Ryan’s attack has given the Guardian a haircut, and, I believe, redecorated his office. Sideshow Luke Perry talks the Guardian out of killing Ryan, playing on the Guardian’s insecurity — can’t have a guy like Ryan go to meet the great and glorious Zoot before he does.
Seline breaks down and for the first time demonstrates that she actually gives a damn about him. Tyson decides that it’s time for action, not for warm thoughts. So she… writes a letter.
Sideshow Luke Perry tells Seline that he’s managed to smuggle Ryan off to safety, but she’s not to tell anyone, and he claims that he’s done this behind the Guardian’s back. Unfortunately, Ellie sees him comforting Seline and decides that Luke’s in love with her.
Edward Scissorhands is sold into slavery by the redheaded Leprechaun, but, to his shock, despite the fact that Edward Scissorhands has spent the past ten episodes warning him of this, the Chosen decide that a fair trade would be “We’ll take Pride and also the three of you as slaves.”
May smuggles an important map to the resistance, but it’s in code, which stymies our heroes until they realize that “FD” means “Fuel Dump”. And “GS” means “Gas Station”. And “Refueling Depot”. Basically, The Chosen have as many words for “Place To Get Gasoline” as the Eskimos do for Snow.
Sideshow Luke Perry finally delivers Tyson’s note to the Guardian, which just says “Do you like me? Check One: [] Yes [] No.” The Guardian checks “Yes”, and May makes googly eyes at Edward Scissorhands.
Bray, Ebony, and Lex work together to blow up the fuel depot, and in the first really just utterly moronic thing she’s ever done, Ebony lights the fuse to blow it up before Bray even makes a token attempt to exit the depot. This would be brilliant and Machiavellian, except that it’s entirely clear that she’s just, I dunno, not paying attention.
Bray escapes, of course, and they decide to booze it up in celebration, forgetting that Lex is like two days from getting his six week chip.
Sideshow Luke Perry and the Guardian are starting to do some role-reversal, as the Guardian is by this point sufficiently crazy that he doesn’t think the destruction of the fuel depot should prompt, say, going and hunting down the rebels, but rather, say, reflecting on Zoot’s deeper purpose and marveling at the wonderous miracle of Big Honking Explosions. He summons KC to interpret it, in the hopes that it’s a sign from Zoot that it’s okay for him to sleep with Tyson.
May reports Edward Scissorhands’s fate, and also that she is totally warm for his pasty form. Bray thinks that’s awesome, since it means that Pride isn’t off sexing up Amber.
“Are you there, Zoot? It’s me, Seline,” she asks, actually praying to Zoot to bring her husband back. Meanwhile, Tyson gets to seducing the Guardian, but this is cut short when the Guardian has a revelation, and names her the new Supreme Mother.
KC proposes himself as Sugar Daddy to Telly, the Leprechaun’s kid sister, which suggests to me that this term does not mean the same thing in New Zealand as it does here.
Bray, Ebony and Lex take in a Punch and Judy show about their exploits. Afterward, they rough up the puppeteers and put on their own show, which is not nearly as well written, but gets the point across.
The rebels hear about the impending coronation, and Lex pushes them to use this as a change to execute the Guardian and also whoever the new supreme mother is, who he is so sure is a self-seeking opportunist who has betrayed them, that he’s not even going to wait and find out who it is. So Bray is elected to go all Book Depository, since he knows how to use a crossbow.
KC and the redheads make commemorative T-Shirts for the coronation.
Alice bitches Seline out, she runs up a flight of steps, then falls down, and miscarries.
Lex, predictably, decides that his wife has betrayed him and is really on the side of the Guardian. Bray, unexpectedly, thinks that maybe Tyson is just playing the Guardian. Lex claims that he’ll kill the Guardian if he lays a hand on his wife, which is not much of a threat when you consider that the whole plan was for them to kill the Guardian regardless.
Ebony finally tries to comfort Lex by pointing out that he wouldn’t exactly be the poster child for monogamy, though Lex think’s that’s different, because he is a man. That’s the douchebag we’ve come to love.
May sets up a meeting between Lex and Tyson so that she can explain herself and Lex can get his end away.
Seline goes into an entirely reasonable depression over the miscarriage, and she swears Luke to secrecy about it. Because no one will notice when she never gets any more pregnant.
Tyson has a vision of Lex shooting The Guardian, which is fair, because Lex plans to shoot the Guardian. Meanwhile, the Guardian offers one of the Mallrats amnesty, and they choose Ned the Tall Leprechaun, since they want to be rid of him (KC’s got a good scam going and doesn’t like his chances on the outside; Ellie is no good in a fight, and Alice won’t leave anyone alone with Ned), but they have to trick him into thinking they’re not trying to get rid of him, so KC arrainges the most obviously rigged craps game ever. The Weasley Twins work it out, but since they don’t like their big brother all that much, they’re willing to extort KC for their silence.
Ebony and Bray fail to find Lex, mostly because he’s staked out a place near the coronation, while they’re searching everywhere else in the city.
Ned is immediately arrested for drunkenness and rabble-rousing, and ends up back at the mall.
At the coronation, the foley is off, causing the metal-on-metal sound of the Chosen’s scythes to be way out of step with their movements. Bray finds Lex, but Ebony turns on him, refusing to let Bray stop the assassination. He’s shocked, shocked to find that Ebony lied to him. Because Bray has no long-term memory.
Ebony is shocked, shocked, when Bray kicks her ass, and then rushes off to stop Lex. However, showing that can-do effectiveness he’s known for, instead of stopping Lex, Bray just spoils his aim, so that Lex shoots Tyson instead.
Later, The Guardian fires Luke, and he immediately changes into a garish neon-colored outfit, changes his hair, and changes his face painting. He also swears to stop the Guardian, but just the Guardian personally, as he still believes in The Chosen. Pride and May kidnap Brady, tell Lex that Tyson is okay, and then Amber shows up with a deprogrammed Trudy.
As Bray asserts, “This is great; it looks like it’s the beginning of the end!”
Uh… I bet that’s more upbeat in New Zealand.
May, Lex and Ebony won’t forgive Trudy, and she looks very upset that the three most morally bankrupt characters in the show are passing judgment on her.
Without Brady, the Chosen start to come off the rails, and Bray holds a meeting of tribal leaders, who are too scared to join the rebellion.
Meanwhile, at the trial of everyone the Guardian could get his hands on, Tyson convinces the Guardian that the abduction was Ordained By The Mighty Zoot, and so he releases them as instruments of Zoot, except for Luke, who confessed to save the others. Fortunately, as the Chosen desert their posts, they take him with them.
Trudy gives an impassioned speech to the tribal leaders, and Ebony for some reason tries to argue her down, but she manages to rally the troops all the same.
Amber tells Bray, because no one in this show is clever enough to work it out on their own, that she’s pregnant, and Bray immediately pisses her off by asking if it’s Edward Scissorhands’s.
As the Praetorian Guard looks for Luke, he confeses his love to Ellie and she implies hers for him.
Amber rejects the idea of actually just telling Bray that, yes, she loves him and needs him and trusts him and is not doing Pride, because as she’s having his baby, telling him how she really feels is out of the question. Even Trudy thinks that doesn’t make sense.
The Guardian is left with nothing now but his Extra Special Guard, who wear hockey helmets and have extra serrated scythes.
The Guardian has a crying fit over his lack of Guidance from Zoot, so he is naturally pleased when, in an unexpected cliffhanger, Zoot actually does appear to him….
Author: Ross
To Boldly Go…
Star Trek
2009
Directed by JJ Abrams
Starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Bruce Greenwood, Eric Bana
And Karl Urban as Doctor Leonard McCoy
This movie is very good. It is very very good. Infact, this movie is not simply a very good Star Trek movie, it is a very good movie.
The first great thing about this movie was the four teenagers sitting behind us. In the half hour before the film started, they talked at length about which films they think were most popular for having sex in the theater (Rocky Horror Picture Show), and how she didn’t mind who he told about them having sex with each other, but he did mind who she told`. Also, apparently Lisa Hanover (not her real name) is such a giant slut that she agreed to have sex with Billy Gweebinski (not his real name) for fifteen dollars even though he’s totally filthy and a loser. Also, Ms. Hanover got in trouble at school for letting two guys suck on her breasts after a basketball game. Also, both the girls liked Cloverfield, and one of the guys always lost at Gay Chicken, which I gather is when two guys go in to make out, and the first one to bail out loses. The last one to bail out, of course, is branded gay.
The cast is pretty much excellent. I don’t think anyone ever questioned that Quinto would be awesome as Spock. As McCoy, Urban looks the part and sounds the part, but I will concede that for much of the film, he seems to be, well, “McCoying it up”. More like someone doing a McCoy impression instead of actually playing McCoy. I’d expected not to like Chris Pine as Kirk, but he really does pull it off. I’d been suffering from visions of a “Totally Awesome” Kirk tryng to be all hip and streetwise. Thankfully, it was not to be. The only thing I really missed — and this is really the script’s fault and not Pine’s — is that we never get to hear him give one of those classic Kirk Speeches, with Kirk telling… us… that… the indomitable human spirit… yearns to be… FREE! or something.
I was going to say that Zoe Saldana varied the most radically from her predecessor as Nyota (Yes, it’s canon now) Uhura, but then I realized that Uhura never really had any sort of characterization worth speaking of before. So yeah. she differs a lot in that. Anton Yelchin is basically a non-character as Chekov. John Cho’s is competent as Sulu, but nothing to write home about. The biggest disappointment in the cast, for me. is Simon Pegg. I know most people liked him, but I think they’re confusing liking Simon Pegg as a comic actor and liking Simon Pegg as Scotty. Pegg’s Scotty — I will not mince words about this — is The Comic Relief Character. He’s a joke. Scotty should not be a joke.
But for my money, the real surprising role, was the one I didn’t really go in with any preconceptions about: Bruce Greenwood as Captain Pike. He’s basically Dad for the Enterprise crew, and he really ties the film together.
Watching Star Trek get the Crisis on Infinite Earths treatment is something which has sort of affected me at a weird emotional level. Even though Trek doesn’t speak to me the way it used to, it’s something sort of foundational to my brand of geekery. One of those things which was supposed to always be there. It’s the sci fi geek’s equivalent of mom remarrying.
Anyway, it’s visually stunning, it’s got a coherent plot, it respects its roots, and it makes Star Trek all shiny and new.
And to say more, would be spoilers…
Read this
The New York Times reviews ‘The Gingerbread House’:
Call it a whopping case of seller’s remorse. The moral of “The Gingerbread House” would appear to be that retailing your children to strangers will not bring satisfaction. Glad that’s been cleared up.
A Clarification
I just found out what “gigging frogs” means.
The last verse of that Big and Rich song from a few years back now strikes me as perhaps the worst foreplay I’ve ever heard of.
“Hey baby, hows about I take you home to meet my dog, and then we stab some frogs with a spear?”
Spyro Agnew: Eternal Nixon: Part 2: Electric Boogaloo :: Overuse of Colons : The SATs
In day 2 of our Spyro experience, Leah spends several hours trying to defeat some scorpions in a gladiatorial arena, where one of the times she gets killed, the game gets confused and gives her a cutscene anyway, which we accidentally skip, thinking that it’s the cutscene from when she respawns. Frodo blacks out and wakes up back at Sir Ian McKellan’s house, where he learns the power of Earth, leaving only Air and Heart (What kind of a lame power is Heart, anyway?). The power of Earth involves spiro having a six-foot long energy tongue with a giant bulbous nodule on the end. Frodo also learns a new finishing move, which is exactly like Eruption and Blue Balls, but it’s green. He receives instructions to travel to Mount Doom The Well of Souls before the rare astronomical conjunction whereupon the evil forces will be able to bring about Eternal Darkness, which was a Gamecube survival horror game with Lovecraftian overtones and a neat gimmick where they would represent the player character’s growing madness by things like having little bugs appear on the screen or claiming that the disc was damaged (Once, my gamecube really did crash, and it took me several minutes to work out that the game wasn’t just dicking with me.)
Frodo wakes up, and has to fight a flying boat with the head of a shark. From time to time, the boat crashes, and you can kick the ass of the pirate inside, which hangs out the tail end of the boat while it’s crashed for extra damage. Unfortunately, once you deplete its life bar, the game does one of its favorite tricks: refills the life bar and makes the monster more dangerous.
Frustrated, Leah goes off to get some soup, leaving the game unattended, whereupon we learn the trick to this boss: if Frodo just stands stock-still in the center of the ring, the flying boat can’t hit him more than once every two of three minutes
The Power of Earth turns out to be a red herring, as Leah spends four hours trying to defeat the damned thing, before I suggest she switch to her much upgraded Power of Fire, and kills the thing on her third try. Back in his cell, Frodo laments that he can’t escape because of the wooden gate that blocks his cell, and a mole named Moliere gives him some fan mail. After that, Frodo is sent to fight the Dilldozer executioner, who can kill him in one hit.
The Executioner nonetheless proves to be a much less aggravating adversary than the flying boat, whereupon the pirate king brings out Frodo’s Girlfriend and orders them to fight. Before they can, though, flying monkeys attack, kidnap the girl, and bust shit up enough for Frodo and Fry to have a go at escaping.
Hours later, Leah’s still fighting her way though this fleet of flying pirate ships, fighting enemies with names like “Tribad Whitespace” and “Ebikat Snakebeard”
Finally, Frodo defeats the boss pirate, and he and Fry fly off into the sunset, revealing that he can fly, so why the hell does he keep on dying by falling to his death when jumping between platforms?
In mid-air, Frodo the Narcoleptic Dragon has another metaphysical experience, gaining the Power of Electricity,, which means he can now summon Captain Planet, and also perform her new Fury move, the Electric Boogaloo.
Sir Ian goes on break, so Frodo has a vision all on his own, seeing his ex, who is bound and being threatened by the monkey goat thing who is going to turn out to be the penultimate boss of the game. (Right now, he’s the boss, but he’s planning to ressurect some sort of ancient evil force of some sort, which undoubtedly he will, and you’ll fight.)
Frodo wakes up on a ruined island, where Fry claims they’re stranded, as they can only fly when the plot demands. This appears to be the same place as the temple of Magneto that Frodo keeps narcolepting to, except that it’s ruined, and possibly sideways. Fortunately, someone set all the broken ionic columns to “levitate” so Frodo can use them to jump around the ruined temple.
Eventually, Leah hits upon a section where Frodo must solve puzzles to awaken enemies. This gets me thinking, Spyro’s very egregious about it, but you see this throughout the genre, say, in Zelda. There’s a huge element of “The goal of this puzzle is to cause monsters to show up and attack you, because real progress is only made by defeating monsters.” If Spyro had any sense, he’d just stop lighting braziers and electrifying switches and pushing things onto pedestals. It never does anything good.
Ross and Leah Play Video Games: Spyro: Eternal Night
Leah has decided that we should stop having a pile of video games we’ve never played. At about the same time as she suggested this, I went out and bought her a new video game. Now, I can’t promise that I’ll blog everything we play and keep to a schedule and be as thorough as Baf, nor will I present as detailed and critical analysis, but I do intend to be snarkier.
And maybe, in the unlikely event I ever get a working video capture device for my MythTV, Leah and I might start taking videos and such to show you our progress. But until then, please just enjoy my sarcastic thoughts on the subject of Spyro: Eternal Night
First off, I’d like to point out that this is the most unlikely game about a former vice president I’ve ever seen, and that includes Aaron Burr and Dick Cheney’s The Most Dangerous Game You play Frodo Baggins, a purple dragon who can fly, but only well enough to make difficult jumps, and, as is apparently standard for purple dragons, HALT THE FLOW OF TIME. He’s got a little dragon-fairy sidekick, Phillip J Fry, who serves to offer “hillarious” commentary.
I should step aside here that, unlike pretty much every other person who has ever written a review of a video game, I actually like the color-commentary-wisecracking sidekick archetype. I liked Arthur in The Journeyman Project, and Dalboz in Zork Grand Inquisitor. I liked your paraplegic tele-psychic friend in The 11th Hour, and I liked the Cheshire Cat in American Macgee’s Alice. I even liked Clippy the– no, wait, actually, I didn’t . And, HEY! LISTEN! I did not like any of the god damned faries in the 3D Legend of Zelda games. But still, there’s a reason I included Julia in my game. It’s saying a lot when I tell you that I do not like Ninja Butterfly Phillip J. Fry. Billy West seems to be playing the role under the impression that he’s meant to be channeling Gilbert Godfried.
Anyway, the game opens with Frodo the Dragon getting dumped by his girlfriend, at which point he falls into a coma where the helpful ghost of Patrick Stewart reminds him how to use the game controls. This involves jumping on a bunch of spinning platforms as you learn to control DragonTime ™, which is a lot like BulletTime ™, except that it is slightly blue. I assume this is a gimmick based on Prince of Persia, but I’ve never played that, so instead, it reminded me of Braid, which I’d just played a few hours earlier.
- Patrick Stewart: As a purple dragon, you have access to many powers, including power over time itself. Master this power, and you will be able to see things almost before they happen.
- Ross: Wait a second. Isn’t “Almost before they happen” the same as “When they happen”?
- Ross: (Lisa Simpson voice) Wow! You really can see the… Present…
After we tired of hearing Elija Wood’s terrified screams as he fell to his death off the edge of a platform a few times, Leah got about the business of actually jumping across abyss after abyss, and was rewarded with “re-learning” the power of Fire, allowing Frodo the Dragon to summon elemental powers based on Fire. So, Spiro’s powers right now:
- 1. Flies (poorly)
- 2. Mastery over the inexorable flow of time
- 3. Breathes fire
At this point, Patrick Stewart has some leftover Staffloses from Zelda attack Frodo so he can show off his attack skills: “Breathe fire”, and “run towards something while breathing fire.” This is when I notice one of the most interesting details of this game. Like lots of games, when Frodo engages an enemy, you get to see the enemy’s life bar up in the corner of the screen. Along with the life bar is the enemy’s name. And this is the cool part: when I say “the enemy’s name”, I don’t mean something like “Skeleton Knight”, I mean an actual, individual name, for Every Single Monster. Like “Skeletor McLovin” or “Keith Richards”. Well, actually, the names all look to fit a fixed formula of taking four random nature-or-fantasy-related words and stitching them together according to some simple part of speech rules, so the names are all things like “Deathmaul Underhill” or “Honeylocust Meadowlawn” or “Dickmonkey Marshmellow”.
This section also introduces us to the game’s number one door-opening mechanic: lighting braziers. Any video game fan will tell you that in a room with a locked door and a bunch of unlit braziers, it’s patently obvious that the door will only open once you light all the braziers. Also, I like saying “braziers”. Braziers! Anyway, you eventually prove yourself worthy and Patrick Stewart sends you back to reality, where you and Phillip J Fry are immediately beseiged by insects and mollusks of unusual size which explode into disgusting goo when you kill them. Leah incinerates the first few, then discoveres that her magic doesn’t automatically regenerate here, as it did in the land of Professor X. So Leah switches over to using Frodo’s non-limited “just whack the bad guys with your body” technique. This isn’t as effective as fire, but it can be used without stopping to recharge. Still, in the heat of battle, I keep having to remind her to use her fire attack from time to time, by shouting ‘Immolate!” occasionally in my Angry-Homer-Simpson voice.
The first boss we encounter is a thingamajigger riding on a giant snail. His name is “Snail Rider”. What, really? You can name every mook we run into, but not the boss who gets his own cutscene?
Shortly after defeating the snail, Leah is halted momentarily by a room one of whose braziers is behind a barrier.
- Ross: Immolate!
- Leah: No. (smashes barrier) The answer to everything is not immolate
- Ross: It should be!
This game’s favorite brazier trick is that lighting the brazier opens the door, only to disgorge a couple of enemies, then close again. Lighting the final brazier here releases a pair of enemies whose last names are, I am not making this up, “Snakekiller” and “Snakefeltcher”.
Other enemies we encounter in this area include spiders who shoot a white, sticky goo at Frodo and Fry, and these sort of bipedal elephant things with scimitars.
Another Snail Rider requires Leah to take a few stabs at it. It’s at this point that I’d like to mention that when Frodo’s “Rage Bar” is full up from fighting, he can unleash the “Eruption”, an attack so devestating that it causes a cutscene to happen wherever he happens to be. This would make short work of the Snail Rider, except that Leah went into a Wii Gesture Fit just before he emerged and swung the nunchuck when she meant to swing the wiimote, causing premature eruption.
Incidentally, everything in this game makes a sort of squelchy sound when you whack it and then explodes into goo. Just sayin.
Eventually, Frodo comes upon a battle between a bunch of elephants and a very large red dragon played by Sean Connery. His name is St. Ignatius of Loyola, unless Leah is having me on. He beckons you to help, then promptly vanishes leaving you to fight some kind of giant demon bat thing by yourself. Fry buggers off, leaving you alone for the battle, as opposed to previous battles, in which he was there but useless. Once you kick the flying thing’s ass, St. Ignatius reappears and asks you what became of your girlfriend. Frodo cops to being dumped, and they do some more cutscenes in which Frodo reveals his creepy nightmares, which turn out to be prophesy about the coming evil. A bunch of big dragons discuss his prophetic dreams in cryptic, vague terms and incredibly overblown accents. They’re especially worried about Frodo’s encounter with Patrick Stewart, since they know that he’s only ever cast in big epic movies where the fate of the world is at stake. The old powerful dragons decide that they can’t just sit back and do nothing, so they decide to bugger off and do nothing, and let Frodo do all the actual work.
St. Ignatius decides to wait back at the temple while Frodo, the chosen one and the only one who can defeat the Eternal Darkness (Hey, that’s an entirely different game! Holy crap! This whole game is just one of those hallucination sequences whne your sanity gets too low!), treks through a poisonous swamp.
In the swamp, Frodo sees some pirates, and then his narcolepsy kicks in again. Fry attracts the attention of the pirates by being a dumbass, and Frodo is sent off to have another zen encounter with Patrick Stewart. (Actually, he sounds more like Sir Ian McKellen now that I think about it). He hands over the power of Ice, which leaves Frodo only two more elements to master, Air and Boron.
Leah masters Ice after quite a few tries at not falling off some more frakking platforms, and learns the Ice-based Rage move, which is like Eruption, but icy. Since I wasn’t paying attention when they explained the move, I’m going to call it “Blue Balls”.
After defeating the pirates, Leah spends the next hour making her way through a cavern that can be navigated only by jumping on jellyfish. Eventually, she makes it to the wizened old tree, which is somehow linked to Ian McKellen, whereupon it turns into a giant wooden monster attacks noble Frodo, eventually, and this is not snark, wiping Spyro’s entrails off his foot
Immolation ensues.
Afterward, the game decides not to let Frodo duke it out against the pirates, so it is assumed that while he could take out a gigantic tree monster five times bigger than she was, it’s not even worth giving you the chance to try to beat the pirates.
Thus do we end tonight’s gaming adventure, locked in the hold of a pirate ship. Fortunately, the USS Baimbridge and a team of Navy SEALs is on-hand to rescue our hero.
Live Free or Cheap
One of the little corner-of-the-screen tags on CNN yesterday informed me that “The average American spends more on taxes than on food, shelter, and clothing combined!” And I’m outraged by this.
No, I’m not outraged that our taxes are so high, especially because they’re not; taxes in the US are lower than pretty much anywhere resemblign civilization, and if you want to know how great it is to live in a tax-free society, ask a Somalian.
I’m outraged at CNN for repeating someone else’s lie. This particular lie comes from The Tax Foundation, an organization whose raison d’etre is to announce that everything you earned between January 1, 2009 and April 13, 2009 was stolen by the government, and only now are you earning money for yourself instead of being a slave.
I suggest that we immediatelyt let anyone who wants it be declared exempt from all taxes. And then, at the end of the year, send them a bill for their usage of the roads, all public services, their share of national defense, police service, the fire department, and a hefty bill for the education of their children. After all, they’ll all be so much richer from having that extra 28% of their income that they surely won’t mind paying a fair market rate for all the tax-supported services they normally enjoy. Of course, that fair market rate would have to be two or three times as much as they’d pay in taxes, since they wouldn’t be able to leverage the same sort of government protections that tax-supported services do, but, hey, it’s their money.
(I’m declaring 2 PM “Boss Freedom Hour”, when I celebrate the fact that up until that point in the afternoon, the money made by my labor goes to my employer, not to me. But I actually totally made up the calculation since I have no idea how much my employer actually makes from my labor)
Anyway, about that outrage. I make a good living. I make a very good living. I’m not rich, even by the standards of pundits who claim that anything under $250k is “poor”. And my housing costs are ridiculously low. I bought my house shortly before the whole housing insanity that drove us into this recession. So I’m making a very good living, better than most. And I’m paying less than most for housing. (As a data point, Leah, until she moved in with me, rented. My monthly mortgage payment is less than half her monthly rent). A quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that I spend 15% of my income on housing. If, as the Tax Foundation claims, the average American pays April 13 — sorry, 28% of his income in taxes, and that’s more than he spends on food, clothing, and shelter, then that means I must spend less than 13% of my income on food and clothing…
Now, I was taught in school that you spend 1/3 of your income on food no matter what. I thought this was impossible then, and I think it’s impossible now (It turns out that the 1/3 number came about because back in the 50s, the US government hired a Czechoslovakian immigrant to work out the poverty level, and she did, based on the fact that in Czechoslovakia, housing was incredibly cheap, and food was incredibly expensive), but if it were, that would mean that 33% + 15% + x% < 28% where x% is the amount the average American spends on clothing. So, the average American spends -20% of their income on clothing. I go down to the store, and I buy a new shirt, and the store pays me fifty dollars.
But let's just assume for the moment that the Tax Foundation is right, and that the average American loses 28% of their income to Uncle Sam, and they lose a further something-less-than 28% on food, clothing, and shelter. That still leaves 44% of the average American's income unaccounted for. So, 44% of the average American's income, according to the Tax Foundation, is disposable, not used for anything necessary (Yeah, yeah, health care, but real men don't need health care. God gave you two kidneys for a reason). Almost half the money you make, you can use for anything you like.
Which makes July 25 "Necessity Freedom Day", the day after which any money you earn is not used for food, clothing, or shelter, and you can just blow it on, I dunno, booze and hookers if that's where your heart lies.
Call the office, I'm taking off the rest of the year.
The Tribe: Season 3 continued…
The Gaians and Lex capture May as she hands out leaflets on the resistance, which she cooked up with the Guardian to lure him out of hiding, and they concoct a clever plan to snatch Trudy. which is really a clever plan to snatch Bray. but Bray doesn’t know that.
Dal shows up at the last minute before the ambush, having decided to do one last act of active violence before settling down and being the farmer he’s always wanted to be. He goes off alone to play his important role in the fight.
This. Can’t. End. Well.
About ten seconds later, Dal runs into the army of the Chosen. May doesn’t know this, so she gives the signal for Bray and the others to come ambush them. Dal shows up just in time to warn Bray and Amber off before they get ambushed, but then falls to his death when he tries to escape by climbing over a railing and then… Um, well, falling I guess.
Amber doubles back to find him, taking advantage of the Chosen’s lack of peripheral vision (It’s the hoods, Leah reminds me). When she finds him, she shouts his name, which Leah thinks is a dumb idea with the Chosen around. I remind her that the Chosen have amply demonstrated that they can’t hear you unless you address them directly.
After a few dramatic mutterings, Dal shuffles off this mortal coil, whcih would be a lot more touching if he hadn’t buggered off mid-season last year to run the farm instead of being part of the powerful Jack-Dal dynamic.
Amber breaks up after they bury Dal. She talks about their past, when they were neighbors, “He was younger of course, but you wouldn’t know that,” aside from the fact that he’s two feet shorter than the rest of the cast. She also decides to sidestep the whole question of whether she’s going to stay with Edward Scissorhands (who Ebony is close to convincing to murder Bray) or go back to Bray by deciding to bugger off to raise an army.
Fortunately, Edward Scissorhands is noble and stuff, so he definitively steps aside, leaving Bray and Amber to do the whole sex thing, after which Bray swears to someday find Katy Perry so he can tell her it’s over, which he thinks she’ll be okay with, because deep down she always knew he liked Amber better. Which kinda makes Bray look like a lech given just how much sex he was having with her.
Bray falls immediately into a funk when Amber decides to leave anyway, as raising an army is still a good idea. He is roused only long enough to change his face makeup.
Cloey’s career in espionage ends off-screen with her capture and deportation to the spice mines on Rurapenthe, as related to us by Trudy while she’s being passive-aggressive to May. Later, Trudy marries Patsy to Zoot in a creepy ceremony. May enthuisiastically rats Trudy out for being all creepy and weird while relating the story of her conversion. This is important, because if they ever try to convince us that May was never really into the Chosen and this was all an act, it is going to be a gigantic load of bullshit.
When he brings The Guardian some anti-Chosen leaflets and the Guardian gets all weird and babbles about the glory of being hated, Sideshow Luke Perry starts to cotton on to the fact that the Guardian just might be making this shit up as he goes along, and is just a little nutty.
Trudy goes to throw herself at the Guardian, failing to notice that they’ve both got new Sci-Fi clothes and hairstyles, but he freaks out and shoves her.
Ellie makes another flier, this one says “Say no to Shavery” because she can’t spell or maybe because Brazillian Waxes aren’t available in the post-apocalypse. (None of the men on this show have ever had even a hint of stubble, though. Just saying.)
Rejection sends Trudy spiraling further into madness, and I think they missed a good opportunity to work cutting into the laundry list of dysfunctions the gang exhibits.
Alice and Ellie confront Tyson about her little meetings with the Guardian, and they insist that it’s to her to prove that she’s not a traitor. Leah and Tyson point out that the Mallrats are seriously lacking in the Trust department, which will be exemplified later when Ryan freaks out and thinks Selene is trying to recruit him over to the Chosen and storms off. Selene is sad, because she’s one recruit away from earning the toaster oven.
Tired of Trudy’s shennanigans, The Guardian thinks long and hard about what to do with her, by which I mean, he thinks long and hard about how to justify offing her. He eventually decides that Zoot wants her to join him. Fortunately for no one in particular, Lex was in the midst of a booty call when the announcement was made, so he will be able to report this. Good thing Lex is such a stand-up guy.
The Guardian plans to hold a big public execution to show everyone what happens to those who defy him the highest honor Zoot can bestow on one of his loyal followers. And he wants all the representatives of the former tribes and all the Mallrats, and everyone who wishes them any ill-wil and everyone the resistance might want to rescue all together in one big open indefensible public place. Sideshow Luke Perry continues to be bugged by the transparency of the Guardian’s evilness.
Ryan finally grows a pair and tells his wife that she’s got to choose between him and The Chosen. Everyone spends a sleepless night having Trudy flashbacks, except for Lex, who always sleeps through flashbacks. Even Luke plots mutiny, having decided that The Guardian is being too rash, and he’s got to keep Trudy alive until he calms down.
By the way, there are two burning cars outside the Gaian hideout, while outside the mall, the Chosen have Mad Max’s car. Just sayin.
Once Trudy is locked up, KC creates a distraction by claiming to have seen Zoot, bodily ressurected, and the Chosen all run off to see. It would be awesome if every time someone claimed to see Zoot, the Chosen totally bought it. Trudy escapes, but Luke makes her leave Brady behind.
Three seconds later, Ellie throws off her Trudy costume and leaves the cage, making it unclear why she’d have gotten in in the first place. May totally sells out KC in order to be appointed Brady’s permanent nurse, despite the fact that she hates caretaking.
KC fesses up to having seen The Mighty Zoot, but claims that it was a for-real vision. The Guardian challenges him to describe Zoot, and KC does to a tee. Of course, since there’s posters of Zoot on every wall, this is not a tremendous surprise. After the Guardian has had him hauled off, he notices that the teacup was made by the Zoot China Company of Portland.
Bray sends Trudy off with Edward Scissorhands to see Amber, and Sideshow Luke Perry gently nudges the Guardian into deciding that KC had a vision of Zoot because he happened to be in the right place at the right time, and not because KC was in any way special, and the Guardian reaches the conclusion that Zoot appeared to warn the Chosen that Trudy was about to escape. This is because the Guardian isn’t quite unhinged, but he’s certainly sub-optimally hinged. As evidenced by the fact that The Guardian declares KC an Oracle, and then gives him a creepy backrub.
Commercialsign in 5… 4… 3… 2…
The wacky adventures of Mentos the Freshmaker, and a foray into the world of Power Rangers RPM, the eighteenth season of the show you were just surprised to discover is still on…
I like shows with giant robots, okay. So I do watch Power Rangers from time to time. This season is set in a post apocalyptic wasteland where most of the human race has been wiped out by an insane AI and its squadrons of killer robots, including some which look exactly like humans.
No, really.
I swear I’m not making this up.
Anyway, the reason that I bring this up is that John Connor — irm, Flynn, the current blue ranger, is none other than Ari Boyland, little KC, all grown up and with a ridiculous overblown Scottish accent.
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May misplaces Brady because she’s useless. Lex bitches Trudy out for sending Trudy off with Edward Scissorhands. Ellie throws herself at Sideshow Luke Perry in order to get some insider information. The Guardian, being crazy, decides that Ranger Blue’s latest vision means that the Chosen should take all the babies and care for them personally. Ryan shouts over the crowd for Selene not to fess up to being With Child, which you’d think would be a dead giveaway, but remember the immutable laws of this world:
- Any car, once ignited, will continue to burn indefinitely
- Ebony is always believed unless she’s telling the truth
- Lex Luthor is no good in a fight
- Viruses mutate, just like computer viruses.
- The Chosen can not hear any dialogue, no matter how loud, unless they are being addressed directly.
So, Selene gives herself up anyway, because she’s basically half-brainwashed.
Edward Scissorhands isn’t back yet, because he stopped along three way to help some kids, who I will call Hansel and Grettle, and their older brother, a leprechaun, captures him and makes him their pack animal. The Weasley family (they’re all redheads) are a bunch of grifters who take Edward Scissorhands about ten minutes to set at each other’s throats.
Meanwhile, Ryan starts a fight and Luke has to bail him out, and Lex Luthor, who is all torn up about the absence of his wife, tries to seduce Ebony.
As the Guardian becomes more and more crazy, he calls for Tyson, to whom he talks about how depraved and evil Trudy was for throwing herself at him — of course, Tyson responds by showing him how to rationalize sex into his notion of “purity”, which causes him to nearly grope her, then to freak out and call for his guards.
Selene has second thoughts upon finding out that Zoot’s her new baby-daddy. She relates how hard it is to be without a dad, because her dad left when she was — WHAT THE FRAK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? EVERYONE IN THE WORLD KNOWS WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE WITHOUT A FATHER!
May decides to leave the Chosen because the writers have changed their mind about her being an unlovable character. Patsy, by the way, has been carted off to the spice mines or something. I don’t remember this happening, it’s possible that it happened some time ago, and her appearance when May was looking for Brady was an anomaly. It’s also possible that Leah and I missed an episode or something.
Ellie and Sideshow Luke Perry have a heart to heart about their respective political philosophies, and Ellie totally falls in love with him.
Ryan blows his top when he finds out that part of the Guardian’s master plan is that the fathers will never get to see their children, getting so angry that he sounds Scottish for a moment, which prompted Leah to point out that the future-KC, in his life as a Power Ranger, will look (and, for that matter, move) like Ryan. Seriously. Present-Ryan and Future-KC could be brothers.
Poor Ryan. He stages an incredible action sequence in which he tries to assassinate the Guardian. He fails, though it’s a close thing.
As he’s being drug off, he bizarrely shouts, “I’ll be seeing you!” I suppose that quoting The Prisoner is as good a way as any to end one’s tenure on the series, because Wikipedia informs me that this is the last we’ll ever see of Ryan.
You will be missed. Dumbass.
The Tribe: Yet Another Season
After declaring Bray and Lex dead, the Chosen march back to the mall, stopping only to let everyone redo their facial markings and hair color. Trudy freaks out at the news of Bray’s death and Tyson goes cross-eyed at mention of Lex’s. Fortunately, the Chosen aren’t any good at deducing the difference between life and death, and Ebony shows up seconds later to rescue them.
This rouse fools the Chosen for about thirty seconds. The Chosen get rid of all the tribe leaders, which is why Katy Perry will not be appearing in this season.
When Bray wakes up, Lex has slipped off, and Ebony wants the two of them to run away together. But with Bray’s ankle hurt, he’s not going to do much running, which makes it a good thing that the new character who I am going to call Edward Scissorhands, (even though he looks more like The Crow, but that’s awkward to keep saying), doesn’t seem interested in attacking them.
The hungry Mallrats start a protest because they want food, so the Guardian orders all of them executed on the spot. Just kidding. The Chosen seem totally confused by the idea of anyone rebelling. The Guardian shows up and declares them all slaves, and promises to feed them and let them join the Chosen once they’ve proved worthy, once YOU WILL BOW DOWN BEFORE ME SON OF JOR-EL. Which everyone does, because they’re hungry. Except Tyson, who is more morally flakey. But Jaffa (The Guardian), who Leah has decided probably was totally gay for Zoot in life, decides to be a dick, and won’t feed any of the Mallrats until they all KNEEL BEFORE ZOD ZOOT. This starts the rats down the path of in-fighting, since it’s been something like two hours since their last meal.
The Chosen manage to track Lex because he’s molting, and Bray either gets captured or lets himself get captured. At any rate, he points out immediately that they’ve pretty much instantly redecorated the mall with the Zoot posters that were conveniently mass-produced during the fall of civilization.
While Trudy tries to persuade Bray to join the Chosen with the same success Bray has in trying to persuade Trudy to reject the Chosen, Lex and Ebony meet up with Edward Scissorhands, who promptly traps them with a net.
Jack is captured trying to escape, and the Guardian executes him. Nah, just kidding; Ellie pleads for his safety by explaining how Jack is a brilliant scientist. This is because Ellie missed the memo about the Chosen being anti-science luddites. So I guess instead of executing him, they take him off for something worse than being executed. Or something.
Selene claims that she didn’t tell Ryan about the baby because she wanted him to marry her for her, not out of duty. Ryan finds this convincing, because, as I have mentioned, Ryan is incredibly stupid.
Edward Scissorhands reveals that he’s a member of an eco-tribe lead by a chyk named “Eagle”, who he is cryptic about, except that he goes on at great length about how awesome she is. Though when Lex mentions that “Eagle” sounds a lot like Amber, Ebony inexplicably freaks out.
The next morning, Bray’s ankle is entirely healed, because the writers do not comprehend the passage of time. When Bray refuses to submit, they lock him in a room and show him a three-screen multimedia presentation made by their AV department.
Thirty seconds later, Bray is all but brainwashed, until he boldly looks up and shouts “THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!” We also get to see that Trudy can still have her baby yoinked away for disobedience, so when she creepily tells the Mallrats that Zoot is real and his spirit dwells within his followers, we can maybe just about get that the point here is that she’s gone completely ’round the garden path.
Lex wants to rope Edward Scissorhands and his tribe into helping out in the fight against the Chosen, but Ebony is still freaking out at the idea of Lex meeting Eagle. Fortunately for her, Edward Scissorhands isn’t a big one for confrontation.
Ellie and Alice grill Patsy to work out what the weakness of The Chosen is (Turns out, it’s bullets. Unfortunately, a working gun is harder to find than kryptonite in New Zealand).
Bray agrees to join The Chosen in order to save the Mallrats, and apparently is savvy enough to know not to lie to the Guardian, so he outright tells him that he’s going to go along with them in order to save the Mallrats. Jaffa, however, finds this close enough, and lets Bray talk to the Mallrats
Bray does exactly what we expected, and gets two-thirds of the way through telling the tribe to submit, then has a crisis of conscience and tells them to fight back, so he’s next for the chop.
Later, when Lex meets up with Ryan on a chain gang, Ryan reports that all the Mallrats are okay, except for Bray,. who faces execution, and Jack, who has been taken off to Dick Cheney’s Undisclosed Location. Ryan has gotten the memo that Katy Perry is no longer part of the cast, so she doesn’t count.
They take Bray out to the beach, which close as I can tell is the only actually scenic place reachable by bus from the studio, since all the climactic outdoor scenes are set here, and prepare to burn him at the stake. With thousands of Chosen surrounding him, armed to the teeth, they have absolutely no trouble executing Bray. Just kidding, it’s totally going to come crashing down.
Ryan returns to the mall and tells everyone about Lex and Ebony, because, so close as Leah and I can tell, the Chosen can only hear you if you address them by name, like NPCs in an Infocom game. May continues to make herself unlikable.
Trudy is ordered to kill Bray, as proof of her loyalty to Zoot, and Bray begs for his life like a little girl. Trudy just about turns, but it turns out that she’s just crazy enough to do it anyway. With the surprise help of Edward Scissorhands and a cassette of “Listen to the Scary Sounds of Jungle Animals”, enough of a distraction happens that Bray and Dal escape. Though The Guardian just tells everyone that they’re both dead anyway.
Bray freaks out when he finds Edward Scissorhands wearing the ring he’d left on Amber’s grave. Which leads to the entirely unsurprising and frankly not well done revelation that — yes — “Eagle”, the leader of Edward Scissorhands’s tribe — is really — (wait for it) — Zandra!
Nah, just kidding. The show’s gotten kind of tedious at this point, frankly, though I’ll say this: I totally expected them to string us along until they actually showed Amber, instead of just having Edward Scissorhands blurt it out.
May and Selene are edging toward joining the Chosen, May because she’s a little bitch, and Selene because she’s with child, and thinks that starvation might be bad for that.
Dal reveals that he’s had prophetic dreams about Amber still being alive. Lex reveals that he’s had that dream too, as has Bray. So, despite Ebony’s protests, they set out for Eagle Mountain, in order to check that she’s still in her grave. Well, until Ebony actually does talk Bray out of it. So Dal has to set off on his own.
Leah points out that when Bray was given the ring, he was doing Amber, and we may draw what conclusions we like from the fact that Edward Scissorhands has it now. They notice that Dal’s gone like eight hours later, but fortunately, Dal for some reason climbed not Eagle Mountain, but the next mountain over, so I imagine they have time to overtake him.
We also get a name for The Blue Haired Number Two Chosen Guy, which is Luke, so I shall call him “Sideshow Luke Perry”. He seems like a True Believer, but he’s not devoid of compassion and love and goodness and so forth. Which I suspect means that he’s going to make a last-second noble sacrifice.
Dal finds the grave empty, causing them to notice that no one actually remembers who buried her. So they follow Edward Scissorhands back to the Ewok Villiage, where they finally meet Amber, who looks angry, possibly because of her ridiculous Eagle costume.
Intermission: The wacky adventures of Mentos the Freshmaker
Leah has discovered that the Dance Remix CD of the Tribe Soundtrack CD contains music videos for Abe Messiah and two of the songs that aren’t as good. You can find them on YouTube, but I kinda suggest that you don’t. They’re a weird mix of Kids Incorporated, Riverdance, and that David Hasslehoff music video where he’s dancing around the world, with the selfsame Video Toaster effects. The Abe Messiah video includes most of the scenes from the end credits that we were never able to make sense of, including the Mystery Blonde Guy with whom Trudy is dancing in the rave bit from the credits. We only get a clear look at him in the Bye Bye Bye This Is The Place, and if the YouTube comments are to be believed, this is “Good Zoot”, some sort of hypothetical Zoot who had decided to reform and stay with the Mall Rats, to which there has never been any indication in the show.
I like to think that somewhere out there is an entire alternative second season, complete with a radically different continuity. Maybe this hypothetical one makes more sense.
There exists a second version of the Abe Messiah video, which just features Bray, Ebony, Tyson, and Lex Luthor dancing in weird symbolic poses as if they’re about to shout their names and totem animals, then turn into Power Rangers. Which is utterly ludicrous, since we all know that only one of them is going to turn into a Power Ranger.
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Amber wants the others gone, because she’s pissed for reasons she isn’t yet willing to go into in detail. Bray has a feverish night of flashbacks, brough on by the stress of finding Amber still alive, or possibly the fact that he’s been wearing the same knitted wifebeater since last season.
Dal is the first to notice that Ebony was conspicuously unsurprised when Amber turned up not dead. Lex discovers that Edward Scissorhands’s tribe is called the “Gaians”, and they all take their names from animals, except for Pride (Edward), who didn’t understand the rules.
Amber gives Dal a flashback, in which she wakes up after having been buried, gets found by Edward Scissorhands, and gets adopted by the Gaians. He teaches her how to hunt and fish, and she teaches him about this earth thing they call “Kissing”, and she is shocked, shocked, when Dal tells her that Bray and Ebony haven’t gotten together.
Ebony tries to talk Bray into doing a runner, but this is unconvincing since he’s actually in a location shot, while she’s in front of a greenscreen. Well, actually, I wanted to say that, but Ebony totally convinces him… Until Bray goes ballistic and fights his way to her, demanding an explanation.
Amber does her usual “You know what you did so I will not tell you!” bit, and manages to tell him her entire life story about six times without hitting on it.
After repeating the flashback from Dal, she adds that Ebony saved her, then told her that she’d had Bray’s baby. And, because this is Ebony, when she’s lying, everyone believes her, and when she’s telling the truth, no one does. So Amber faked her own death, believing the lie.
Bray should just kill Ebony. He should just break her neck. Like Tirol did to Tory. But instead, he just yells at her a little and believes her when she swears that that Amber hallucinated the whole thing.
Alice and Ellie plot mutiny, loudly enough that even the Chosen who’s guarding them has a hard time not hearing them.
Lex, who knows of only one way to resolve conflict, calls Edward Scissorhands a pussy, so they have a big steel cage match.
- Leah: Pride cometh before the fall
- Ross: Pride also cometh before Amber two times out of three, which is why she’s going to kick his ass to the curb in favor of Bray.
But seriously, Lex gets his ass handed to him, because, as we have previously established, Lex gets always gets his ass kicked. But that means that he and Edward Scissorhands get to be friends now. Of course, Lex was practically gay for nature-boy before.
Episode 7 ends on the startling revelation that Bray and Ebony didn’t have a baby! Wait. We knew that. And Bray’s “proof” is that he found the picture Ebony showed Amber, and he’s got… A good explanation! Wait. Does Bray have some kind of plan here? Seriously? If his word was going to work, oughtn’t it have worked by now?
Actually, his “proof” is that he rips up the photo, which Amber accepts as proof, since Bray would never tear up a photo of his own son. Ebony has another ace up her sleeve, of course, with the metnion of Katy Perry, which basically moves amber from “Jealous and Self-Righteous Anger” to “Ambivalent”
Meanwhile, Selene and May are going to join the Chosen, which makes them look like total bitches, because Selene is determined that no one find out that she’s pregnant and in pretty serious danger of miscarrying if she doesn’t start getting regular meals. May, on the other hand, is just a bitch, at least until the writers decide they like her.
The Guardian and Tyson have the sexiest discussion on theology since the confessions of St. Augustine of Hippo, and Edward Scissorhands shames Amber over the fact that she’s clearly letting her personal feelings get in the way of the fact that helping the city tribes is totally the right thing to do.
Selene, May, and Patsy all agree to join the Chosen, Patsy under duress, May happily, and Selene with reluctance. But Ryan backs out and tells them to get stuffed when they get to the whole “Renounce your former tribe” bit.
The Gaians hole up in a church to plot the retaking of the mall, where Bray and Edward Scissorhands whip them out and compare sizes:
Amber: (To Bray) Pride’s got skills you don’t.
Brainwashing 101 starts out with the Guardian asking the novices to remember how their parents died, share their pain with him, and draw strength from it. Selene ends up brainwashed almost instantly.
Ebony and Lex, who have returned to the city on their own ahead of the Gaians, buy some poison from a young Peter Lorre, as part of their complex plan to kill the Guardian and seize control of the Chosen.
Immediately before invading the mall, Bray asks Edward Scissorhands just how close he is with Amber, and finds out, though he would almost certainly prefer otherwise once Edward Scissorhands explains that they’re New Agey Gaian-Married.
Lex and Ebony corner the Guardian, and are just about to execute him — well, Ebony is, then the Guardian overpowers her, then Lex overpowers him, but he just sort of hmms and haws over the actual murder — when Bray shows up, and Selene decides it would be a good time to scream, thus ruining the whole “surprise” thing.
The battle doesn’t really go anywhere; the Guardian stabs Ebony, the Gaians fight, they see Tyson, then they leave. It’s not clear what they were trying to accomplish, nor whether they actually did it. The Guardian decids to enjoy his favorite pasttimes: reveling in being hated, and threatening Trudy. Afterward, Lex sneaks up for a bit of a cuddle with his wife. Tyson, by the way, has a smallpox innoculation scar. Just thought I’d mention.
Back at the church, Edward Scissorhands explains that both Bray’s plan and Ebony’s were good, but they ought not to have executed them simultaneously. He also is cutely uncomprending of why Ebony is such a bitch.
May is a little too enthusiastic about wanting to catch the traitor the Guardian has imagined is among them, which causes him to suspect her, and accuse her baselessly. I suspect that we’re being shown that Jaffa’s just as crazy as the rest of them, and not just an evil manipulative bastard. Later, May tries to come up with a way to throw suspicion off herself. I suspect that she’s planning to sell out Selene for a pack of smokes, which makes me notice that no one in New Zealand smokes. Funny that. I thought unruly teenagers loved to smoke.
The Tribe 2×41-2×52
While Trudy makes pronouncements to Patsy about the coming new age, Seline turns down Ryan’s proposal of marriage, and the Chosen’s careful plan to lull everyone into a false sense of security falls apart because they just can’t stop kidnapping people, whose kidnappings get noticed.
Or, it would ruin their plan, except that everyone is too caught up in themselves to notice. Lex and Tyson have become a couple, but have to keep it on the DL because Alice thinks Lex likes her, and no one wants to risk upsetting Alice. Dal’s lusting after Ellie, so it’s a good thing that Jack isn’t nearby. Chloe’s going crazy with abandonment issues. And Trudy convinces Ryan that Bray talked Seline out of marrying him.
When Trudy reveals that Ebony sold her out to the Chosen, it occurs to Bray and Katy Perry that maybe the Chosen haven’t really broken up, and this has all been a smokescreen to lull them into a false sense of security… And Ebony’s behind it all! Because Trudy is entirely trustworthy!
Also, Patsy creepily imitates Trudy’s speech and movement patterns, which I think suggests that she’s a much better actress than the rest of the cast.
While the Chosen kidnap people using the van from The A-Team, Trudy goes to meet with Jaffa, whereupon they reveal to us that the baby Trudy’s been carrying around isn’t really Brady, who the Chosen still have.
The Chosen know that there’s one thing that always works: planting evidence on someone. So thye stick some evidence in Ebony’s pool in order to make it look like she’s behind the kidnappings. That something is Spike’s corpse
As usual, this works like a charm, resulting in civil war.
Seline runs away from home, deciding that Ryan’s too good for her, and happens upon May, the girl who stole Lex’s shoes, while running from a gang of Sharells who appear to be a crossbreed of High School Musical characters and leftover mooks from Power Rangers. Seline throws up, for once without actually meaning to, and May deduces that she’s pregnant. Because basically, there are only three reasons in the world that anyone would throw up. And the virus has died down, so that only leaves pregnancy and bulimia, and Seline’s on a diet.
The Sharells show up at the Mall and accuse Lex of killing their leader, that guy who lived in a tanning booth and wore tinfoil, which prompts Katy Perry to decide that they’re being set up to create civil disorder, but, again, she won’t even consider the possibility that it was anyone but Ebony behind it. Ryan proves he’s still in love with Seline by kicking their asses when he finds out that they were the ones who chased her.
Also, May recognizes Trudy as the Supreme Mother of the Chosen. Of course, if anyone believed her, that might foil their plans. But they don’t, not after Trudy claims that she was just playing along to keep them from taking her baby away.
KC, who hasn’t been paying attention, hires the Sharelles to play at Ryan and Seline’s wedding while he’s stealing a ring for Ryan. All the love and whatnot makes Lex decide to propose to Tyson. She doesn’t believe in marriage, and Leah agrees that in the post-apocalypse, marriage is kind of pointless, especially the sort of fakey and frivolous marriages they have around here. But Tyson comes around when Lex explains it purely in terms of love.
Trudy, by the way, is going to perform the ceremony for Ryan and Seline. Though the Chosen plan to crash the wedding and take over the city.
During the wedding. Patsy leads Ebony to her own murder, wherein the Chosen drive their truck at her, forcing her off a pier into the water, on the theory that, since Ebony basically spent the whole first season in the pool, she probably can’t swim. Trudy performs a ceremony that weirdly oozes with evil that no one notices.
And then they decide they have to kill Patsy too. So if she didn’t get that the Chosen might not be as benevolent as Trudy had been claiming by now, she might have a suspicion now.
Patsy predictably runs back to Trudy, who tips her hand that she’d been playing her the whole time, but Patsy still doesn’t quite get it.
Alice gets herself captured when she bursts in on the Chosen who are in the process of converting or murdering the Locos. She challenges Jaffa to single combat or something, he responds by trying to brainwash her.
Seline forces herself to sleep with Ryan, despite the fact that she now finds him repellant, so that she can sell the idea that the baby’s just a couple of weeks early, instead of the only reason she married him.
The unsurprisingly still-alive Ebony confronts Patsy, and helps her down the road to recovery from evil. Chloe changes Brady since Patsy is too zoned out to notice, causing her to notice Brady’s shiny new penis.
The newly reformed Patsy and Chloe warn Bray that the tribal meeting is a trap, showing up about 5 seconds before the Chosen do so that they’re absolutely no help, except that they manage to stop Bray going in.
The Chosen capture the tribal leaders, then they take the mall because no one believes Alice when she shows up, predictably, ten seconds before the chosen.
Patsy denounces Trudy, at which point, everyone just stands around debating what to do until the Chosen show up and capture them.
The Chosen threaten to execute Katy Perry unless Bray surrenders himself, which he does, but not without bringing a small army with him to kick some ass. The captured mallrats are rescued, but they misplace Ryan in the process (Leah and I think Lex beat him up by accident, as he was wearing a Chosen costume). Finding him unconscious, Selene gives every indication of actually loving him for once.
Bray corners the Guardian and the Chosen, but can’t bring himself to kill the Guardian. Which is unfortunate, because he reveals that he’s actually got an army of what looks like about a thousand men he’s been hiding. Having forced everyone into submission, The GUardian just sits there and looks confused when Lex shows up up in a go-kart and rescues… Bray. Bray?
Anyway, by the time you’ve got your head around this one, Lex has already crashed the go-kart, apparently killing the both of them.
And thus does our season end, not with a bang, but with frakking Ebony looking on from the distance.