Thoughts of a Dying Alias

So I’m watching Alias at the moment. It’s taken me a good few weeks to get to the end of Season 2, but I’ve made it at last. I know it was out years ago, but I’ve just seen it, so it’s new to me.

Before I sit down to watch Alias, I have to put myself in the right mindset. My disbelief has to be not only suspended, but chained up and hung from a steel cable to ensure no chance of escape. The show’s like a patchwork quilt, this huge mass of incongruous and seemingly unrelated bits that they’re trying to jam together into something workable. You have your lipstick transmitters and your bareknuckle kickboxing; your college exams and your CIA wetwork missions; your touching family moments and your brutal slayings. It’s almost like they tried to appeal to everyone by sticking in one scene from every show ever made, with the characters’ names changed so there’s some kind of continuity.

Almost, but not quite. The show’s saving grace is that it seems somehow aware of this. It knows full well that it’s doing something just for dramatic effect, or just to show the ridiculous amount of combat training that Jennifer Garner’s done. It knows that the only reason she has short blue hair in this scene (and only this scene) is because it makes her look fucking hot in the matching blue plastic minidress she’s wearing. Somehow, with a wink and a nudge, it manages to pull it off, somehow turning the cheesiness into entertainment rather than annoyance.

It reminds me of, if nothing else, Moonraker-era Bond. You know, with the cars that turn into submarines and the jetpacks and the giant space stations. It’s the same sort of thing – cheesy scifi-cum-espionage (I think I’m supposed to call it spy-fi) that just about manages to get away with it.

And even though it does occasionally end up with too much sci- and not enough spy- to go with its -fi, it does have some really great moments. The relationship between Syndney and her parents is great, as is her friendship with Will and Francie (before that all goes funny in S2 anyway). Marshal is also a brilliant character, if a little too stereotypical – not that that’s out of place in this show. I can’t stand Vaughn, but that’s just because he’s a French smeghead and there’s not a lot he can do about that, so I’ll let him off.

But. And it’s a big but, so I’m going to take a run-up.

…

But. What the fuck, Abrams!? Why do you insist on doing this crazy shit!? End of series 2, everything’s fine – we’ve had the Big Battle with “Francie” that we’ve seen coming for the last ten episodes, and while it wasn’t as epic as I’d've liked (too much throwing each other through glass, too little actual fighting) it was still good. But now it’s two years in the future for no reason? Why do you do these things!?

Not that this utter ridiculousness is going to keep me from watching the show – it’s still got plenty of value yet. You can tell when it’s gone too far when it’s not readily obvious what’s keeping you watching the show, and I’m not there yet. But this is seriously pushing it, man. This is House territory. Here be dragons.

Besides being a quite entertaining way to spend 45 minutes, Alias is also a useful vehicle for thinking about Lost. As we all know, Abrams’ latest show is a hundred kinds of fucked up. Polar bears, visions, giant black men with Bible sticks… it’s got it all. “We’ve gotta go back!” But you can really see the evolution of this kind of thing in Alias. You’ve got the Rimbaldi stuff for the utterly incongruous plot feature that nobody’s quite sure about – what the hell has a 16th century soothsayer-cum-inventor, a la Da Vinci, got to do with a show about today’s CIA? – of which Lost has far too many to list. You’ve got the troubled familial relationships that both shows explore in depth. You’ve got the shameless retconning.

I was going to say that Lost is Abrams now thinking “Okay, so this sort of thing worked pretty well in Alias, but how far can we push this before people go insane?” – but really, this whole two-year gap thing is just as crazy as any shit Lost ever pulled, if not moreso. I think I’ll have more to say once I’ve finished season 3 of Alias, but for now – good god.

Mr Stephen Fry

As a follow-on from the previous post: I always remember this quote of Stephen Fry’s on the sacking of Angus:

“Greasy, miserable, British and pathetic.”

It sums up my feelings about this sort of thing perfectly. Leave them alone, already.

Of Mosley and the NSDAP

This is, of course, the news that Max Mosley is a fiend and a cad.

Dylan Moran put it best (at about 5:30) when he said “Ohh, the shame of it! How could he!? How absolutely dreadful! I’d never do that! I’ve never had the chance, but I would never ever do that!”

I’ll come back to the Nazi connotations in a moment, but first let’s just assume that he really was doing something absolutely dreadful. So what?

Whatever took place in this hotel room happened between a group of consenting adults. Who cares what they got up to? I really don’t think that public interest is a decent defence here, because when are anyone’s consensual sexual habits in the public interest? A man might enjoy being stood on, being shat on, weeing in people’s faces – it’s nobody’s business but his own and the person he’s doing it to. If the News of the World win this case, it’s going to be a sad, sad day for British privacy law.

Secondly, Nazism. I think there’s a lot of mileage in Nazism as a fetish. The Nazis stood for industry, martial power, overwhelming force, skilled engineering and expert piloting. A finer set of sexual metaphors would be hard to find. Rule 34 dictates that there’s a fetish for everything else, so why not Nazism? I can think of worse things to fetishise – it’s not like the Nazis are a hot issue some sixty years after the end of the war. Why is having a fetish for being a prisoner (from which it’s not much of a stretch to prisoner of war, and who’s the first military that’d spring to the mind of someone of his generation?) so abhorrent that not only is it in the public interest (which I’ll touch on in a bit) but that organisations the world over felt the need to force him to resign?

Which is another thing that annoys my tits off. Something bad happens, some high-powered person has to resign. How the arseface does that work? The killing of Jean Charles De Menezes is a good example – I recall how there was tabloid speculation that Ian Blair, of all people, was going to resign! Ridiculous given that he had absolutely nothing to do with the shooting, regardless of the outcome. Or when Angus Deayton was sacked after an incident similar to Mosley’s. The only thing he was presenting at the time was Have I Got News For You. I could understand if he was a kids’ TV presenter, because that’s a bad message for children – but HIGNfY is a very adult show, hosted by adults and watched by adults. Sacking him for something he did in the privacy of a hotel room is just idiotic. It’s just like Dylan says; people are so quick to jump on the abuse train to get as far away from the wrongdoer as they can.

And finally, even if we accept that Mosley did have a Nazi-fetishist romp and even if we also accept that that’s a very bad thing and that he should lose his job over it: where exactly do you draw the line? There’s nothing actually illegal about having sex with Nazi intonations, so that can’t be it. So which fetishes are allowed and which aren’t? Is there a list you’re given when you become a public figure? Scat is allowed, but only if you’re the one doing the shitting? Bondage is allowed, but only when the ropes are tied to your hands and the implements are improvised, rather than purpose-bought? Clearly, this way lies madness.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it says more bad things about the timbre of the critics’ sex lives than it ever could about Max Mosley.

I’ve just written six hundred words, when really what I should be saying is this:

Shut the fuck up about people in the public eye doing things they shouldn’t. They can do what they like as long as it’s private, consensual and legal.

Whaaaaat

Yes, I’ve given in and started a blog. Shameful, I know.

The idea is that I need to start writing again and since I’m always thinking “Wow, that’d be ace to write about!”, a blog is a good medium. I can fire something out whenever the mood strikes me, which could be multiple times a day or once a year – who knows?

My intention is to perhaps put some CMUD tippery on here as well in the future, but it’s mostly going to be things in the news, things that’ve happened at work (with the names removed), things I’ve seen or done, things that’re happening in the games I’m playing. Hopefully nothing too shocking.

We’ll see how it goes.