This episode was so good I didn't even post about it for a week and a half because I was so intimidated. Plus I started descending into the joy/awfulness of Bedlam. So it's not super fresh in my head now, but it was really great and made me feel bad for ever doubting The Fades in the slightest.
Paul got magically brought back to life but it didn't annoy me, which seemed like it would be impossible until it actually happened. He was a Fade for most of the episode. He hung out with the Joe Dempsie ex-Fade (who is now an immortal human) and learned about how badly Angelics have treated Fades in the past. Just when the viewer was hoping Paul would stay as a Fade and start fighting Neil and the other Angelics, Paul brought himself back to life BECAUSE HE LOVES DANIEL KALUUYA SO MUCH. Then he threw up butterflies.
I have to admit that if I magically brought myself back to life, those would probably be the circumstances. The butterflies helped a lot.
In The Vampire Diaries, which is crammed full of annoying resurrections, I think what makes the resurrections most annoying is that they are so obviously driven by the importance of the person who died. If a recurring character gets bitten by a werewolf, she dies. If the star of the show gets bitten by a werewolf, they find a way to keep him from dying. The major human characters wear rings that cause them to come back to life if a supernatural creature kills them--well, okay--but what happens when one of the characters gets shot by a human with a gun? Don't worry, a girl who has been doing magic for less than a year is able to bring him back to life. For some reason none of the other humans who died on the show got to be brought back to life, but oh well. They weren't main characters.
I think The Fades avoided this kind of bad writing by having Paul bring himself back to life. It had already been established that Paul is the most powerful Angelic ever, so there's no need to explain why Angelics have never brought anyone back to life before--no one as strong as Paul had ever tried it.
Notes:
The awkward previouslies were actually cool this time, because in the middle of narrating them Mac almost started crying about Paul's death. He also sounded like he was crushing on Paul so hard. I appreciate that this show is about a friendship but I can't help wishing there could be a horror-quirkfest show about gay kids.
Sarah's husband decided that he doesn't like knowing her ghost is following him around, and he told her to go away. Everyone obvs found out he didn't really kill any of those people. Sarah didn't annoy me in this episode. PLUS, at the end she told Neil that it was time for her to eat some dead bodies and become powerful. She told Neil that this was so she could be a Fade on the Angelics' side or something, but I bet she was just tricking him.
I guess the main important thing I learned about Fades was that they can't just not touch people--they find it unbearably painful to do so. The special guns that Angelics fire at Fades have little pieces of blood and skin in them. The Joe Dempsie ex-Fade started having the power to touch humans when he was lying on the bathroom floor while his wife was committing suicide. He loved her too much to move away from her dripping blood, and he grew new skin in the places where the blood had hurt him. This is quite beautiful and even Christian, and really messes with the evil/zombie implications of the Fades eating people.
The Joe Dempsie ex-Fade is perfect, as I think I said before. He eats chocolate, moves his head around like a raptor, and throws up black liquid every so often. Paul trusted him so he killed a bunch of Angelics and he saved Natalie (the best character!!!) and turned her into a human by the same process that he was turned into one. Josh's comments about her in 1x05 were "oh my gosh, dribble" so I guess that she is going to be hot?
Neil was a dick. I'm not going to try to actually summarize this episode since I watched it so long ago (and am super tired) but Neil was such a dick that even some of the other Angelics were mad at him. For example! Mac kept saying it was his fault Paul had died, and Paul's Fade kept telling Neil to say that it wasn't, but Neil was just like, "Yeah, it sounds like it was your fault, great job ruining the last hope of humanity."
Hate Neil! Anyone who upsets Daniel Kaluuya should be erased with the giant eraser from Are You Afraid of the Dark. You should have seen Daniel Kaluuya by the way. He was just...I don't even know how many times I wrote "Daniel Kaluuya is a perfect human being" in my notes while watching the episode. He was so fucking good when Paul was dead. They did a good job portraying the stereotypical geeky comic relief character actually being sad, without losing his character traits.
Showing posts with label the fades. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the fades. Show all posts
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
The Fades 1x03
This made me happy:
Otherwise the episode wasn't that good. I seem to be in opposition with Josh regarding which episodes are good and which are weak, which is totally terrifying and leading to an identity crisis. But there was more focus on the characters I'm less interested in, like Neil's dead friend Sarah, his other dead friend Helen, and Sarah's husband whose name I can't remember because all he did in the last two episodes was have sex.
Speaking of sex, this episode started with a pretty great scene where Paul was jerking off to a fantasy about playing strip rock paper scissors with Jay. When they had sex later in the episode he seemed really disappointed that it didn't involve RPS. Anyway, when Paul came he grew giant wings. Sadly this was the zenith of the episode.
One of the things I did like was how everyone was a complete fail at the typical "keeping magic a secret" trope, and it wasn't really such a big deal. Paul told Jay, "I grow wings when I ejaculate," but again she just thought this was sad/cute bedwetter foreplay. But then his sister Anna saw them kissing, and when she came up and started making fun of them, Paul accidentally magically sealed her mouth shut. People kept yelling at Paul about how weird this was, and Paul would just say, "I know!" awkwardly.
In the next scene, Anna's mouth had come unsealed some way or another and she was sitting in her room refusing to talk to Paul. Their mom came up to ask what had happened, and Anna yelled, "He's having sex with my best friend! He's got superpowers!" but their mom was too busy congratulating Paul on having sex with Jay to notice the part about magic.
Later there was an annoying scene where Paul texted and told Jay this long story about a space probe that is pretty impressive but was built in a boring town, which I guess is supposed to be a metaphor for how he just wants her to see him as normal even though he can do magic things. It was more annoying than it sounds because he had climbed up into the tree next to the window of her giant house, and was magically making all the flowers on the tree bloom like some kind of John Cusack. Then they had sex and he apparently didn't grow wings this time, or maybe he did and they just didn't mention it because Jay thinks that's how bedwetters have sex.
My point is though that even though I didn't like this scene, I did find it refreshing that Paul didn't really stick to his plan to have a secret identity, and just opted to try and make it seem cool when Jay found out about it.
To continue with the stuff I liked, there was a nice storyline where Paul forgot Mac's birthday, although he remained unaware that he'd forgotten about it for an unbelievably long time. Mac was super mad at him and kept telling him that he felt tired because he'd been waiting for someone to surprise him all day, and Paul was like, "What are you talking about?" Eventually Paul remembered and the next day he wrote "Happy birth-yesterday" in shaving cream in front of Mac's house. It was cute.
There was another cute scene where Paul gave Mac a key to his house for his birthday and they had a fight with ice cream, but then Paul got HIT BY A TRUCK AND DIED. Whyyyy did this happen. I bet quite a lot of people watching this show are fans of Skins, so it's not like watching someone get randomly hit by a vehicle is the shock it would be to most people. And it just seems like a huge shark-jump moment.
It seems pretty clear that the AED didn't work so Paul is definitely too dead to be brought back by medical means. This leaves two options:
1. He will be a Fade for the rest of the show, which I personally think would be annoying.
2. He'll be brought back by magic, which I also think would be annoying. I find myself struggling to explain why this bothers me so much, but I just think bringing people back to life on TV always seems cheap, and it's especially annoying in the fourth or fifth episode of a show. Bringing someone back to life is one of the most impressive things you can do magic-wise, and it's going to feel like the show already blew its load. Also, Helen and Sarah didn't get brought back to life so it's going to be really obvious that Paul got brought back because he's the protagonist, not for any in-story reason. I'm so disappointed in this!
What else happened. Continuing the trend where we tell everyone in the whole world about stuff we're supposedly keeping secret, Neil told Sarah's husband that Sarah's ghost is following him around, and allowed them to have a conversation through him. Again I like how this departs from cliche, but I just wasn't interested in watching the scene. Some more Angelics came to help out. Paul impressed everyone by healing Neil, who isn't dead by the way, obviously.
The gross Fade who looked like Nosferatu from Are You Afraid of the Dark? went in a cocoon for a while and came out as Joe Dempsie, except he was super buff. Should be fun.
Neil's annoying friend Helen, the vicar, turned out to be one of the dead people who ascends instead of having to be a Fade. I will tell you why this annoys me! Helen is a dick. She kept talking about how Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden for doubting what they were told, and said that Sarah is having a bad time basically because she's a weak person. Helen was absolutely sure she was going to ascend because she believed that she would, and then she ascended, instead of not ascending which is what I was hoping would happen because she was so self-righteous.
This seems really inconsistent of me. I'm Christian, and I get really bored of Christian TV characters who are evil or stupid or are always being proved wrong. But the afterlife in The Fades clearly is not consistent with Christianity, unless maybe you believe that being a Fade is hell and people fail to ascend because they deserve it--but that really doesn't make much sense. So why is Helen still Christian when she knows about Fades? Also, why is she so judgmental?
It was also super Christian when Helen told all the Angelics that they should capture Fades and start torturing them. They captured Natalie (my favorite character) and I guess they're going to start torturing her in the next episode. Whatever. I'm done talking about Helen.
I feel bad for Lily Loveless. There was one sort of nice scene where Anna told her mom that she feels like her mom likes Paul better than her, but otherwise Anna just goes around saying things that are supposed to be horrible but don't sound like things a real person would say. "You're kissing my brother. That's like you're kissing me. It's like you're kissing the worst part of me. It's like you're kissing my ass!" Again, her Katie Fitch redemption arc needs to already be here.
Also:
"I've seen you masturbate." "When?" "The school trip to Calais." "You were awake?"
"A truly surprising birthday is one that takes place a day late!"
I love how actors with physical disabilities are being cast in minor roles in the show! In case you don't know, Jack Thorne identifies as disabled and worked on the show Cast-offs where all the characters were physically disabled and played by disabled actors. He is also a supporter of Don't play me pay me, which campaigns for more disabled actors to be cast on television, especially playing disabled characters. I basically love him. But anyway.
I love that Paul seems to own only one pair of pants and they're pink. In all likelihood my favorite thing about a character I already like a lot.
Mac's dad decided to arrest Sarah's husband for the murders of Sarah, Helen, and the rabbit kids, apparently because the guy he works for (or with? whatever) doubts his ability to do his job. The guy told him to his face that he thinks Mac's dad was only hired because he was black, which to me seemed like kind of an awkward attempt to address racism, but then I'm white so maybe people do say things that awkwardly racist in real life.
Paul went to his therapist and told him he didn't need to see him anymore because he was "cured" and "too busy for this...I've got two lives to lead." Can someone please explain to me how someone labeled with mental health problems could get away with saying all the things Paul says that in real life would make staff/parents totally crack down on you?
Otherwise the episode wasn't that good. I seem to be in opposition with Josh regarding which episodes are good and which are weak, which is totally terrifying and leading to an identity crisis. But there was more focus on the characters I'm less interested in, like Neil's dead friend Sarah, his other dead friend Helen, and Sarah's husband whose name I can't remember because all he did in the last two episodes was have sex.
Speaking of sex, this episode started with a pretty great scene where Paul was jerking off to a fantasy about playing strip rock paper scissors with Jay. When they had sex later in the episode he seemed really disappointed that it didn't involve RPS. Anyway, when Paul came he grew giant wings. Sadly this was the zenith of the episode.
One of the things I did like was how everyone was a complete fail at the typical "keeping magic a secret" trope, and it wasn't really such a big deal. Paul told Jay, "I grow wings when I ejaculate," but again she just thought this was sad/cute bedwetter foreplay. But then his sister Anna saw them kissing, and when she came up and started making fun of them, Paul accidentally magically sealed her mouth shut. People kept yelling at Paul about how weird this was, and Paul would just say, "I know!" awkwardly.
In the next scene, Anna's mouth had come unsealed some way or another and she was sitting in her room refusing to talk to Paul. Their mom came up to ask what had happened, and Anna yelled, "He's having sex with my best friend! He's got superpowers!" but their mom was too busy congratulating Paul on having sex with Jay to notice the part about magic.
Later there was an annoying scene where Paul texted and told Jay this long story about a space probe that is pretty impressive but was built in a boring town, which I guess is supposed to be a metaphor for how he just wants her to see him as normal even though he can do magic things. It was more annoying than it sounds because he had climbed up into the tree next to the window of her giant house, and was magically making all the flowers on the tree bloom like some kind of John Cusack. Then they had sex and he apparently didn't grow wings this time, or maybe he did and they just didn't mention it because Jay thinks that's how bedwetters have sex.
My point is though that even though I didn't like this scene, I did find it refreshing that Paul didn't really stick to his plan to have a secret identity, and just opted to try and make it seem cool when Jay found out about it.
To continue with the stuff I liked, there was a nice storyline where Paul forgot Mac's birthday, although he remained unaware that he'd forgotten about it for an unbelievably long time. Mac was super mad at him and kept telling him that he felt tired because he'd been waiting for someone to surprise him all day, and Paul was like, "What are you talking about?" Eventually Paul remembered and the next day he wrote "Happy birth-yesterday" in shaving cream in front of Mac's house. It was cute.
There was another cute scene where Paul gave Mac a key to his house for his birthday and they had a fight with ice cream, but then Paul got HIT BY A TRUCK AND DIED. Whyyyy did this happen. I bet quite a lot of people watching this show are fans of Skins, so it's not like watching someone get randomly hit by a vehicle is the shock it would be to most people. And it just seems like a huge shark-jump moment.
It seems pretty clear that the AED didn't work so Paul is definitely too dead to be brought back by medical means. This leaves two options:
1. He will be a Fade for the rest of the show, which I personally think would be annoying.
2. He'll be brought back by magic, which I also think would be annoying. I find myself struggling to explain why this bothers me so much, but I just think bringing people back to life on TV always seems cheap, and it's especially annoying in the fourth or fifth episode of a show. Bringing someone back to life is one of the most impressive things you can do magic-wise, and it's going to feel like the show already blew its load. Also, Helen and Sarah didn't get brought back to life so it's going to be really obvious that Paul got brought back because he's the protagonist, not for any in-story reason. I'm so disappointed in this!
What else happened. Continuing the trend where we tell everyone in the whole world about stuff we're supposedly keeping secret, Neil told Sarah's husband that Sarah's ghost is following him around, and allowed them to have a conversation through him. Again I like how this departs from cliche, but I just wasn't interested in watching the scene. Some more Angelics came to help out. Paul impressed everyone by healing Neil, who isn't dead by the way, obviously.
The gross Fade who looked like Nosferatu from Are You Afraid of the Dark? went in a cocoon for a while and came out as Joe Dempsie, except he was super buff. Should be fun.
Neil's annoying friend Helen, the vicar, turned out to be one of the dead people who ascends instead of having to be a Fade. I will tell you why this annoys me! Helen is a dick. She kept talking about how Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden for doubting what they were told, and said that Sarah is having a bad time basically because she's a weak person. Helen was absolutely sure she was going to ascend because she believed that she would, and then she ascended, instead of not ascending which is what I was hoping would happen because she was so self-righteous.
This seems really inconsistent of me. I'm Christian, and I get really bored of Christian TV characters who are evil or stupid or are always being proved wrong. But the afterlife in The Fades clearly is not consistent with Christianity, unless maybe you believe that being a Fade is hell and people fail to ascend because they deserve it--but that really doesn't make much sense. So why is Helen still Christian when she knows about Fades? Also, why is she so judgmental?
It was also super Christian when Helen told all the Angelics that they should capture Fades and start torturing them. They captured Natalie (my favorite character) and I guess they're going to start torturing her in the next episode. Whatever. I'm done talking about Helen.
I feel bad for Lily Loveless. There was one sort of nice scene where Anna told her mom that she feels like her mom likes Paul better than her, but otherwise Anna just goes around saying things that are supposed to be horrible but don't sound like things a real person would say. "You're kissing my brother. That's like you're kissing me. It's like you're kissing the worst part of me. It's like you're kissing my ass!" Again, her Katie Fitch redemption arc needs to already be here.
Also:
"I've seen you masturbate." "When?" "The school trip to Calais." "You were awake?"
"A truly surprising birthday is one that takes place a day late!"
I love how actors with physical disabilities are being cast in minor roles in the show! In case you don't know, Jack Thorne identifies as disabled and worked on the show Cast-offs where all the characters were physically disabled and played by disabled actors. He is also a supporter of Don't play me pay me, which campaigns for more disabled actors to be cast on television, especially playing disabled characters. I basically love him. But anyway.
I love that Paul seems to own only one pair of pants and they're pink. In all likelihood my favorite thing about a character I already like a lot.
Mac's dad decided to arrest Sarah's husband for the murders of Sarah, Helen, and the rabbit kids, apparently because the guy he works for (or with? whatever) doubts his ability to do his job. The guy told him to his face that he thinks Mac's dad was only hired because he was black, which to me seemed like kind of an awkward attempt to address racism, but then I'm white so maybe people do say things that awkwardly racist in real life.
Paul went to his therapist and told him he didn't need to see him anymore because he was "cured" and "too busy for this...I've got two lives to lead." Can someone please explain to me how someone labeled with mental health problems could get away with saying all the things Paul says that in real life would make staff/parents totally crack down on you?
Monday, October 10, 2011
The Fades 1x02: moral support listens at the door
Just kidding, I love The Fades. It's the greatest show ever. I don't know if this episode was actually that much better than the first one, or if I was just in a better state to appreciate it. But it was awesome and exactly what I want from TV.
Daniel Kaluuya, never change. Or always change, I'm undecided. This episode began with the strangest previouslies I've ever seen. Instead of just showing clips from the first episode they had Daniel Kaluuya's character, who I didn't even realize knew what was going on, describing the concept of the show. It wasn't exactly a "we're telling you what happened in case you missed the episode" thing, because I hadn't figured out most of what he was telling us even though I had seen the first episode. At the end of the previouslies, Daniel Kaluuya announced he was going to watch Star Wars. I hope this doesn't happen again.
Josh explained this episode to me by telling me that Paul is "the Twilight Sparkle of The Fades." If you don't watch My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (and really, why don't you?) this means that the episode was like the myriad episodes of Buffy where some authority figure tells Buffy that a Slayer is always supposed to work on her own, but that authority figure turns out to be totally wrong because it's actually through the combined abilities of the Scooby Gang that Buffy is able to defeat the forces of darkness. Paul's mentor Neil tells him that he has to say goodbye to everyone in his life and leave school to fight the Fades, but Paul concludes that he doesn't want to leave his loved ones behind. Instead he wants to have two identities, like Superman.
The best scene in the episode was when Daniel Kaluuya (Mac) adorably brought Paul a SODA like they were going on a date in a Precious Moments figurine
(
)
and they were planning to go to a party and "have sex" (Mac paused for a minute) "with girls," but then suddenly, Neil appeared out of nowhere looking judgmental!
I LOLed.
At this point, Paul was still planning on leaving his life behind after going to the party and telling the girl he likes, Jay, that he likes her. But after hooking up with Jay, Paul decided that he couldn't do it.
This kind of pissed me off! According to Jack Thorne, The Fades is supposed to be a "love story" between Mac and Paul. I actually thought the scene that made Paul realize he had to stay in his life would be when he and Mac were having a dance party at two AM and Mac's dad (who is the detective investigating the disappearance of some people that the Fades ate, more on that later) came in and yelled at Mac and pushed him against a shelf. Mac fell down and cut his arm, and after Paul touched it, his hand started glowing and the cut was healed.
Take note, this is exactly the kind of scene I want from television, Jack Thorne (and everyone)! It was already a funny scene between Mac and Paul, which then became sad when we found out that Mac's family situation sucks. Mac's injury wasn't just a plot device for Paul to realize he could do magic, but the magic added another layer to a scene that was already good.
Later, Paul was cutting his arm to see if he could heal it, when his mom walked in. What, you don't lock the door when you cut yourself? Did I mention that for some reason Paul has painted a desert with a cactus on the walls of his room?
Anyway, Paul's mom asked if he was self-injuring and then totally forgot about it, even though Paul is already considered to have mental health problems because he has apocalyptic visions and wets the bed. Paul has previously talked to his therapist about "how you should say goodbye to people if you're going to disappear from your life"--which seems like a stupid thing for someone labeled with mental health problems to go around saying, but okay, maybe this is what British people are like. They must be, because he goes ahead and says the same thing to his mom. "If I disappeared, would you be okay with that?"
Instead of getting worried about this--especially considering Paul was just cutting himself!--Paul's mom is just kind of sad and nice, and tells him that if he disappeared, she definitely wouldn't be okay.
But despite this conversation, and despite the fact that Mac's life is awful and Paul is his only friend, Paul doesn't decide not to disappear until he makes out with Jay. Who is a girl. Even though she looks like a lesbian.
I don't mean that Jay isn't pretty, but just that she has a lesbian haircut. Like every other geeky boy on television, Paul is in love with a popular girl--in this case, Jay is friends with Paul's really mean, popular sister Anna--and in some ways The Fades handles this in a less annoying way than other TV shows. Despite supposedly being very mainstream, Jay seems like someone who could believably be liked by and like Paul. The only problem is that she doesn't look like someone who could actually be mainstream popular as a teenager.
In America, popular girls look like this:
They don't look like this:
I'm not saying that all girls with short hair are social outcasts, but if you were going to hang around with someone like Anna who says things like "There's a difference between you and me--you're retarded and I'm not," you would not have hair like Jay's hair. Don't argue with me, I know the truth, and my token British friend confirmed it is the same over there.
I really like Jay as a character, and since she looks so hipster-y I was hoping it would turn out she was just friends with Anna as a joke. Instead she told Paul: "There's two versions of me, one that likes being friends with Anna and being popular, and" (here I was thinking she was going to say, the kind of person who would actually have a fauxhawk?) "one that likes you." For reals? Paul is her first non-mainstream interest, ever?
She's still pretty good for a love interest though, and the conversation set up Paul's realization that THERE COULD BE TWO VERSIONS OF HIM! "Clark Kent, Peter Parker!" he exclaimed, and kissed Jay for giving him the idea. She was confused, but apparently thought it was the kind of thing sad/cute boys who wet the bed say when they're flirting with you.
Did I mention how pleased I was to notice that Paul is actually a geek? I think--probably through no fault of the first episode--I had gotten the impression that this was going to be one of those shows where the main character is sort of different in a sexy way, and his sidekick is a comic relief geek. But I was relieved to learn that Paul and Mac are both geeks. It was pretty great when Paul confessed his feelings by telling Jay that he would most want to have sex with George Lucas, but that if he had to do a mashup of girls, she would be the only girl in the mashup.
Oh right the actual FADES. They killed Neil but Josh sort of told me that he doesn't really die, but he wouldn't actually tell me. Josh is a dick! The main thing that happened with the Fades was that they turned out to be killing and eating humans. It was gross! This is how they can now touch objects and people.
I know what you're thinking: if the Fades couldn't touch people until they started eating people, how did they eat the first person they ate? If this show is like most shows, it will pretend this question doesn't exist, so I've resolved to do the same.
My favorite character on the show is probably Natalie, the silent, semi-decomposed cute teenage Fade girl. She stands around and shifts from foot to foot, but in this episode she actually communicated with Paul and smiled and seemed really sweet, until she suddenly tried to kill him. Neil seems to be really familiar with Natalie (on one forum it was suggested she might be his sister) and he was surprised that she tried to kill Paul, and even more surprised when he saw her eating dead bodies. He was even more surprised when she set him up to get killed at the end of the episode!
The reason I like Natalie so much--and the reason I liked it when Neil took Paul to talk to a 140-year-old Fade who, as you might expect of a 140-year-old, is blind and deaf--is that the show is really taking advantage of the nature of the Fades' evil. They're not mindlessly evil, they're just in a terrible situation where most people go evil. So there can be a helpful Fade, and in fact all of Neil's recently dead friends hang out with him and help him (they can even still talk). And there can be someone like Natalie, who probably was harmless for long enough for Neil to still think of her as harmless even as she's starting to do evil things.
I should mention that as the Fades kill people and become more powerful, this is going to lead to the apocalypse somehow? I'm actually trying to ignore the fact that this show is about the apocalypse because I'm not that into it. But I still can appreciate the fact that the apocalypse is caused not by an evil force, but by normal people doing what most normal people would do if they were stuck in the most horrible afterlife ever.
Miscellaneous:
"IT WAS ONLY PARTIAL NUDITY."
Like all lesbians I will watch anything Lily Loveless does, since I was twelve, and so on, but it is pretty annoying that all she does is flip Paul and Mac off while calling them retards and fags. Last episode, in the teaser for this episode they showed her flipping Paul off, and it was like "...we know, how is that a teaser?" I guess this is actually going to be a Katie Fitch situation and soon she will be the hero of the show. THOSE DAYS CAN'T COME FAST ENOUGH.
Loved that those kids bullied Mac and Paul by pretending to be rabbits!
"I don't understand! I didn't ask for any of this." stfu paul
Did he really just bring a dead bird back to life, for real?
"I WAS BORN IN THE TOILET SO THERE WAS IRONICALLY A TIME WHEN MY MIDDLE NAME WAS GOING TO BE SHIT."
"QUESTIONS ARE FAGGY" "QUESTIONS ARE NOT FAGGY"
I like that the therapist isn't evil like they always are on Skins.
his mom is such a cockblock<---this was a note I wrote and don't actually understand, but I love it. I think it had to do with him cutting himself.
Lamest ever party, admittedly all my knowledge of parties comes from Skins, and my and Clayton's parties where we drink White Russians and watch The Vampire Diaries.
How come the Fades didn't eat the Angelics they killed in the first episode? (Unfortunately people who can see and fight Fades are called Angelics.) Would they get hurt if they did that? Maybe we should trick them into eating an Angelic!
After an Angelic heals someone, they throw up a bug. I wouldn't care except that I happened to pause the episode at this moment:
I think this post is longer than any post on my "real" blog has ever been. Don't even care. Love it.
Daniel Kaluuya, never change. Or always change, I'm undecided. This episode began with the strangest previouslies I've ever seen. Instead of just showing clips from the first episode they had Daniel Kaluuya's character, who I didn't even realize knew what was going on, describing the concept of the show. It wasn't exactly a "we're telling you what happened in case you missed the episode" thing, because I hadn't figured out most of what he was telling us even though I had seen the first episode. At the end of the previouslies, Daniel Kaluuya announced he was going to watch Star Wars. I hope this doesn't happen again.
Josh explained this episode to me by telling me that Paul is "the Twilight Sparkle of The Fades." If you don't watch My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (and really, why don't you?) this means that the episode was like the myriad episodes of Buffy where some authority figure tells Buffy that a Slayer is always supposed to work on her own, but that authority figure turns out to be totally wrong because it's actually through the combined abilities of the Scooby Gang that Buffy is able to defeat the forces of darkness. Paul's mentor Neil tells him that he has to say goodbye to everyone in his life and leave school to fight the Fades, but Paul concludes that he doesn't want to leave his loved ones behind. Instead he wants to have two identities, like Superman.
The best scene in the episode was when Daniel Kaluuya (Mac) adorably brought Paul a SODA like they were going on a date in a Precious Moments figurine
(
)and they were planning to go to a party and "have sex" (Mac paused for a minute) "with girls," but then suddenly, Neil appeared out of nowhere looking judgmental!
I LOLed.
At this point, Paul was still planning on leaving his life behind after going to the party and telling the girl he likes, Jay, that he likes her. But after hooking up with Jay, Paul decided that he couldn't do it.
This kind of pissed me off! According to Jack Thorne, The Fades is supposed to be a "love story" between Mac and Paul. I actually thought the scene that made Paul realize he had to stay in his life would be when he and Mac were having a dance party at two AM and Mac's dad (who is the detective investigating the disappearance of some people that the Fades ate, more on that later) came in and yelled at Mac and pushed him against a shelf. Mac fell down and cut his arm, and after Paul touched it, his hand started glowing and the cut was healed.
Take note, this is exactly the kind of scene I want from television, Jack Thorne (and everyone)! It was already a funny scene between Mac and Paul, which then became sad when we found out that Mac's family situation sucks. Mac's injury wasn't just a plot device for Paul to realize he could do magic, but the magic added another layer to a scene that was already good.
Later, Paul was cutting his arm to see if he could heal it, when his mom walked in. What, you don't lock the door when you cut yourself? Did I mention that for some reason Paul has painted a desert with a cactus on the walls of his room?
Anyway, Paul's mom asked if he was self-injuring and then totally forgot about it, even though Paul is already considered to have mental health problems because he has apocalyptic visions and wets the bed. Paul has previously talked to his therapist about "how you should say goodbye to people if you're going to disappear from your life"--which seems like a stupid thing for someone labeled with mental health problems to go around saying, but okay, maybe this is what British people are like. They must be, because he goes ahead and says the same thing to his mom. "If I disappeared, would you be okay with that?"
Instead of getting worried about this--especially considering Paul was just cutting himself!--Paul's mom is just kind of sad and nice, and tells him that if he disappeared, she definitely wouldn't be okay.
But despite this conversation, and despite the fact that Mac's life is awful and Paul is his only friend, Paul doesn't decide not to disappear until he makes out with Jay. Who is a girl. Even though she looks like a lesbian.
I don't mean that Jay isn't pretty, but just that she has a lesbian haircut. Like every other geeky boy on television, Paul is in love with a popular girl--in this case, Jay is friends with Paul's really mean, popular sister Anna--and in some ways The Fades handles this in a less annoying way than other TV shows. Despite supposedly being very mainstream, Jay seems like someone who could believably be liked by and like Paul. The only problem is that she doesn't look like someone who could actually be mainstream popular as a teenager.
In America, popular girls look like this:
They don't look like this:
I'm not saying that all girls with short hair are social outcasts, but if you were going to hang around with someone like Anna who says things like "There's a difference between you and me--you're retarded and I'm not," you would not have hair like Jay's hair. Don't argue with me, I know the truth, and my token British friend confirmed it is the same over there.
I really like Jay as a character, and since she looks so hipster-y I was hoping it would turn out she was just friends with Anna as a joke. Instead she told Paul: "There's two versions of me, one that likes being friends with Anna and being popular, and" (here I was thinking she was going to say, the kind of person who would actually have a fauxhawk?) "one that likes you." For reals? Paul is her first non-mainstream interest, ever?
She's still pretty good for a love interest though, and the conversation set up Paul's realization that THERE COULD BE TWO VERSIONS OF HIM! "Clark Kent, Peter Parker!" he exclaimed, and kissed Jay for giving him the idea. She was confused, but apparently thought it was the kind of thing sad/cute boys who wet the bed say when they're flirting with you.
Did I mention how pleased I was to notice that Paul is actually a geek? I think--probably through no fault of the first episode--I had gotten the impression that this was going to be one of those shows where the main character is sort of different in a sexy way, and his sidekick is a comic relief geek. But I was relieved to learn that Paul and Mac are both geeks. It was pretty great when Paul confessed his feelings by telling Jay that he would most want to have sex with George Lucas, but that if he had to do a mashup of girls, she would be the only girl in the mashup.
Oh right the actual FADES. They killed Neil but Josh sort of told me that he doesn't really die, but he wouldn't actually tell me. Josh is a dick! The main thing that happened with the Fades was that they turned out to be killing and eating humans. It was gross! This is how they can now touch objects and people.
I know what you're thinking: if the Fades couldn't touch people until they started eating people, how did they eat the first person they ate? If this show is like most shows, it will pretend this question doesn't exist, so I've resolved to do the same.
My favorite character on the show is probably Natalie, the silent, semi-decomposed cute teenage Fade girl. She stands around and shifts from foot to foot, but in this episode she actually communicated with Paul and smiled and seemed really sweet, until she suddenly tried to kill him. Neil seems to be really familiar with Natalie (on one forum it was suggested she might be his sister) and he was surprised that she tried to kill Paul, and even more surprised when he saw her eating dead bodies. He was even more surprised when she set him up to get killed at the end of the episode!
The reason I like Natalie so much--and the reason I liked it when Neil took Paul to talk to a 140-year-old Fade who, as you might expect of a 140-year-old, is blind and deaf--is that the show is really taking advantage of the nature of the Fades' evil. They're not mindlessly evil, they're just in a terrible situation where most people go evil. So there can be a helpful Fade, and in fact all of Neil's recently dead friends hang out with him and help him (they can even still talk). And there can be someone like Natalie, who probably was harmless for long enough for Neil to still think of her as harmless even as she's starting to do evil things.
I should mention that as the Fades kill people and become more powerful, this is going to lead to the apocalypse somehow? I'm actually trying to ignore the fact that this show is about the apocalypse because I'm not that into it. But I still can appreciate the fact that the apocalypse is caused not by an evil force, but by normal people doing what most normal people would do if they were stuck in the most horrible afterlife ever.
Miscellaneous:
"IT WAS ONLY PARTIAL NUDITY."
Like all lesbians I will watch anything Lily Loveless does, since I was twelve, and so on, but it is pretty annoying that all she does is flip Paul and Mac off while calling them retards and fags. Last episode, in the teaser for this episode they showed her flipping Paul off, and it was like "...we know, how is that a teaser?" I guess this is actually going to be a Katie Fitch situation and soon she will be the hero of the show. THOSE DAYS CAN'T COME FAST ENOUGH.
Loved that those kids bullied Mac and Paul by pretending to be rabbits!
"I don't understand! I didn't ask for any of this." stfu paul
Did he really just bring a dead bird back to life, for real?
"I WAS BORN IN THE TOILET SO THERE WAS IRONICALLY A TIME WHEN MY MIDDLE NAME WAS GOING TO BE SHIT."
"QUESTIONS ARE FAGGY" "QUESTIONS ARE NOT FAGGY"
I like that the therapist isn't evil like they always are on Skins.
his mom is such a cockblock<---this was a note I wrote and don't actually understand, but I love it. I think it had to do with him cutting himself.
Lamest ever party, admittedly all my knowledge of parties comes from Skins, and my and Clayton's parties where we drink White Russians and watch The Vampire Diaries.
How come the Fades didn't eat the Angelics they killed in the first episode? (Unfortunately people who can see and fight Fades are called Angelics.) Would they get hurt if they did that? Maybe we should trick them into eating an Angelic!
After an Angelic heals someone, they throw up a bug. I wouldn't care except that I happened to pause the episode at this moment:
I think this post is longer than any post on my "real" blog has ever been. Don't even care. Love it.
Saturday, October 8, 2011
The Fades 1x01
This is the picture that I found when I googled The Fades
and it all by itself explains why I should enjoy the show. I guess my imaginary ideal work of fiction is something that's genre but not in a way that makes genre the main reason for its existence. I am a greedy person and I think in the ideal work of fiction, you would layer in genre on top of some good characters and feelings to raise the stakes and make all the emotions double emotional. And when a really good description or a really good shot is of a werewolf instead of a tree, it's three times as good. I'm possibly sort of a whore/the kind of person who puts ketchup on everything, but that's all right. I just want to have a lot of feelings and reblog gifs on tumblr.
I partly like this picture because it reminds me of Animorphs my first pop culture obsession, which embodies the ideal I'm talking about and is probably why I'm so crazy for it. But I mostly like it because it itself embodies the ideal. It's probably a promo picture for a genre show because if it was just about this kid going to school, why does he look so CRAZY and what is he doing in front of those birds and lightning, instead of just being in his room? On the other hand, you can't actually tell what the show is about. Birds? Hitting birds with lightning? It looks cool!
The Fades is actually only tangentially about birds; they keep falling dead to the ground in a way that is supposed to symbolize something I didn't pay enough attention to figure out. It's mainly about a sad/cute boy (is there any other kind) who wets the bed and can see zombie ghost things, and is friends with Posh Kenneth from Skins. That sentence sounds like my ideal TV show, so why was I semi-bored watching it?
Maybe there's something else intangible that my ideal TV show needs, or maybe I just need to give it time. Some stuff:
The Fades are zombie ghost things, like I said, or as the main character Paul is told, they're "shitty ghosts." For no particular reason they haven't ascended to the afterlife, and they wander around in the world and are intangible. Understandably this makes them "get shitty." After ghosts get shitty they start looking like the vampire from the Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode with the movie theater.
They've recently become able to touch people, which is scary.
I like the idea of having a monster that has really mundane reasons for being evil. And just like everyone else I like sad/cute boys who wet the bed and are friends/siblings with Skins alumni. Maybe I was just bored by all the scenes that Paul, Posh Kenneth, and Naomi Campbell weren't in, that also weren't scary. I think I might like the show better if we only saw and learned about things from Paul's perspective, instead of having to see scenes with other characters who I think are supposed to be fighting the Fades, or married to people who fight or used to fight the Fades, or something.
My conclusion is for a lot of the time when I was watching the first episode, I was pretty bored, but the end actually scared me a little and after ruminating on this show I've managed to convince myself all over again that I should enjoy it. So I will keep trying.
A cool moment, and what I hope the show will turn out to be like, was when Mac (Posh Kenneth/Daniel Kaluuya) was talking about The Sixth Sense while Paul was watching a dead lady. Even though Mac's fridge logic wasn't even good.
and it all by itself explains why I should enjoy the show. I guess my imaginary ideal work of fiction is something that's genre but not in a way that makes genre the main reason for its existence. I am a greedy person and I think in the ideal work of fiction, you would layer in genre on top of some good characters and feelings to raise the stakes and make all the emotions double emotional. And when a really good description or a really good shot is of a werewolf instead of a tree, it's three times as good. I'm possibly sort of a whore/the kind of person who puts ketchup on everything, but that's all right. I just want to have a lot of feelings and reblog gifs on tumblr.
I partly like this picture because it reminds me of Animorphs my first pop culture obsession, which embodies the ideal I'm talking about and is probably why I'm so crazy for it. But I mostly like it because it itself embodies the ideal. It's probably a promo picture for a genre show because if it was just about this kid going to school, why does he look so CRAZY and what is he doing in front of those birds and lightning, instead of just being in his room? On the other hand, you can't actually tell what the show is about. Birds? Hitting birds with lightning? It looks cool!
The Fades is actually only tangentially about birds; they keep falling dead to the ground in a way that is supposed to symbolize something I didn't pay enough attention to figure out. It's mainly about a sad/cute boy (is there any other kind) who wets the bed and can see zombie ghost things, and is friends with Posh Kenneth from Skins. That sentence sounds like my ideal TV show, so why was I semi-bored watching it?
Maybe there's something else intangible that my ideal TV show needs, or maybe I just need to give it time. Some stuff:
The Fades are zombie ghost things, like I said, or as the main character Paul is told, they're "shitty ghosts." For no particular reason they haven't ascended to the afterlife, and they wander around in the world and are intangible. Understandably this makes them "get shitty." After ghosts get shitty they start looking like the vampire from the Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode with the movie theater.
They've recently become able to touch people, which is scary.
I like the idea of having a monster that has really mundane reasons for being evil. And just like everyone else I like sad/cute boys who wet the bed and are friends/siblings with Skins alumni. Maybe I was just bored by all the scenes that Paul, Posh Kenneth, and Naomi Campbell weren't in, that also weren't scary. I think I might like the show better if we only saw and learned about things from Paul's perspective, instead of having to see scenes with other characters who I think are supposed to be fighting the Fades, or married to people who fight or used to fight the Fades, or something.
My conclusion is for a lot of the time when I was watching the first episode, I was pretty bored, but the end actually scared me a little and after ruminating on this show I've managed to convince myself all over again that I should enjoy it. So I will keep trying.
A cool moment, and what I hope the show will turn out to be like, was when Mac (Posh Kenneth/Daniel Kaluuya) was talking about The Sixth Sense while Paul was watching a dead lady. Even though Mac's fridge logic wasn't even good.
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