Shark Puppet

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Channel Chaser! With all the buzz going around this week about trailers and reveals for the upcoming Star Wars: Episode VII, I figured today might be a good time to address one of Disney’s more current forays into the famous sci-fi franchise: the new, animated series Star Wars: Rebels.

Visually very similar to the past series The Clone Wars, Rebels takes place somewhere between the prequel trilogy and the original movies, with the relatively new Galactic Empire tightening its grip on the galaxy. The story begins on the planet Lothal, an Imperial stronghold, where orphan Ezra Bridger uses his street smarts to make life a pain for the local stromtroopers and officials. Not that it’s really too hard to do–the Imperials in the show are about as bright and accurate as their live-action counterparts.

Through a series of complicated events, Ezra discovers that there are others fighting the Empire like him, albeit in bigger ways: namely, the five-member crew of a renegade starship called the Ghost. These rebels include ace pilot Hera, explosives and graffiti expert Sabine, cranky astromech droid Chopper, the Wookie-like Zeb, and former Jedi turned criminal Kanan Jarrus. Inducted into the Ghost family, Ezra explores the galaxy while battling the Empire’s tyranny wherever it presents itself, eventually discovering that he has the Force skills needed to possibly become a Jedi himself one day.

When I first heard about the series, my initial reaction was mixed. Sure, it sounded like an intriguing premise, and I do love Star Wars, but it was the Disney label that I just couldn’t get over. I mean, it’s supposed to be a kids’ show, right? How great can it be? I was not at all excited about the prospect of my treasured childhood memories being watered down for the sake of today’s P.C. programming standards.

That said, I have been known to be wrong on occasion, and I’m happy to admit that this was one of those times. The hour-long pilot movie was quite promising, if a bit kid-oriented, and the following episodes explored a few interesting ideas such as the origins of familiar Imperial tech like the TIE fighter and the Empire’s brutal, if still off-screen, methods of oppression. It wasn’t until the last few weeks that I really got pulled into the show, with installments like Ezra’s undercover infiltration of the Imperial Academy and an exciting two-parter where the rebels attempt to help an Imperial deserter escape custody.

Putting the slowly improving storyline aside, I’ve also become more and more interested in the characters as well. I find Ezra and Kanan’s relationship to be the most interesting, of course, due to the whole padawan and teacher dynamic they have going on, but it surprises me how much dark subtext exists in their backgrounds for a kids’ cartoon. For Ezra, it’s the loss of his family. For Kanan, it’s the implied horrors he witnessed with the extermination of the Jedi that even now make him resistant to wielding his lightsaber in public. The Empire apparently wiped out Zeb’s whole race, too, making him the last of his kind in the galaxy.

It’s pretty heavy stuff, right? But never fear: Rebels has more family-friendly entertainment in spades, from the somewhat-flirty relationship between Ezra and Sabine to Hera’s motherly role and Ezra, Zeb, and Chopper’s constant bickering, pranks, and antagonism. I’m actually very impressed by how well Disney managed to capture the essence of Star Wars with this series, in that it’s light and fun if you don’t want to think too much about it, and really deep and meaningful if that’s more your thing.

There have also been some vague hints at the directions the show could take so far, all of which could be very cool. Ezra’s lack of control over his Force powers and his pent-up anger make him a possible candidate for going Dark Side at some point, as foreshadowed when he loses his temper and sends a massive space monster on a rampage through Imperial forces. Some familiar faces have shown up in the form of rebel droids C-3PO and R2-D2, and one wonders if more could follow in the coming episodes. And while there’s been nothing to support this so far, it’s a safe bet that the Ghost crew will come to play an important role in the rise of the Rebel Alliance, some of whose future members we have already seen.

Of course, no great series can survive without some good villains, and this is one point where Rebels has not quite delivered to my satisfaction as of yet. Instead of Darth Vader, who must be out taking care of some other really important evil business while all this stuff is going on, we get the Inquisitor, a demonic-looking alien warrior who uses the Force and looks cool doing it with an awesome double-bladed lightsaber. I’m assuming due to his title and his comments thus far that his job is to hunt down possible Jedi for the Empire, but he just doesn’t seem like that much of a threat, what with getting beaten up by the main cast all the time. He’s clearly interested in recruiting Ezra for the Empire, though, so that could be something.

There’s also Agent Kallus, the stereotypical bumbling bad guy who always lets the heroes slip through his fingers and then shakes his fist, yelling, “I’ll get you next time!” It has been hinted, however, that he was responsible for the massacre of Zeb’s people, and the two share an intense hatred, so it’s nice to at least see some kind of emotional connection between the two sides. Hopefully we’ll see more of this in the coming episodes.

My Rating: 3/5

So far, Star Wars: Rebels has far surpassed my admittedly low expectations and proved itself, in its finest moments, to be a truly enthralling story and a great addition to the Star Wars universe. Whether it can keep this up, however, is another story. I’ll be very interested to see how the show develops the many plot threads it has laid out. If they do it as well as they already have, we could have a new Teen Titans-level animated series on our hands. If you’re a diehard fan, you might like it. For families just looking to get into the universe, you’ll definitely like it. Do yourself a favor and check it out before it makes the jump to light-speed.

Channel Chaser is written by Kyle Robertson. You can check out more of his work on his website. Check back every Friday for new articles.

Welcome back to Channel Chaser! As I was looking back in my massive catalogue of watched TV shows for a review to do this week, I happened to notice in my daily Netflix surfing that the most recent season of the FX series It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has finally been uploaded. I was at first very happy, and then immediately flabbergasted about how I could have overlooked on of my very favorite shows in this column for so long.

To start with, the background: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia–or It’s Always Sunny or just Sunny for short among diehard fans–is a sitcom-style show that follows the lives of “The Gang”, a group of five adults who run a perpetually unprofitable dive bar called Paddy’s Pub off of South Street in Philadelphia. True to the name, almost all of the episodes take place either in the pub or in different areas around the city. This may not mean much to most people, but as a longtime resident of Philly, the familiar setting really helps to ground the stories for me in very believable terms, especially when the characters reference places, events, and sports teams in the area.

I said Sunny was a sitcom, and it basically is, although perhaps “black comedy” would be a more accurate description. The show shares a lot of qualities with Seinfeld, possibly the forerunner of all modern sitcoms, in that it is essentially a “show about nothing”: that is, it’s about relatively unimportant occurrences in the humdrum, everyday lives of the characters that directly mirror things that happen to most real people every day, albeit with greatly inflated impact and consequences. Episodes frequently center on the members of The Gang discussing a controversial current topic, from guns to gay marriage to religion, and eventually getting into tremendous arguments over their vastly differing points of view.

In fact, the fan-coined descriptor “It’s like Seinfeld on crack” was eventually adopted by FX as the show’s official tagline. And for good reason: while Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer may have been a bit odd, self-interested, and tasteless at times, the crowd of Sunny takes these less-than-desirable qualities and ratchets them up to an eleven on the scale. The Gang consists of Dennis Reynolds, an incredibly vain and sociopathic man; his sister Dee Reynolds, who is snobby and superficial; Ronald McDonald, better known as Mac, outwardly a tough-guy “man of action” but inwardly a cringing, child-like coward; Charlie Kelly, a filthy, illiterate slob; and Frank Reynolds, father of Dennis and Dee (and possibly Charlie, too) and a scheming con-artist. I’m honestly not sure if The Gang or the Bluth family from Arrested Development should win the title for most dysfunctional cast.

As you would expect from such a motley crew, The Gang’s opinions on the various contemporary issues they are confronted with range from sadly misinformed to horrendously prejudiced. While they always claim to have a unified front, any one of them is willing at any time to stab one or more of their fellow Gang members in the back if it means they will come out on top, and they are all perfectly okay with performing degrading public acts of humiliation just to get what they want. Sunny approaches all these topics with a no-holds-barred, profanity-charged political incorrectness that makes you gasp, laugh, and cringe all at the same time. The supporting cast compliments this idea very well, with recurring characters like Carmen the transsexual, former priest-turned-homeless-drug dealer Matthew “Rickety Cricket” Mara, and the shockingly open actress Artemis DuBois.

The humor in the show is always edgy and usually very tongue-in-cheek as well, and the style of the series chips in to support this, from the incongruously cheery background music to the incredibly blunt and uncreative episode titles such as “Who Pooped the Bed?” and “Mac Bangs Dennis’s Mom”. Direct contradiction between what the characters say and what they do, and frequently even between what they say at one point in an episode and another, also supplements this feeling of confusion and dysfunction.

While Sunny does almost always focus on current affairs in its choice of topics, some of my favorite episodes are ones in which The Gang members get to show off their individual talents–or the lack thereof–in creative endeavors mostly designed to relieve their boredom when they should be working. These include two home-made sequels to the Mel Gibson Lethal Weapon franchise, featuring Mac in questionable blackface, an in-house drinking game involving public humiliation, emotional battery, and physical harm, and a staged musical titled “The Nightman Cometh,” which may or may not be based on Charlie’s repressed memories of being molested as a child.

It’s also worth noting that the actors involved in the show use real life situations to parallel and further relationships in the show. For example, despite their great animosity and antagonism toward each other on-screen, Kaitlin Olson (Dee) and Rob McElhenney (Mac) are actually married. So are Charlie Day (Charlie) and Mary Elizabeth Ellis, who plays the still-unnamed Waitress. In the show, Charlie is obsessively in love with the Waitress and stalks her constantly while she insists that she has no interest in him and that she will never, ever, go out with him.

But the most intriguing and enticing thing about Sunny for me is that, in spite of all of this, at the end of the day, the characters just don’t care. Even though their plans almost always fail miserably and they admittedly can’t stand each other most of the time, there’s just something fascinating about a group of such dysfunctional people who at the end of every episode can shake it off and say, “It’s okay, screw it. Let’s just go get drunk.” In the end, The Gang always has each other, and while nobody on the outside may understand their convoluted–and probably unhealthy–relationship dynamic, it’s strangely and perversely uplifting to know that they’ll just be back at it in the next episode like nothing has happened.

My Rating: 4/5

While its subject matter can frequently be offensive and its humor is often rude and crude, the uncensored feel and pure anarchic energy of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, combined with great character performances of its all-star cast (especially Danny DeVito–did I mention he’s in this show?) make it one you pretty much have to try at least once. Now going on ten seasons, Sunny is still going strong and shows no signs of slowing down. I know I speak for a lot of fans when I say that it will be a dark day in Philadelphia when no one gets the reference, “Hey, want to go down to Paddy’s?”

Channel Chaser is written by Kyle Robertson. You can check out more of his work on his website. Check back every Friday for new articles.

Welcome back to another edition of Channel Chaser! This week, I’ve decided that it is long overdue that I throw my hat into the ring on the current debate surrounding one of my favorite TV shows, the British sci-fi series Doctor Who.

With the show’s eighth season coming to a close, fans are more polarized than ever before over a number of different issues: from the characters, to the writing, to the show’s overall tone and direction…you name it, and it’s probably up in the air. This is kind of inevitable, given that Doctor Who is one of those rare long-running shows that changes its entire cast on a regular basis, leading to all kinds of uncertainty and stress as new actors try to mesh with each other and make the series their own, but it seems that Peter Capaldi’s introduction as the Twelfth Doctor has sparked the most intense round of argument yet.

As I see it, the detractors of this past season are divided mainly into three camps: people who don’t like the new Doctor, people who don’t like Danny Pink, and people who just don’t like the direction the show is heading in. I’ll address concerns about the Doctor first, because that seems to be the issue with the smallest amount of debate.

I’ll admit it: I really didn’t like Peter Capaldi at first. I respected how the show-runners were trying to shake things up by introducing a character so vastly different from the Doctor’s more recent incarnations, but I was so pained by the departure of Matt Smith–my favorite Doctor, in case you hadn’t figured that out by now–that for a while I really didn’t think I could give Capaldi a chance. It didn’t help that his lead-in episodes “Deep Breath” and “Into the Dalek” were nothing special. But then I saw “Listen”: a masterpiece of an episode that convinced me that Doctor Who still had what it took to be a great show. It had everything: action, mystery, suspense, and some serious character development for both the Doctor and companion Clara Oswald.

Sure, there have been some other not-so-great episodes like “In the Forest of the Night”, but that’s the same as in every series of Doctor Who. The first season with a new Doctor is always a challenge for the fans, and I feel that people are overreacting to it even more than usual because the Doctor is no longer the goofy, spastic, and loveable chatterbox that he’s been for years now.

I really believe that the writers were using this season to take Doctor Who back to its roots and remind everyone that while he may have good intentions, the Doctor is not human. He may have developed an understanding and compassion for humans over time, but at the end of the day, there are a lot of things about us that he can’t figure out. It also kind of goes with the idea that a consequence of his whole new regeneration cycle–Smith’s Eleventh was technically supposed to be the last–all the progress he has made as a character is erased and he sort of has to start back at square one in terms of personal development. It’s actually a smart move because if they left him as he’s been for the last few years, where would the show go from there?

My last word on this is that, to steal a quote from The Dark Knight, Peter Capaldi may not be the Doctor we–or anyone in his fictional universe, for that matter–need right now, but he’s the Doctor we deserve. When you get too complacent with such a fundamentally alien character, as Clara did with the Eleventh Doctor, you’re guaranteed to get burned at some point. That aside, I find Capaldi’s dry, quiet sense of humor and reserved personality a refreshing dose of realism on a show that frequently gets carried away with its own nonsense.

Honestly, this season might be more about Clara than about the Doctor. The long-running companion has developed in leaps and bounds this series, something that is long overdue since her default cheerfully bossy attitude got really old in season seven. It’s all the more meaningful since the writers haven’t been making it easy for her. I really, really want to like Danny Pink…but I just can’t. Compared to similar characters in past seasons, he’s gotten virtually no screen time and no meaningful development.

It might have helped if Danny actually had the chance to get in the TARDIS and travel somewhere with the Doctor and Clara, but the writers seemed intent on avoiding it for some reason. Many opportunities that could have opened Danny’s mind a bit and made him a more likeable and relatable character were ignored or shut down, to the point where I think that his “death” in “Dark Water” is probably the best thing that could have happened to him. As it is, I feel that Danny was criminally neglected by the show’s overarching story, and I really can’t understand what Clara sees in him without more evidence than we’ve been shown so far.

In terms of the writing overall, one thing I am excited about is the return of the Master. Not that it was surprising, though: I and pretty much everyone else had already figured it out. The big twist reveal of Missy’s identity was overall kind of disappointing, especially since she’s working with the Cybermen now. I liked it a lot better when the Master was sort of a lone wolf, and Cybermen aren’t known for being great villains, so I’m not sure how it’ll play out. I am excited, however, to see the Doctor’s greatest nemesis back in action, and Michelle Gomez has been playing the new “Mistress” version to creepy, obsessive perfection so far.

I’m even more excited with the possibilities it opens up for the series proper. So Time Lords can regenerate into Time Ladies? This opens up a new level of interaction between the Doctor and the Master, as well as a new uncertainty about the Doctor’s future. Is this a subtle hint that, one day soon, we’ll have the first woman Doctor? I feel that it’s a move whose time has come, for a lot of reasons.

I’ll admit the writing for this series hasn’t been the best–episodes that could have been great like “Dark Water”, “Mummy on the Orient Express”, and “Kill the Moon” were just fair and seemed like missed opportunities. But I feel that people are being a bit too harsh in their judgments so early on in Peter Capaldi’s career. He is a good and potentially great Doctor plagued by bad writing–bad in that the writers just haven’t figured out what to do with him yet apparently. Can he be silly, like in “Robot of Sherwood”, or do they want him serious and contemplative like in “Listen”?

Oh, and then there’s that whole thing about Gallifrey not being destroyed and lost somewhere in time and space. Are we ever going to talk about that again? Steven Moffat, quit slow-rolling it and own up to Day of the Doctor, for crying out loud. Is the reappearance of the Master a hint that this may be coming? Here’s hoping.

One thing’s for sure: Moffat and the Doctor Who crew are intent on using Capaldi’s Doctor and this new series to shake veteran audiences out of their comfort zones and make them think again. Controversial? Yes. Jarring? Definitely. But how will it stack up in the years to come? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Channel Chaser is written by Kyle Robertson. You can check out more of his work on his website. Check back every Friday for new articles.