to hop on the tinker's cart, complete with a hug and bundle of food from Mrs. Fitz, when Dougal comes to fetch her. He takes her to Colum, and brooks no arguments. Colum escorts Claire into the bowels of the castle, to the secluded bit where she had sex with Frank (of course), and tells her that this is the castle's surgery, once belonging to Davie Beaton, who sadly has died and left the castle without a physician.

Claire's all, "Well that's nice, now may I go?" But no. She may not go. Dougal and Colum are still very suspicious of her, and they've decided against letting her leave. She'll stay at the castle and be their physician until such time as they're certain she's not a spy. She's not a prisoner, she's a guest. Unless she tries to leave. As Claire fumes and begins to cry with frustration, Colum and Dougal leave, locking the door behind them.

End of episode.

So, less action packed, but no less full of drama, eh? I appreciated getting more background on Jamie, and I quite like the choice to actually show us what happened, instead of making us sit there while Jamie narrated it. I also find it interesting, however, that they are picking and choosing which memories to show us instead of telling. We didn't see Jamie get flogged at Fort William, but we did see his encounter with Randall. Hmmm. I think they might be saving some of this stuff for later, when we get a much fuller story on it, but still. Interesting.

I also appreciate some of the changes made to the story. They moved up Claire's meeting with Geillis, which is good, and they added in that whole story with the tinker. I like it. It gives the narrative more weight, and Claire's desperation is more visceral when we see her chance of going home literally driving off without her.

But most of all I loved the blatant feminism of this episode. Claire's one line about there never being a good reason for rape is just so so so good. Amazing. Wonderful. This show makes me feel so much better about life than Game of Thrones ever did. And I'd apologize for the constant comparisons, but it really is like night and day.

Also? I liked how much of today's story required us to stare at a shirtless Jamie for a while. A+ storytelling, gentlemen. You may continue. It doesn't hurt that Sam Heughan is actually a really compelling actor either. And Caitriona Balfe knocked it out of the freaking park. Her tiny little facial changes when she's thinking? Amazing.

Ugh. I can't wait for next week. So good.

As an adult who has seen more than her share of children's programming, I have a very complex relationship with Dora the Explorer. On the one hand, I think it's a brilliant show that deftly teaches basic reasoning skills, shapes, colors, and Spanish fluency, and on the other hand, it's so annoying it makes me want to jam pencils in my ears.

The reason I find it so irritating is almost entirely due to those reasons listed above, because as an adult with a working grasp of logic and spatial relations, I find it endlessly tedious to sit there waiting for a two year old to figure out where Map is on the screen. But I get why shows like this are useful and important. They're educational, and nice, and hey, isn't it pleasant when kids know at least a few words in languages other than their native tongue?

It's this understanding that helps me bite my tongue and not snark at the screen during Dora the Explorer, or the slightly less inane Diego the Explorer, or the painfully adorable Ni-hao, Kai-Lan that teaches children Mandarin Chinese, or the moral lesson minefield that is Little Bill. I appreciate all of these shows for their willingness to use entertainment to educate children, and their comfort with other languages, cultures, and moral lessons. That's all great and I support it.

But that's not the real reason I put up with these shows (all of which I find educational but super duper irritating, as only an adult forced to watch television for toddlers can). The real reason is a little more nebulous, but a whole lot more important. None of the main characters of these shows are white. And that's a feature, not a bug.

I complain a lot (a lot) about the lack of diversity in most mainstream media. The lack of diversity can lead to a decrease in the self-esteem of children of color watching it. When they don't see themselves on screen, they can come to feel like they are worth less, or like their stories aren't worth being told. Worst of all? They can come to feel like they aren't human or that the world does not see them as people. And it's not just me saying that:

This month, the academic journal Communication Research published a study by two Indiana University professors called “Racial and gender differences in the relationship between children’s television use and self esteem: a longitudinal panel study.”
This unique piece of research studied 396 black and white preteens in communities in the Midwest United States over a yearlong period. Researchers focused on how much the kids watched TV, and how that impacted their self esteem. What they found – although kind of common sense – is making headlines: Television exposure predicted a decrease in self-esteem for white and black girls and black boys, and an increase in self-esteem among white boys. [From Racebending.com]

So obviously there is a lot of value for children of color to look at the television and see these shows. Dora and Diego are identifiably Hispanic, while Kai-lan is Chinese, and Little Bill is African-American (and based on Bill Cosby). These are important characters for children of color to see and relate to, to understand that they are human, and that their stories should be told.

But I would argue that there's another benefit too, one that gets a bit less press because it's harder to quantify: watching these shows gives white children a valuable view of cultures and experiences different from their own. And that has merit not just because sharing and caring is a nice thing to do, but because exposure to the lives and cultures of people of other races can and does have long-lasting impact on the child's perception of those races.

In other words, a kid who loves Dora the Explorer is a lot less likely to grow up and hate Mexicans. A child who enjoys Ni-hao, Kai-lan is less likely to spend their adulthood raging about them Chinese coming to steal our jobs. And the adorable child who watches Little Bill and learns moral lesson after moral lesson is considerably less likely to believe that the African-American community is entirely filled with thugs and hookers and criminals. These shows have a normalizing effect on their audience, both in showing children of color that they are not alone, and in showing white children that people of color are human too.

That's very very important.

I don't really talk about politics on this blog, but if you follow my tumblr then you should know by now that I am very aware of what's happening in Ferguson, MO, and it breaks my heart. It's horrific to watch a group of people being targeted strictly because the law enforcement in that town does not see them as human. It's really sad, and I see no other explanation. And I'm not saying that all of this would be solved with a mandatory viewing of Little Bill or some episodes of Diego, but I do think that diversity of children's programming is a crucial first step in making sure that our future generations never ever think of their neighbors as less than human.

And the handy part is that diverse children's programming doesn't just make children more tolerant and willing accept others, it also has a noticeable effect on their parents. No parent wants to seem like a jerk in front of their kid, and if the kid slowly grows more tolerant, then the parent, not wanting to seem like a complete poophead, especially in public, is apt to follow suit.

Obviously there are exceptions, because people can and are terrible sometimes, but most often, this sort of gentle pressure works. And constant, mind-numbing exposure to other cultures via children's television? It's hard to get through that and not feel some connection with the other parents and nannies sitting through it around the world.

So obviously these shows are an incredibly valuable resource. I would actually go so far as to say that they are one of our most valuable resources. I don't want to dig up the statistics, because they make me sad, but in reality only a minuscule proportion of children's media features children of color. These shows are great, but they're also, sadly in the vast minority.

Far more shows actually feature animal protagonists than protagonists of color, a fact that makes horrible sense of a lot of our current culture. We are, after all, the culture that regularly inquires about the health and happiness of the animals who died to go into our food, and rather blithely ignore the millions of people dying because they lack access to fresh drinking water, or the police brutality that regularly occurs across town. We are more used to humanizing animals than people of color, and that bothers me deeply.

Furthermore, all these animal protagonist shows only serve to reinforce the notion that white culture is "universal". While the protagonists in these shows are usually rabbits or dogs or aardvarks or whatever, culturally they can be considered white. They are usually voiced by white voice-actors. Their families celebrate Judeo-Christian holidays, and they live in nice suburbs with, well, culturally white signifiers of status. You cannot tell me the Berenstain Bears are not white. Nor can you convince me that Arthur is not the whitest white child to ever white.

What this does is create a false illusion of diversity. Because with the relative dearth of human protagonists, shows that feature a character of color in the lead role seem almost like they represent a large proportion of the programming on channels like Nick Jr. or PBS or Disney Junior. But they don't. Arthur the Aardvark might not have a visible race, but you bet your butt that Arthur is reinforcing white social normals and cultural values. It's a strange, strange world when the talking aardvark (an animal I doubt most toddlers could identify even with help) is a more comforting protagonist, and more culturally familiar to the white audience, than the human being who happens to need less sunblock to go outside.

Okay. I've ranted a lot. What's the upshot?

The real key here is twofold. First, I really do want to praise the shows I've mentioned above for stepping out and giving us really quality programming with a diversity of culture and race. I love that the kids I nanny get to learn some Spanish, a smattering of Mandarin, and even the occasional Urdu, thanks to Burka Avenger, while they veg out. I love that they get exposed to other cultures, and I love that they're given the chance to see that they are not alone in the world.

But also I want to issue a warning and a challenge to all the white people out there. It's easy to ignore how privileged we are culturally. Fish don't notice the water they're swimming in, and we don't really tend to see the ways in which our popular culture is geared towards making us feel comfortable. With shows like Max and Ruby and Arthur and Berenstain Bears making white culture accessible even when represented by animals, we need to be really careful to make sure that we don't forget that our culture is not universal. It is not better, it is not more common, and it is not what everyone experiences.

Get out of your comfort zone. Experience the world through someone else's lens. Be uncomfortable. Notice your whiteness, and confront it. Recognize how many stories around you are about people like you, and actively seek out the ones that are not. If you have children, intentionally expose them to stories about people who live utterly different lives, and make sure above all else that they know their fellow children, no matter their race, are human.

It's the only solution.

Look at all those fellow human beings. I like them.

A page from Elektra.

Hello all! A few months ago, I gave you guys a peek at what's on my pull list, as in, what comics I pre-order at my local comic book shop. Pre-ordering is a great way to vote (monetarily) for the projects and stories that you think should stick around, and it's a handy way of helping your local geek scene become just a scooch more diverse and awesome. I have a personal policy of primarily subscribing to female-lead or female-centric projects, but there are a couple dudes who've snuck their way in.

Anyway, I thought it might be time to update this list, since in the past couple of months, I've been pleased to see a whole bunch of new awesome titles coming out, ones with ladies kicking ass and taking names, and I figure it's worth letting you know what all I've added to my list since last time.

[For the record, in case you didn't click that link above, I've already mentioned that I have Ms. Marvel, Captain Marvel, Black Widow, Lumberjanes, and the Wonder Woman and Saga trades on my list.]

1. Storm (Marvel)

I was kind of surprised to know this, but the 2014 Storm comic is the first time that Storm, inarguably the most recognizable member of the X-Men next to Wolverine, got a stand-alone comic. That's weird that it took that long, and it's kind of insulting when you think about how she is hands down one of the most popular comic book characters in the world. But whatever. She has one now, and it's pretty darn good!

Storm as a character (real name Ororo Munroe) has always fascinated me, so I'm digging the way that this new comic examines her view of herself. In her life she has been revered as a goddess, lived as a thief on the streets of Cairo, been a superhero, married a king, and now is the headmistress of a school for mutants. She's had an interesting life is what I'm saying. The comic seeks to explore that life, but also to examine who Storm really is when she's by herself. So much of her life has involved other people trying to define her, but who does she says she is?

Identity is always an important issue, but it's especially compelling to see it examined through this lens. Ororo is an African woman, a superhero, an immigrant, and a mutant - she's got a lot of identities to choose from, but she also has a lot of experience with negative labeling. So I like that this seems to be the tack of the new comic, and I'm mostly just thrilled that we get a new comic at all!

2. Elektra (Marvel)

While I do have friends who swear up and down by Elektra, she's never really been one of my favorites. Still, this current run of her story (part of the Marvel NOW series) is really interesting. Artistically it's amazing, with swirling, dream-like paintings on every page, and covers that are just breath-taking. Story-wise, I feel like I'm probably missing something because her backstory isn't one I know as well, but it's still pretty interesting.

It's weird to read a book that is a superhero title but still feels like a fever dream, all blended visuals and cryptic dialogue. Elektra is trying to atone for the sins of her past, but she's afraid she never can. Also, she is still an assassin, and while she doesn't want to kill any bad guys, that doesn't mean she's above killing killers. This makes her a very interesting and perplexing character, which I do enjoy.

Overall, though, I don't feel like I'm super into this story. I don't know. I'm definitely still reading it, but I feel like something is missing, some vital key to my falling head over face in love with this story. I do really like the villain, Bloody Lips, but it's only recently that he's taken center stage enough to pose a serious threat. And while I understand that this book as well is dealing with issues of identity - does who we were define who we will be - I don't think it's fully baked yet. Still, I am reading it.

3. Bee and Puppycat (Boom!Studios)

Okay, to be fair, this one is pretty much just pure adorable crack. Bee and Puppycat is a story you might know from the kickstarter a little while back, and right now they're doing a limited run of comics through Boom!Studios. The comics are cute if episodic, and the whole thing is pretty much on the level of nice thing that you read in order to cleanse you palate after something intense.

Not that there's no place for that in my comics list. Obviously there is. And I appreciate the idea of supporting comics that anyone can read, that are appropriate and entertaining for all ages. Bee and Puppycat are temp workers for the world's weirdest temp agency, taking jobs that sometimes require them to fix a music box hidden in a house full of music boxes, and sometimes taking them to far off lands while still in their pajamas.

If you like Adventure Time or Bravest Warriors, then you'll probably like Bee and Puppycat. Which is by no means an insult. I really love a little adorable crack in my day. It really helps get your brain ready to read about some angsty superheroes some more.

4. Rat Queens (Image)

I love this comic because it makes me laugh. Nothing really more complex than that. Rat Queens is a bawdy, crass, hilarious comic about a team of female adventurers living in the Discworld-esque town of Pallisade, and fighting against monstrous evil, as well as the bureaucratic system that keeps trying to kick them out of town. It's a bit silly, and entirely bizarre, and it makes me happy on a deep and meaningful level.

I think part of the reason I appreciate this comic so much is because it directly relates to my experiences as a female geek. It satisfies a craving I didn't even knew I had. See, when I started playing D&D, it was in a group with only one other girl, and while I have since played in more diverse groups, D&D always stuck in my head as a "guy's game". That in order to play it and feel like I was playing it in a fun way, I had to act like the guys, play like the guys, sometimes even play a guy. I had this weird idea, because it took a long time for me to figure out otherwise, that in order to have fun playing Dungeons and Dragons, I had to remove all my femininity for a couple of hours. If I didn't, I'd be a killjoy or a boring person or whatever.

Not true. And I really enjoy reading a comic that reminds me of why I fell in love with Dungeons and Dragons in the first place, but that also recognizes the place for femininity even in a bawdy role-playing game.

5. Lazarus (Image)

If you want to be technical, I don't actually pre-order the issues of this one. Instead I have a standing pre-order of the trade paperback, because I got into a little late, and I have a weird thing about having something in partially issues and partially trade paperbacks, I know it's dumb but it booooothers me.

Anyway. Lazarus is the kind of comic that takes a while to sink in. I'm still not sure if I actually like it or not, but that doesn't really matter. I'm invested. The story takes place in an apocalyptic future of the United States (and the world, I assume, but we've mostly just seen the Western US) where people are segregated into a strict feudal system. Everyone is divided into families. The families rule huge swaths of the country, get the best of the best food and education and living situations - effectively acting as a mix between the nobility and the heads of a corporation.

Everyone else is either a serf (as in someone who can offer a valuable skill or service to the family and therefore is cared for financially and medically), or waste. If you're waste, then you have nothing.

The whole book examines the class issues innate in a system like this, as well as the complex stories of the characters who have to live in this society. Our main character is Forever Carlyle, the "Lazarus" of the Carlyle Family. She's genetically engineered and made into a bio-weapon to be the family's enforcer, as well as their human shield. Forever's an interesting character, though I'm actually more intrigued by the other characters, the ones lower on society's totem pole. Still, awesome story.

- This is only part of the list. The rest will be coming to you next week! -

I think it's worth noting here how many of the comics I pre-order are Marvel titles. That's not an accident or a quirk of fate or anything. It so happens that Marvel is the company currently publishing the kind of stories that I like. Stories about women and people of color who manage to be heroic even without billion dollar trust funds or phenomenal cosmic powers. When it comes to superpowers, I'm much more interested in the idea of identity and what it means to be a hero in our world than I am in looking at cool stories about gadgets or superpowers or apocalyptic crossover events.

I mean, there's a reason why my favorite superheroes are Wonder Woman and Captain America, two squeaky clean scouts who just want people to have compassion for each other and really think about their actions.

And when it comes to non-superhero titles, I tend to gravitate towards stories that are a bit more unusual and surprising, which I guess happen to be mostly what Image publishes. Not sure how they got the mass market share on crazy, but I'm not going to argue.

The real lesson here is that I love diverse comics. Not just because I have all these philosophical reasons for loving them or because I only support things I can ideologically agree with (even I'm not that good), but because I think diverse comics make for better stories. We can explore the world so much more fully, and tell so many more interesting stories when we're not bound to a single white, middle-class, male view of society. Diversity is good. It makes life and comics better.

Fionna and Cake also make life and comics better.

Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables is one of those stories that has been spun off so many times and so many ways that it’s hard to remember now what the original point of the story was. Is it a story of redemption? A screed about class warfare? A handbook to revolution? A really long, boring historical story about some dude who kind of wandered around for a while and then died?

The answer is all of these, and also none of them. Each interpretation of the story has focused on something different. The 2012 Tom Hooper version locks its gaze on the redemptive arc of Jean Valjean. The early 2000s non-musical is more about the historical facets of the story and the relationship between Javert and Valjean. The musical is kind of all over the place, no matter how good the songs are, but it generally falls in favor of a romantic version of events, privileging love and human relationships over the movements of nations and the grim reality of war.

Which of these is the real version? Well, all of them. All of them are equally valid, though not all of them are equally good. See, the thing that most people forget when making an adaptation of an existing work like Hugo’s masterpiece is that the real key to creating something you can be proud of is making it your own. So all of these are valid versions of the story, because they don’t just tell us about the original tale, they also tell us about the soul of the person adapting the story. We see what matters to them. And there’s a lot of value in that.

The problem comes when a text, like Les Mis, becomes so popular and “revered” that one reading of the text becomes seen as more canon than another. So, in this case, the musical version and its emphasis on the romantic warm-fuzzies of the story tends to overshadow the other interpretations. Just by virtue of popularity. And that’s all well and good, I do quite like the musical, but it can also really mess things up. Why? Because when a single reading of the text becomes overwhelmingly popular like this, it’s easy for it to overshadow future interpretations.

In other words, because of the popularity of the Les Mis musical, it’s hard now for anyone to imagine interpreting this story differently. Someone says, “I want to tell the story of Les Miserables!” and everyone assumes that they mean they want to tell it in precisely the same way the musical did. Set in that precise time frame, with that amount of screentime given to each historical period the story covers, with those themes, and those English accents.

Seriously. It’s set in France. Why does literally every film version of this story insist on making the actors speak in British accents? It’s weird. Really weird. Hugh Jackman is Australian. Liam Neeson is Irish. Anne Hathaway and Uma Thurman are Americans. And all of their characters are French for crying out loud.

That’s not a super important example, but I hope it gets across what I mean. Something so simple as the accent with which actors play these characters - the original musical had actors with British accents, because the original musical was cast and first performed in London’s West End. So of course the cast had British accents. But then it came to America, and everyone seemed to assume that British accents were part of how it was supposed to be done, and now, decades later, that’s a thing. A definite thing. Can you imagine a version of Les Miserables where the actors had American accents? The horror!

It’s stuff like this, but on a global scale. And unfortunately, it’s stuff like this that blinds us to the real important aspects of the story, the ones that actually do matter in reinterpretation. For example, Tom Hooper’s 2012 version of the musical was largely praised for sticking so closely to the original.

The main criticisms had to do with the places where Hooper had decided to do something a little different, to play around with the source material. Like where he used a slightly experimental shooting style and shot a lot of it first person, on hand-held cameras. How he had the music recorded on set and not on a soundstage. How he gave parts of the story a heightened reality, a sense of surrealism not present in the stage version.

All of those things? Are the parts I actually like about Hooper’s version. I don’t really give two craps about the rest of it. It’s mediocre sappy pablum, and I could live without it. But the haunting scene where Gavroche rides on the back of a carriage, staring into the camera and incisively diagnosing social malaise? Yeah, I like that.

The part where the poor of Paris stare straight at the audience and demand neither their pity nor their condemnation, but rather their respect? I like that too. I like the parts where the movie makes you look. Where it grabs your chin, rubs your nose in it, and says Look at this. It is important.

But the sweeping vistas of the French countryside and the montages of a broken Jean Valjean searching for work leave me cold. Now, part of this is the timing of the film. In translating the movie from stage to screen, I feel like Hooper made a big blunder when he decided to keep the weird narrative proportions of the musical. In the show, the first act covers about twenty years of time, skipping blithely through Valjean’s life, from his time as a prisoner all the way up through to his retirement as an old man in Paris. Literally, twenty years. And act two? It covers the space of maybe a couple of days.

That’s very lopsided, obviously. And it works in the musical, because we have all that lovely, stirring revolutionary music and all that. But in this film, Valjean is clearly situated as the main character. This is Hugh Jackman’s star turn. It’s Valjean’s story that we follow, his transformation that we hope for. And his transformation is over in the first five minutes.

It doesn’t really make any sense, does it? The novel handles this by actually giving you a vast ensemble of developed and intriguing characters, and following all of their arcs as they reconcile or distance themselves from an understanding of God and redemption. Jean Valjean is the central character, yes, but he’s not the protagonist exactly. His transformation is largely a done deal in the story, and he functions more as a facilitator of others’ transformational journeys.

But in this movie, none of the other characters are developed enough to grasp the torch, save maybe Hathaway’s Fantine who barely gets any screentime, and so the story feels stilted. We’re here for Valjean, but he’s not very interesting. The better story would have been to show us Valjean as a young man, Valjean in prison, Valjean desperately seeking work, Valjean in rage and hatred and frustration, Valjean stealing from the Bishop, Valjean being broken, and Valjean repenting. Those first five minutes of the movie are the most compelling to me, and they’re glossed over in a series of cinematic montages.

It’s not just that, though. Because I feel like, in a very real sense, we all love Les Miserables too much now to actually appreciate it. We spend so much time enjoying this one very specific version that we don’t really see the larger points being made.

Obviously I’m talking about this in the context of Les Mis because it’s a story that I care about a lot. Heck, I’m even working on my own version (which is very much removed from the original, because it is set in space and also ridiculous), and a friend of mine in high school made a short film that recast the story into the second world war, with Jean Valjean as an escaped Jew fleeing the concentration camps, and Javert as a Gestapo officer hiding his Romany background.

What I find interesting about these versions, both my space opera version and my friend’s retelling in the second world war, is that they are no less valid understandings of the original text than the ones that stick strictly to the setting in post-Revolutionary France and insist on keeping everyone’s names the same. Our stories are different, yeah, but that doesn’t make them bad. In fact, by changing the surface details, these radically different versions can often serve to more clearly highlight the actual meaning of the text.

Take, for example, Clueless. Yeah, it’s a beloved teen classic, and very funny, but it’s also an incredibly clever retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma. What I love about the film, and what I think it manages much better than the stodgily true to the book Emma that came out a few years later, is that it really captures the essence and the point of the story. The point of the story is that Emma is kind-hearted, but ultimately naive and a bit prejudiced. It’s easier to see in Clueless because we’re not distracted by the trappings of the story. We just take it as it is.

Or we could look at 10 Things I Hate About You, another teen classic (and one that really deeply influenced my idea of what it meant to be an awesome teenager). It’s based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, but it actually succeeds much better than the usual productions of the play at getting to the heart of the show’s material: marriage is a compromise between two individuals, and love is about choices and work more than romance and frippery. You can get that in the play, sure, but it’s a heck of a lot easier in the movie.

Also there’s a Shakespeare Retold version that’s amazing, but that’s another matter. And also that one takes just as many liberties with the story as 10 Things does, it just happens to keep a bit of the dialogue the same. Anyway.

The point here isn’t to bash adaptations that stay too faithful to the original material. A lot of those are amazing. Kenneth Branaugh’s Much Ado About Nothing is deeply devoted to its source material (and one of the best cast movies I have ever seen), and it’s amazing. No, faithful adaptations can be good. But so can adaptations that take a bit more liberty.

What really matters in adapting a story is how much of the message of the story comes through. And I know that it’s not particularly cool or of the moment to talk about stories having “a message”, but let’s be real, they all do. Every story tells us something about the world and who we are in it, the question is what it’s saying. And chances are, if you love a story, you love what it says. So if you adapt that story, you should be adapting the message that you love.

For me, in Les Miserables, what I love is the story of redemption, but also the pragmatic realism of the circumstances these characters find themselves in. The schoolboys fail in their revolution. Some good people die, and some bad people continue to thrive no matter what happens. A few people get happy endings. More people don’t.

It’s a story about identity, about how our circumstances define who we are, and how the world will define us if we let it. Jean Valjean’s story is one of self-understanding, his constant refrain, “Who am I?” It’s an important story. And it’s a story that, when I adapted it, I changed surface details of, in order to highlight the beauty underneath. That underneath stuff is the part that really matters. All the rest of it is frosting.

Gives me chills.

As this is being published, I'll be out in the woods of Pennsylvania, setting up for my best friend's wedding. It's kind of awesome. I'm pretty okay with it.

But, since the wedding is pretty far from civilization, and I'm way too braindead to prepare anything for you, instead of actual content, here's the video for Sia's new song "Chandelier", because it's amazing and stunning and I love it.

I'll be back on Monday.

Yeah, so apparently recovering from this wedding thing, and also physically getting back home, took a lot longer than I anticipated. Hopefully we'll be back to a regular posting schedule next week, but in the meantime, I did watch the newest episode of Outlander. And yes, it continues to be just as wonderful and amazing as promised.

The title of this episode is “The Way Out”, and it’s clearly on Claire’s mind. As you hopefully remember from last week, Claire is now basically a prisoner at Castle Leoch, imprisoned both because they think she’s an English spy and because they desperately need her medical skills to help the people of the castle. Claire’s not happy being stuck here in the past, and she’s looking for a way, any way, to get out.

But first, a flashback! We see a moment of Claire’s life with Frank prior to her abrupt transition in time, and it’s a very sweet moment indeed. Also, notably, a feminist one. In this memory, Claire and Frank are saying goodbye in a train station, as Claire gets ready to head to the Front, and Frank must stay behind in London. He’s protective and worried, but Claire is the sort of girl who never runs from danger, and she reassures him that she’s doing her duty, before kissing him through the train window as she moves off into the future.

I’m just saying, think of how many times we’ve seen that scenario play out with a wildly different gender dynamic. I find it incredibly refreshing to see Claire leaning over to kiss her man goodbye before she goes off to war. Even better, Frank isn’t guilting Claire over her choice or being anything but supportive and worried. It’s rad.

We then go into the world’s best misdirect. While Mrs. Fitz dolls up Claire like she’s her own, well, doll. One gets the impression from this, and the implication that Mrs. Fitz has been dressing Claire every morning for the multiple weeks she’s been at Castle Leoch, that Mrs. Fitz really really wanted a daughter. Also she kind of likes how Claire looks all pristine and not covered in scars.

But then Claire has to go and ruin the moment by telling Mrs. Fitz that she’s actually from the future and she fell through time and she needs to find some way to get back home because her husband is amazing and she misses him so much… Mrs. Fitz doesn’t really know how to react to this news, and promptly freaks the crap out, screaming about Claire being a witch and how she’s a demon and all that good stuff. Then Claire actually wakes up.

It’s a great misdirect for a couple of reasons. First, because this is a scene not in the book, but one that feels incredibly plausible. So I was stuck watching like, “Are they really changing it like this? Huh. Weird choice.” But it handily answers the audience’s question of why Claire never tells anyone. That’s why. And it’s a good reason. Second, this is a fantastic misdirect because it allowed the show to use a clip of Claire explaining her situation to someone in all of their promo-trailers without actually having to have a scene like that. Handy.

Anyway, the real business of the episode then gets underway. Mrs. Fitz wakes Claire up and gets her ready, reminding Claire that her existence in the castle relies on her being in Dougal and Colum’s good graces. The best way to do that? Lots of doctoring!

Of course, the doctor before Claire was a mis-informed quack who was pretty bad at his job even by ye olde-y standards, so in order to get to her doctoring, Claire has to clean out the surgery and get rid of that guy’s weird medicinal remedies. Like jars full of pill bugs and powdered human skull and dead mice. Fun, helpful stuff. But in between all the grossness are some valuable medicines, so the task isn’t impossible. Just boring. Insanely boring for Rupert, who is still her Dougal-assigned keeper. He yawns a lot. It’s pretty great.

As Claire gets down the real business of healing people, Rupert even goes bored enough to leave and go drink in the kitchen. It’s an interesting commentary on her character, too, that Claire doesn’t use this as an opportunity to try to run off. It seems that she really does take her doctoring seriously, whatever else she might resent about this place. There are sick and hurt people who need her, and she might be hell bent on leaving, but she’s still a physician. She still has a duty.

I like her.

When Claire comes up to the kitchen to try wrangling her guards into actually helping her, though, the real story of this episode gets going. It seems that one of the local boys has recently died after being possessed by a demonic spirit. Claire is baffled by this news, especially as it is delivered by a completely serious Mrs. Fitz. The stricken boy was friends with her grandson or nephew or something, and she’s terribly worried he might be taken too, since he went to the same evil place as the dead boy. But there’s no time to think on that now, as Colum has summoned Claire, and that could mean literally anything.

In this case, it means that Colum wishes to use Claire’s medical skills. He wants her to massage his legs - which as you may recall are misshapen due to a genetic disorder - and relieve the pain. Also we are treated to a positively badass scene where Colum tears his tailor a new one. The tailor has made Colum a new coat, but it’s a good foot longer than the current style, and Colum rightly assumes that this is because the tailor wants to hide his legs. And Colum? Colum is not ashamed of his legs. He refuses to be ashamed, and he’s certainly not going to pay anyone to imply he should be.

Just one more moment when this show proves that it can be radical and progressive and amazing without ever really feeling incongruous or anachronistic. Colum calls out ableism, Claire calls out sexism - it always feels natural and reasonable, because it is. People have always wanted to be treated as people, that’s not a new invention. There is no reason why Colum should feel ashamed about his legs, nor is there any reason why Claire should be okay with the idea of rape. Calling these things out isn’t anachronistic, it’s human. And awesome.

Back to the story, Claire’s a bit uncomfortable when Colum basically guilts her into massaging his legs, but then she recovers quickly and informs him that she’ll really need to massage his back in order to help the pain. Once more, Claire’s twentieth century medical training proves helpful, and her massage is the best relief Colum has gotten in years. Yay! People helping people!

While she massages him, they talk a bit about the stricken boy, and Claire inadvertently reveals that she doesn’t believe in demons or devils. No matter. Colum and everyone else believes enough to cover her. And he’s very grateful for her helping the pain, so he invites her to come to the hall tonight and listen to the bard sing.

This isn’t really Claire’s scene, and she’s quite happy to stand in the corner and drink some really strong wine, ignoring Dougal and his raging insensitivity as she tries to pretend she’s okay with being there. She ends up sitting right next to Laoghaire, the pretty girl that Jamie saved from a beating last episode. Laoghaire’s clearly got a thing for Jamie (because she is a human being with eyes), and Claire is more than happy to play matchmaker. She motions Jamie over, makes him sit next to Laoghaire, and then tells him how pretty Laoghaire is.

Tragically, Jamie only has eyes for Claire, and spends the whole evening chatting with Claire only, while occasionally noticing that Laoghaire is still there. And then handing her a dirty dish to take to the kitchens. It would be sad if it weren’t so funny. It’s also not helped by Claire and Jamie’s obvious closeness. After you’ve ridden on a horse with someone for three days, seen them shirtless, bandaged their wounds, and sobbed all over them, you bond a little.

Since Claire’s been drinking steadily throughout the night, Jamie decides to intervene before she passes out in the hall, and manufactures a reason to get her out of there. But not before he takes her wine glass and downs it, an act of casual intimacy that makes Laoghaire positively green and makes the audience coo. Or at least it made me coo. And I do not regret that.

Jamie drags Claire off to the surgery to ask her to change his bandages. He’d have done it down at the stable, but he doesn’t want Old Alec, the horsemaster and his mentor, to see his scars. Alec knows, of course, but knowing and seeing are two very different things. That might be one of the more profound points made on this show.

Also the sexual tension between these two is getting so thick I feel like I’m going to choke on it. In a good way? Just make out already! Seriously, she slowly undresses him in order to look at his bandage, and their faces are so close together and this is becoming physically painful. Ugh. Attractive people saying goodnight to each other. Ugh.

Fortunately we are saved by a scene change to the next morning, where Claire (and a reluctant Rupert) join Geilis Duncan on a hunt for medicinal herbs. By way of casual chit-chat, Geilis mentions that she came up with Father Bain, who is going to perform an exorcism on “the Baxter boy”, aka Mrs. Fitz’s grandson/nephew person. Claire is immediately alarmed, Geilis is disturbingly okay with all of this. And also super duper creepy.

She clearly knows something is off with Claire, and she’s got a solid hunch that whatever is up with Claire is not natural. Claire senses danger, and she should.

But also Claire’s innate sense of duty and need to help people in pain kicks in, and she rushes off to save Thomas Baxter from the tender mercies of Father Bain and an exorcism. This part, just for the record, isn’t actually in the book, but it should be, because it so excellently sets up later plot points. Anyway, Claire bursts in and tries to heal everything, while the priest freaks out and hates her vaguely for interfering with God’s work. And that priest is even creepier and more sinister than Geilis, which is saying something.

Rupert drags a dejected Claire back to the castle, where she sits down to rest for a moment and accidentally interrupts a “moment” for someone else. Namely Jamie and Laoghaire, who are making out furiously in a corner of the storeroom. Awkward. But Claire responds by basically giving Jamie a thumbs up, and then pretending she saw nothing. Because Claire is a mensch.

Fortunately, being a mensch doesn’t stop Claire from razzing Jamie about his tonsil hockey at dinner. There’s some lovely wordplay over “messing with the fillies” and then there is foot-kicking under the table and I want to smash their heads together and make them kiss, okay? And apparently so does Jamie’s friend (older relative, actually) Murtaugh, who tells Claire not-so-subtly that he thinks she should marry Jamie. Because reasons and the whole castle ships it by now.

This reminds Claire that she already is married, though, and she runs outside to cry a little. She’s so homesick, and Frank-sick, and just sick of being in 1743. I can’t blame her for needing a bit of a cry, and neither can Dougal, who happens on her vulnerable moment and is surprisingly kind about it. He tells her they’ll ride down to the town tomorrow, and she can visit with Geilis. It’s not a solution, but it helps.

Down in the village, Claire sticks the hell out. She’s dressed finely, riding her own horse, and accompanied by the brother of the laird. Not inconspicuous, exactly. Still, it’s nice for Claire to get to be with Geilis and talk herbs. Also Geilis takes a moment to warn Claire away from the priest, because he hates women and is also deeply crazy. Hooray! And Geilis continues trying to weasel information out of Claire, and Claire keeps trying to resist. What friendship. What love. What incredibly obvious ulterior motives…

The moment is interrupted when an angry mob appears, led by the priest, dragging a young boy to justice. Since Geilis’ husband is the local justice, they’ve come to her house, and Geilis remarks casually that her husband isn’t feeling well, so he’ll probably order the kid’s hand chopped off. Geilis is way too casual about maiming. Blegh.

And here’s the husband in question! Geilis’ husband, Arthur, is an elderly fat man with stomach problems. One would wonder how Arthur Duncan ended up with a hot wife like Geilis, but then again, some things never change. Like how hot women really like financial security. And, fortunately for Claire’s sense of justice, Arthur is really really dim. Geilis manipulates him into giving the boy a lighter sentence, mostly because Claire seems to want it, and Arthur thinks it’s all his own idea.

It would be cute if it weren’t so very terrifying how easily Geilis can run circles around her own spouse. I mean, I know she’s kind of creepy in the book, but the show has kicked her up about twelve notches. I love it.

The boy’s sentence is lightened to just getting his ear nailed to the pillory for an hour, a lenient judgment by medieval standards, but still one that horrifies Claire. Geilis decides to keep prying at her for more information, but Claire is saved when Jamie walks in. Jamie’s there to take her back to the castle, and by way of some adorable telepathy, he declines to hear anything about Claire’s past or stay for a cup of wine and interrogation. Good man, Jamie. He even brought Claire a cloak.

As Claire and Jamie are getting ready to leave, Claire can’t help worrying over the boy nailed to the pillory in the square. The people in the town are mocking him, and she just - Claire hates to see anyone in pain. She’s a healer. And Jamie? Jamie freaking loves that about her.

So they plot and plan and walk up to the pillory to take a look at the boy. Jamie taunts the child, while Claire pretends to swoon. The villagers are swarmed around Claire, making sure she’s okay, and Jamie takes the opportunity to pull the nail out of the boy’s ear while the incredibly conspicuous English lady plays on everyone’s assumptions that she’s afraid of blood and prone to swooning.

Their plan went off well, so Claire enlists Jamie in another scheme. To go to the “haunted” church where the two boys went right before becoming “possessed.” Jamie reveals that all the local boys go to this church, to prove their manhood and how they’re not scared. But lots of boys have died after visiting the church. And Claire might have found the reason - there’s a plot of plants that a lot of the boys eat. They look like wood garlic, but they’re actually lily of the valley, and that’s poisonous.

She knows what happened. She just has to prove it.

She doesn’t have much time, either. When she gets to the Baxter house, Father Bain is performing last rites on the boy. Claire pretty much demands to be allowed to treat him, and Mrs. Fitz agrees. Then Claire performs a “miracle.” She gives him essence of belladonna to cancel out the poison, and the boy wakes up. He’s healed, and Claire is officially in Colum’s good graces and the priest’s bad graces. Really bad.

And when talking to Jamie, Claire realizes that she might have gotten a little too far into Colum’s good graces. She’s proven to be such a good healer that he can’t let her leave. Well, crap. Though, for the record, isn’t it nice to have a female character on a show whose biggest obstacle is being too good at her job? That’s nice.

Also, Jamie doesn’t really like hearing Claire complain about how she wants to “get out of here.” Because he loves her. Poor Jamie. Loving a time-traveler is hard business.

So Claire takes a moment for a hardcore sulk and some more drinking while she listens to the bard. Jamie likes Claire too much to let her have a sad, and he drags her up front to listen to the songs. He also helpfully translates.

I say helpfully because it turns out that this song is really deeply relevant to Claire’s life. It’s about a woman who traveled through the stones to a far distant land where she lived for a time and then returned again home. In other words, what happened to Claire? It’s happened before. And that means she can get home.

End of episode. Next week? The Gathering for Clan MacKenzie and Claire’s first real chance to escape! Also, more Jamie drama, and a lot more sexual tension it looks like. Guh.

It's not cheating if your husband hasn't been born yet, Claire.

There is a distinct and meaningful satisfaction that comes from seeing your predictions about a television show coming true. I mention this because, so far at least, my interpretation of how the first Outlander novel would be translated to the screen has been spot on. Sure, I missed the finer details of how the show is making the source material more feminist and that is rad as hell, but the larger points about where they're breaking the story? Yeah. I got that. Because I'm awesome.

Fine, enough gloating, let's get down to brass tacks. What happened this week?

This week, like last week, starts with a misdirect. As we open, the camera pans to show us the sentries as Castle Leoch, nervously scanning the woods. They spot something. They aim their muskets. We see Claire running through the woods. Frantic. Oh no!

Actually, it's fine. The guards were startled, but it's just Claire playing a game of chase with the local kids. The kids, for the record, absolutely adore her. Her watchers, Rupert and the other one, are less thrilled with her antics, and beg Claire to let up and go back to the castle with them so they can enjoy the Gathering. After all, it only happens once every twenty years!

Reluctantly, Claire agrees to go. Because the misdirect was half-true, it seems. She was playing tag, that's true, but she was also finding the weak spots in the sentries' field of view, and plotting her escape. If the Gathering is tonight, then all the clan's fighting men will be drunk in the hall until morning, and Claire can escape. She can make her way back to the standing stones, and hopefully back to Frank.

Guess this episode is going to be the one where she tries to escape, guys! Better hold onto your petticoats.

For those of you just joining us, last week Claire heard a folk song sung by some pretty dude with a harp and realized that this meant she might be able to get back home. It also raised some rather significant questions about why she isn't telling anyone about her journey, since it seems to be a common enough trope in their literature that no one really thinks anything of it. Oh, some lady accidentally time-traveled two hundred years through the standing stones? Right on.

Anyway, this week is the Gathering, a time when all the members of Clan MacKenzie come up to the castle to pay their respects to the laird. Since this means all the men of the clan will be in one particular place at the same time, Claire figures this is the best possible time for her to hare off in search of the future. She also figures that she shouldn't tell anyone why she needs to escape, because she doesn't want to be burned as a witch. And I guess that's a fair point.

The biggest problem standing in her way is that she has now gone from having one guard (Rupert), to having two guards (Rupert and his friend). She disposes of one of them by setting him up with a local lusty wench - for reasons that mildly escape me the woman was interested in him - but she still has to deal with the other. Fortunately for all of her escape plans, Colum has ordered Claire to come along on the hunt tomorrow, in case someone gets gored by a boar, so she can do a lot of very suspicious things and blame them on the hunt.

Like, for example, going to the stables and picking out a horse. Old Alec is there, but for once Jamie isn't, and Claire is a little confused. Hasn't Jamie been pretty much living in the stables for weeks now? That's weird. But Alec tells her in no uncertain terms to leave it alone and piss off. So clearly something is going on. And Claire is going to ignore the crap out of that something going on so that she doesn't get distracted from her escape plan. Right on.

She keeps on making preparations, but when she gets back to her surgery, there's an unexpected guest. It's Geilis! You remember Geilis, the single most creepy person on this show. The lady in question is hovering by Claire's fire and has absolutely been rummaging through Claire's stuff while she was gone. She found Claire's giant bag of food, and isn't that suspicious?

Geilis makes insinuations. Claire dodges them. Geilis makes vaguely stalkish remarks. Claire reminds herself why they're friends again...

Also Geilis makes a lot more references to her husband's stomach problems than seems overly polite. Like, I get it, your husband gets really bad gas. You don't have to tell me that literally every time I see you.

Geilis manages to hit on Claire's one real weak spot: talking about her husband. Claire doesn't like saying that her husband is dead, since it's not exactly true, but Geilis isn't the sort of character who will settle for being told he's "not alive." So Claire is forced to say it, and it's a testimony to Caitriona Balfe's acting skills that when she says it, it really sounds like a betrayal. She seems wounded to pronounce her husband dead, even if she's been letting everyone think that for weeks.

Possibly months. I'm not great at gauging how much time has passed on this show.

At least this works and convinces Geilis that Claire is deeply in mourning and really unhappy. Which is good? She implies heavily, as is her way, that Claire is barren, and isn't that a nice cherry on the sadness sundae!

Geilis continues rummaging and prying, but she does finally tell us something about herself. When she came to the town she was on her own, had nothing, just her wits and her looks and some knowledge of plants. She married Arthur not because she loved him (obviously), but because he was safe and secure and reasonably nice. Geilis is content with the choices she's made in life, and she wonders if Claire will be too.

And then she spoils this touching moment by making it absolutely clear that she knows Claire is going to run away. So there's that.

Claire ventures out of the surgery one last time to gather her last supply: a knife from the kitchens so that she can protect herself. But she runs into Mrs. Fitz on the way, and it's not like Mrs. Fitz is going to let go of an opportunity to dress her living doll for the biggest event in twenty years! She bustles Claire off and then shoves her into a fancy shmancy dress for the Gathering.

As a side note, where does Mrs. Fitz keep finding these dresses? I mean, Claire's everyday clothes seem pretty reasonable, since she's a fairly average size for those times (a little skinny and tall, maybe), and she only really has the two dresses, but she has way more formal clothes than the average lady of the day. Is Mrs. Fitz just stealing stuff out of the laundry so she can put them on Claire? Are there women of the castle who keep being mystified because their clothes disappear, and then they see them on Claire, but are afraid to say something because Mrs. Fitz is in charge of everything? Food for thought.

Okay, I will say that watching Mrs. Fitz dole out backhanded compliments to ladies she doesn't like in the hall, and then shoving people around so Claire gets a front seat is hilarious. Claire and Murtagh are her two pets, and she's very happy to treat them as such.

The Oathtaking begins with Colum's dramatic entrance - notable here because he chooses to walk the full length of the hall instead of slipping in close to his seat. Colum continues to make it clear that he does not see his bone-disease as making him less fit for duty, or see it as anything to be ashamed of. He's still the laird, and they will treat him as such. He then welcomes the men to Leoch, and starts the Oathtaking. Dougal is the first to come up, since he's Colum's brother and it's symbolic and all that. Dougal swears his sword and blood to Colum, and all that's well and good. They drink the ceremonial wine, everyone cheers, and Claire gets bored.

She decides now is the time to escape. But she does still have one minder to get rid of. That's where the port she got from Geilis and all the drugs she has access to in her surgery come in. She gives the dude drugged wine, and then watches as he absolutely chugs it. That's that problem taken care of!

Now she just has to get out of the castle, get down to the stable, steal a horse, dodge the sentries, and make her way thirty miles or so across unfamiliar country swarming with patrols and English soldiers. No big deal.

And of course she doesn't even make it out of the castle before disaster hits. First it comes in the form of Laoghaire asking Claire to make her a love potion to cast on Jamie. Claire sort of stutters for a minute, then grabs some random stuff and makes up a spell (that adorably references The Wizard of Oz) to get Laoghaire to go away. Cute. Besides, since Claire has no intention of sticking around, why shouldn't Laoghaire and Jamie end up together? She's all right with the concept, even if she has made it abundantly clear that she wants to climb Jamie like a tree.

Next, Claire can't even get out of the castle because she's accosted by drunken clansmen who want to rape her. Of course they do. But Dougal, who has made his feelings on rape very clear already on this show (he's not a huge fan, but it's more of a timing thing than a moral objection), shows up and fights them off. Unfortunately Dougal is also drunk. He kisses Claire against her will, which is interesting since we didn't even know he liked her, but he draws the line at actually raping her. What a gentleman. Yuck.

Still, our Claire can take care of herself. She brains Dougal with a chair and keeps going. Right on, girlfriend. She manages to make it all the way to the stables, and she's really close, so close, when WHAM. Claire trips over something hard in the dark. And then the thing tries to stab her.

Oh hey! It's Jamie, hiding in the stable!

Jamie is the only one to immediately suss out what Claire is doing and call her on it. He's a bit disappointed that she's running away, but he's more concerned that she hasn't thought this through. Claire is incensed by the implication that she didn't plan enough, but Jamie quickly reveals that she really hasn't. Sure, all the fighting men of Clan MacKenzie are up at the hall. So obviously Colum hired extra guards. And when they discover she's missing, which they will, they'll have the whole clan after her. It won't end well for Claire.

Unshockingly, Claire is devastated by this, and rails against Jamie. It's perhaps the first time that Jamie really understands that Claire isn't just complaining. She really and truly wants to leave. Desperately. She's not being dramatic. Well, she is being dramatic, but there's clearly something pretty intense going on. And Claire has no intention of telling him what that is.

Still, Jamie is very happy to escort Claire back up to the castle and make sure she doesn't run off. Because he looooooooves her, let's be real.

The only problem with this plan is that in escorting Claire up to the castle, Jamie himself walks up to the castle, something we are coming to see was very much not in the plan for tonight. He was sleeping in the stables for a reason: to avoid this. But he's found and set on by men of the clan immediately, and those men aren't about to let Colum MacKenzie's nephew skip the Oathtaking, are they?

We're treated to another little glimpse of shirtless Jamie as he changes into his full MacKenzie attire and Claire fumes in the background. While it's sad to realize that Jamie's being forced into this, it's super cute to see the two of them working as a team on this. Claire dismisses the men and controls access to Jamie while he steals himself for whatever is about to happen. Because the thing that's definitely not going to happen is Jamie swearing himself to Clan MacKenzie - he has his own clan. And he reminds Claire of this when he tells her his clan's motto: Je suis prest.*

Back in the hall, Claire runs into Murtagh and admits that she's the reason Jamie is here. Murtagh, Jamie's constant companion and probable relative, is devastated to see Jamie in the hall, and explains to Claire why this is such a bad thing. Basically, because Jamie is the laird's nephew, he's up there in the succession when Colum dies. Obviously neither Colum nor Dougal want this, but since Colum's living on borrowed time, it might become an issue soon. And Jamie is tragically very popular and a great leader. He would be a big draw, and Dougal might not be able to secure the succession for himself and Hamish.

This also explains the hostility between Dougal and Jamie, as well as the deep and meaningful tension about Hamish's (Colum's son) parentage. The succession is a big deal, and no one wants it messed with. The thing is, now that Jamie is in the hall, it's not like he can avoid swearing loyalty. If he swears to the MacKenzies, then he's a MacKenzie and could be laird someday. If he doesn't, then the MacKenzies will kill him for clan honor.

Whoops.

Murtagh and Claire basically fret in a corner for a while, but when it comes time for Jamie to take his oath, it seems their fretting was for nothing. He's a slick customer, and Jamie manages to both pledge to Clan MacKenzie and yet also keep himself out of the line of succession. Smooth move, kiddo. I give you a lot of props for this. He makes it clear that he is loyal to his own clan, but he pledges his sword to Colum under the bounds of kinship. And that works. People accept that. Yay!

The next morning everything seems different. Now that she's not run away, Claire actually does have to go to the hunt, and she's irritated by the whole thing. Still, it seems that boar hunting is more dangerous than she'd originally assumed. Claire has to save one boy whose leg has been gored, and then quickly runs off to find that another man has been savaged. The boy will live, albeit with a limp, but the man isn't going to recover. Instead, Claire and Dougal, who knows the man well, hold him while he bleeds out in the forest.

It's a disgusting scene, but also really interesting, for the main reason that for the first time Dougal sees that Claire has a lot of value to the clan. He's just been going along with Colum's assessment, but now he sees that she can do combat medicine. He can use that. Of course, on the other hand, why does this schoolteacher's wife know how to do combat medicine?

I think it's also quite interesting to note that Claire doesn't take this opportunity to run off. I mean, she could, actually. The hunt is a better option than the day before, because with all the commotion in the woods, and the fog, and the blood everywhere, it would be surprisingly hard to track her.

She could run off in the name of getting lost in the woods for a good long while before she got in trouble. But as we noted last week, Claire can't ignore a person in pain. She would never consider running off when there was someone who needed healing. It's impossible for her. And so she doesn't.

Dougal and Claire make their somber way up to the castle and happen upon a game of field hockey. Jamie and Murtagh are playing, and Dougal apparently decides that the best solution for his angst at watching a friend die is to grab a stick and start smacking the hell out of Jamie in the name of "winning the game". It starts off friendly, and becomes increasingly less so as the game goes on.

There's this fine line between healthy competition, and an uncle and nephew trying to beat the crap out of each other with sticks. Everyone there knows it. Jamie might have diffused the tension last night, but he's not out of the woods. Colum and Dougal still know he's a threat, and he's being reminded of that.

Claire goes back to the surgery, and is getting comfortable with the idea that she might be stuck there forever when Dougal comes in and point blank says what he's thinking: "You've seen men die before, and by violence."

She responds equally simply. "Yes. Many of them."

And now all our cards are on the table. Claire is sick of pretending to be just a simple schoolteacher's wife, but she's not willing to explain precisely what she is. For whatever reason, Dougal respects her forthrightness more than her protestations about dignity and being a lady. So he puts his cards on the table too. He's leaving the castle tomorrow to collect rents throughout the clan lands, and Claire is coming with him. She might yet get to escape.

End of episode.

*Incidentally, this is my clan's motto, because half my family is Scottish, and this is our clan. Just a sidenote, but reading these books makes me kind of happy because it's pretty much reading about my family's history. I mean, really literally. Same clan, same path from Scotland to France to America, same historical events. It's kinda rad.

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