Java

The gate team keeps running into the Wraith when they go offworld. Something's got to give.

( Here be spoilers )

An energy-eating incorporeal entity puts the city in danger.

[This is not the gene therapy storyline I mentioned in the previous post.]

( Cut for length )

I've been watching The Mentalist lately. I used to watch it back when it first aired, the first two seasons or thereabouts, until I got fed up with Patrick Jane. He is the main character so the audience is supposed to like him or at least empathise with him, right?

I think he is a horrible person. A benevolent sociopath. He doesn't actually care about anyone's feelings, he plays people according to his whims, and if he ever does something nice, he does it for ulterior motives or to prove that he can, to show how smart he is. Even if it's just for himself. And he thinks he is above the law, because he can charm and manipulate people to get out of whatever situation he has gotten himself.
Case to point, he kills a man he knows is not Red John, and then manipulates the jury to acquit him. Then, after goading Red John to kill another serial killer, he frames a man who committed suicide to have been the killer to cover it up, to get the FBI close the case. That's a whole lot murder, and this [paraphrased] quote from Hercule Poirot has stuck with me; after a first murder, the second one is easy.

Watching the show now, without trying to care one bit about what happens to Jane, The Mentalist is entertaining, albeit getting a bit predictable. Usually, if the murderer of the week is some of the characters introduced and has enough screen-time and interaction with other characters during the episode, I can tell who did it around thirty minute mark at the latest. So the myth-arc episodes are the more interesting ones.

I'm halfway season four now, and the whole Red John thing is starting to look kinda ridiculous. He has reached completely unrealistic, epic proportions, but I haven't taken anything about this show seriously since I started watching again from season three, so, *shrug*.

What was really a shame, was what happened with the FBI agent, Greg O'Loughlin, Van Pelt was dating and later about to marry. Eric Winter plays the romantic fiancé with a hidden side to his personality really well. I suppose it's all those years doing Days of Our Lives*.
He can do the almost too sweet, but never quite going overboard with it, guy with a completely straight face. I spoilt my self what would become of him when he first went out with Van Pelt, because I totally shipped them from the moment they were on screen together, and I really wish the storyline would have gone differently, and they would have gotten married and been happy. They were so adorable together.

Rigsby, who I know Van Pelt will get back together with, I don't like at all. He is a bumbling oaf who has no class. Van Pelt could do so much better. I don't care how much Rigsby claims to love her, to me he is just a man-child with a puppy-crush.

* From what I've seen, every male character on that show is either an outright moustache-twirling villain, or a romantic fiancé/husband who has a secret lizard-ly side to them.

I rewatched Blade Trinity yesterday. Mostly for Hannibal King. He has the best lines. And a little for Abigail Whistler, because she is a badass and so so gorgeous. Callum Keith Rennie was there, and that is always a plus. Also explosions and vampires (/^^^\)

What surprised me a lot, was how unrepentant and unaffected Blade was about killing humans, even the police who stormed his base to arrest him. He is the hero of the film afterall. That so not would fly today. I'm not sure how I feel about that.
On one hand, heroes should have morals, because 'with great power..' and all that, but this set in stone 'Do not kill' leads to implausible fight scenes, stupid deaths when the bad guys accidentally kill each other of themselves because plot demands that they die but the good guys can't be the ones killing them, and endless stalemates with the boss villain coming back over and over.

To get to the actual reason I'm writing this:
After watching the film, I went to read fics I had bookmarked way back when. Those surprised me even more. It's been years since I've read any Blade fic, and during that time I've apparently become more aware of problematic elements in fics. And I've gotten even more picky about what I read.

I'm sort of ashamed for the back-then!me for liking some of those fics, because of the blatant bashing of the female characters, especially Abigail. She did nothing wrong in the canon, and she was noticeably better in hand-to-hand combat than Hannibal King, but in fics she was portrayed as a bad leader, nowhere near as good of a fighter as King and/or the bitch that betrays King.

Either there has been more discussion of how women are portrayed in fic, or I only started to see it sometime after I left the Supernatural fandom back in, IDK, winter 2008-2009. Because Flying Spaghetti Monster knows, that fandom loves the women in the show. [/sarcasm]

I would like to think that how women are portrayed in fic has become more of a visible topic in the western TV/film fandom. That vilifying, erasing and fridging women doesn't get overlooked and ignored so much.

But it's not all sunshine and kittens.. ( Vague spoilers for Avengers, Thor and The Losers. Spoilers for Inception & Spartacus season 2 )

Actually, now that I think about this whole 'how women are treated in fanfic' -issue, I remember the fic and a comment to it that clued me in.
It was a Die Hard 4.0 series, and the fic in question was fourth or fifth part. John McClane was leading a team of hackers who worked in preventing and investigating cybercrime. There was a scene where a female OC came to their office, was obnoxiously insistent about something, I think, and one of the hackers, IIRC, the token female in the team, Nana-chan, attacked her and beat her up and the other characters just let it happen. [Including McClane. Who, seriously, is not the type to let women be beat up and do nothing.]
Someone commented that they were uncomfortable with the scene, and the writer of the fic answered along the lines 'Well, you are, of course, entitled to your opinion,' making it sound like they were being magnanimous for 'allowing' the commenter their opinion. The whole exchange made me uncomfortable and start to pay more attention to what I read.

Watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for the first time. I've seen Voyager and The Next Generation twice, back when they first aired on TV here, and I rewatched them when they came out on DVD. Maybe because I never saw DS9 on TV, I skipped watching it, but recently I've been craving a scifi fix, so I decided to finally watch it.

I'm going to post my insta-reactions on tumblr HERE, and collect them here later.

thefridayfive

1. What is your favorite season?
Winter, hands down. It's dark and cold, both of which I highly prefer over bright and warm, and the snow is beautiful and covers up so much of the dirt and absorbs noise, the world feels more quiet.

2. Do you do anything special to acknowledge the change of seasons?
Spring cleaning. Mostly to stash away winter clothing and get the summer clothes out. And wash the windows.

3. Planning to do any spring cleaning this year?
See above :)

4. What is your favorite plant and why?
Plant? Eh, I don't know. Of house plants, ficus benjamina or epipremnum aureum which I have always known by it's Finnish name kultaköynnös, direct translation 'gold vine'. And of the plants I can see when I look out the window? Evergreens and during autumn, also maples.

5. Hows about a poem? C'mon, it can be about anything you like.
I don't understand the freeform western poetry. I love traditional Japanese poetry, haiku and renga. The way they are so limited by their form make them so powerful in their expression. The set form also makes those poems very hard to translate into English. So no examples.