Blog Archives
Liz Tells Frank What Happened In “Mass Effect 2”
Dear Frank,
You, like anyone else who checks in with the official Liz Tells Frank Twitter account, might have noticed that over the past few months, I’ve been spending some time playing a video game. This might not seem like a huge deal, except for the thing where I don’t really ever play video games — I mean, I enjoy the mind-fuck that is Portal, and I can still kick anyone’s ass at Street Fighter II (if you let me play Chung Li). But for the last fifteen or more years, video games have not been a part of my life — which is why it is SO WEIRD, how Mass Effect 2 COMPLETELY ATE MY BRAIN.
When I told you about the first Mass Effect last year, Frank, I did so with help from my friend Kate, because I hadn’t played it myself. I mean, the franchise sounded relevant to my interests, in a sexy Star Trek kind of way, but have I mentioned how I don’t really play video games? It wasn’t something I really considered an option for me.
Then my brother bought me ME2 as a Christmas present, and on a whim a few months ago I decided to crack it open and see how badly I’d do at it… Basically, your classic “meet-cute” love story. Read the rest of this entry
“Farscape”: The Complete Skip It/Watch It Guide
[I’ve wanted to do a SI/WI for this show for ages, but it’s been a while since I really dug into the Henson Company’s insane combination of puppets, sci-fi and attractive people in leather pants. Fortunately, I happen to know a bonafide “Farscape” expert, and she was willing to step in and perform this valuable public service! Andreanna Ditton, take it away… –Liz]
Farscape is, as one character says, “Disneyland on Acid.” It’s a roller-coaster of sci-fi and bad decisions when the human is always wrong, but that doesn’t stop him from having a plan. Our protagonists are all escaped criminals, from the big blue priest (Zhaan), who orgasms in the light, to the tentacled warrior masquerading as a Klingon rip-off (D’Argo), who turns out to be funny, young, romantic and ragey. There’s a soldier (Aeryn Sun), raised by a fascist military race that look human, who accidentally goes against her training and gets exiled for it. And then there’s the deposed dictator with the worst case of swamp gas in history (Rygel). Couple all that with a living ship (Moya), her snarktastic Pilot (Pilot), and John Crichton, All-American boy wonder who got shot through a wormhole into the ass-end of a universe that considers him expendable, problematic, and eventually marked for death — and you have a television show.
This is science fiction for people who like their comedy in turns black and snot-filled, their love stories fraught and full of sex, their action-sequences big, the consequences bigger, and the actual science…best left unexplored. It’s space opera on an epic scale.
Farscape tackles all the traditional tropes, then turns them on their collective heads. Continuity matters. Story matters. This is the Odyssey — a man lost in the universe, trying to get home. In the meantime, home changes. Decisions don’t get undone in Farscape, for any of the characters — heroes or villains. It helps that the cast is uniformly stellar, that crazy is not pretty but terrifying, that space is vast, and villains cruel but multi-faceted, and that everyone is capable of doing bad all by themselves.
And yes, there are puppets. If those puppets don’t make you cry at some point, you have no heart. Read the rest of this entry
Liz Tells Frank Stuff She Forgot Happened In “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace”
Dear Frank,
It’s kind of profoundly intense these days, to remember the spring of 1999 and how very, very fucking excited we nerds were for Star Wars: Episode 1. Remember that? Remember talking about the trailers and debating casting spoilers and not even doubting a little bit that it would be awesome? And then we all actually saw the movie, and… yeah.
I saw Phantom Menace three times in the first five days of its release, each time having to work harder to convince myself that it wasn’t really that bad, until finally I searched my feelings. I knew it to be true. And then I pretended the movie didn’t exist for ten years.
However, it’s my brother’s birthday this week, and to celebrate I said I’d take him to the movie of his choice. He picked the shiny new 3-D transfer of The Phantom Menace. Now, honestly, this could be a lot worse — for his birthday in 1999, I took him to see the PAINFULLY bad Wing Commander, because the Phantom Menace trailer was premiering before it exclusively. Read the rest of this entry
Liz Tells Frank What Happened In “Mass Effect”
Dear Frank,
As you know, every once in a while I reach out on Facebook and Twitter to ask people what they think you need to know about, because as a great philosopher once wrote, “true enlightenment comes from complete submersion into the unknown.” Okay, that great philosopher was me pulling some words out of my ass just now, but the concept is sound, right?
Anyways, a friendly fellow by the name of Woody Tondorf suggested that you needed to know about the video game series Mass Effect, which is a video game I have heard a lot about, but have never played, because as previously mentioned, my gaming abilities are pretty sub-par. However, I knew of someone who had played it: Kate Cox, of the video game criticism blog Your Critic is in Another Castle. Not only is the name of her blog AWESOME and her analysis of the video game industry from a feminist/media perspective very smart, but we went to summer camp together. Which makes her a most trusted expert.
So this week it’s less Liz Tells Frank and more Kate Tells Liz What to Tell Frank. But to be honest about it and show my work, below please find the chat conversation in which Kate reveals the first Mass Effect‘s secrets, I ask a lot of stupid questions, and we learn how complicated sexytimes in space can be. Read the rest of this entry
Liz Tells Frank What Happened In... 