beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

Had a sleep, woke up still annoyed about how the Frost story played out.
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I stopped with two episodes left in the season, so, shall see how it ends.

I have been watching the Flash
(yes I know I attempted to rage quit. I'm never any good at that. i watched more.)

Snow and Frost became two people in two bodies, and now Frost turned herself in and pled guilty to the crimes Frost actually committed back when.

... except that's not the story I've seen in what they've shown us? ( Read more... )

Also I keep thinking about other 'verses and the similar but not quite same things happened there. Jack O'Neill, for instance. Are he and his clone equally legally liable for things he did before he was cloned? Or is the clone an entirely new legal entity?

Or the two Rikers. Or that time he got cloned and killed his other self. Or... lots of SF scenarios that all play different when you throw in 'but what if a crime before they were copied' (or, but what if murdering his clone is still murder, like on DS9)

In our world it isn't going to come up... except as a specific reading on corporate malfeasance I guess... but cloning isn't here yet and memory duplication certainly isn't.

But in the SF worlds it's just... it seems like a dangerous precedent. Like, you could do this on purpose. Make a copy, have the copy plead guilty, go about your merry.


... make the copy, plead guilty on the copy's behalf, do a quick switch and go about your merry...

there just seem like a lot of angles where either outcome. both or neither guilty, has huge and unfortunate repercussions.



I have to say, aside from the legal fascinations of the setup, I was very surprised that the story arrived at 'but she actually did the crimes so the law says she should go to prison'. I mean, every other character was on team 'but you've changed', and one of them was straight up saying prison is hell that doesnt make you a better person, so the story seemed very... well honestly it seemed as it has since season one, where Joe asked what's the difference between us and them, and Barry said we're the good guys. Being a good guy has been their reason for doing any and everything, and it being somehow secretly okay. And that was frustrating! I spent the whole episode in my head being all 'but she did it' and was wildly surpised when Frost and the story apparently agreed with me.

... I expect the story will depict keeping her in prison as Wrong somehow, and get her out again, but at least they said it once?



So this bit of the story was interesting, but I am not hopeful for the show retaining my interest.

I dreamed that Eobard Thawne flew a spaceship up to defend against an invading Really Big spaceship, which was full of undead.

And then he stayed up there for six thousand years.

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Angry at The Flash. My feelings about the whole season and show changed when they wrote Nora making that choice in Legacy. Angry and frustrated now.

how am I liking The Flash season 5?
I just watched through Godspeed
and it turns out it is 0130 in the morning.

soooo
fair to say it has my full attention.


... if I could pick which characters to be obsessed with life would be so much simpler...




I will have more thoughts at some length, but not until actual after sleeping morning.


is good so far though.

I have watched the first five episodes of Flash season 5.
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Flash remains fun and I'm having fun watching.



Also my delivery food arrived and I have a week of food and many nice eats to choose from again. ... I ran out a bit yesterday but only in terms of variety, only freezer food left, but many of it.
I somehow managed to order 20 loo rolls though. So. That will be sufficient for some time. And I need to find somewhere to store quite a few of them...

I am rewatching The Flash season 1 and it is much less interesting now I am not interested in Reverse Flash.

I mean, I used to think there was a whole complex story going on there, and the more we see of him the more he's just a jerk who likes stabbing people, so, you know, that's... that's boring.

I wanted to know how changing his entire body changed him, but we're not getting that answer, or possibly the answer is it didn't. I wondered if he had any memories transferred, but that's basically a nope. I had questions about the whole be careful who you pretend to be, because he fit into Wells' life for fourteen years, and that seems like an interesting thing. I thought he might have motives, like, actual sense making ones, at some point. I thought there might be feelings and hints at depth going on, but on rewatch he's less interesting than he was in my head.

It's Earth X that broke things. There's no ambiguity left, he's just ... that.

And it doesn't even make sense, because you have to fit together a guy who declared he hated every minute at STAR labs with a guy who had absolute power and used it to be at STAR labs. And it's possible neither of them have memories of STAR labs anyways.

Obviously fanfic is a thing and I can wander off with the interesting person I made up and keep playing with him, but canon is feeling much more four color two dimensional this time around, and I am not into it.

Plus that interesting brain person shares too many parts with the Earth X guy and funnily enough that is offputting. Don't want to even slightly appear to like that guy. No.



So then I'm left trying to file the serial numbers off the time traveller story in my head, the one where everyone has a good reason and a protect/preserve plan.

Except the problem with that is it all comes down to what is even possible. Like, in the made up physics of the made up world. You have to decide who even can change things, what they can change, whether it even works. You make up laws of the universe that decide if one side can even win.

And most stories come down to : Time Travel, Don't Do It
which is a valid position, since we're sitting here without the ability to time travel, so we're really talking about, like, that first episode of DS9 where he's trying to explain linear time and they're pointing out he's stuck in that one moment? So time travel stories are about that one moment, and what we'd do to go back and do it different, but since we can't go back, they're going to suggest healthy alternatives, like actually coping with grief and moving on.

Which is why I'm interested in the story of the guy from the future, because we're in general agreement we can in fact change the future from here. For him it's a story about being stuck in the past, but for everyone around him it's a story with infinite possibilities. So what is it he's trying to avert? Why did he feel the need to intervene? We can pick such a stack of reasons right now, I mean it's easy to go post apocalyptic or cyberpunk or all sorts. The idea that you have to go back because there is no forwards, that's, like, a logical consequence of... so many warnings lately. So the time traveller is just like a physical warning?

And we'd want him to use the technology of the future to come up with easy answers and fix everything like whoosh, but he'd be here to point out there's a bunch of tech already, and we aren't using it.

What kind of interval is most interesting? Like, do we send someone back to when they were a young man, or when their parents were? Does it make it more interesting if there's that connection?

If it's a superhero story it's about the power of one man to make a difference. By punching. Obviously I like that enough to watch, like, many shows on this theme, but it's frustrating too?

How about the power of one woman to make a difference by team building and consensus making?

And the DCTV shows are sketching out an arc of history that goes from one guy having a secret prison and handing people over to Argus to a future where Argus runs the country or possibly world with secret prisons for pretty much everyone. Good arc, but, now fix it.

And if you set the laws of time travel in a Tragedy direction, you get a time traveller causing everything they wanted to avert, but that is so boring. I mean, yeah, play with cause and effect, but if all you do is set up the problem, I am bored, it is boring, that isn't very clever, there's just... problem everywhere. Fix it! Show how! Do things that work!

Genre conventions and logic seem to pull in opposite directions.

But people watch the genre conventions?

So presumably think they're interesting enough.



I like the idea of a story about tragedy time traveller from the future who is stuck in the story of Death and the Man With the Very Fast Horse, where the more he tries to get away from his fate the faster he goes towards it... but that's setting up the problem. That isn't the ending.

If the ending is he turns out to be a very bad man and deserved it all after all then I'm just bored and annoyed.



So I'm contemplating how to make a Good Bits Version of the time travel epics in my head, but, it depends so much on how you set up the physics, it's basically a big old cheat. Which is frustrating, really. Yet that thing where you're writing all the characters at once and decide everything they can and cannot do and the success thereof is, you know, also the exact same kind of cheat. So. *shrugs*



So my rewatch is frustrating and I should probably write.

Soooo... *big sigh*

This was weird because I like the solution they stated out loud, but I didn't like pretty much any of the steps they took to get there, and don't feel like their ending matched their statement.

Two episodes though, so, start with
Snart.
And heist movies.

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HR and Savitar and The End.

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Very busy last episodes, some clever bits but some bits I found confusing all year.
I'm going to find bits to like but it takes more work than I'd like.
I hope they simplify next year and have the heroes regularly do heroics.

HR and Tracy
Joe and Cecile
and Barry finally figures it out.

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This season is telling a story about dark sides and disconnection but without putting the capacity for choice where it belongs, and it's leaving me feeling like I have to take the story apart and jiggle it before it's any good at all.

Which is annoying.

Right now I'm looking forwards to this season being over and next season doing something different.

Abra Kadabra shows up yet somehow it's still all about Savitar.
I think I'd be bored of that even if I didn't know the ending.
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I'm not liking several layers of what they're doing.
At the moment I'm looking forwards to the end of the season.

Barry goes into the speed force to get Wally out.
Aka yet another not-Snart, why do they do this to us?

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Lots of interesting story parts. I'm annoyed at Barry, not the writers.

... though Barry doing hero stuff again would be quite nice too.

Why is Barry having a big argument about killing Grodd
and nobody is mentioning
Al Rothstein, Eddie Slick and Griffin Grey.

Were there others? I honestly can't remember right now.

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I am also bored by mind control, so that's a blah.

But Grodd stories, especially one where the first half had Barry win by doing a Reverse Flash, are about how they're both shaped by how they were raised, and what that man Grodd calls father gave them. So there's three of Wells in this story, the two live bodies and the influence of the murderer. Which is cool. Barry deciding whether or not to kill is absolutely a story to explore with this kind of comparison.

But it really needs to remember he already did.