DR. BELCH
04-06-2002, 04:17 PM
ST SHK #21: Attack of the Living Brain Puppets!"
Meet Madelyn Spaulding, an overly ambitious young woman running for student body president at Dakota High. Richie, thinking she's a real witch with a B, decides to run against her, on a single-plank platform (fixing the snack machines). She rapidly becomes dangerous by first nearly discovering Virgil changing out of his Static duds in a bush...and then when her talents emerge, she reads Richie's mind and learns for sure that Static and Virgil are one in the same.
Madelyn manipulates her opponent into giving up the race, then later calls a meeting of her minions in the middle of the night in the gym (which Virgil, pretending to be mindwiped, crashes). She gets too cocky, though, and tries to control Static...and winds up brainfried. She thankfully forgets--it is the custom in things that whoever learns the hero's secret must die, get amnesia, or be fooled into thinking they are mistaken--after being reduced to the mental level of a three-year-old. As for Richie, he doesn't win the race, but his opponent promises to adopt the snack machine cause, and it seems he realizes he works better as the man-behind-the-man anyway.
Madelyn is the only Bang Baby who doesn't rename herself after she gets her power. We see her exposed to the gas in a flashback after she starts cramping in the cafeteria (insert lame "girly problem" joke here)--and note that the homeless man she meets is none other than Ragtag from "Power Play"!
DYN the throaty noise that Richie makes as Virgil confronts him? Very similar to that of the victims in Body Snatchers--as well as Brain in "Brainwashed".
My mother loved the bit at the end where Virg and Rich stagger off pretending to be zombies in search of "meeeeeeat...meeeeeaaaaaaaaat..."
It's really cheesy, I admit it, but a delightful throwback to movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Night of the Living Dead, with all of Virgil's friends, and even his dad and sister, reduced to slavering blank-eyed zombies bent on crushing him. And the dream sequence with the laughing mouths was simply surreal.
Is Sharon still in school, or has she graduated? She gets mad at Virgil for borrowing her psych textbooks, indicating she's at least a senior (at my h.s. you couldn't take a psychology course until twelfth grade). And oh, does she laugh at the "brain puppet" theory. That from a girl who dates a rubber man....?
ZETA#15: "Wired" II
A captured Zeta escapes being brainwiped by Bennett by copying and relocating files in his memory banks but admits he sort of lost track of himself...sort of like a phrase becoming rote and meaningless after writing it innumerable times.
West is still a complete moron, going gung-ho at Zeta with the intent of ripping his head open to extract data. And Rush has to cover up some piece of idiocy he pulls--"Don't tell the boss where I am."
Zeta goes rogue and almost kills Ro...and if that isn't disturbing enough, Bennett almost appears human here. His sole concern in chasing Z is to see that no one gets hurt--ignoring the innumerable people he's stepped on in pursuit of that goal or how many lives the tin man has saved (recall the man's bland attitude of unconcern at the thousands that would die in Gotham if Stan's bomb had went off). There's a particularly poignat scene in which he begs Ro to just walk away...which she won't, because she and countless others owe their lives to Z.
When Ro asks Bucky why he didn't tell her about those hacker screwballs, he simply says, "I didn't want you to get a swelled head." Which makes one wonder what else he's hiding. Recall he isn't much better than they are, which is why I wonder why Ro trusts him.
Watch as Zeta flashes up the faces of all the people he's met or become--among them Shower Granny in "Out West", that kook at the candy factory in "Taffy Time", and Dr. Selig himself.
So what of the phantom chip? Is it a gremlin the doc had put there that wasn't in the blueprints, or the hackers, or Zeta himself (but doesn't recall doing it)?
Ro's speech about the dark and light side of everyone was very inspirational--"It makes you more human." More than Bennett, i'll wager.
Note the face on the vidscreen Ro speaks to is very Beyond (the ephemeral Net newscasters that perform all the exposition).
POK JJ #440: "The Art of Pokemon"
This one broached disturbing and gross, as it introduced us to a Pokemon who paints with a "secretion from its tail end". Friends and neighbors, it goes around creating art with its own feces. Not only does it make messes on walls, but all over people, as well, including our heroes. When Ash sniffed a canvas and said, "Smells like turpentine", I just about lost it.
The city the kids stop at is called White Stone, and it appears to be made of marble, like Rome--but like the great ancient city of sin, it's actually just painted brick. Here they meet up with a famous abstract painter whose name is a pun on Jackson Pollack, the famous abstract artist whose canvases appear to have been vomited on but who is world-renowned. He offers a blank check to pay for the mess his Pokemon have made slopping their "paint" on the buildings.
Here we see that Team Rocket has some moral qualms--thinking the man might be poor, they won't steal the check and write an exorbitant amount on it, because it might leave him with nothing. They aren't adverse, however, to first snapping photos of the painter's art in the museum (which, despite Ash's must-crush-Team-Rocket attitude, is hardly a crime, and pretty lucrative at a couple of bucks a pop for picture postcards) and later (after Jessy gets greedy and insists photos simply won't do) swiping the little artists and forcing them to paint masterpieces on demand. They are forced to retreat to the safety of their balloon, however, after the creatures see their master and ran to him. A good thing, because in a moment Jessy seemed about to go Kathy Bates in Misery.
The artist is uninspired and gives a speech at one point about being creatively driven by seeing a sunset in his youth...which is reminiscent of another artist in a previous ep (who worked in crayons). He is old and unable to see the colors anymore, and his little dung-painters, also uninspired, and have been producing lackluster work, which he chops and slaps together in collages and sells to pay the bills. However, after a talk with Ash and seeing the sun rise over a cliff, they go on a mad burst of inspiration and paint a gorgeous multihued mural (with only a basic Superman palette of red and yellow and blue). The rain comes and washes it away, but the artist doesn't seem to care or want to bother recreating it, as it wouldn't be authentic. It'd be no better than taking a photo or a TV image (although if someone had a camera or the crews had been rolling, there's have been something for posterity. Geez, even a mock Mona Lisa is still a pretty hot ticket.)
The Rockets, who miraculously get away this time without blasting off again, nonetheless lose, after Wobafett bumps the sketches out of Jessy's hands and sends them blowing away. Her "thinking moans" (as the captioning called them--very strange way of phrasing it) were all for naught.
Note Meowth pops James for his "marble-ous" pun. Isn't that hypocritical? He's knocked off a few bad jokes in his nine lives. Also, note his confusion of Rodan (the movie monster) with the man of the smae name who sculpted The Thinker. He probably should've taken a lump for that one as well.
No digevolution today on Digimon. but I called it when I said Jerri's puppet would come back. She barely speaks here--the sock has taken over her brain. The poor girl is so disassociated from reality at this point her eyes have gone totally Linda Blair. There's a FanFic here--Jerri is commited shortly after the Tamers return to the real world, and while in the nut barn meets a certain redheaded ex-Team Rocket member. They rapidly become great friends--think "Harley and Ivy" meets Girl, Interrupted meets Devil in the Flesh 2. ;)
Meet Madelyn Spaulding, an overly ambitious young woman running for student body president at Dakota High. Richie, thinking she's a real witch with a B, decides to run against her, on a single-plank platform (fixing the snack machines). She rapidly becomes dangerous by first nearly discovering Virgil changing out of his Static duds in a bush...and then when her talents emerge, she reads Richie's mind and learns for sure that Static and Virgil are one in the same.
Madelyn manipulates her opponent into giving up the race, then later calls a meeting of her minions in the middle of the night in the gym (which Virgil, pretending to be mindwiped, crashes). She gets too cocky, though, and tries to control Static...and winds up brainfried. She thankfully forgets--it is the custom in things that whoever learns the hero's secret must die, get amnesia, or be fooled into thinking they are mistaken--after being reduced to the mental level of a three-year-old. As for Richie, he doesn't win the race, but his opponent promises to adopt the snack machine cause, and it seems he realizes he works better as the man-behind-the-man anyway.
Madelyn is the only Bang Baby who doesn't rename herself after she gets her power. We see her exposed to the gas in a flashback after she starts cramping in the cafeteria (insert lame "girly problem" joke here)--and note that the homeless man she meets is none other than Ragtag from "Power Play"!
DYN the throaty noise that Richie makes as Virgil confronts him? Very similar to that of the victims in Body Snatchers--as well as Brain in "Brainwashed".
My mother loved the bit at the end where Virg and Rich stagger off pretending to be zombies in search of "meeeeeeat...meeeeeaaaaaaaaat..."
It's really cheesy, I admit it, but a delightful throwback to movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Night of the Living Dead, with all of Virgil's friends, and even his dad and sister, reduced to slavering blank-eyed zombies bent on crushing him. And the dream sequence with the laughing mouths was simply surreal.
Is Sharon still in school, or has she graduated? She gets mad at Virgil for borrowing her psych textbooks, indicating she's at least a senior (at my h.s. you couldn't take a psychology course until twelfth grade). And oh, does she laugh at the "brain puppet" theory. That from a girl who dates a rubber man....?
ZETA#15: "Wired" II
A captured Zeta escapes being brainwiped by Bennett by copying and relocating files in his memory banks but admits he sort of lost track of himself...sort of like a phrase becoming rote and meaningless after writing it innumerable times.
West is still a complete moron, going gung-ho at Zeta with the intent of ripping his head open to extract data. And Rush has to cover up some piece of idiocy he pulls--"Don't tell the boss where I am."
Zeta goes rogue and almost kills Ro...and if that isn't disturbing enough, Bennett almost appears human here. His sole concern in chasing Z is to see that no one gets hurt--ignoring the innumerable people he's stepped on in pursuit of that goal or how many lives the tin man has saved (recall the man's bland attitude of unconcern at the thousands that would die in Gotham if Stan's bomb had went off). There's a particularly poignat scene in which he begs Ro to just walk away...which she won't, because she and countless others owe their lives to Z.
When Ro asks Bucky why he didn't tell her about those hacker screwballs, he simply says, "I didn't want you to get a swelled head." Which makes one wonder what else he's hiding. Recall he isn't much better than they are, which is why I wonder why Ro trusts him.
Watch as Zeta flashes up the faces of all the people he's met or become--among them Shower Granny in "Out West", that kook at the candy factory in "Taffy Time", and Dr. Selig himself.
So what of the phantom chip? Is it a gremlin the doc had put there that wasn't in the blueprints, or the hackers, or Zeta himself (but doesn't recall doing it)?
Ro's speech about the dark and light side of everyone was very inspirational--"It makes you more human." More than Bennett, i'll wager.
Note the face on the vidscreen Ro speaks to is very Beyond (the ephemeral Net newscasters that perform all the exposition).
POK JJ #440: "The Art of Pokemon"
This one broached disturbing and gross, as it introduced us to a Pokemon who paints with a "secretion from its tail end". Friends and neighbors, it goes around creating art with its own feces. Not only does it make messes on walls, but all over people, as well, including our heroes. When Ash sniffed a canvas and said, "Smells like turpentine", I just about lost it.
The city the kids stop at is called White Stone, and it appears to be made of marble, like Rome--but like the great ancient city of sin, it's actually just painted brick. Here they meet up with a famous abstract painter whose name is a pun on Jackson Pollack, the famous abstract artist whose canvases appear to have been vomited on but who is world-renowned. He offers a blank check to pay for the mess his Pokemon have made slopping their "paint" on the buildings.
Here we see that Team Rocket has some moral qualms--thinking the man might be poor, they won't steal the check and write an exorbitant amount on it, because it might leave him with nothing. They aren't adverse, however, to first snapping photos of the painter's art in the museum (which, despite Ash's must-crush-Team-Rocket attitude, is hardly a crime, and pretty lucrative at a couple of bucks a pop for picture postcards) and later (after Jessy gets greedy and insists photos simply won't do) swiping the little artists and forcing them to paint masterpieces on demand. They are forced to retreat to the safety of their balloon, however, after the creatures see their master and ran to him. A good thing, because in a moment Jessy seemed about to go Kathy Bates in Misery.
The artist is uninspired and gives a speech at one point about being creatively driven by seeing a sunset in his youth...which is reminiscent of another artist in a previous ep (who worked in crayons). He is old and unable to see the colors anymore, and his little dung-painters, also uninspired, and have been producing lackluster work, which he chops and slaps together in collages and sells to pay the bills. However, after a talk with Ash and seeing the sun rise over a cliff, they go on a mad burst of inspiration and paint a gorgeous multihued mural (with only a basic Superman palette of red and yellow and blue). The rain comes and washes it away, but the artist doesn't seem to care or want to bother recreating it, as it wouldn't be authentic. It'd be no better than taking a photo or a TV image (although if someone had a camera or the crews had been rolling, there's have been something for posterity. Geez, even a mock Mona Lisa is still a pretty hot ticket.)
The Rockets, who miraculously get away this time without blasting off again, nonetheless lose, after Wobafett bumps the sketches out of Jessy's hands and sends them blowing away. Her "thinking moans" (as the captioning called them--very strange way of phrasing it) were all for naught.
Note Meowth pops James for his "marble-ous" pun. Isn't that hypocritical? He's knocked off a few bad jokes in his nine lives. Also, note his confusion of Rodan (the movie monster) with the man of the smae name who sculpted The Thinker. He probably should've taken a lump for that one as well.
No digevolution today on Digimon. but I called it when I said Jerri's puppet would come back. She barely speaks here--the sock has taken over her brain. The poor girl is so disassociated from reality at this point her eyes have gone totally Linda Blair. There's a FanFic here--Jerri is commited shortly after the Tamers return to the real world, and while in the nut barn meets a certain redheaded ex-Team Rocket member. They rapidly become great friends--think "Harley and Ivy" meets Girl, Interrupted meets Devil in the Flesh 2. ;)