gagglefrak - comic books, science fiction, faux profanity

Okay, so if you watched this week’s episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, odds are you want to talk about those painted doors. Because seriously, what the hell was up with that? And I have some ideas. But first, let’s run through the rest of the episode …

Using photos left behind by the Future Freedom Fighters, Sarah gets a lead on somebody who may be responsible for the creation of Skynet — a former Cyberdyne intern (Andy) who now sells cellphones. She dates him for a few days, and learns that he’s created “The Turk” — a primitive AI that mostly just plays chess. When she learns from Andy that The Turk has moods — that its choices vary from day to day for no logical reason, she realizes this is perhaps the first sign of Skynet-like self-awareness, and decides to act. In the end, instead of killing Andy, she burns down his house, thereby destroying The Turk. Continue Reading »

Previously on Terminator … an artificially intelligent computer from 2029 named Skynet wants to eradicate mankind. So it sends a cyborg assassin back in time to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, the not-yet mother of the human resistance leader. Her future son, John Connor, sends back a man named Kyle Reese to protect her, and he does, and then gets her pregnant with John. Ten years later, two more terminators from 2029 arrive, one programmed to protect John Connor and the other sent by Skynet to kill John Connor. The good one tells them that a Cyberdyne employee named Miles Dyson will create the first self-aware computer in August 1997, which will evolve into Skynet. So Sarah tries to kill Dyson, and can’t do it, but he dies anyway and blows up all of his AI research. Sarah and John and his pet terminator kill the bad morph-y terminator, the good terminator kills itself, and the future is safe.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles picks up the story in 1999 … Continue Reading »

“I didn’t rise from prisoner to prisoner with benefits to protector back to prisoner with benefits to Lord, just to have you come and muck it up.” - Spike to Angel

In issue #2 of “Angel: After the Fall”, Angel has to deal with the consequences of having just killed the son of Demon Lord Burge at the tail end of the first issue. Namely, he has to find his son, and warn him that the demon’s father might come gunning for him. What he finds is that Connor is more than capable of taking care of himself, as they both deal with the violent power vacuum created by Vampire Gunn’s killing of a demon lord (also in the first issue) — demons falling all over each other to vie for the top spot, putting humans at risk in the process.

As for Gunn, he seems to have a revenge bone to pick with his former employer. He’s holding it against Angel for leaving him on his own at the Big Showdown, which resulted in him being dragged off by vampires and turned into one. Yet he seems to think that even as a vampire without a soul, he is more of a Good Guy than Angel who has one, and has some plan we don’t know about yet to take all the demons down. In the meantime, he takes out his frustrations on Betta George — a giant floating telepathic fish (a character introduced in Lynch’s “Spike: Asylum” series). Continue Reading »

“It’s too dangerous! We can ski down these crazy Alps in the morning, but till then, television’s Tina Fey … we must find a way to keep warm.” - Willow to Tina Fey

Issue #10 is an extra long stand-alone story penned by Whedon himself, titled “Anywhere But Here”. The focus has shifted away from Faith and Giles, and back to the core players. Buffy and Willow are off on a mission to enlist the aid of a powerful demon against the threat of Twilight, while Xander and Dawn have some quiet time back at the castle. The overall theme, as reiterated over and over by Sephrilian — a big wormy-looking Tichajt demon with huge teeth, arms, and four faces, who exists in some kind of warped time/space bubble — is that humans are big fat liars who hide things even from the ones they’re most close to. And the Scooby Gang is no exception.

Willow learns that Buffy and the Slayerettes robbed a Swiss bank to acquire the funds they currently use to keep the world safe from demons, which Willow considers the “first domino” in the New Initiative War. Buffy learns that Willow had sex with a mermaid. Xander learns that Dawn did not actually have sex with her thricewise ex-boyfriend, but rather with his roommate — a broody, cigarette-smoking, guitar-playing “bad boy” — and that this is why she was giant-ized. We see a future glimpse of Buffy beaten and bruised, and are told that somebody close to her will betray her. Continue Reading »