Da Vinci's Demons

One of the least helpful questions when discussing TV is, "why would they make this?" It is meant to convey incredulity at perceived poor decision making on the executive level. That what is being discussed is either the product of psychedelic insanity or out and out malice. As many people asked of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. when it was being made, "Why would they make a superhero show with no superheroes?" But the fact is that most of the time the answer to that question is usually incredibly boring and pragmatic. In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s case, it was that Disney wanted to spread Marvel's cinematic success to its struggling network, ABC, without jeopardizing any potential movie franchises. So you wound up with a TV show set in the Marvel Universe that studiously avoided the Marvel Universe for most of its first season.

Da Vinci's Demons is a show that feels like people should be asking "why would anyone make this?" In fact, at the time of its release, people did ask exactly that. But the answer to that would be the most boring answer possible. If someone had made a computer algorithm to create a TV show for Starz, then Da Vinci's Demons would probably be that show. It's a historical conspiracy thriller with elements of fantasy thrown in. This is entirely inline with Starz other contemporary programs, Spartacus and Camelot. And it is enfolding pretty obvious elements into itself: The Da Vinci Code, The Borgias, The Tudors, Assassin's Creed.

In fact, if there was a "most obvious historical figure to turn into a premium cable drama series" Leonardo Da Vinci would be it. He was a genius painter/inventor/scientist/mathematician who lived long enough ago that the period can be exoticized. And, of course, he was a white man (always important). The only problem is that Leonardo was likely gay. In fact, a quick perusal of research on the subject would turn up quite a lot of discussion as to whether Leonardo was celibate or actively homosexual, but no one seems to argue that he slept with women. Which is bit of a consternation for a premium cable drama, where the main character is supposed to be a white man who sleeps with many women.

In the history of television there has been essentially one non-heterosexual male lead of this kind of show, Captain Jack Harkness of Torchwood. When a non-heterosexual man is the central character of a show it is almost universally (to the point where I can't think of an exception other than Torchwood) a non-genre show set in the present about being gay, and most of the time a comedy (Will and Grace, Queer as Folk, Looking, Please Like Me, Transparent). In a grand (and expensive) historical drama, gay characters are meant to be side characters, to show people are sexually libertine or self-hating or oppressed or even just flavoring. Sometimes this is handled very, very well, Spartacus, but these are meant to be the stories of heterosexual, white men. The historical dramas of The Tudors and The Borgias are merely the same male anti-hero drama formula as Breaking Bad or The Sopranos, simply set in a different time. Mad Men even shows there is no line dividing them by being explicitly both. The historical dramas actually have a natural advantage as they are about Popes and Kings, whereas the contemporary versions merely posture in that direction.

Grappling with Leonardo's sexuality is a central problem in the pilot episode that the show can never quite figure out how to resolve. Within the first ten minutes there are two separate scenes detailing gay dalliances. In both of them, one of the two characters dies. It seems to be the show trying to signal that it isn't really homophobic and then failing to realize that there would be any subtext to killing off those characters. In a very, very rare turn for this kind of show there are two men with nude scenes and two women with nude scenes, allowing for some kind of equality. Historical dramas (and the quasi-historical Game of Thrones) are meant to have lots of naked women because it is the past and in the past naked prostitutes were everywhere. So even an attempt to include male nudity is a notable change. Of course the show can't go too far and so had both of its men be quite old and nudity fleeting, while its women are quite young and the camera lingers on them. Leonardo's friend implies he had sex with men. And in a way that's brave without actually being brave in any real way, Leonardo makes a comment that he might enjoy looking at men and then proceeds to have an extended sex scene with a woman. It all adds up to the show trying very hard to announce it's lack of homophobia while still delivering the heterosexual male gaze as much as possible. Game of Thrones's near constant heterosexual male gaze is consistently its worst feature, transposing that format onto a historical figure who is notoriously gay is just a cowardly decision.

Of course had they made Leonardo gay, it would have probably made for a very excited and evangelical fan base. All the people who were very, very loud about the "straight-washing" of Leonardo would have probably excitedly watched at least a few episodes. The show's star, Tom Riley, even went on weird apology tour of gay news outlets in order to try to convince people to watch the show (he somehow managed to come off both as sincere and also speaking the kind of corpo-huminoid lines written by PR people). Of course it would be a gamble that Starz's baseline audience wouldn't immediately change the channel in rejection of a gay lead character.

There's a lot of other stuff going on in the pilot, but it isn't particularly interesting. There is a secret society conspiring across time (The Da Vinci Code), a lot of Italian politics (The Borgias), and some ahistorical inventions (pretty much every dramatization of Leonardo Da Vinci). The only really interesting dimension to the show is the sexual politics, and even then it is mostly the metatextual sexual politics of the behind the scenes show. Everything else is a retread of other properties.

Avengers vs. X-Men

From the moment that Brian Michael Bendis transitioned from writing gritty street-level heroes to headlining the major franchises of Marvel, Marvel has suffered from poor plotting regulated by poorly conceived crossovers. If you excluded the X-Men comics and the cosmic comics, every major crossover from Avengers Disassembled straight through to Avengers vs. X-Men was terrible, and the only real debate is which particular shade of terrible is the worst. While Civil War is undoubtedly the most poorly written, on just a technical level, Avengers vs. X-Men is just pure garbage on everything from theme to characterization to plotting to even basic knowledge of what's being written. It is the worst.

One of the core problems is that they tried to replicate Civil War's two sides formula. It didn't work in Civil War and it really didn't work in Avengers vs. X-Men. There's one inescapable fact to the crossover: Cyclops was right. So color me surprised when someone linked to an article he wrote attempting to argue that inescapable fact.

The only difference in this respect between Civil War and AvX is that while you could at least make the argument that, in a quote-unquote "real world" context Iron Man probably had a point (even if, in-story, we always still knew Cap was right all along), there really doesn't seem to me to be any reason whatsoever for pretending that Cyclops had any rational justification for his actions over the course of AvX #1-12. There's no real suspense here. In both practical and ideological terms, Cyclops wasn't just wrong, he was spectacularly wrong. 

Except he was right. Everything he believed was entirely correct. Everything he predicted was correct, and everything the Avengers feared would happen didn't. Had the Avengers done literally nothing the entire incident would have sorted itself out completely beneficially to everyone involved. The Phoenix Force would have been hosted by Hope Summers, and with the help of her four lights, would have restored all mutants. They had at least three time travelers, five former Phoenix Force hosts (both those numbers include the time traveler and former Phoenix Force host Rachel Grey), and Layla Miller to talk it over with. Cyclops even had the Phoenix Force literally tell him it loved him, once. Cyclops's assumptions were entirely inline with every past experience with the Phoenix Force, what every person who witnessed the Phoenix Force was saying, and what most of the time travelers believed.

 In that story the new Nova, Sam Alexander, witnesses the Phoenix destroying / consuming an entire planet - Terrax's planet, incidentally - while making a beeline for Earth. The new Nova reaches Earth at the beginning of AvX proper, carrying the warning that the Phoenix is loose, heading in the direction of Earth, and destroying planets left and right.

This is, incidentally, part of why AvX is so poorly written. That's not how the Phoenix Force has ever behaved before. When it was corrupted while mimicking Jean Grey it destroyed one planet. At the end of Grant Morrison's run it destroyed a timeline via time traveling telepathy making Cyclops choose differently at a specific moment. But it never just randomly destroyed (that's Galactus's role). But, it could. A pretty good story could be written where it goes berserk and starts destroying at random. However AvX being not a very good story offers no justification for it (just a hand wave towards literalism of "burning away").

Given that, it is more than reasonable to expect that the Phoenix coming to Earth does not bode well for the planet and its inhabitants. 

But, of course, the last time it showed up it saved the entire planet from a black hole. Again, it has to be justified.

So even though we as readers know the Phoenix is probably coming to Earth to do something related to M-Day and Hope Summers and all that jazz, the people in the story don't know this with anything resembling certainty.

Again, and this is important: Cyclops did know. The X-Men knew an entire mythology about the Phoenix Force and a chosen one and five lights. It was a central part of many stories preceding AvX. Now you can make the claim that billion-year-old alien robots are untrustworthy and how much credence to give mythology, but did know this with quite a lot of certainty.

With the Phoenix on the way to Earth, there was a not-zero chance that the Phoenix intended to destroy the Earth for whatever reason, or maybe even no reason at all. 

Why yes, but there is also a not-zero chance that the Scarlet Witch won't go crazy and commit genocide again. In fact, that's far more likely given that the Phoenix Force has considered Earth its home for a decade within the timeline of Marvel comics. And, this is not a minor point, the Phoenix Force declared that it was in love with Cyclops once. And the last time there was an incident with an out of control Phoenix (which involved a lot of convoluted backstory not particularly relevant) that love was what stopped it dead in its track.

If there is a not-zero chance that the Earth might be destroyed, it isn't just irresponsible to stand in the way of a solution to the problem, it's downright villainous.

It is actually the duty of heroes to do exactly that. The whole point of superheroes is that they do not follow expediency. They make the correct moral choices, even in the face of considerable risks. In the rather excellent Hulk vs. Thor animated movie there is an exchange that gets to the heart of this:

Thor: You would risk everything for the sake of one soul? 

Hela: As YOU yourself would do, Odin's son.

Superheroes routinely make the choice that saving the entire planet is not more important than saving a single life. Sometimes that choice is poorly handled, but more often than not it is why we consider them superheroes.

And what's more, it's not even as if you can make the argument that the Avengers were really trying to persecute the X-Men, put the surviving mutants in camps or Negative Zone prisons or whatever else the government did during the Civil War: all they wanted to do was take Hope as far away from Earth as possible in an attempt to forestall the not-zero chance of planet-wide extinction. 

...They did do that. After they invaded a sovereign nation, they rounded up all the mutants and put them in concentration camps, and forced them to wear those mutant control slave collars. Also, the Avengers plan was an assassination attempt on a teenage girl. Wolverine just got cold feet.

(It's also worth mentioning that later on, at the story's conclusion when Hope actually does receive the Phoenix force, she is only able to control the force and use it benignly because she's spent months being trained in K'un-L'un by Iron Fist, Spider-Man, and Captain America. This wasn't something Cylcops or even Cable did for her.) 

This just didn't happen. If you can find anything in that final issue that shows Hope controlling the Phoenix Force because of little bit of training she received from Iron Fist, I'll give you a cookie. This is just more bad writing on the part of the comic, it needed to sideline Hope for a bit and so sent her off for nebulous and ultimately useless training.

Magneto is the first character to utter the phrase "homo superior." 

This is a weird, but true point to make. However, Magneto gave no indication that he was coining the term. And the third issue of the series ends with the X-Men saying good bye to the reader over the following conclusion, "And when that does... the X-Men will be ready! Now, until the next issue, from Homo Superior to Homo Sapians, --farewell!" The actual comics themselves were always pretty clear that mutants were as much of a different species from humanity as the Atlantians, Inhumans, Deviants, and Eternals.

Professor X asserts that mutants are a part of humanity, and that their "extra" powers do not give them extra rights to exert their superiority over those who are not so gifted (or cursed).

I do not see how these things preclude each other. Unless you are operating on a very narrow definition of "humanity." Modern humans and neanderthals are different species, and yet few people would argue that neanderthals were not a part of humanity. This was a point explicitly made by Grant Morrison when he had Cassandra Nova argue about whether the neanderthals interbred with humans or were eliminated via warfare.

This isn't a minor quibble. The X-Men operate with a radical inclusivity. Their view of humanity is extremely broad. That's the entire reason for the existence of the "Danger" arc and everything that followed up on it. If inclusion in humanity is decided solely upon a genome, then Xavier did nothing wrong, and Danger is just a piece of technology that is broken. But no, the X-Men knew it was a sentient being with a right to self-determination and rehabilitation. A part of humanity.

Their mutations are completely random.

 Except they aren't. The Guthries, the St. Croixs, the Rasputins, the Frosts, all are families that produced huge batches of mutant children. And there has been rather consistently shown to be elements like sibling immunity to each other's powers, children having similar powers to their parents, or the St. Croixs all being able to merge with each other. While Marvel has offered several different explanations for the existence of mutants, the mutant genes are not random. They run in families and they interact in surprising ways with close relatives. While there is no hard and fast rule about it, it is hardly random.

This is why my least favorite X-Men stories have always been those stories that deal with the idea of a "mutant cure" as if it were some kind of terrible existential threat to mutantkind. 

 The cure storylines have been overdone over the years. But they are an existential threat to mutantkind. Going back to Genosha and the Genegeneer. He had, in fact, discovered a cure for mutants. He even found a way to take those mutants whose genes had made them deformed and give them whatever genes he wanted. He promptly used that technology to enslave every mutant on the island. The X-Men have a not subtle theme about liberty vs. slavery. A mutant cure is immediately abused. It's weaponized. It's an instrument of oppression. The concept of a mutant cure is not able to be separate from the giant purple robots governments build to commit genocide. While, in theory, a mutant cure could be benevolent, in reality the people controlling it would, inevitably and by design, the same ones authorizing the Sentinel program.

where Cyclops took the time to explain exactly why the mutant gene simply had to be restored

I'm not sure why he would have to explain it. It is generally agreed that genocide is a bad thing. It is right there in "geno" from Greek "genos" which is where we get the word "genes" from. In the most literal sense the Scarlet Witch committed genocide. And, whereas with those cures you could theoretically make a choice to remain a mutant or not, she made that choice for everyone. She violated people's bodily autonomy, in the process killing many people and disfiguring even more. And she wiped out a distinct group of people. The mutant gene simply had to be restored because otherwise genocide is both right and victorious.

Those people were led by Cyclops, and at no point during the course ofAvX does he ever actually explain why cursing Mudbug, Eye Boy, and Shark Girl to live terrible lives was a necessary sacrifice for the good of the "mutant race." 

Wow. Going back to this point, "here has been ever since Stan & Jack created the Mortimer Toynbee in 1963 - whose mutations resemble something more along the lines of a physical disability." It is very much a fact that deaf people do not consider themselves to have terrible lives. There's an entire deaf culture, and deaf academic studies. And, in that culture there's considerable discussion about medical intervention to correct for deafness. It's not treated as an overarching positive. The same is true for neuro-atypical people. Part of the whole theme of the X-Men is that they aren't cursed and they aren't going to lead terrible lives. If Beak and Angel can find love and happiness, then anyone can.

The fact is that this article is just wrong on every level. It's not hard to be wrong on certain points when dealing with such an atrociously written pile garbage. But the idea that Cyclops was anything less than right represents some level of delusion.

Getting Your Kids Into Preschool... On TV

This past week two shows indulged in one of the most bizarre modern TV tropes, "I need to get my kid into a super-expensive, super-exclusive preschool." It's an LA thing that the other 300 million Americans have no concept of, outside of seeing it appear over and over on TV. TV executives fall into the weird category of rich-enough-to-spend-thousands-of-dollars-on-preschoool-but-not-rich-enough-to-guarantee-a-spot, and so the fraught drama of getting a kid into preschool keeps popping up endlessly because it keeps popping up in their lives.

Both Grandfathered and You're the Worst utilized this trope in starkly different ways, revealing why one of those sitcoms is among the best shows on TV and the other is, well, not.

Grandfathered embraced the trope in the most conventional sense possible. Due to implausible circumstances, main character Jimmy (John Stamos) has to take his granddaughter to a preschool open house. Yes, a preschool open house. Already the plot has gone off the rails in under two minutes. Unwilling to openly admit he's a grandfather, Jimmy lies and says Edie is his daughter. Naturally his son Gerald (Josh Peck) shows up and the kind of wacky shenanigans this plot always involves kicks in, Jimmy and Gerald have to pretend to be a gay couple because the super-exclusive preschool wants more gay families.

It's groan inducing. In fact, two straight people pretend to be a gay couple to get their child into preschool has been done at least twice in recent memory, Baby Daddy and Cougar Town. And Two and a Half Men just dedicated its entire final season to two straight men pretending to be a gay couple, so there's that. To the show's benefit it at least has someone point out that it is an episode about straight people trying to benefit from the advances of gay rights without going through the struggle and oppression. But really it just is an incredibly lazy version of terrible plot.

Normally in these plots some outside complication arises that eventually causes the charade to fall. In Grandfathered a single day of pretending to raise a child is so psychologically traumatizing to Jimmy, that he makes out with the very female admissions officer of the preschool who randomly shows up at his restaurant. And by pretending, I mean that some people came over and put up fake photographs, brought some toys over and did a little rudimentary baby proofing in his apartment. Everything falls apart in the interview because the admissions officer does her job instead of lying for the sake of someone she barely knows.

Meanwhile there is a subplot about Gerald's mother, Sara (Paget Brester), trying to convince the family that a normal daycare is good enough. She discovers that the daycare she used for Gerald is extremely dangerous and completely dilapidated.

In the end what the show chose to reveal about its characters in this episode is that Jimmy is so vain he compulsively lies, he cares more about even just the perception of his swinging single life than his granddaughter's well being, and that Sara was a bad mother. Obviously no one learns anything. The gravitational pull of that terrible idea for a plot dragged all the characters into the worst possible characterizations, with no reward for going there.

You're the Worst  normally starts out with characters the show labels as awful in its own title. That's part of its charm. But "LCD Soundsystem" breaks the format from the beginning of the episode. It introduces two characters, Lexi and Rob (Tara Summers and Justin Kirk), that have never existed in the show's universe before. The first act of the episode is just a little slice of their day, with only the most minimal acknowledgement that they exist within the neighborhood of You're the Worst's main characters Jimmy and Gretchen.

Lexi and Rob are presented as having very successfully negotiated the transition from wild 20s to adulthood (and parenthood) while never losing their innate coolness. They have everything that Gretchen wants from life without losing the aspects of her personality she most likes.

Almost immediately in the episode Lexi and Rob discover that they have one of those big preschool interviews coming up. Lexi bemoans that they've become a cliche which artfully foreshadows just how much of a cliche every aspect of their lives will be revealed to be as the episode unfolds. It's critically symbolic as the upcoming interview is the only naturally occurring motivation they have in the episode (Gretchen's intervention into their lives by taking their dog being decidedly unnatural). It keeps reinserting itself into the narrative in unexpected ways.

No matter how much Lexi might state resistance to the interview, she barrels forward with grim determination. The episode regularly undermines Lexi's statements with her actions. As just one example, she first dismisses Rob's concerns about pot smoking, but then forbids drinking that night, only to wind up drinking herself before the night is over. Lexi's mild hypocrisy throughout the episode underlines her statement 'To be a slave to an idea of coolness is why some of your friends never grow and in the end are actually less themselves, and counter intuitively live less authentic lives than the buyers-in.' It's exactly what Gretchen wants to hear. She already made a similar statement, almost word for word. But Lexi, who lives it, ultimately reveals the idea to be nothing more than a self-justifying platitude.

The preschool interview ultimately symbolizes all the unstated problems in the relationship. Lexi is buying in, and her cool-girl persona is nothing more than a superficial shell. She's driving their relationship to a normalcy where who they used to be is a cosmetic shell. Rob, meanwhile, is not buying in. He's just there out of inertia. There are all sorts of indicators showing Rob's dissatisfaction. He plays a Gameboy and discusses how fun it is. He is very eager to talk about how he and Lexi met by a quick hookup in a rock club bathroom. The fact that he cares much, much more about the missing dog than the preschool interview.

Rob's primary reaction to the interview is initially just not to care about it, and then to only care about how it will impact his life. Specifically he wants to smoke pot, and then later in the episode drink. And he utilizes it to comment on how Lexi has changed (she isn't smoking pot much anymore). It's small comment, but one that starts to crack open how they have changed and are starting to become incompatible. When Rob suggests postponing the interview, she looks at him as if he just asked her to murder someone before asking "why would we do that?" Rob doesn't care about the interview, he only cares about the dog he has had since before he met her. It's an intractable issue that only fails to become a full fight only because Gretchen shows up with the dog.

Gretchen and Jimmy spend some time at their house, where Gretchen gets an even closer look at everything she thinks she wants. She sees this perfect life as social conscious, cool, aging hipsters living an upper class life without all socially-oppressive bullshit such a life is supposed to entail. And then she is blindsided by the out poring Rob's own dissatisfaction. An out poring where one of his prime concerns is, "Lexi's always like, 'school, Harper's school' and it's like 'fine,' but on the other hand, I don't want to be having that conversation." As far as the episode is concerned, that's a concern that has materialized in the span of a day, and will be over after the interview. But it symbolizes everything wrong with their relationship. The perfect upper class lifestyle can't fix a rotten core. The failings of the American Dream can't be fixed by putting posters of indie rock bands on it. No matter how hard you can try to only buy-in to the hyper-specific aspects of American life that you think will make you the most happy, you can't keep the rest of it out. The ennui, the dissatisfaction, the depression keeps seeping in compelling you to buy-in to just one more aspect and it will vanish. In Gretchen's case that one more aspect was Rob and Lexi's life, in Lexi's case it was the preschool.

The use of that trope in You're the Worst was because it was so unrealistic and ridiculous. It's a couple whose main problem is an interview at preschool, that is to Gretchen. and by extension the audience, a perfect life. The kind of life she'd love to live for 90 years. But it becomes the metaphor for all the deep emotional problems within that relationship causing it to fail. And that's the primary difference between You're the Worst and Grandfathered. The former intentionally used the trope to reveal the real existential despair of its characters, the latter used it to accidentally reveal it's characters are awful people.

How Cyclops Was Ruined... and Then Redeemed

Few writers have as large an influence on their chosen medium as Chris Claremont. He shepherded the X-Men from an already canceled book to Marvel's most profitable and prolific franchise. And, in the process, was far more influential than commonly cited works like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. While praising those books for the quality of their story telling, what everyone really wanted was to be the next X-Men (including characters that pre-dated the X-Men). Claremont wrote seminal, brilliant stories and created memorable, beloved characters all of which have stood the test of time.

However as his sixteen year stint writing Marvel's mutants carried on, his weaknesses as a writer became increasingly more apparent. One of his most frustrating traits was his inability to let go of a plotline when it was no longer relevant, logical, or even coherent. As a particularly egregious example, there is the case of Madelyne Pryor, Claremont's original ending for "The Dark Phoenix Saga" was to have Jean Grey stripped of her powers and move to Alaska with Cyclops. However, as the Phoenix had killed billions of people this was deemed not punishment enough. Editorial wanted Jean held on an asteroid and tortured until the end of time. Eventually they split the difference and Jean heroically commits suicide to save the universe.

After Jean's death, Cyclops bummed around for awhile. He dated a boat captain named Lee Forrester. He rejoined the X-Men, left them, and generally just hung out. But Claremont desperately wanted to do his ending to "The Dark Phoenix Saga" even though Jean Grey was, you know, dead at the time. So when visiting his parents in Alaska he meets Madelyne Pryor, a woman who just happens to look exactly like Jean... except without any powers. In less than ten issues the pair is married.

There is nothing about this storyline that isn't deeply weird and warped. Cyclops could just have easily wound up in Alaska with Lee, but she wasn't Jean Grey. Claremont seemed to think it was incredibly romantic, and yet when specifically talking about the storyline states his reference point was Vertigo, a movie about mental illness and obsession. At one point Cyclops outright askes Madelyne if she is Jean, and Madelyne hits him. To Claremont this symbolized, "Because her whole desire was to be deeply loved for herself not to be loved as the evocation of her boyfriend's dead romantic lover and sweetheart." Except that by hitting Cyclops she (and by extension, Claremont) is merely avoiding the question, "how is Madelyne any different than powerless Jean Grey?"

At the end of "The Dark Phoenix Saga" Cyclops went on a long night of the soul. He was growing and changing, by necessity, from the trauma. The introduction of Madelyne throws all that character development out of the window, rendering him a crazy guy so obsessed with his dead highschool girlfriend he marries a woman he barely knows because she looks like him. Which, of course, means quite a lot of trouble when Jean comes back.

When Jean Grey was found alive at the bottom of the ocean, Cyclops abandons his wife and child to run off and be a superhero again. This event has caused a significant portion of X-Men fans to loath him, including Claremont himself (who wasn't writing that particular X-Men book). But the fact is that Claremont had put the character in a narrative bind without any way out. The minute Cyclops married Jean Grey Lite it was inevitable that he'd return to the real thing if she ever came back. Madelyne was literally created to be a placeholder for Jean, and now that Jean was back she served no purpose. There was just no possible in character reason that Cyclops wouldn't leave her immediately.

Claremont used Madelyne as a supporting character in his X-Men title, and eventually she was revealed to be a clone of Jean, given both magical and telepathic powers, turned evil and killed off. Turning Madelyne evil actually gave the character a solid motivation different from Jean Grey, and is the primary reason why she continued to pop up intermittently over all the years since her death.

Cyclops and Jean eventually married, but their marriage was never as happy as other Marvel characters' marriages (Marvel loves a troubled marriage, but normally they are counterbalanced more evenly). They came off as two people who couldn't get over the fact that they dated in highschool, because that's basically what they were. Scott spent the five years Jean was dead with a placeholder and Jean jumped right back in a relationship with him out of inertia. Both of them contemplated straying (Cyclops with Psylocke and Jean with Wolverine). Throughout the '90s, the marriage was legitimately holding both characters back, reducing them to treading water.

When Grant Morrison took over writing the characters, he built his entire storyline around a love triangle between Cyclops, Jean, and reformed villain Emma Frost. Emma and Jean had a long, tortured history with each other, and were in many ways mirrors of each other. Emma had a cold and cruel exterior that hid a inner vulnerability and loneliness. Jean was all sweetness and nice covering an inferno of anger and a rather callous bully.

Cyclops had been possessed by an evil spirit, and shown his darkest nature. Jean didn't really seem to care, she acknowledged it happened but was far too busy with her own life. So Cyclops sought counseling from Emma. All his latent issues were brought to the surface, including the sexual dysfunction in his relationship with Jean. But the larger point Morrison was making was Cyclops and Jean had finally grown up to become two different people. Each had a particular trajectory and they didn't need each other. When Cyclops began his relationship with Emma, it was, despite two marriages, his first real adult relationship.

Emma pushed Cyclops. She helped him grow. As everything for mutantkind became worse and worse, she was the one who was able to bring out the version of Scott that could be an iron willed leader, a savior of a species. He couldn't be the highschool kid in love with his schoolmate, which is all he could ever be with Jean. That cancer that was introduced with Madelyne Pryor was finally excised by Emma Frost. It allowed Cyclops to become the dynamic center of the X-Men.

The Land Before Time XV: Independence Day 2: The Fast and the Furious 8: Jurassic Universe's Return of the Living Dead

Interior Dom's garage. Dom (Vin Diesel) and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) and fixing a car. Hobbs (The Rock) walks in next to Little Foot.

Hobbs: I need you, for one last mission.

Dom: I told you I'm out of the game.

Hobbs: The game is not done with you.

Letty: He's out, we're all out.

Hobbs: How out are you going to be when a T-Rex comes stomping through your living room?

Dom: What are you talking about.

Little Foot: The aliens have weaponized time travel. They're releasing packs of velociraptors in New York city right now.

Letty: And what do you want us to do about it?

Hobbs: There's only one group of people I know who could break into the aliens' fortress in Cambodia and steal a time travel device.

Dom: Letty, call the crew.

Cut to montage of Mia reading to her children, Roman and Tej on a first class flight, Gisele and Han-Seoul-Oh eating brains in a fancy Tokyo restaurant. Each of them gets a phone call and flys back to Dom's neighborhood garage. Where they all stand around a table.

Little Foot (whispering to Hobbs): I don't trust no zombies.

Hobbs: Well those zombies happen to be an Israeli super spy and a drifter... and you don't even have thumbs.

Little Foot: I can still drive.

Hobbs: The aliens' fortress is guarded by thirty-six velocirapters and twelve T-Rexes. There's also a bunch of little buggers who spit poison. It's located underneath an abandoned Buddhist temple. We don't know what's inside. I'm betting robots.

Mia: Sounds like a challenge.

Dom: Sounds like fun.

Han: Braaaaaaaaaaaaains.

Dom: Let's roll out.

Everyone picks up guns and then climbs into shiny new cars, except for Gisele who is on a motorcycle, and Little Foot whose head is sticking out of a Jeep.

The Spies and Nikita

The spy genre has never recovered from the end of the Cold War. Certainly the popularity of the genre never diminished, but the defining concepts remain so intrinsically tied to that particular geopolitical moment that it can't help but feel like it is floundering in a foundationally different world. Outside of The Prisoner the genre was never truly willing to engage with the dark, messed up things that happened in order to win the cold war, but the world of CIA torture rings is so wildly removed from what the genre does that it renders the stories archaic, almost quaint, reflective of a nostalgic sentimentality. Except for, oddly enough, the CW's Nikita which explodes with a degree of relevance wildly absent from its fellow stories.

The Cold War set up certain rules for how spies operate. Two global powers of roughly equal ability face each other with cutting edge equipment. Spycraft ultimately becomes a high stakes political game for strategic advantage. Of course the genre expanded beyond that paradigm (Ian Fleming famously created SPECTRE because he believed the Cold War was ending), but even against super villains the same rules applied. And those rules could never be adapted to a world where low-tech terrorism carried out by people who held no nationalistic ideologies became the entire focus of intelligence agencies. And that those intelligence agencies would brutally violate not merely human rights of suspects, but would attempt to spy on essentially all communication is far beyond the scope the genre was willing to engage in.

So the stories being told wound up repeatedly attempting to force the square peg of reality into the round hole of convention. .Homeland started out strong by examining the surveillance state, but quickly descended into magical terrorists and a version of Iran that was an even match for the CIA. James Bond fights against a North Korea with seemingly unlimited wealth and technology far beyond anyone else on the planet in Die Another Day. 24 became a jingoistic celebration of the worst abuses of the Bush administration, all while descending into ludicrous plotting. The Americans simply threw up its hands and set itself in the waning days of the Cold War (as did for comedic effect Archer).

And then there's Nikita. Ostensibly it is the story of a woman's mission of revenge against an organization, Division, that betrayed her. But really it is about the bureaucratic nature of the American intelligence agencies. It is less the story of Nikita, the rogue agent, and more the story of Division, the rogue agency.

From the outset Division is ruthless, cruel, and sort of pointless. Behind all of the rhetoric given by the first head of Division, Percy Rose, is the truth that there is no ultimate goal or purpose to the organization. It makes money for some people, but mostly it simply exists to perpetuate its own existence. This comes into even starker relief as Percy is removed and a lengthy series of factions takes over the organization. With each successive change in leadership it becomes more obvious that no on actually wishes to do anything with Division, they just wish to have it. Even more pointedly, each successive regime intends to reform the excesses of its predecessor, only to backslide into the exact same underhanded tactics. The show's central theme is bureaucratic inertia, and watching it elegantly unfold over several seasons.

And what Division does is primarily work for big business. Despite being a government agency, virtually all of the work Division does is in the service of the private sector. They take down environmentalist groups, trade adverse foreign leaders, scientists creating benevolent new technologies. The show posits that the government has come to serve the interests of major economic powers, not the actual citizens. It is a rather brilliant examination of what drove the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected government of Guatemala on behalf of a fruit company.

Division's primary adversaries are not, in fact, Nikita's team, but rather a Russian organization named Gogal. But unlike any reflexive attempt to retread the Cold War, there is no ideological difference between the two organizations. The difference is entirely economic, with Gogal serving a different set of corporations than Division. Capitalism won, and this is the ultimate aftermath, organizations brutally killing people on behalf of nothing more than profit margins.

One of the more interesting elements of the Senate torture report is the constant question of why the CIA would do what it did. Why would it continue to interrogate people it already determined had no information? Why would it continue to hold people it knew were innocent? Why was all of this necessary when it knew going into the war that conventional interrogation provided more reliable information? Nikita somehow conceived the answers to these questions prior to them even being asked. Once a policy has been implemented advancing the policy supersedes the goal of the policy. The desires of the rich and powerful are more important than all other considerations. Loyalty to an organization is the ultimate good (regardless of how that organization operates) and whistle blowing is intrinsically evil. Amazing how a silly little show on the CW manged to nimbly adapt a stagnant genre to the modern world.

Ranking the Top Ten X-Men

There have been around 90 official members of the X-Men over the years. The X-Men essentially became a smaller company inside Marvel, spreading out to the point where four different X-Men teams could operate simultaneously along side affiliated teams and solo adventures. And the reason for that wild success is that the concept of the X-Men is so simple and yet so brilliant, the themes are so powerful, and the characters so vivid. Like any comic book franchise it has its fallow periods, but few comics can boast not merely being intellectually and emotionally fulfilling, but also being a force for social good.

10. Magik: Illyana Rasputin was introduced as Colossus's younger sister. After a series of horrific events her mutation (to teleport through time and space) activated alongside her nascent mystical abilities. Bad, nightmarish things happen to her, events far beyond the routine suffering piled upon superheroes. But even in a profoundly unjust world she still strives to be a hero, to be a better person.

9. Dazzler: Alison Blaire never desired to be a superhero. She wanted to be a singer, and her mutation (to convert sound into light) was merely something she used to make her shows more theatrical. But what makes her special is that she was the public face of mutants. While the X-Men sequestered themselves in their mansion, Alison was a beloved entertainer. She was a mutant superstar and became the positive example of her species the world needed. In her time, she did more work for the X-Men's goal of human/mutant peace than anyone else.

8. Beast: Hank McCoy was born a mutant, but his own experimentation upon himself pushed his mutation beyond its natural limitations. He is an affable genius. One who has been an Avenger and a Defender, beyond merely being an X-Man. What makes him stand out is his never ending quest for knowledge. The world might be a difficult place, with many setbacks, but the X-Men embrace it, and none more so than Beast.

7. Nightcrawler: Kurt Wagner is a profoundly different individual. His mutation resulted in an almost demonic appearance. But rather than be bitter, he embraced his mutant nature. Mutation thematically represents a huge swath of "others" and as part of that self-loathing is not uncommon. Nightcrawler represents the best of us, how what makes us different is not shameful or bad, but something to be embraced and celebrated.

6. Rogue: Rogue's mutation is deadly. She steals the very essence of anyone she touches. She was battered, abused and manipulated. But she sought help, and through the X-Men became a stronger, more complete person. Alienation is not total, there is help, and growth is possible.

5. Cable: Jean Grey referred to her not quite son, Nathan Summers, as, "a cable linking the present to the future." Time travel has almost always been a major element to the X-Men, because the X-Men are not focused on a perpetual present. The X-Men look to the future with specific goals, and so the future must intercede upon the present in order to clarify the stakes and how the dream the X-Men advocate will fail or succeed. And that intercession is Cable, a man who is the mutant messiah in multiple eras thousands of years apart. He is the watchman, keeping the dream alive across all of time, from the most bleak to the most paradisaical.

4. Magneto: The X-Men are unique in that their adversaries each represent specific ideologies. In Magneto's case that ideology is militancy. While the X-Men are (in a very round about way) pacifists (I should reiterate it is in a very round about and ass backwards way), Magneto represents the idea that safety can only come from weapons and aggression. But what makes him a compelling character is that he is not necessarily wrong. And the fact that his goal is what he perceives is best for the mutant species, which does not preclude working with and occasionally being a member of the X-Men.

3. Charles Xavier: The founder of the X-Men and the man with the dream. He is, ultimately the leader of a social movement, not the leader of a super hero team. And like all such leaders, he has a grand vision. That is why he never ceases to embrace all people, including villains like Magneto or his step-brother Juggernaut. He tries, in his own way, to help everyone, And, like all such leaders, he occasionally fails and his personal demons get in the way. That's what makes him a tragic hero, rather than a mythical icon of goodness.

2. Emma Frost: Emma originated as a member of the Hellfire Club, which represented decadence, licentiousness, and greed. Unlike Magneto or the X-Men (or even Mr. Sinister, Mystique, and Apocalypse) the Hellfire Club cared for nothing more than their own petty aggrandizement, wealth and power. It is the Id run amok. But Emma grew beyond that ultimately sociopathic outlook. She became an ally of the X-Men, eventually training the younger generation of mutants before eventually joining the team outright. Being a hero is a struggle for her. Her natural impulse is not necessarily to do the right thing, but she does (or tries to) anyway. She represents the potential for the ideology of the X-Men to convert those around them.

1. Cyclops: Scott Summers is the man who holds everything together. He has the weight of both an entire species resting upon him. He saves people. He does good. His power is uncontrollable in a perfect metaphor for how the world is uncontrolable. And yet, Cyclops manages to keep everything in check. Everything advancing towards the ultimate dream of peaceful integration. He's strong, he's moody, he puts his responsibilities to the world ahead of any happiness he might ever have. He's willing not merely to sacrifice himself, but to allow himself to be hated and be ostracized. That's what being a hero really means, making hard choices for the good of those around him and accepting the consequences.