Author: Ross

• I’m sorry. What? “This is a new civilization and we get to make all new rules.” Okay. I can deal. But for some reason they’ve decided that the right response to Lex Luthor trying to rape Zandra is for Zandra to propose to him. And he accepts. This makes it all better. I suppose I can’t quite get around the idea of a kids’ show whose raison d’etre isn’t to teach kids important lessons about how to
• Even after the apocalypse, Zandra and Lex Luthor have to wait until they’re fake-married by Hsu Tai (Whose real name is Tai San, so I will switch to calling her “Tyson”, as I am less likely to misspell it). What is this, a Stephanie Meyer novel? (Seriously, in The Host, Melanie has to wait six months to sleep with the love of her life, because she’s not 18, and therefore it would be wrong. After the entire human race has been subjugated by aliens.) But as this is The Tribe and not an edgy Young Adult novel, Zandra remains the second least sympathetic character in the series.
• Ebony, Zoot’s evil second, crashes the wedding and gets captured. Then, in a re-enactment of an episode of Angel, she nearly convinces everyone to let her out by threatening their masculinity. Showing the sort of sound tactical judgment that he has become known for, Lex Luthor unlocks her cage to spar with her. Showing the fidelity for which his financee loves him, he instead beds her. Now, it’s a rule of this show that if a man enters the presence of a woman other than the one who’s lusting after him, she immediately assumes that he’s cheating with this interloper. Witness Trudy about Bray and Magenta, Trudy about Bray and Amber, Trudy about — well, actually, we’ve expended our supply of age-appropriate women. But also Zandra about Lex and Ebony. But at least she’s right this time.
• Lex Luthor, apparently, rolls over and goes to sleep after sex, because Ebony escapes. Ebony has this mascara stripe around her eyes which makes her look like in New Zealand, there aren’t any racist implications to comparing someone to a racoon.
• Trudy doesn’t care about the defense of the Mall from the impending Loco attack, because she saw Magenta snogging Bray earlier, which is much worse.
  • Leah: I thought you said that she was the only one acting like a real teenager
  • Me: (whispered) As it turns out, I’m old, and hate real teenagers
• Upon hearing that Bray was seriously macking on Magenta, Amber instantly becomes a bitch to her too.
• The afforementioned macking happened just after Bray and Magenta had a conversation about how, with the city darkened by apocalypse, you can see the stars, and then some wistfullness about civilization rising again.
  • Me: New Zealanders were created by man. They evolved. They rebelled. And they have a plan
  • Leah: [Bray and Magenta snog] All this has happened before. It will happen again
• Lex Luthor’s excuse for getting locked in the cage while Ebony escapes is that she pretended to be sick and he went in to check on her. Aside from Lex being a terrible liar, if he’d just told the truth except for the bit about doing Ebony, everyone totally woulda bought it. “Hey guys, she told me I sucked, so I went in to rough her up. Turns out I suck, and she kicked my ass.” I suspect that Lex being an awful liar is going to be a recurring theme.
• No one’s seen Paul the Diferently Abled One in a few episodes. It would be totally awesome if we just never see him again and never get any explanation.
• Bray, fulfilling his one character trait, does a runner. He persuades Ebony to, instead of launching a counter-attack, to start her own religion.
• It has only just occurred to me that Lex Luthor’s only outfit is a pullover and rainbow suspenders. He’s like a post-apocalyptic Robin Williams.
• Trudy misplaces her baby, by virtue of somehow having overlooked the fact that she was still in the last place she’d left her. Trudy truly is the mother of the year here.
• Tyson, whose idea it was for Zandra to marry Lex Luthor, has decided to throw herself at him, because her complex Granola Girl spirituality is complex and confusing.
• In Kiwi, it appears that you use the indicative in many contexts where we USAnians would use the gerund. Trudy accuses Magenta of “kidnap”, Tyson finds that Lex Luthor has made a “punch bag”. It’s creepy and weird.

• Ryan (Lex Luthor’s flunkie) sharps the little kids at poker, finally finding his intellectual equals in people under the age of eight.
• Cornered by the Demon Dogs, who apparently are a tribe similarly evil to the Locos, Lex Luther and Dalek decide to split up. The Demon Dogs are entirely befuddled by this, and their leader just stands there looking back and forth. No wonder they mistook the Sattelite of Love for a dog bone.
• Magenta seems like she’s got her eye on making off with the still-unnamed baby. Trudy, after being thoroughly unpleasant at all times except when she was delerious with fever, turns out to be a crazy, manipulative bitch.
• Dalek, who after a touching moment a few episodes back, decided not to take a picture of his dead family, stopped while running from the demon dogs to get a baseball mitt.
• For the love of God. Zoot appeared in like 10 scenes, and 8 of them were just the same shot of him looking menacing from the back of his police car, but they keep flashing back to him. He’s had more screentime since he died than he ever did when he was alive.
• The new leader of the Locos is some chyk who it is implied would not like it if she found out that Zoot had fathered a child by some other girl. Episode 9 ends with her looking menacingly at the camera through the flames of, I believe, Zoot’s funeral pyre, which, of course, is still burning. I think maybe they’ve decided that in the fictional world of this show, fires, once lit, will remain burning indefinitely, as, it seems, it was only the adults who enforced the idea that fuel is depleted as it burns.
• In episode 10, Bray talks Amber into running against Lex for leadership in an election, which Amber decides to throw, in order to teach Lex an important life lesson. In the post-apocalypse
• Meanwhile, Bray laments over his dead psychopath brother. Oh, dead psychopath brother, how sad it is that we can not be a family, you and me and your girlfriend and daughter, we could give up your lifelong orgy of destruction and just settle down somewhere pastoral.
• And, of course, everyone votes for Lex Luthor, because he threatens them. They elect the guy whose whole schtick is that he’s evil. They elect Doctor Insano President.
• Amber throws the race because she thinks it’s important that Lex believe he won fairly. Of course, since Lex thinks he won by coercion, I don’t know if that counts.
• Also, Lex doesn’t find it odd that he won with 99% of the vote. Who voted for Amber? Bray, obviously, and Amber if she’s got any sense, because, let’s face it, if no one voted for her, it would look rigged. So who’s the third?
• Trudy cycles between accusing Bray of having a thing for The Girl Who Looks Like Magenta, accusing Bray of having a thing for Amber, and insisting that she loves Bray. She’s emotionally inconsistent, sort of nutty, and a moody, angst-ridden manipulative bitch. In other words, she acts more like a 14 year old girl than any one else in the cast.
• Which reminds me. Episode 10. A 14 year old girl has given birth, a gang of kids has committed murder, and Lex Luthor has kinda sorta killed a man. There is no way this show could ever be aired in the US.
• Now that Kiwi Haley Joel Osmet (You know, not really. You know who he is? He’s the Kiwi version of the kid who found the Doctor’s watch in “Human Nature”. Y’know, the little kid in Love Actually whose dead mom was married to Liam Neesen and who had the crush on the little girl that sang that number in that play.)
• The choices of times for the heartwarming music to kick in are a little surprising, like when Lex apologizes to Ryan for knocking him down in training. I guess this is to indicate that Lex is like a father figure for the tribe. A drunken, abusive father figure prone to fits of violence
• Lex Luthor: “The trick to leadership is to never be predictable.” Oh my God! George W Bush learned his leadership skills from Kiwi Television
• Magenta makes bread. They eat it from bowls with spoons. Does bread mean something different in New Zealand?
• Lex Luthor finds that despite his tough-guy act, he can’t murder Cloey’s pet cow. So he lets it go, then claims he was jumped by one of the crazy tribes. And insists that the last he saw, the cow was being brutally killed and sodomized. He says this to Cloey, and, as far as I can tell, he says it for no reason other than to be a dick.
• Trudy is in full-on Fatal Attraction mode. Again, still acting the most like an actual teenage girl of any of them.
• Lex Luthor leads the search party for Cloey, and he intentionally leads them in a stupid direction so that his leadership is consistent with his story: instead of taking them in the direction the cow would have gone, he takes them in the direction of the tribe he claimed took the cow. Which means he’s knowingly leading them on a wild goose chase just to be evil. Lex Luthor doesn’t think his evil through very far, does he?
• And yet, the Locos have indeed gone into the woods, where Cloey and the cow have gone, rather than into the city where Lex Luthor is leading the rescue party. Jean-Paul Sartre has joined the writing staff.
• At the end of episoode 15, Cloey is rescued by a new girl, a sort of weird zen hippie chyk whose name I have forgotten, but who I will call “Hsu Tai” after the Chinese girl on The Tomorrow People. She speaks entirely in platitudes, which leads me to believe that after the apocalypse, she holed up in a fortune cookie factory for six months.
• Hsu Tai eplains that she was destined to come hang out with the tribe in order to reaffirm their bonds by giving them a name, and, Lex Luthor being the one who gets to make this decision, they go with “Mallrats”, implying that only the works of Kevin Smith will survive the apocalypse. I think I liked them not having a name better.
• Trudy decides at the last minute to join in their femmy little ritual of solidarity where they choose their name, thus indicating that she’s decided to stop being a crazy bitch and actually contribute something to their new little civilization. Then she walks in on Bray making out with Magenta. Wonder how long this “Not crazy” phase will last.
• And to celebrate Cloey’s safe return and their new name, they do what The Matrix Reloaded tells us must always happen when a post-apocalyptic civilization decides to celebrate: they hold a rave. Remember: post-apocalyptic priorities: Ridiculous makeup, check. Hair dye, check. Extasy, check. Rave music, check.

While I’ve been writing this, Battlestar Galactica ended its run. Four years after the apocalypse and not a single person wearing silly Beyond Thunderdome makeup. They came so close.

Lex Luthor’s sidekick notices that someone’s nicked their stockpile of cash, and he freaks out and lays traps to catch the culprit, which proves that this guy is a fucking moron.
Somewhere between episodes seven and eight, they reveal that Zoot Suit Clockwork Orange is the father of Trudy’s still unnamed baby, which Bray reveals by bringing the craziest motherfraker in the city to their secret hiding spot, whereupon the guy who runs the craziest most ass-kicking gang in the city promptly trips over Lex Luthor’s shoe and falls to his death. Amber still has yet to say anything that sounds like natural dialogue for a person under the age of twenty-seven, but I’ve noticed that she sounds more American than anyone in the last four seasons of Power Rangers, and I’m including Jason David Frank. (She even says “Idear” instead of “Idea” the way that an American does when he’s pretending to have a British accent). Also, Amber has now said “poor little thing” about someone for about the one thousandth time. Everyone dresses up even more ridiculously than normal to hold a funeral for someone they don’t actually like to begin with, and they mention that “The graveyards are all full”, which means that as 99% of the population was dying of the virus, they at least had the consideration to bury themselves..
Also, I’ve determined that this show has something like 400 episodes, so from now on, I’m going to condense about five episodes per post.
Zoot is given a viking style burial with a funeral pyre on the beach. For this they need a boat, petrol and everything on the beach that burns. Bray also reveals that he knows Zoot’s real name, and it becomes clear to me fully 20 minutes before it does to everyone else that they were, in fact, brothers back before the apocalyse. Everyone wears silver eye makeup for the funeral and looks like extras from a Styx video. Amber lets her hair down and looks like Daryl Hannah in Clan of the Cave Bear, if you couldn’t afford the real Daryl Hannah and got, say, Lori Singer instead.
And in case we had any doubt that Zoot really is dead, they did the one thing that in the land of television guarantees that you can never turn out to have mysteriously survived what looked like certain death: they give him a “Yes, he’s really dead” montage, showing all the touching clips from Zoot’s tenure on the show. That is, they show the same clip of him shouting “POWER AND CHAOS!” that is part of the title sequence, and a scene from earlier in this very episode. Let’s face it, Zoot was not really a character, which is why I didn’t even mention his name until the previous post.
The Girl Who Looks like Magenta From The Rocky Horror Picture Show is much happier now that she knows Bray is unentangled, and, for that matter, now that Lex Luthor is officially a murderer, or, at least, a minor obstacle whose simple physical presence caused the death of what passes for a master villain in this show, Zandra stops fawning over Sidekick Boy and all but dry-humps Lex Luthor on the spot.

Cloey catches Bray talking to Zoot. If that nonsense made any sense to you, you’ve watched more of this show than I have. Zoot, as it turns out, is the Alex-From-A-Clockwork-Orange guy who runs the Locos, who I am totally sure is gonna turn out to be Trudy’s Baby-Daddy.
Kiwi HJO, who has been hoarding a secret stockpile of food, gets all bitchy when redhead dye job girl asks to use some of his water ration to bathe the baby, who is now old enough to stink.
Cloey agrees to keep Bray’s dirty little secret friendship with this season’s big bad in exchange for guaranteeing the safety of her pet cow.
It turns out that Shortround’s name is “Dal”, not “Dell”. Not that either of these is, so far as I know, an actual name, but we get to see it written down when he raids his late father’s medical office.
Oh, and the cars are STILL FUCKING BURNING.

In which Bray runs off to find stuff suitable for infants, Trudy runs a fever, and the cars are still on fire.
Notably, though there is no visible gap between episodes 1 and 2, dialogue in episodes 3 and 4 claims that they’ve been living together for “a few days”. Episode 5 is set just hours after Trudy delivers, but everyone has had time to redo their ridiculous makeup (Everyone except Lex and His Big Dumb Sidekick have revised their looks).
I finally work out that Amber’s sidekick Shortround is named Dell. It confused me for a moment since the first time I notice it, they’re looking at a laptop. This is a very 1999 vision of the future, so they’re trying to use it by ooking up medical information on a shareware CD-ROM. Fortunately, this future isn’t a 2008 future, where all that sort of crap would have been superceded by the internet. Back in 1999, we hadn’t even worked out a consistent capitalization of “internet” (Seriously. I read a novel around then which insisted on talking about the “InterNet”. Since it was a very 1996 vision of the future, it talked about how the “InterNet” had been replaced by the “Global Information Superhighway”, a system under tight government control which connected, I think, all traffic control systems to hospital power supplies to toasters. So that an evil alien computer virus could go all SkyNet on us.)
Dell gets sent off on a suicide mission to find antibiotics, raising hopes that he won’t survive. Meanwhile, the little kids gorge themselves on Kiwi Haley Joel Osmet’s secret cache of candy and get sick, causing people to momentarily think they have the virus.
Which means that kids in general, and the survivors in specific don’t have any particular kind of immunity to the virus, which means that there’s absolutely no rhyme or reason to why there even are survivors, or, more likely, the kids don’t understand how viruses work, or, most likely of all, the writers don’t.
This episode’s best line:
Zandra: Can’t you just imagine me in lingerie?

In which Trudy has a baby, Cloey walks her pet cow, Lex looks menacing, and hot water is essential.
Seriously, does anyone know what you use the hot water for during a childbirth? Also, Red-Blue-haired-girl, who Wikipedia tells me is named Zandra, talks Lex into giving her some parcetemol in exchange for the promise of no sex, proving that Lex Luthor is an idiot. Immediately after delivering the baby which everyone thinks is his daughter, Bray does a runner, and instantly, everyone assumes that he’s abandoned his girl and child and they begin plotting revenge. I think it’s safe to assume that he’ll be back in an hour or so.
The cars are still on fire, and, I swear to god, Cloey frolics with a cow until the Locos come and she runs away. She’s sneaking off with food for her pet cow. At some point, this cow is going to become delicious.

As a change from my recent hell-bent pursuit of recapturing my own youth, I decided to take a stab at recapturing someone else’s.
For the past few years, much of our fine American entertainment has been outsourced to New Zealand. Yes, Australia’s Canada has provided its lush landscapes, moderate climate, and non-SAG actors to such US-targeted productions as Farscape, Xena:Warrior Princess, Hercules: The Legendary Journies, Power Rangers, and Lord of the Rings. But did you know that New Zealanders also make their own television programs, featuring local non-SAG actors who don’t have to pretend they have American accents? Why, they even have their own culture and lifestyles which you or I might find strange and incomprehensible. Unless, of course, you are yourself a New Zealander, in which case, you probably find my Saturday Morning Cartoon-esque Mighty Whitey approach to your culture kind of insulting, unless, of course, you’ve got a good sense of humor. I suspect New Zealanders have a good sense of humor, because they call themselves “Kiwis”, after a kind of delicious fruit with the mouthfeel of a cat’s tongue and a kind of flightless waterfowl. Flightless waterfowl is the most ridiculous thing known to nature, so I have to assume that Kiwis have a pretty good sense of humor.
Anyway, one of these shows which I keep hearing about all the time (Except by “all the time”, I mean “two or three times,” which is a lot by the standards of New Zealand Television, as the list of all shows I have ever heard about on New Zealand television consists of: this show) is called “The Tribe”. It’s a show from the early part of this century with shades of Lost, Lord of the Flies, and… Um… Well, I haven’t watched that much yet, and I was planning to rattle off a long list with something silly at the end, but the truth is, it’s basically just every “The whole world is a post-apocalyptic hellhole” show you’ve ever watched.
The story is this: A plague has killed all the adults, and it has therefore gone all Lord of the Flies in New Zealand with kids forming little miscreant tribes and the more sociopathic kids preying on the less sociopathic ones and so forth.
I’m one episode in, so I haven’t really made much sense of it all yet, but given that the plot is Post-Apocalypse+Parental Abandonment+Photogenic Youngsters+Angsty Science Fiction, it’s basically like this show was made by taking the eigenvector of my taste in television. All it’s missing is giant robots (Though I gather a reasonable percentage of the cast went on to be Power Rangers).
Now, remember, this is television aimed at kids. And it’s produced by a country whose primary export, unlike the US, is not entertainment, and if British television and Japanese television and Canadian television is any indication, the rest of the world believes that spending actual money on the production of television is a shameful extravagance. And it is to some extent a soap opera (So I’ve been told. It’s kinda hard to tell the difference between a soap opera and a character-driven story with substantial plot arcs, though. Especially since sci fi fandoms are dominated by high-functioning crazy people who call anything with any kind of character development “soap”, insist it’s for girls, who are gross and slimy and have cooties, and why doesn’t anyone like me when I am so clearly a superior intellect in every way? And hey, give me back my lunch money!), so I’m guessing that it’s going to be a little rough.
Which is why you’re coming with me. Here are my observations on episode 1…

• This is the 80sest vision of the future since Max Headroom. Only when Max Headroom was on, it was the 80s. This show is ca 2001
• In the event of apocalypse, I wonder how long it would take me before my priorities shifted to include giving myself a weird Beyond Thunderdome makeup job.
• In every street scene, there has been a car on fire. Exactly how long after the apocalypse do cars stay burning?
• In this dystopian future, food and gum are valuable commodities. Weird 80s-style punk rock hair dye and makeup are apparently not in short supply.
• It has not yet been made clear how long after the apocalypse this show is set. It can’t be long, since a bunch of unattended prepubescent children are still alive on their own just sort of wandering around, and none of the people who were young enough to survive the plague have grown up yet. But it’s long enough that food is no longer readily available, and all the good stuff has been looted. I’m fairly sure that if production stopped dead tomorrow, it’d take a heck of a long time for the surviving population, which appears to be something in the neighborhood of 50, to loot everything.
• The bad guys, the “Locos” are a tribe that drives around in a police car, led by a kid who appears to be playing sort sort of Nazi version of Alex from A Clockwork Orange. It this is the near future, and he’s, let’s say, 16, it’s kinda inconceivable that he’d have seen A Clockwork Orange.
• The good guys, whose names I have not managed to learn yet, consist of a couple of random groups of kids who have all happened upon each other, and then stumbled upon a kid who’s fortified a mall. They’ve also captured this small gang consisting of two reasonable people (aside from the makeup and dye jobs. Seriously, in a desperate struggle for survival, everyone has time to keep up their dye jobs?) and their unreasonable boss who pisses off the Locos for no clear reason other than that he’s a punk. I suspect they will become the loveable-but-untrustworthy-antiheroic foils to the rest of the tribe.
• There’s two other folks who started out somewhere pleasant, then ventured out into the wasteland for unclear reasons. They haven’t interacted with anyone else yet.
• Seriously, this show has the look and feel of something that was made by PBS, except that it’s not educational. And is instead making me feel dumber. I keep expecting Video Toaster special effects (Which I am learning to identify on sight, by the way. That’s kinda cool.) I’m vaguely reminded of an old show set on a post-apocalyptic earth about the Dewey Decimal system. It was called “Tomes and Talismans”, which I mention here because from time to time I forget the title and have a hell of a time finding anything on the internet that reminds me of it.
• The credits list this show as having a Story by … Based on an Original Idea by… I assume the “Original Idea By” guy is the guy who wrote “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”
• At least this show has an excuse for the post-apocalypse looking like the outback.

Episode 2 hooks up the other two with the tribe, along with the revelation, unless I overlooked it in the previous episode, that Trudy, that’s the girl of the other two, is about thirty seconds away from childbirth, which, I guess, can give us a ballpark figure for how long it’s been since civilization collapsed.

• In Episode 2, Clockwork Orange Guy holds a book burning. Just to prove that the Locos are evil. Because only evil people burn books.
• As predicted, the Gang-of-Three has been allowed into the Tribe. Bad Dye Job Girl seems to be on the frindge of being a good person, whereas their evil leader Lex Luthor is a dick, and let two of their gangmembers get captured by the Locos. I can’t seriously believe the idea that the Locos actually murdered the fallen gang members, being, fundamentally, a bunch of unruly children (After all, if they were that kind of crazy, they’d be doing something more evil than burning books. Like burning babies or something. So I’ll assume that they instead lost half their GP and were sent back to the last save point.
• Lex Luthor really is kinda stupid. His whole argument seems to be “Let us out of this cage, or we’ll hurt you when we get out of this cage which we can only ever do if you let us out!”
• New guy, the one with the pregnant girlfriend Trudy, gains their trust in about three seconds, then steals their food, then comes back with his pregnant girlfriend, and a bunch more food. Did I miss a step in his logic here?
• Trudy is bothered when the girl who Wikipedia tells me is named Amber doesn’t use her name when she asks about letting them stay. Trudy is nine months pregnant and the world is kind of a shithole. I think she could be a bit more gracious.
• Also, Trudy’s hair is half black and half blue. Even pregnant and on the run, she can keep up her dye job in this post apocalypse.
• The cars are still on fire. Are Kiwi cars all made of thermite? (Fun fact: Once you start thermite burning, there is no way to make it stop until all the thermite has been consumed)

Episode 3 centers around the debate as to whether or not to let Trudy and her boyfriend Bray join the tribe. Lex Luthor is against it for reasons which entirely make sense but which don’t count because it’s obvious that he sees Bray as a threat to his becoming the alpha male, while Amber is for it because she quite clearly wants Bray to tell her about this earth-thing he calls “Heavy Petting”, until the final scene where she does a face-heel-turn and decides to kick them out. Also, Lex Luthor forces unwanted smoochies on the two-tone-hair-girl from his own gang (Her hair is half red and half blue, so that we can keep her separate from Trudy. She also looks a bit like a girl I went to college, enough that I kept glancing up at the screen and saying “Hey, what do I know her from?”) in order to cement our belief that he’s a total douche.

• Cloey, the weirdly shell-shocked little girl who led Amber and whoever it was she started out with, let’s call him Shortround, to the rest of the children, spends this episode dangerously wandering off unattended to follow a cow into Loco territory. Someday, TV writers may realize that viewers can only stand so much of cute childlike characters who unthinkingly lead everyone into danger, like the kids who go playing in the zombie-filled wastelands in zombie movies, or the kids who sneak off to get a good look at the ghost and get captured, or Gilligan.
• Bray and Trudy get voted off the island. It’s Lost, it’s Survivor, it’s Mad Max, it’s all this and more!
• The frakking cars are still on fire. The Locos apparently all stick together and patrol the city in an orderly fashion, so who the frak is tending all these fires until they get there?
• Every time someone refers to Bray as the father of Trudy’s baby, Bray and Trudy look away. It’s obviously supposed to be a big surprise when we find out he’s not, so don’t spoil it for anyone.
• It’s not possible in TV for pregnancy to lead to anything but a sudden screaming birth at the worst moment possible, so you bet your sweet ass that Lex Luthor doesn’t even have time to extinguish her torch after voting her off the island that Trudy goes into labor
• Fun fact: In New Zealand, Macaroni and Cheese comes in a can.