Diplomatic Smackdown

Continuing my policy of complimenting people I dislike when they do something right, I award a gold star to Nicholas Sarkozy:

With Russian tanks only 30 miles from Tbilisi on August 12, Mr Sarkozy told Mr Putin that the world would not accept the overthrow of Georgia’s Government. According to Mr Levitte, the Russian seemed unconcerned by international reaction. “I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls,” Mr Putin declared.

Mr Sarkozy thought he had misheard. “Hang him?” — he asked. “Why not?” Mr Putin replied. “The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein.”

Mr Sarkozy, using the familiar tu, tried to reason with him: “Yes but do you want to end up like [President] Bush?” Mr Putin was briefly lost for words, then said: “Ah — you have scored a point there.”

h/t to Robert Farley and Duss.

Frakked Up

Thanks to Jamie I finally got to play Fantasy Flight's Battlestar Galactica board game at the weekend, desperately hoping that it would be as unrepentantly awesome as Arkham Horror.

Turns out: it is. In fact, in certain respects, it's better. Like AH, the game is co-operative in nature, casting each player as a character from the series, and launching wave after wave of raiders, heavy raiders, and baseships against you, occasionally mixing it up with a food shortage or fuel leak. Again, like AH, there is a palpable sense of the odds being ludicrously stacked against your rag-tag fugitive fleet. Run out of food, fuel, people or (perhaps slightly less convincingly) morale, and it's game over, and it seems that every ten minutes someone is rioting, engaging in McCarthyist Cylon-hunts, or repeatedly trying to usurp the Presidency (that last one might just have been Cocklick, though in fairness he was playing Baltar). You get distracted trying to save a clutch of helpless civvie ships from incoming raiders, and all of a sudden there are centurions in your launch bay waltzing (roboboogie-ing?) their way to your tenderest areas.

The true genius of the game is the fact that one or even two players might be a Cylon. Might be. Maybe not. Maybe everyone around the table is a pure-blood human, just as dedicated to saving the survivers of the Twelve Colonies as you are. But can you afford to take that chance?

Obviously, this ferments a glorious atmosphere of paranoia. Attempts to resolve the various crises can be scuppered by Cylon agents, though they must take care not to make their sabotage too obvious (we were three quarters of the way through the game before it was even confirmed there was a Cylon in our midst, but more of that later). Many decisions have no wrong and right answer (should someone activate an emergency jump during an attack, even at the risk of losing some of our ships?), meaning a savvy Cylon can deliberately weaken the fleet even as they appear to protect it.

Plus, just to make things more confusing and entertaining, there's a chance that players may prove to have been Cylon sleeper agents halfway through.

That was exactly what happened to me. Having spent the first part of the game (which is almost entirely based on the first season, and thus concludes with the arrival at Kobol) as Admiral Adama, bravely fighting off swarms of Cylons, choosing our most profitable path through the galaxy, and taking Baltar's presidency from him in a bloodless coup (I was suspicious he might be a toaster), I awoke one morning to learn I was a Cylon. Admiral Adama, President of the Twelve Colonies, and a Cylon agent.

This has potential, I thought.

From that moment on I began to eat away at the fleet like a cancer. Each jump suddenly happened to take us to desolate systems, absent of resources. Galactica's battle tactics switched to focusing on destroying baseships, allowing raider squadrons to attack the fleet and further deplete our fuel supplies. Several characters found themselves unexpectedly detained in the brig, unable to argue or barter there way out. Each responsibility belonging to either Admiral or President was perverted to suit my agenda. Only at the end, when it was too late to do anything about it, did I reveal my true colours by deliberately allowing a fuel leak, leaving the Galactica all but dead in space.

Meanwhile, the bickering amongst the other players had reached fever pitch. Was Baltar's single-minded quest to seize the President's power proof of some treacherous agenda? Why was Lee Adama spening so much time out of the cockpit? Why did Tyrol keep claiming he couldn't speed up repairing our birds? Roslin I had arrested as a Cylon sympathiser, which I thought pretty funny, all things considered. Tigh got arrested too, whilst I still thought I was human, but mainly for shits and giggles (it eventually transpired he had been a Cylon all along, so I guess I called that).

By the time I vented the fuel, revealing myself as a Cylon (unfortunately getting tossed in the brig before I could escape giggling), the fleet was totally screwed, with half the characters incarcerated, a massive toaster fleet hammering the Galactica, and plenty of robo-men traipsing through the corridors with gay robo-abandon. Victory was imminent. Tragically, though, the sweetness of our triumph was somewhat lessened, for two reasons. Firstly, Tigh's revelation that he was also a skin-job was somewhat muted since Jamie did it by attempting to make me President again whilst I was incarcerated, forgetting that his "Martial Law" skill hands executive power to the Admiral, which was a title I no longer possessed. Thus, Lee Adama received the Presidency instead, or at least he would have done, had Jamie not tried to pull all this off in someone else's turn, and was therefore breaking the rules. He might as well have baked a cake with "I am a Cylon" written atop it in icing, for all the good his unmasking did.

No matter, I thought. So what if the only other Cylon in the game has horribly botched his coming-out party? The fleet is running on fumes, the chrome-jobs have the feeble flesh-sacs surrounded, and any moment now I'll be able to kill myself and return to the fold. What could possibly go wrong?

What went wrong is that Jamie had accidentally fucked up to such an epic extent he had created three sleeper agents at the halfway point, in addition to himself. The Cylon players outnumbered the humans. Tigh, Baltar and both Adamas were skin-jobs, leaving Roslin and poor Chief Tyrol the only real people aboard. We had spent the last three damn hours running a fucking Basestar, with two humans aboard just to mess with their heads.

Damn you Jamie. Damn you to Hell.

Our host suggested another game, preferably with me in charge of Cylon generation, on the reasonable grounds that now we knew what we were doing, it might be somewhat less frustrating. At that point, though, I was convinced Jamie would still find some way of messing up, leading to us discovering four hours into the game that the crew of the last battlestar comprised three Cylons, two pod-people, and Saruman of Many Colours.

Still, brilliant game. Just make damn sure you read the Cylon agent rules damn carefully, because you can't ask half-way through "How many of us are skin-jobs then?" because you've suddenly realised that you couldn't organise a mecha-pissup in a bullethead brewery.

Shrinking Gods And Narrowing Gaps

I found myself intrigued by the description of Michael Poole's piece on the Guardian website right now:

Confusing creation with creationism

Intelligent design and young Earth creationism are both false, but that does not discount the notion of creation, writes Michael Poole.

It's hardly a tremendously novel article: Poole points out that the fact Young Earth Creationism is scientifically disprovable and ID shot full of logical holes doesn't invalidate the possibility of a Creator. Which, of course, is true, but it fails to address a more fundamental point. Once science maps out a framework under which the universe can exist perfectly happily without needing God to nudge it from time to time, what good does God do anyway?

Arguments such as Poole's generally boil down to "We can never tell". No matter what is defined and described and explained and proved by science, none of it will ever totally remove the possibility of a man behind the curtain. To some extent you can see how that would be unarguable, in much the same way we can never prove we're not in the Matrix right now. The degree to which the faithful are placated by being told their God might not actually do or ever have done anything, and while effectively useless within the universe might still exist maybe, is a topic for another time.

In fact, I'm not even convinced that the "maybe" argument is particularly compelling. Richard Herring said something along the lines that "Claiming the universe suddenly appeared because of a massive explosion that came from nowhere doesn't seem any more sensible than 'God did it'". I'm not an astrophysicist, so I don't get the Big Bang either, but even so I'm not sure you can equate the two.

Even if you can, though, it's at least arguable that it's only a matter of time before the Big Bang is explained to our satisfaction (if, indeed, it hasn't already, some of my regulars will know more about this than I do). Once we get there, though, we can describe the entire existence of the universe without recourse to a Creator of any kind. At this point, the logic position to take would be non-belief. We can accept the universe's existence without a God to create it, and any belief that such a Creator exists immediately begs the question "What created the Creator?" In other words, how did an entity more complex than the universe spring into being in order to start the Big Bang itself? This doesn't disprove God, but it does lead to a logic trap that we don't need to resort to any more. Option A: a fully cogent description of existence. Option B: an idea that has no proof and actually requires the collapse of deductive reasoning.

So I don't think Poole's platitudes, as well-meaning as I'm sure they are, particularly convince. I suspect the "God of the gaps" is not long for this world, and that sooner or later faith in any God will no longer become simply unprovable, but, in the strictest sense of the word, irrational.

Right: I'm going dark for the weekend, as I get my game on over in Lancashire. See you all on Monday.

SpaceSquid vs. The X-Men #9: Fatal Exorcist

During my thorough and entirely deserved kicking of Jean Grey I pointed out that while some of the blame for her truly feeble character development through the years could be pinned on the awful treatment she received at the hands of her Sixties writers, it wasn't really the whole picture. Yes, it was a hard time to be a woman in comics, even if most of the writers could (generously) be said to have had the best of intentions, but many other super-heroines created in that period (and it's not like the male heroes back there were particularly fascinating character studies either) went on to become far more complex and interesting than their humble origins would suggest.

In particular, I referenced Polaris as an example of how far one could develop such vacuous non-characters, given time and effort. Certainly, to compare Polaris and Jean Grey these days (ignoring the rather inconvenient fact that Grey is dead, or at least I think she is), it isn't immediately apparent that forty years ago one could only distinguish them by powers, costume and hair colour.

That's something of an oversimplification, though. Whilst Polaris has been redefined many times over the years (though she rarely redefines herself, and more on that later), and far more completely than Grey (whose occasional lapses are generally retconned), studying her history makes it clear that it took at least thirty years for any meaningful change to come about, and that until that happened, Polaris was actually far worse served as a character than Jean Grey was.

As mentioned in my article on her, Grey spends more time in the original X-Men run as a damsel in distress than I was entirely comfortable with. Despite this, though, and despite her shopping obsession and her truly vomit-inducing puppy love for Cyclops, even through those early days she does at least show signs of becoming the strong-but-caring woman that was mistaken for good female characterisation until at least the Nineties (and probably later). Polaris, by contrast, is pretty much the damsel in distress and nothing else.

We first meet Lorna Dane whilst she is under the influence of the hypnotist Mesmero (himself working for a robot he believed to be Magneto; long story), who only avoids being run over (hypnotised people apparently not understanding how to cross a road, making the whole "collect mutants" plan a bit of a bust from the get-go) when Bobby Drake pulls her out of harm's way. Clearly thinking with the wrong head, Drake brings Dane back to the mansion so she can coalesce, risking the security of the X-Men in the process [1]. It then turns out that Lorna has her own secret, along with the worst hair-dye on the planet, when a shower reveals that her tresses are in fact bright green.

There is little time to process this before Mesmero attacks the mansion, and Lorna is captured (along with Iceman). This is something of a repeated theme in Lorna's life. Up until she joins X-Factor in 1991, some 23 years since her first appearance (and thus around four comic years), it seems every storyline she is involved has her at the mercy of some enemy or other. This is particularly egregious in the early days. First she joins "Magneto" following her abduction by Mesmero, apparently due to a combination of believing herself to be Magneto's daughter[2] and a person's innate desire for power. Beast goes so far as to suggest this is a combination that would force her to take Magneto's side, which seems a somewhat unenlightened position for McCoy to take. The next time she ends up in trouble (having, probably wisely, concluded that the life of a super-heroine probably wasn't for her) it's when Sentinels attack her apartment, and she simply goes into shock. Jean might have gotten herself abducted a little too frequently, but at least she gave some vague impression of fighting back.

It is while a prisoner of the Sentinels that Polaris meets Havok, a man with whom she spends almost the entirety of her comic history. The pair return to the mansion and join the team as reserve members, much to Iceman's disgust, as he believes he had first shout (or dibs, or whatever expression you want to use for the ridiculous notion that there exists some kind of rigid etiquette to love). Inevitably the two come to blows, eventually leading to Iceman being injured and Havok leaving in shame. Xavier sends Lorna after him, hoping she can persuade him to return. This she manages, though only through the somewhat unusual method of being captured by the Hulk and needing to be rescued by Havok. The two don't even make it home before they are both imprisoned by the Secret Empire. The other X-Men don't even search for them, assuming Polaris was too rubbish to either tempt Havok back or remember to phone them to tell them she had failed.

Are we seeing a pattern yet? It would be tempting to pile on the accusations of accidental sexism, but that would be unfair, at least in part. Polaris' problem was that her character was totally unnecessary within the group. Her magnetic powers at this point were not all that much more impressive than Marvel Girl's telekinesis, with the added problem of only working on metal [3]. Beyond that, she was just another woman on the team, without anything more specific to recommend her. I've read most of Polaris' original appearances in the black and white Essential Classic X-Men series, and it's remarkable how difficult it is to tell the two women apart without their hair colours making it obvious. The best bet is to see who's fighting over her in any given panel, which implies that Lorna suffers from the same problem Jean does, she promotes conflict in other characters rather than having one within herself. Only the way this problem is dealt with particularly distinguishes the two at this stage.

With Polaris, there seem to be three options. Firstly, get rid of her. Lorna repeatedly drops out of the X-books, citing her education (she and Havok apparently have a sideline in geophysics), a desire to escape the superhero life, or an attempt to recover from the latest in an apparently endless series of traumas.

The second option is to have her captured, or possessed. This too is a recurring theme. The next time we see Polaris after the Krakoa incident[4] both she and Havok are under the control of a Shi'ar agent, who attempts to use them to stop Xavier meeting Lilandra. Proteus attempts to control her not long afterwards, and next it's Malice's turn. Malice, one of Mr Sinister's marauders, possesses Polaris for so long that the two become permanently bonded, seeming removing Lorna from the equation indefinitely. Ultimately Polaris only regains control when Malice herself is captured by Zaladane in the Savage Land. Malice is thrown from her host body, but Zaladane steals Polaris' magnetic powers.

This leads us to the third method for attempting to do something useful with Polaris; mess around with her powers. For reasons that aren't entirely clear, Lorna escapes the Savage Land with a new power, the ability to feed off surrounding negative emotions and convert them into mass and strength. This, whilst in some ways just making her a poor substitute for Colossus instead of a poor substitute for Phoenix, does at least keep her going until she is once again captured, this time by Legion (who himself is possessed by the Shadow King), and used as a battery for captured negative emotion (by now we have learned that she induces negativity as well as absorbing it).

In the resulting fight, the X-Men and X-Factor join forces to defeat the Shadow King, and Lorna regains her powers. In the wake of this, she joins a new iteration of X-Factor as a government-sanctioned mutant team. It is now, at long last, in 1991, that someone (namely Peter David) puts some effort into defining Polaris as an actual character. Realising that this post would require me to read some of his early X-Factor run was a genuine pleasure. The '91 reboot represents some of the best writing of the era, at least where Marvel was concerned.

One day there might be time to discuss David's run in more general terms (it's certainly worthy of study), but for now the key point is that David made Polaris into an actual person. The consequences of Lorna's low self-confidence and repeated external manipulation finally began to make themselves felt. She is referred to a psychologist, but refuses to speak, seeing his attempts to "get in her head" as one more act of mental violation. Eventually, though, he allows her to come to terms with herself, in addition to persuading her that she may be borderline anorexic.

This, at last, is the beginning of a genuine character. I've spoken before about the fact that the "flawed hero" archetype usually relies on a very narrow field of potential flaws, usually a dark past, torturous present, or a temperament unsuited for beating up super villains without killing them. Polaris tries to be a hero despite her low self-esteem and resulting extreme weight-loss. For all her fear of both recommitting to Alex and of losing him, and her conviction that she is unworthy of her role in X-Factor, she pushes it aside when it comes to the crunch. As time passes she begins to build her esteem, and becomes the moral backbone of the group. Now at last, she is strong and compassionate because she has overcome her demons, not simply because it's the accepted template for comic book heroines.

Naturally, this state of affairs couldn't last. Later stories (post-David) had her once more melt into Havok's shadow, needing him to save her from repossession by Malice, and freaking out totally when he leaves her (actually part of a plan by Dark Beast, which was part of a plan by Onslaught, which was then built upon by a plan of Havok's, it all gets very confusing). By the time Polaris returns to the X-Men following X-Factor's cancellation and Alex's apparent death (he actually just changes dimensions for a while), she is as helpless and pathetic as ever, running scared from a team of Skrulls that are tailing her when she should be beating the extra-terrestrial crap out of them. Her decision to join Magneto in ruling over Genosha (given to him by the United Nations in exchange for him not destroying all electronic equipment on the planet) at least shows some steel [5], but we quickly learn her motivation was simply to learn the truth about Magneto's relationship to her. No sooner has she learned that he is indeed her father, then the Sentinels of Cassandra Nova attack, all but annihilating the entire Genoshan population.

I mentioned some weeks ago that whilst Polaris' development as a character was undeniably significant, it was also cynical in the extreme. It is from this point on that this charge becomes applicable. The dual shock of discovering her father's identity and the massacre of millions of mutants changes her forever. The first change is entirely welcome, to the reader if not her colleagues: the murder of so many fellow mutants persuades her that Magneto was right all along, in terms of general philosophy if not necessarily in each individual terrorist act. With Magneto dead, she takes his place, finding herself comfortable in the role as his daughter and his successor, leader of the battered remnants of his country.

If they had left it there, everything might have been OK. The idea that even one as devoted to Xavier's dream as Lorna could turn 180 degrees in the wake of such tragedy is a powerful one (the real world parallels need not be named), and it gave her a mission and a purpose that she had always lacked. This, though, required that Magneto stayed dead (which he absolutely, absolutely should have, for so many reasons), which was never particularly likely.

Instead, Polaris returns to the X-Men to find Alex alive, though in a comatose state. At this point she switches into full-on Fatal Attraction mode, threatening Alex's nurse Annie with magnetically-controlled scalpels, taking every advantage to criticise and belittle her, and basically act like a total bitch. When Alex finally awakens, Lorna begs him to marry her, a rather sad proposal that the rest of the X-Men treat as a done deal before Alex has a chance to respond. It's all bound to end in tears (though it does lead to a sequence with a stag-night shape-changing stripper that's probably the funniest scene UXM has yet produced) since Alex has fallen for his nurse (her mutant son has been setting them up on psychic dates while Havok was comatose, which is one of the freakier things I've heard of). Waiting until the ceremony to confess this (Havok being, essentially, a douche) he sets Polaris off on a murderous rampage.

This is where we get into trouble. Dealing with Lorna's trauma over the Genosha incident by having her change her political philosophy and embrace her father's legacy made total sense. Watching someone who has been, on and off, a super-heroine since the late Sixties become essentially a terrorist sympathiser and even backer probably upsets a lot of fans (it bugged me a little too, though mainly because of how I remembered her from X-Factor back in the mid Nineties), but it was a logical progression that breathed new life into the character. But have her try to kill all her mates because she's been dumped at the altar? Sheesh. I get the argument: that this was just the straw that broke the camel's back, but having a genocide survivor finally snap because her wedding has been cancelled (a wedding, by the way, that she was very clear about being a sensible move rather than a heartfelt or passionate one) is nothing short of pathetic.

In the issues since then, she has lost her powers again due to M-Day, once again becoming whiny and useless and entirely defined by Havok (who now loves her again, did I mention he's a douche?) before being captured (hooray for tradition) by Apocalypse and converted into Pestilence.

Ultimately this bonding gave her back her powers, and she has both forgiven Havok and possibly restarted their relationship (it's hard to tell, they're in space now), but she still seems to oscillate between the unforgivably wet whining Lorna of the Sixties; the raging, directionless psychopath of the new millennium; and the pointless Jean Grey clone she seemed to be at more or less every point in between.

For God's sake, Marvel, give her back to Peter David. He's even writing X-Factor again.

Next time, we take a look at Havok, the final X-Men from the Sixties (that'll make seven years already dealt with; and they said this couldn't be done), and discuss the problems inherent in being a younger sibling to an apparent golden boy, and also to have powers which are rubbish and keep going crazy.

[1] Though since she actually sees Beast and he just tells her he's off to a costume party (in the middle of the day, natch), she's clearly too outrageously stupid to be of any real threat to the operation's secrecy.

[2] This, of course, is true, but complicated. Since Magneto had an affair with Lorna's mother, and later apparently killed both her and her husband in a plane crash, the truth wasn't actually known by Lorna's adopted parents (actually her "paternal" aunt and uncle), hence the "reveal" in UXM 52 that Lorna and Magneto weren't related), leading them to debunk the tale that, years later, turned out to be true.

[3] It's worth noting that Polaris' similarities to Marvel Girl is somewhat echoed by Havok's similarities to his brother (this at least makes somewhat more sense). I don't think it surprising at all that neither character remained with the X-Men for particularly long.

[4] The battle in Giant X-Men that led to the changeover between the original team and the Seventies recruits that re-energised the comic, and ultimately turned it into a franchise. It was also the crisis that led to Phoenix removing the mental blocks Polaris had apparently subconsciously erected to limit her powers. Apparently otherwise there would have been a very real chance of her achieving something.

[5] And some pleasing moral flexibility, too. Magneto loses his access to his powers in his attempt to shut down the world's machines, and only close proximity to Polaris allows him to regain his abilities. Had Polaris refused to join him, it is likely that his rule over Genosha would have been short-lived in the extreme.

If Only Someone Else Read For Him

If you can get past the overblown language and Olbermann's tendency towards histrionics, this is about as good an attack on Proposition 8 I've heard so far.

What He Said

Since he's pretty much my role model in any case, I'll let Charlie Brooker sum up on post-election disbelief. Hopefully this will be the end of it for a while, and I can find something else to bang on about.

(Best line, by the way:

Jesus, guys, why not just change your name to the Bastard Party and march around in long black capes? Vote for us, we're openly despicable.

Needless to say, he's describing the Republican campaign.

Also, make sure you stick around for the zombies).

No Respect For The Dead

SpaceSquid and C are changing following their calisthenics programme, which is very manly and makes women love them. Our awesome masculinity is marred, however, by the sudden arrival of rubbishy classical music.

SS: Why the Hell are they piping this crap through in here?

C: You have an objection to Handel?

SS: I'm just uncomfortable listening to him while I take my clothes off. I feel like I'm in a Stanley Kubrik film.

C: You have an objection to Kubrick too?

SS: Are you kidding? If I end up in his oeuvre I'll be bored senseless, and possibly hacked up with an axe.

C: Maybe the axing will come as some sort of relief. Unless Kubrik does ghosts. Does Kubrik do ghosts?

SS: In The Shining, yeah. I like that you didn't know that but you haven't questioned that whole axe thing. What's your point?

C: That you'll spend eternity haunting a Kubrik film.

SS: Ah, Christ; you're right. I hope it's Full Metal Jacket. That's only half total shit.

C: I couldn't interest you in 2001? You could freak out the apes.

SS: Pffft. I can't help thinking prehistoric primates wouldn't fully appreciate the terror of being visited by a furious ghost from the distant future.

C: Erm, the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut?

SS: Sigh. I guess that's the best I can hope for. Sold.