on a whim, i recently watched the 1990 film Total Recall, which i had never seen before but was aware of culturally and especially as the source of the name of katya's webseries "total rucall" and i wasn't sure if you'd seen it? but your recent posts on fury road made me think a lot of things about it. it's shockingly revolutionary in a lot of ways. the band of heroes is made up of sex workers and mutants (the film's verbiage) with visible body and facial differences.
oh INteresting.... ty friend im gonna look this up <3
would love to hear your complicated feelings on the michael/sanders scene in context!
okay so this is messy because my thoughts are still a little all over the place, but the issues i had were specifically with the new power reveal, and they were basically 1) the way they've handled the pod squad gaining new abilities, and 2) the decision to give michael in particular this ability and backstory
i wish the reasoning was more nuanced and meaningful but a lot of it is just "i don't vibe with this" and "i think it's dumb" lmao
so i'm starting to get less and less impressed with how they're rolling out this "aliens can have more than one skill" idea. sometimes the concept comes across as Very Sexy but the execution less so.
i wanted to actually see them learning these new skills. i wanted to see them tutoring each other and practicing and doing stuff wrong and getting frustrated and feeling weird trying to learn powers that are different from the ones that have been a part of them for their whole lives. but isobel's telekinesis was really the only new skill that got any screen time, and i think michael was only sort of grudgingly there for one scene of it. healing hasn't been mentioned (to my recollection?), and mindscape practice has been mostly off-screen and it seemed more about deflection in case they were pulled into jones's mindscape and less about learning to influence people.
and now it's starting to feel like we're just sort of rolling out new full-fledged abilities left and right. like, there are really only three or so, but it feels like oprah is behind the scenes going YOU GET A POWER AND YOU GET A POWER and doesn't feel as organic as i'd like it to feel. and at least reading auras and telepathy have mindscape vibes and feel like natural extensions of that power. but why is firebending now a whole new subset of powers? what are the limits of these alien abilities? how many more undiscovered powers are there?
and that's not even mentioning the proficiency with swords. that feels like a decently unique kind of weapon to fight with, but it doesn't require any practice. we just dig that sucker up and the spirit of mom says "fuck 'em up, girlie." who cares if jones has been fighting with it for decades (centuries? i'm unclear on the length of this guy's life lol). he's not good enough to beat a really motivated novice.
anyway!
now we're saying that michael has secretly been able to jump into heads and control people for ten years but he doesn't use the power because he's terrified that it makes him evil and his siblings will be disgusted with him. and despite the fact that he hasn't practiced this power in ten years, a large part of the "beat the bad guy" plan hinges on his being able to overpower jones's control of the sheriff, meaning that the incident at eighteen isn't being looked at as a fluke when a new power manifests. we're just assuming michael has this fully developed mind control ability lying dormant in his brain. we lay out that michael did this thing, redefined his whole life by this new trauma, and, after a quick pep talk with his pseudo-dad, has processed his fears of his inherent evil enough to confess to his siblings and subject himself to using the power. all in like six minutes of screen time.
and his siblings are entirely unaffected by this. they're not like... what??? you lied about a secret power for years??? they're just like [PSA voice, mentor putting a hand on mentee's shoulder] you could never be bad, michael. we love you.
and then he DOESN'T EVEN DO IT. he just hops into the mindscape like anyone else could've done and says "pls don't shoot my friends :(" and the sheriff says okay and stops "letting" jones control her.
why was this a good way to roll out this new power???
so the whole point of the reveal that michael has this mind control power apparently didn't even have anything to do with the sheriff subplot because he didn't actually use this power to resolve that problem. for now - until it comes back again, which based on some of the other subplots this season is not a guarantee - it was just to heap more trauma on his shoulders and legitimize this "woe is me, i'm a horrible monster!!" yarn they keep trying to spin without actually showing him do anything Truly Bad or Mildly Morally Gray.
the sanders conversation is a rehashing of the alex convo from earlier where someone has to insist to michael that his genetics don't make him inherently evil. and the alex one was more effective for me because it was in the immediate aftermath of this massive revelation about who his father was AND michael
thought he was about to get murdered. he was spinning out. but having it happen again like eight episodes later - after michael still hasn't actually done anything to lend some legitimacy to his fears that his bloodline is Unavoidably Evil - doesn't have the same emotional impact. the worst things michael has ever done with his powers were shown back in the first half of s1, and he's be almost entirely reformed since then.
so to set up whatever michael/jones showdown must be coming our way, we get the introduction of this ability that michael has never even so much as hinted at having before, and we get the reveal that it has colored how he looks at himself since he was eighteen.
what.
michael saying that his religious extremist family tried to perform an exorcism on him and couldn't and dallas inferring that he started to believe he was the demon was a good exchange. we already knew about that incident, but michael played it off as no big deal during 1x06. the new conversation helps him to relate to dallas, finds them some common ground, establishes trust, and makes the true emotional depth of what happened to michael explicit.
having michael redefine all of his emotional struggles for the last ten years through the lens of "actually i found out that i have the same ability as the alien that possessed my sister and made her kill three girls in front of me, and it has made me view myself as fundamentally evil since that day" is such a bad rewrite of his history.
was the history of horribly abusive foster homes insufficient in explaining michael's self-worth issues? was being the victim of a hate crime not enough trauma? was the witnessing and covering up of two separate murders that derailed his entire academic future not enough to make michael question his own goodness or value? why would it be necessary to add this mind control element to really make him feel bad about stuff?
and if ANYONE was going to get a story that dealt with struggles with consent and mental control, why was it not isobel?? why was it not that holding the turquoise enhanced her abilities and enabled her to control people, and she was TERRIFIED of that because of noah?? her consent was violated horribly, and she has struggled horribly with respecting the consent of others. this needed to be her ability to develop and deal with!
giving it to michael fully developed also feels like a very handwavey, last minute choice. if this was planned from the beginning, why is this the first that the audience has heard about it?
he says he never mentioned it because of isobel, which explains why isobel and max don't know about it. but why doesn't the audience know about it? in s1, michael is adamant that liz leave town. if isobel couldn't get her to go, why didn't michael sneak off and make her leave? why didn't he force her to forget (if that's within the purview of the power)? sure, he doesn't like having this power. but he's also more than willing to sacrifice himself for his siblings. wouldn't a little unethical behavior be worth saving them from experimentation?
also if michael has been able to force people to do things all along, where was that energy when alex got kidnapped? why is torturing flint in a basement less inherently evil than just compelling him to tell the truth or compelling helena to let alex and charlie go?
i know not everything can be planned from the beginning. but there was no reason this power had to be written like this. it didn't have to be something michael knew he had. but they chose to insert it into his history, and i feel like that was a bad call.
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positives about the scene
dad!sanders supremacy
michael needs a dad figure who's like "you're a good person, you dumbass" and straight up LAUGHS at his assertion that he's evil.
just catching up on things now BUT i feel i do have to warn you that not only is the film andy samberg time loop, but palm springs also features a riverdale thespian
i wouldn't qualify it as horror per say but one of my favorite not-scary scary films is Coherence (2013)... i saw it on a whim and it stuck with me for days. i'm scared to rewatch in case it's not as good lol. the less you know going in the better imo.
