I realize it’s been quiet on this blog lately, but there’s just so much going on in my life right now: work, niece/nephew, more work, focusing on getting through the winter…
I’ve recently enjoyed some annual leave, and used the time in order to catch up on big-budget franchise shlock that has been stored in the hard-drive for a while now – I’ll have more to say on all that in my next Reading/Watching Log.
For now, here are some interesting up-and-coming projects…
Callisto from Xena Warrior Princess
There’s an argument to be made that Callisto is one of the most iconic villains of popular culture, breaking more than a few glass ceilings in how women can be represented as compelling, dangerous threats, while also remaining complex and pitiable, with no easy answers provided in how someone like her should (or even could) be dealt with.
But what makes a “good” villain? Panache? Presentation? A sympathetic point-of-view? That debate continues, but on some level it’s generally agreed upon that the most effective bad guys often serve as a mirror to their heroic counterparts, highlighting their foibles and reflecting their strengths, bringing them into sharper focus by operating as a dark foil to their thoughts and deeds.
That pretty much sums up Callisto, who first appears in the episode aptly named “Callisto,” in which she’s introduced destroying villages under the name and guise of Xena herself. When our Warrior Princess rocks up in order to put a stop to it, she’s hit with a devastating truth bomb:
When she was just a child, Callisto was the sole survivor of a raid that Xena led on her community, one that took the lives of both her parents. Driven mad with grief and rage, Callisto has now come of age and is ready to take her revenge. She’s a destructive, unanswerable, in-your-face consequence of Xena’s own past, who has no motive or ambition beyond making Xena suffer as much as Xena made her suffer when she was a girl. She cannot be stopped or swayed or reasoned with. She doesn’t want power or wealth or even an apology – only to wreak havoc on Xena’s life.
As Callisto herself announces at one point: “you created a monster – with integrity.”
It’s reminiscent of the whole “you made me/you made me first” exchange between Bruce Wayne and the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman, but with infinitely more depth since Xena has to take full responsibility for what Callisto is. And yet her existence leaves Xena powerless: she can’t deny what she did to Callisto, and she certainly can’t defend it. She can’t apologize for it in a way that changes anything, and she can’t make it better in any meaningful way.
What gives Xena the right to kill a woman whose family she murdered and life she ruined? And yet, how can she justify sparing her when Callisto kills indiscriminately? It’s the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object: an enemy of Xena’s own making.
This of course is where the show stumbled a little. Being naturally unwilling to kill Callisto off permanently, and yet not being able to let her roam free or incarcerate her for any length of time, the writers relied heavily on cave-ins and falling rubble and other contrived ways of rendering her incapacitated until the time was right to release her from these narrative holding pens.
Which was often, as she was a recurring villain throughout five of the show’s six seasons. Though her final fate was a bit of a headscratcher (she’s eventually reborn as Xena’s daughter), until that point you could guarantee that any episode which featured her was sure to be a highlight. Her episodes often focused on the cycle of vengeance and its inescapability, and along the way she also murdered Gabrielle’s husband, temporarily swapped bodies with Xena, allied herself with a demonic child, died and started working for the devil, and became an angel before her eventual rebirth. She even enjoyed a few guest appearances on Hercules.
And none of this would mean anything if it wasn’t for Hudson Leick’s performance. In the past I’ve described her as a blend of cat and spider, child and woman, mental insanity and clarity of purpose, complete with a little-girl voice, creepy mannerisms and deranged look in her eyes. As Xena’s accidental protégé, physical match and living reminder of her past sins, she was easily the show’s most evocative villain.
I’m in the middle of my annual leave, which started during the final week of May and will continue through the first week of June, so I’m enjoying myself by catching up with a lot of things – and I’m finally about to get cracking on Doctor Who, The Wheel of Time, Andor, Star Trek Discovery and other big franchises that I’ve been ignoring for a while.
For whatever reason, May ended up being a month of Arthurian legend and vampires – I’ve no idea how two such different genres came together in this month, but it’s lead to a number of familiar faces popping up in various projects, years apart from each other. Oliver Jackson-Cohen starred on NBC’s Dracula as Jonathan Harker, who I’m now watching on Surface every week with my mum, while Ben Miles also featured on Dracula as the head of the Order of the Dragon, and just recently played Mon Mothma’s unfortunate banker friend on Andor.
And between Gawain and the Green Knight, Elphaba in Wicked, and the dense forest setting of Frances Hardinge’s The Forest of a Thousand Eyes, this was also a month brought to you by the colour green.
(We also had another movie night at work recently, but because I’ve spoken extensively about Spirited Away in the past, I won’t repeat myself here).
It has been over two years since my last Standing Tall post and over TEN years since I actually saw this cross-city sculpture trail in the first place. We’ve had two more since it concluded, one involving penguins and the other variations on Elmer the Elephant. Ah well, there’s nothing else for it but to keep chugging on, as we are closer to the finish line then we were back in 2022. (This is giraffe #35 out of #50).
Here in Aotearoa we love our native birds, so there was little surprise that they turned up so prevalently on these sculptures. This giraffe, situated in front of Jellie Park, one of the city’s largest public pools, is covered with them: the pukeko, the fantail, the wood pigeons – as well as some native flowers and fish (those yellow ones are kowhai, the red are pohutakawa).
I like the way it stretches from the stony river bed at the giraffe’s feet, up through the branches to the birds and monarch butterfly at the giraffe’s head. Designed by Ira Mitchell-Kirk, it’s called Reach for the Stars, presumably referring to the white stars on the solid blue background – though to be honest they look more like the stars on the Australian flag given they’re not outlined in red, and there are too many to denote the Southern Cross, the star constellation on our flag.
Still, it’s a nice work – I may have just been a bit distracted as I distinctly remember dropping my camera on the concrete steps.
Demona from Gargoyles
With each year that passes, Demona feels less like a villain and more like an anti-hero. She wants to destroy all of humankind, and these days, who can really blame her? TV Tropes would probably describe her as a Well-Intentioned Extremist or a case of Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters, and if she was in a Marvel movie, she would be one of those patented “has noble motivations but is going about achieving their ends in the wrong way” left-coded antagonists, who fight for things such as equality and freedom and essential supplies for the underprivileged, but blow up buildings along the way so the audience doesn’t become too sympathetic to their cause.
Demona is someone who has a very real set of grievances, though back in the halcyon days of the nineties, the oppression she faces must be met with boundless patience and forbearance, as demonstrated by her partner Goliath, even when her fellow gargoyles aren’t allowed into the dining hall built upon their ancestral land without being called “beasts,” or hang out on the clifftops where their eyrie is situated without someone throwing a burning log at them.
Understandably, Demona despises this treatment, and so comes up with a plan to reclaim the land for her own people. Sounds pretty fair to me! But of course, nothing ever goes according to plan...
What follows is a saga that spans hundreds of years, forming the backbone of the show in its entirety. From surviving the massacre at Castle Wyvern to her generational feud with the Hunters, her immortality granted at the hands of the mysterious Weird Sisters to the stable time loop in which her future self appears to show a young Demona her what the future holds, thereby ensuring the entire tragedy is set into motion in the first place, Demona’s life story was Shakespearean in its grandeur. And I mean literally – a huge part of it involved Macbeth himself.
Goliath and the other clan members may have been the show’s protagonists, but you knew you were in for an incredible episode whenever Demona turned up.
Marina Sirtis voiced the character with an arch, sharp elegance, though the most compelling thing about Demona was that you could never fully discount her opinions on the cruelty of humanity or the state of the world. Still, the moral framework of the show made it clear that her one-woman war against mankind was a misguided cause, one that leaves her embittered and hateful, thereby rendering her the very thing she initially wished to destroy.
Yet despite her blind hatred and inability to take responsibility for her actions (perhaps her most telling line is when she looks upon the destruction at Castle Wyvern and cries: “what have I... what have they done to you?”) according to creator Greg Weisman’s website, his long-term plans for Demona would have eventually included a redemption arc, largely brought about by her love for her daughter Angela. I hope one day we get to see this story play out.
Until then, Demona remains one of the most complex and three-dimensional villainesses of all time. Truly, I’m struggling to think of anyone comparable, and that she appeared in a Disney cartoon back in the nineties is just astounding. As pitiable as she is terrifying, surely her most memorable moment would have to be at the end of “City of Stone,” in which the other characters implore her to tell them a password they need to reverse a timed chemical reaction that she’s sabotaged.
After some cajoling from mystical forces, she eventually divulges the word she chose to override the computer system: “alone.”
Whew. If that doesn’t break your heart, I don’t know what will.
Late as usual, but here it is. April was about the two Alien movies (there are only two), Beatrix Potter, and plenty of Arthurian retellings – specifically three TV shows that are fascinating in how different they are from each other while still being recognizably based on the same source material.
Furthermore, none of them are very good. It made me wonder what a good adaptation would look like? It would have to span several decades, feature aging actors, contain dozens of narrative tangents and cul de sacs, and not be afraid to go to some very strange places. It would also have to settle on a central theme, which might be the most difficult thing of all considering the number of writers who have brought their own perspectives and ideas to the Matter of Britain across the centuries.
Personally, I think that the legends do better in print than on-screen, and many talented authors that have handled the material come to mind: Rosemary Sutcliffe, T.H. White, Bernard Cornwall, Roger Lancelot Green, T.A. Barron, Mary Stewart, Kevin Crossley-King (though I’m leaving out Marian Zimmer Bradley). One day I’ll get through all of them, though I managed to check a few off the list this month.
Ages ago I mentioned doing a comprehensive write-up of the BBC’s Robin Hood, a show that ran from 2006 to 2009, was comprised of thirty-nine episodes in total, and which continues to be something of an albatross around my neck. It was the basis of my very first fandom experience, which involved watching the series unfold on a weekly basis before discussing each episode with others in chatrooms and on LiveJournal, and contributing a few stories to the pool of fanfiction. I made friends in that fandom who I am still in contact with to this day, and it inspired a lot of my own writing, whether it be fanfiction or original work.
That’s not to say it was objectively good. Along with messy storylines, inconsistent characterization and a tiny budget, it also contains one of the most inexplicably terrible creative decisions I’ve ever seen in my life (if you’re familiar with the show, you’ll know what I’m talking about).
That promised write-up is still forthcoming, as it’s very difficult to discuss something dispassionately when you have such strong feelings about it. In the meantime, I’ve recently concluded a rewatch of the show in its entirety with my friend, a first-time viewer. It was fun watching it through a pair of fresh eyes over the course of a year or so, and it inspired me – in lieu of a proper, in-depth review of the show – to rank all thirty-nine episodes.
This was slightly more complicated than it sounds. Sometimes episodes are bad or good not just in themselves, but regarding context – where they’re placed in the show and how positively I feel about what comes before and after them. For instance, many singular episodes are solidly put together but belong in series three, which I dislike on principle. I’d rather watch a weak series one episode (“Dead Man Walking”) that contains my favourite characters than one of the stronger season three episodes (“Do You Love Me?”) in which they’re dead or absent.
Some episodes showcase strong characterization or important plot-points in stories that are narratively all over the place, so what do we rank higher: well-constructed filler episodes (“The Angel of Death”) or tentpole episodes that are complete gibberish (“Let the Games Commence”)? There’s also personal bias when it comes to my favourite characters – I’m naturally going to enjoy the Will/Djaq/Allan-centric episodes more than anything that spotlights Tuck or Kate.
(Then there are those that contain genuinely offensive material like “A Dangerous Deal,” the most misogynistic forty-five minutes of television you’ve ever seen!)
What’s more important: coherent plots or narrative significance or entertainment value? Everyone’s going to have a different opinion, and I can’t pretend I’ve been in any way consistent with how I’ve chosen to rank these episodes. Some are higher because they’re crucial to the overarching storylines, some because they’re fun to watch, some because they’re well-written. Some rank lower despite being all these things because I don’t like the way the characters are treated, or because it’s time-wasting filler, or because they take place in series three.
In other words, I won’t pretend this list isn’t subjective, but it’s my list so I can do whatever I want with it.
The method with which I sorted these episodes was to divide them into five groups of seven, roughly ranging from the best to the worst, and then ranking the entries of each category with more accuracy. As it happens, some of the grading surprised me, certain episodes being higher or lower than I initially assumed they’d be.
So below the cut you’ll find the thirty-nine episodes of the BBC’s Robin Hood, divided into five categories ranked from the absolute worst to the very best, so we can get the negativity out of the way quickly (though just to wrap things up, there’s a bonus category of episodes which are so terrible they defy the ranking system).
