H50 Ep: Pe'epe'e Kanaka

[the_other_sandy]

Only two episodes left this season, huh? I suspect they may be the last two I ever watch.

I'm kind of in a quandary here. I've never been shy about saying when I didn't like something about an episode, but there's a potential here for me to get really unpleasantly ranty, more so than anyone would find enjoyable to read. I also don't know if it's possible for me to properly articulate why this episode made me so angry. I think it just may be that the sheer number of things in this episode that pushed my buttons achieved critical mass and I'm overreacting. Let me start with the basics and see how far I get.

---

Nope, I didn't get far. You can't see it, but I've been writing and deleting and rewriting this entry for over an hour. I think I'm just going to have to let this one go.

---

So, umm...

Yay for TPTB sending Danny to PT instead of granting him a magical recovery during the off-week. Boo for the way the "banter" scenes between Steve and Danny have become so mean-spirited.

And you know, I mostly do like Grover, but they really need to stop having him participate in the action scenes. Chi McBride is just not up to it.

Sorry, everyone. There were many issues in this episode that deserved thoughtful and considerate deconstruction. There are many things to be said about the plot, the way Steve talked to Dawn, and the agenda TPTB had for this episode that they pushed so hard they didn't care the episode ran short enough to need two epilogues, including a monologue about fish. But they're not going to be said by me. I need to go read some fic. From another fandom.

Comments

[the-other-sandy.livejournal.com]

I hope I maybe could articulate some of what's been bothering you about it

I think my friend bookwurm nailed it in her comment when she said, "Then it turned into a jingoistic, anti-Islamic train wreck with a side of borderline-exploitation of wounded veterans."

As for the Patriot Act defending attack ad that made up the rest of the ep .... *sigh* it's just another of those examples of TPTB being too heavy-handed in their approach to any kind of sensitive topic

I think this episode had the potential to be really good, if it had been done as an episode of another show that had better writers. As it is, I think they wrote Steve's "America is the greatest country on earth" speeches first and then tried to construct an episode around them.

I thought the actress portraying Dawn did an exceptional job

As did I. I was very impressed with her, which ironically led to another problem I had with this episode. I hated the way Steve talked to Dawn. She was just as much a militant believer in the cause as anyone Steve would have met in Afghanistan, but because she was white and young and female, Steve talked to her like she'd just let her friends peer-pressure her into shoplifting. Threatening her with death or prison was never going to have an effect because that's what she wanted. Dying for the cause or going to prison (which to her was like becoming a POW) only made her a hero in her own mind, and yet Steve never managed to change gears.

Now I'm going back to searching for that x-men first class fic I've been craving because I've been on Marvel's superheroes like white on rice those past few weeks

I've been reading some Avengers and Captain America fic lately, but I'm in the middle of an enormously long, plotty Hobbit AU fic that I'm enjoying immensely.

[mangacat201.livejournal.com]

I wholeheartedly agree about the quote, couldn't have said it better. I think it's what chafes us most about these episodes - that they have the potential (and considering the talent on the show, they also have very much the means) to be exceptional. But the writer's room as always seem to be stuck on making a mess out of current, important, sensitive issues. I think I might be onto something with that lone intelligent and polit-savvy writer pitching these things and then the execs get their hands on it and turn it to pulp. It just feels that way every time they pick up an issue like that and then proceed to spend the whole episode showing that THEY DON'T GET IT. Ah well.

Also agreed about the way Steve handled the interrogation. I mean, he's an ex-Navy-Intel counter terrorist specialist who - as it has been alluded enough times - spend quite some time in the dirt, HE of all people should know how to do it. It's like he stepped foot on the island and then did a Never Ending Story (III?) where he loses an important memory every time he does something heroic. *sigh* Again, ah well.

I spend the first two weeks of April nose-deep in post-Winter-Soldier ficcage, but now I'm giving them time to write a few long-fics and not overload myself. And somehow I took a left turn to Inception and how the heck did that happen? I could never actually get into reading LotR/Hobbit fic, which is weird, because they're like the universe of all expandable and unchartered universes. Maybe because I really don't have a ship in there and tend to habitually bypass Gen for some reason.

[the-other-sandy.livejournal.com]

I never got into LOTR fic either. I can't even honestly say I'm into Hobbit fic. The story I'm reading now got recced in the Kili tag on Tumblr and I decided to look it over to see if it was any good, and yes, yes it was. It's also nearly 230,000 words long, so I made it into an e-book and stuck it on my Nook so I could read it on the go. There's no way I could sit in front of the computer for 230,000 words.

[mangacat201.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about getting myself an ebook reader, especially with all the easy ways to turn fic into those formats from AO3 and getting open source books from Gutenberg for example, but I'm still between that traditionalist attitude that *books* need to be paper and finding it difficult to navigate the different systems on offer and which one is best for price... how did you chose yours?

[the-other-sandy.livejournal.com]

I used to be a traditional paper book person too, but then I moved into a very small apartment and ran out of room for paper books. The only reason I got an e-reader in the first place was as a space-saving measure, but then it turned out that what I really liked were stories and the stories were the same no matter what I read them on. E-ink screens are actually pretty nice. Overall, I still prefer paper books, but my Nook has been great for both space-saving and for reading enormously long fics.

If you do get an e-reader and want to read fic on it, you should download Calibre (it's free) and the FanFictionDL and EpubMerge plug-ins. FanFictionDL does a much nicer job of creating e-books from fic (there's a major bug in AO3 when it comes to downloading fics that have illustrations, like big bang and reverse bang fics), and using FanFictionDL with EpubMerge allows you to download an entire series as one big fic with each story in the series as its own chapter in the table of contents. It's very cool.

My e-reader pretty old, so there were a lot fewer choices available when I bought it. Tablet e-readers hadn't come out yet, so e-ink was the only option, and the only brands where I live were Kobo, Nook, and Kindle.

I tried a Kobo at an electronics store and hated it. It felt cheap and the page turns were so slow I thought I'd hit the wrong button or something.

Between the Kindle and Nook, I chose the Nook because Amazon had been in the news several times for deleting books that people had paid for from their Kindles, usually "controversial" titles like gay fiction. As a librarian, that deeply offended me. Amazon is also pushier about getting you to buy more titles (their cheapest model is ad-supported, so you get ads pushed at you all the time) so I went with the Nook. I also chose the Nook because there's a brick-and-mortar Barnes & Noble near where I live, and the employees are all trained on it, so you can actually take your Nook there and they can help you if you can't figure out how to do something on it. Since it was my first e-reader, I liked that extra sense of security. That said, I know a lot of people who are perfectly happy with their Kindles, so YMMV.