Netflix vs. Amazon: Two Comic-Book Takes on the Post-9/11 World

Adorable shorts are cool. (Change my mind.)

It turns out 2019 was quite the year for dramas based on comic books. On the big screen we saw Disney's MCU series finally come to a gorgeous, decades-long climax with Avengers' Happy Ending Avengers: Endgame. On the small screen meanwhile Netflix and Amazon found themselves going head-to-head (although head-to-knee might be more appropriate given the disparity between the two) with two surprisingly watchable adaptions of comics from the late 2000s...

The Umbrella Academy

Tweenage superheroes in goofy prep-school uniforms (including kinky eye-masks, Argyle sweaters, knee-length socks and adorable little shorts) ought to be a genuinely fun idea. X-Men go full Hogwarts? Why not? Mix in time-travelling men in black assassins from Doctor Who (or at least from the 1990s "wilderness years" novels and comics versions of the franchise) and you should almost by definition have a kick-ass (if not quite Kick-Ass) comic book and a very serviceably fun but fucked-up TV show.

So! Did it work?

Well I've never read the comic, so I can't possibly say whether the Netflix people did a good job of adapting the source material. As a show though it's... OK. As I said, the main gimmick is sound, being mostly tried and tested, and the back-up time travel gimmick has of course been tried and tested to destruction (even if I use the phrase advisedly).

Just as Stan Lee taught us that superheroes can have their human sides, and Watchmen taught us that if Batman were real he'd have more in common with Nathan Bedford Forrest (or at least Bernhard Goetz) than he would with Sherlock Holmes, now we're invited to imagine that not all super schools are quite so "enlightened" as Charles Xavier's. In fact there's nothing like being brought up with your fellow (alien) septuplets in a big house in New York, with an emotionally distant authoritarian Englishman (also an alien though!) for an adoptive father and an android Stepford housewife for a mother and, er, an augmented chimpanzee for a butler to leave you... an angry, embittered, emotionally needy, "dysfunctional", and generally just typically obnoxious millennial. Only with superpowers!

If the X-Men were written to appeal to teenagers not too cool for school but definitely too cool to fight in Vietnam, the Umbrella Academy were evidently supposed to be channeling the angst of a generation that couldn't quite cope with 9/11, Bush and Iraq. Now they've been repackaged in time for the Great Awokening, I'd suggest that updating them by the better part of two decades wasn't such a great idea.

For one thing, they don't really fit into the post-2008 era, let alone the world post-2016. It's hard to sympathise with the marital problems of a super-powered Hollywood celebrity (for example) if you're a 40-year-old man who can't afford to move out of his mother's spare room, and when teenagers are being sacked from university and having their lives ruined for expressing the "wrong" opinions on WhatsApp it's a bit much to suggest they should be angry at their 'rents for having been too strict. (Then again, the total failure of the entire media establishment to come to terms with either the Great Recession or the post-Obama revolutions of Brexit and Trump is an ongoing cultural problem. So perhaps one shouldn't judge Netflix too harshly for failing adequately to adapt a 2000s comic-book to a late 2010s zeitgeist.)

Thomas Hoepker's "most controversial photo" of 9/11

Rather more important is that The Umbrella Academy has a very distinct post-9/11 vibe to it. When Mohamed Atta and his chums brought down the World Trade Centre, they also challenged many of the Baby-Boomers' and Generation X's previously devoutly held beliefs (even if in the end they didn't quite manage to bury them). Thomas Hoeopker's infamous photograph in fact illustrated not so much the indifference of young Americans' to their fellow citizens' suffering but their complete inability to comprehend what was going on. "I don't get it, dude. Why would anyone want to attack us? We're cool, aren't we?" Because whereas previously multiculturalism had been seen only as a Good Thing and America's role on the world stage had only ever (or at least since 'Nam) been seen as "a force for good", suddenly young Americans were invited to re-imagine both America's relationship with the world beyond their borders and their own relationship(s) with the American government itself.

Of course, in a comparatively short period of time the fantasies of the past all bounced back in the shape of conspiracy theories about Bush, oil, evangelical Christianity and (of course) racism. But for a short while the kids who'd grown up watching John Hughes movies and listening to the sonic sewage of MTV felt vulnerable both physically and intellectually. Having finished the first season of The Umbrella Academy therefore, I was interested to discover that it was the brainchild of Gerard Way, who was of course (with My Chemical Romance and in particular 'The Black Parade') one of the very, very few creative talents to have tried in any way to come to terms with 9/11 artistically. And whereas 'The Black Parade' was an unusual and (at least in some ways) original reflection on how young people should think about death, the first Umbrella Academy story gives the dysfunctional early 2000s generation their own comic-book avatars, who are supposed to overcome their own dysfunctionality and bickering in order to stop the End of the World.*

Admittedly, it's hard to make dysfunctional people dramatically engaging, let alone sympathetic. There aren't many people in The Umbrella Academy that we can really be expected to root for. But then one presumes that's the point. Deep down, each one of them is a beautiful damaged human being, and in the end they all love each other, and we learn to love them as they reconnect and rediscover what they have in common. Or... something like that.

The only really good thing about the Netflix adaption is of course Aidan Gallagher. Robert Sheehan finishes comfortably but still distantly in second place, playing a gay character who hardly develops at all. (He goes to 'Nam - having travelled back through time to get there - and comes back not significantly affected by the experience beyond having had a boyfriend who then died. Which makes one wonder if that's really all the significance that war can have to a X-gen/millennial audience.) And unfortunately it also has one really, genuinely bad thing going on, and that of course is the abysmal Ellen Page. And it is unfortunate because she's really, really, really bad. She's clearly supposed to be an "interesting" baddy. But alas, she really, really isn't.

And on the subject of interesting baddies, that brings us neatly to...

The Boys

Should one feel disappointed that a TV streaming series called The Boys hardly has any actual boys in it?†

Only joking! The Boys is glorious, and so gloriously fucked-up it should be on one of Russell Brand's 12-point rehab programs.

Simon Pegg gives it a big daddy kiss of approval. In the original comic book he was actually the inspiration for the main character, and he even wrote a foreword to one of the trade paperbacks by way of a wink and a thank-you. Here he literally plays the daddy of the main character, albeit with a slightly ropy Noo Yawk accent. Karl Urban sports an if anything even ropier London accent, though he goes on more or less to save the series on a character level just by projecting sheer scary bear charisma. Less successful is the actual main character, played tolerably but almost entirely without charisma or insight by Jack Quaid, as is his similarly one-dimensional super-powered girlfriend played by Erin Moriarty. (I just had to google their names, so trust me they're forgettable.)

In fact the series titular heroes - a slightly screwy squad of CIA gunslingers who are dedicated to "bringing down" (politically, legally and literally) the world's superheroes (who in general terms are asshole versions of DC's Justice League) - are surprisingly dull. There's a token black man (of course), who believes in Jesus and lies to his wife. There's a comedy token Frenchman (for some reason), who tortures people to death and then fusses about his baguettes and so on. And then there's Karl Urban's character Butcher, who's out for revenge, and we definitely feel his pain, but then he flies into a homicidal rage and murders Haley Joel Osment (whose guest appearance as a psychic washed-up former child prodigy is quite fabulously dark) in a public lavatory.

And that's sort of it for the goodies. Yes, obviously the series was trying to go down the now well trodden GoT route of not really having goodies and baddies. But there's a sense in which that wasn't quite what was wanted. It's clearly supposed to be "challenging", but if one really wanted to challenge modern norms one could easily have flagged up (for example) why a man and a woman who aren't married to each other should think it's OK to fornicate. Quaid's nerd and Moriarty's feisty blonde are supposed to be the goodies, but they're only goodies in that they both have utterly cliched story-arcs. Her "rebel without a clue" arc is even lamp-shaded by the Wonder Woman character. His arc looks as if he might be a new Breaking Bad-type character in the making, but as of the end of the first seasons he's nowhere near there yet. (In the last episode he shouts "Sorry!" whilst murdering private security guards. Is that supposed to be darkly funny? I'm not even sure that it was.)

"Post-modern? Moi?"

What saves the series rather than the Boys themselves is the baddies, who are of course the not-so-super superheroes. And boy, what wonderful baddies they are! If the X-Men comics humanised heroes and Watchmen and its followers meditated on the dehumanizing effects of having great power and great responsibility, The Boys takes the latter concept one stage further and asks what sort of people superheroes would be in the "real" world of rolling news channels, Hollywood blockbusters and media-savvy politicians.

Obviously the whole world at some point is going to have to come to terms with why we're currently spending the same sort of money at the cinema to see Iron Man thump Thanos as we used to spend on Gone with the Wind (or at any rate on a pseudo-sci-fi Gesamtkunstwerk like Star Wars - or even an American homemade neo-Marxist mythological masterpiece like Titanic). Personally I think there are perfectly legitimate economic reasons why we do. (Patriotic epics are all very well, but by definition they have limited international appeal. And yes, that includes Bondage.) And it's possible that even kiddie wizards and neo-mediaevalism may simply have had their day (especially now that China is opening up to Hollywood). But there's also a clear sense in which the 21st century world has both forgotten the past (the historical epic is currently beyond resuscitation) and lost faith in the future (because sci-fi as a genre isn't much better off), and so it contents itself with a fantastical version of the world of the present day. The question is, does it dare from such a vantage point to say anything about (let alone to) that present-day world. And does it have anything to say?

Like The Umbrella Academy, The Boys does indeed "deal" with 9/11, but having been written by a Brit rather than an actual resident of New York it does so far less obliquely, far more cynically and (arguably) more observantly.†† In fact it has an actual 9/11 calque in the shape of a 'plane hijacking that the heroes then make a hundred times worse when they intervene. And the character who fails to save the day but who then goes on to save virtually the entire show is of course Anthony Starr's Homelander. In the current golden age of television, when writers write to character rather than plot and then write their characters to the actors playing them (even when it means they end up with character-arcs that make no sense in the context of the plot - witness Jaime Lannister and Daenerys for a couple of good examples!) it was perhaps inevitable that having cast somebody really good as their main baddie they would end up whether intentionally or not making him the most "interesting" character of all. Because Anthony Starr, to employ a phrase, absolutely kills it.

Homelander on screen is cleverer, more charming, more three-dimensional, more devious and more ruthless, and altogether more interesting than he was in the comics. Is this just a problem with writing to a genuinely good actor? (And the Great Awokening has certainly sorted the men from, er, the boys in that regard. With fewer white heterosexual roles out there, even a thorough-going scary villain like Homelander, much like Smith in MitHC, will end up becoming a deeply compelling antihero.) He's cynical enough to bring a baby into a room with a bomb just because he wants to know if it will survive the blast - because he wants to know whether it's his or not. And the scene when he finally gets the measure of evil domineering single-mother lipstick-feminist nympho Hillary-clone Madelyn Stillwell and lasers her brain out of her head must have raised a cheer from every God-fearing toxic masculinist throughout the English-speaking world.†††

Umbrella Academy went to town on the idea of superheroes being emotionally immature adults, but The Boys goes all the way to the big city on it. And in doing so it doesn't just dip into a somewhat hackneyed critique of what a liberal American might consider to be a cold-showers boarding school-style of education. Perhaps inadvertently The Boys holds up what a leftist Ulsterman might consider a mirror to America itself. Yes, it turns out that Homelander was brought up in a laboratory. But then "real-life" modern America is itself just as much an artificial being. After all, what other sort of country could ever be satisfied with such an utterly banal version of protestant "Christianity", in which religion is reduced to pop music, scriptural slogans and foreign aid campaigns? (Give me dogmas and incense any day!) In what other sort of country is it considered sexually mainstream for teenage boys to lust over women's mammary glands. (Over here, even straight men prefer their hindquarters.) If America were a superhero it would be Superman, and if Superman were real he'd a smug but neurotic evangelical obsessed with tits.

One final thing that The Umbrella Academy and The Boys have in common is that each breaks with its comic book source by giving its first season a cliffhanger ending, and one indeed that holds out a glimpse of a possible "nostalgic" resolution. The Umbrella Academy's is fairly simple. Even if is about to "get messy", we're still invited to imagine the characters are on the verge of going back through time and having a Quantum Leap-type second chance, with childhood innocence, order and beauty restored. The Boys on the other hand ends with a humdinger of a twist, when we find out that both Butcher's wife and Homelander's son are alive and well and living in a leafy suburb somewhere - though not how any of them will really react to their discovery.

So, have we seen the last of Ellen Page? Will the Umbrella Academy now be able to move on from that quirky, slightly convoluted time-travel story and continue having new wacky adventures for years to come? Will Butcher be able to come to terms with the probability that he was legitimately cuckolded by Homelander and certainly not widowed? Will Homelander give his long-lost son the chance to become the emotionally developed human being he could never be? (Because even being brought up by a single mom beats growing up as a super-powered lab rat.)

With second seasons in the pipeline for both shows, each has plenty to play for.

"No! I am Darth Vader."

*Interestingly there are several musical choices in The Umbrella Academy that tonally feel quite out of place. Generally speaking if I recognize a song in a show's soundtrack the chances are that it's too mainstream for the drama. So 'Run Boy Run' may have briefly fitted the mood for the opening of the second episode. But 'Don't Stop Me Now', though in many ways excellent, certainly didn't. The idea of having any Black Parade songs in there may sound in and of itself incestuous, but given that a Black Parade atmosphere pervades The Umbrella Academy the fact that it wouldn't have fit the tone of the drama rather makes one wonder what tone exactly the show-makers were aiming for.
†There is one, as it happens, and he's mouth-watering.
††Having been brought up on legends about Dunkirk, Brits are perhaps more familiar with the ability government spin-doctors have to turn a monumental establishment fuck-up into first a national tragedy, then a national parable, and finally into a foundational myth for whatever the Government wanted to do in the first place. (As a WWII nerd, one suspects Garth Ennis would appreciate the parallel.)
†††They did repeat Brightburn's goof though - i.e. when Superman's heat vision blasts straight through the back of your skull it's unlikely you'll have time to wince and say "ouch".

I feel like laughing but this is tragic.

Very soon, people are going to wake up.

And then they'll realise that however much they wanted this ridiculous, non-curative "cure" it was far, far worse than the disease. https://t.co/eT2XwiT1iv

— Man in Black (@Man_in_Black_63) May 2, 2020

The X-Files: The Shape of the Conspiracy - Part Two: Kidnapping and Clones

Herrenvolk

As in the good old days when the previous Doctor Who's outgoing script editor would write the first serial of any new Doctor, 'Little Green Men' feels like a season one story meant to refresh our memories. It makes little sense, beyond that the military are still the bad guys and the Smoking Man is pressuring Skinner to close down Mulder's work. Sen Richard Matheson is presumably the connection in Congress that Mulder mentioned in the pilot episode. But here he functions mainly as Deep Throat's replacement. The only real revelation of the episode is Skinner, who now suddenly starts to come into his own, apparently protecting Mulder by keeping him in an inconspicuous job, albeit one that's well beneath his talents and dignity. (Later on, in 'Ascension', he says 'I can't protect you, Agent Mulder.' The clear inference is that he has been protecting Mulder so far.) And the 'Get out!' scene with the CSM is priceless.

Skinner comes even more into his own in the next episode, in which we learn that he's basically been trying to restart the X-Files by the back door. His 'This should have been an X-File!' is one of the most haunting lines of the entire show. (At least it was for me.) And when he does eventually reopen the X-Files in 'Ascension', because 'that's what they fear the most', it's something of a spine-tingling and/or punch-the-air moment. In fact all things considered 'The Host' is a really good reboot episode for the series as a whole. (On a personal note, it was the first full episode I ever watched, back in the day, on dear old Auntie's very much terrestrial second channel, and it immediately cemented the show in my family's weekly telly schedule.) Yes, the story is crap, but it's literally so - and that's a good thing! And yes, there's something glorious about the fact that Darin Morgan, who would go on to become something of a guru for those who like the "monster-of-the-week" episodes, started out playing an actual monster-of-the-week in that cheesy "fluke man" costume. Of course as yet there's still no real difference between the two types of episode, and in retrospect that's actually a very pleasing thing.

'X', like Deep Throat, is a spy from inside the military. This is all but confirmed later on in 'Fresh Bones'. (More specifically, he's probably ex-Marines.) Currently though, he's "at the FBI". (It's a normal enough career path, after all.) In 'One Breath' X has a little rant at Mulder in which interestingly he reasserts the conditions that Mulder and his "predecessor" worked under. 'You’re my tool, you understand? I come to you when I need you.' But it's quite a different relationship. 'I don't want to be here.' he barks, in 'Sleepless'. Are we still supposed to believe that he, like Deep Throat, just wants to use Mulder for the same ends (i.e. to expose the fucked-up shit the Government is getting up to with aliens and alien spaceships and alien gene therapy and, er, getting loonies who've been interfered with by aliens to kidnap sexy FBI Agents and hand them over to the Navy for Japanese scientists to do, er, weird things to them)? Presumably! But we feel that X's motives are personal rather than political. He's loyal, albeit in a somewhat grudging way, to his "predecessor" Deep Throat and to Deep Throat's ideals. But we never really find out what the connexion was between them. Given their quite different characters one can theorise that the nature of X's "loyalty" is one of personal honour rather than shared sentiment. (Did Deep Throat save X's ass in 'Nam? It's possible. X looks old enough.) Whereas Deep Throat claimed he was trying to make amends for his sins, we feel that X has been hurt by the system and wants revenge on it. And whereas Deep Throat always came across as a patriotic patrician ashamed of what his country had become, who was seeking to expose a nefarious conspiracy even at the cost of his own life, X has more of an angry black radical vibe. (Even X's disdain for opera in 'End Game' hints at a man who fundamentally despises the Establishment and wants to survive long enough to dance on its grave.) In 'Soft Light', when X effectively manipulates Mulder into leading him to Dr Banton, we get our first, er, glimmer of how he might be using Mulder: just as the Smoking Man used Mulder and Scully to retrieve Ray Soames's tracking device and the alien foetus from Fort Marlene, so presumably Deep Throat could always claim as cover that he was running Mulder as his own double agent within the Bureau. But in truth this is almost certainly just X at the same stage as Deep Throat was at in 'E.B.E.' - abusing Mulder's trust (not to mention sacrificing various mostly innocent lives along the way) out of fear that his own credit with the Syndicate may be about to run out.

The real watershed episode is of course 'Duane Barry', in which we "learn" (for want of a better word) that "the Government" are "in on it"

DUANE BARRY: The government knows about it, you know. They're even in on it sometimes. Right there in the room when they come. They work together with a, uh, secret, uh, corporation. ... A man, the military. They're all in it together. ... The government knows why they're here, but they wouldn't dare let the truth out. So they cooperate.

I have to say, personally, that I've always thought the new idea of the dear old, sinister old "Government" co-operating with extraterrestrials to be something of a lapse in tone for the series. Frankly, men in suits may be scary to crazy hipster libertarian types. But for me the vision of the men with the goofy tie-pins standing next to the creepy child-aliens just made the latter seem considerably less creepy. And fundamentally the whole idea of men dressed as bank managers nattering away to little green men is frankly just silly. It's a concept that gets somewhat salvaged later on, with the whole idea of the conspiracy within the world's governments working in secret to become the Vichy Government to the Alien Colonists' invaders, along with slogans like 'Resist or serve' and 'Survival is the ultimate ideology'. But at this point the revelation comes as something of a "now you're being silly" moment.

And then again, the whole idea that it's not really the government but a "government within the government", made up of men wearing stripey shirts and stripy ties, is itself somewhat disappointing - as indeed, for that matter, are the "politics" of The X-Files generally. But I digress.

Ostensibly at this point, the Smoking Man and indeed Alex Krycek are still just secret agents for the military, acting in secret for the sake of national security. (For all his pixie good looks, we can easily imagine that Krycek is ex-military as well. We later find out that he's a Russian secret agent, but hey, these things happen.) But the extreme possibility is dangled out for us not only that they look down on FBI dogsbodies like Skinner but also that they have no real loyalty either to the military, whose alien foetus they didn't return at the end of 'The Erlenmeyer Flask' or, indeed, to any legitimate government. And if they're the ones behind Scully's abduction, and in other words if they're controlling Duane Barry, then they may as well be the "secret corporation" that's "cooperating" with "them".

We later find out, in 'Anasazi', that the Smoking Man's "day job" is as head of Garnet, and it's the nearest we ever come to discerning what his actual official position is in the whole US (and international) establishment. Indeed it's almost the only time we see him actually break sweat over a case. As the MJ-12's chief troubleshooter he's essential not just to the generals who are trying to keep the truth about UFOs out of the limelight but also to the Syndicate itself. More generally, it's given him carte blanche, in the name of national security, so glide around not just the J. Edgar Hoover Building and the Pentagon but pretty much everywhere, keeping an eye on government secrets and finally, apparently, building up literally a vast storeroom of his own. And he's been around for so long that in the upper echelons of the FBI they can no longer even remember his name.

In 'Ascension' he gives Krycek some blather about not killing Mulder for fear of 'turning one man's religion into a crusade'. It's a cute line, and indeed it's repeated again and again in later episodes. (He uses it to Bill Mulder in 'Ansazi' and to Strughold in the 1998 movie, and clearly he's used it so much by 'Talitha Cumi' that even X has heard it.) But it's not terribly satisfactory, and one cannot blame the writers for retconning later on that the real reason he doesn't want to kill him is that the Smoking Man actually admires Mulder. (A mere two episodes later he tells Mulder to his face that he likes him, and we later find out, of course, that he's Mulder's father. In 'The Erlenmeyer Flask', Mulder refers to Deep Throat as Obi Wan-Kenobi: perhaps it was inevitable that the CSM would turn out to be Darth Vader.) It's just possible that even in the early years the Smoking Man was grooming Mulder as a possible ally in case things went pear-shaped with the Conspiracy.

Mulder for some reason (though we later find out he was right) assumes that Scully was abducted by the Navy, presumably on the basis that he knows he didn't kill Duane Barry so the Navy must have covered up his cause of death. (And Mulder calls Krycek 'Alex'. Soooooo cute! Ahem!) Yes, this feels like another lapse of judgement. The Smoking Man can sit in on meetings at the FBI, and he's got a big private stash of alien gizmos at the Pentagon. And somehow he also has a hold over Krycek, Blevins and, to a lesser extent, Skinner. (And no, we never find out how, exactly! For some reason we're just supposed to picture him as some sort of school superintendent, who can make people sit up straight and look nervous whenever he's around. "SKIN-ner!") We're encouraged to imagine (from the final scene of 'The Erlenmeyer Flask') that he's from "the executive branch", but what does that mean exactly? That he plays golf with the President and can have anyone who works for any government agency immediately fired on a whim. (According to X, referring to Sen Matheson in 'Ascension', 'They have something on everyone.') Or are we supposed to accept that anyone who knows anything about him knows the deep dark gangster secret of state power, and that none of them wants to end up like Deep Throat? It's fine, on a level of immediate drama - tone and setting and so on. But given that just two episodes on from 'Ascension' we find out that he's just a lonely old man who lives in a dinghy apartment, as X-Files mysteries go it's even less satisfying than most.) The only, slightest hint of an explanation we ever get is that as head of Garnet he has the authority of some sort of permanent executive branch, inter-agency chief "fixer". But is it really feasible to imagine that he has the entire US Navy at his beck and call?

Well anyway, for some reason the Navy kidnap Scully, they access her medical records by using a weird genetic tracking device that was put in her arm when she had her smallpox jabs, they snaffle her ovaries to make baby alien hybrids (albeit still quite crap ones that don't last very long), they put a Japanese microchip in the back of her neck to stop her getting cancer (and possibly to read her mind, possibly even to call her back whenever they feel like it using some hokey alien mind-control device!), and then they dump her back at the Georgetown Medical Centre. It's not at all clear how this all came about, but we're invited to believe that this is all part of a long-standing secret tri-services alien hybridisation programme. (Still all sold to the military as being in order to breed super-soldiers? And covered up in the name of "national security"? Presumably!) So presumably the Smoking Man just got her name on the list. And got them to accept deliverance at a UFO abduction hot-spot! From a gibbering loony in drawstring pants called Duane Barry!

And, er, then she got lost in the bureaucracy and ended up half-dead and half-alive at the hospital attached to her old uni in Washington. Because, er, these things happen! It is of course quite plausible that some sweet old navy doctor recognised Scully from some Christmas party when she was a kid and so quietly had her dropped her off at Georgetown. This would at least explain why the Syndicate, presumably smarting because they never got a sample of Scully's blood, dispense one of their thugs to pick one up from the hospital.

Of course, the Smoking Man claims that he was responsible for returning Scully because "he likes her", but it doesn't quite ring true - or at least not quite so true as his "I like you" to Mulder (because, er, I am your father, ahem!). His 'I'm in the game because I believe what I'm doing is right' though does have a glimmer of plausibility. It's possible that even at this point Carter was imagining the great project of the conspiracy - to resist colonisation or to serve the colonists, and to make sure their families (in C.G.B. Spender's case his wife Cassandra, and maybe one or other of his two sons Jeffrey and Fox) would survive. Certainly the 'If people were to know the things I know, it would all fall apart.' is a meme that's going to come up again and again before the conspiracy arc is exhausted. (And yes, the 'This'll be our secret.' is fabulously pedo.)

There's a sense in which 'Red Museum' is a sort of last hurrah for early-style X-Files. I starts out "monster of the week" and, after a fabulously overstocked* set-up (not just handsome teens being abducted at night and ending up in the woods in their underpants, but loads of paranoia - i.e. paranoia about eating meat, paranoia about vegetarian New Age cults, paranoia about teenage violence and rape, paranoia about modern farming methods, paranoia about peeping Toms and pedos, paranoia about family doctors, paediatric medicine and vaccinations, paranoia about, er, the government... and, of course, paranoia about paranoia) suddenly who should emerge out of nowhere but the Crew Cut Man (who killed Deep Throat)? Yes, by inference he's still working for the Smoking Man, so the experiment he's closing down here is either another hybrid operation (injecting children with alien DNA) or (just as likely!) the flip-side "Purity Control" experiment - "control" meaning probably not so much a 'control' as in an experiment as a means of fighting the spread of the alien virus by creating a vaccine for it. (And are we supposed to imagine that, like Michaud in the movie later on, he sacrifices his life for the project partly because he's been told that he'll come back as a super-soldier?) And of course it's all rounded off, once again, with Gillian Anderson's beautiful sexy vowel sounds and the beautiful chilling finale that the case is still open.

'Colony' of course introduces the theme of alien colonization. (Duh!) In the process, of course, we also get clones, alien viruses and, of course, the Alien Bounty Hunters (and, perhaps more importantly, their race) into the bargain. But Carter's original conception of his great arc seems to have been quite different. According to the original plan, apparently, the "aliens" actually doing the "colonizing" were themselves clones. That is to say (implicitly) that they reproduced asexually. They presumably had some rudimentary "shape-shifting" ability, so that they could look like humans (because by any stretch of the imagination it seems far fetched that an alien race would all look like humans with matching male pattern baldness), but at the same time, irrespective of external appearances, they could also always recognize other aliens. But they had no real individuality. (We learn later on that the Samantha clones have an "original", archetypal clone, who, if she survives, will somehow ensure the survival of her race as a whole. And the Alien Bounty Hunter's question "Where is he?" in retrospect sounds as if he was referring to an original Gregor archetype rather than simply to the next Gregor on his list.) The reason why the clones are interested in the "government"/military's hybridization experiments (which apparently go back to the 1940s) is 'to erase that aspect which has forced the community [i.e. the colony] to scatter... [i.e.] their identical natures'. If they don't all look the same then it won't look weird if they live together. But alas, they're now being closed down, and this time it's by their own people rather than by the US government. Though the extraterrestrial politics of The X-Files are never really explained, clearly there are nasty right-wingers out there just as there are down here. This at least seems to be the implication of the Samantha clone's explanation that 'The experiments weren't sanctioned. It was considered a dilution of their species, a pollution of their race. So a bounty hunter was dispatched to destroy them and terminate [Terminator-style] the colony.' The Bounty Hunters apparently are chauvinists who take the concept of "identity" very seriously. (One idea from this early stage that certainly didn't survive was that of the "impure" Gregor clones' wanting "to share the planet" with the "pure" Bounty Hunters. It's barely audible in the screened version of 'Colony', but just about detectable if you put on the subtitles.)

In practice, even Mulder doesn't quite believe this shtick from Samantha about racial purity. But at the same time there's a certain thematic elegance to all this, so it's something of a pity that so much of it was later implicitly jettisoned and retconned out of existence. The only thing that doesn't quite sound right, oddly enough, is the Samantha clone's claim that there were two clones who originally came to Earth in the 1940s and pretended to be her parents. If they really had arrived in the 1940s, presumably they would have been so old that they could only have posed as her grandparents. And since the only clones we see who are old enough to have been born in the 1940s are the Gregor clones we must, alas, admit that the story about the two original parent clones was probably a fib. After all, since when did clones need more than one parent, especially if we're supposed to imagine that like the hybrids in their vats in 'The Erlenmeyer Flask', clones can be grown to term in giant fish tanks?†

One of The X-Files's great strengths of course has always been that, unlike every other show on American TV (though not unlike older British shows such as Doctor Who, of course!) it never had a "bible": scriptural authority was never an issue, and sometimes even the show's fundamental doctrines could evolve and change from one season to the next. In the case of the hybridization and cloning experiments, it's not long before the show is using the two words interchangeably. (In 'Memento Mori' Mulder addresses the Kurt Crawford clones with a cheery 'You're hybrids!' and they don't disillusion him. And in the movie the Well-Manicured Man says 'Without a vaccination, the only true survivors of the viral holocaust will be those immune to it - human alien clones.') And yes, unlike the Jeremiah Smiths (who work for the Social Security Administration rather than in abortion clinics, albeit arguably no less improbably) and (we later learn) the Bounty Hunters, the Gregors never "shape-shift", so with a bit of retconning we might just about be able to shoehorn the Gregors into being not alien clones but human clones whose genes have been spliced with alien DNA. And arguably we can legitimately speculate about the nature of the Gregors' attempt to erase their identical natures, and about the individuality (or "freedom") that they were hoping to achieve for themselves: the only reason the extraterrestrial colonists would have engaged the services of a bounty hunter must have been that the Gregors, via their hybridization, had discovered a way to resist the Black Oil. We learn later on in 'The Red and the Black' that the Alien Bounty Hunters' race have started their own resistance movement against the Colonists, but these clones are evidently the original "rebel colonists". (Their goal of subverting "the Project" is shared by the Kurt Crawford clones in 'Memento Mori', and indeed we are probably supposed to imagine them sharing a similar grisly, bubbly green fate.) But then how things changed from season to season! In 'Colony' the Alien Bounty Hunter arrives from outer space in a UFO. In 'Talitha Cumi' he's apparently just bumming around New England waiting for a call. And by 'Memento Mori' these things can apparently be left to the Grey-Haired Man - who, despite not being very nice, is apparently quite human.

The Gregors' relationship with the later X-Files mythology (not to mention the later X-Files clones) does of course raise the whole question of timelines. We can legitimately deduce that there have been three periods when batches of the clones that appear in The X-Files have been produced: the original Gregor clones were apparently "born" in the 1940s, the first batch of Adam and Eve clones and the Samantha clones that appear in 'End Game' (and presumably the Kurt Crawford clones that appear in 'Memento Mori') were cloned in the 1960s, and the cute little Samantha and Kurt Crawford "drone" clones were products of the 1980s. (And finally, is William a clone as well? Was there one final batch of millennial-baby clones? It seems we'll never know, but the final shot of 'My Struggle IV' would seem to suggest that William has the standard "hybrid" abilities of surviving gunshot wounds and breathing underwater that were established in 'The Erlenmeyer Flask'.)

So was Samantha cloned when she was born? If she was, we might imagine it was her father's doing. Was the original Samantha a test-tube baby? Was Bill Mulder himself unable to get children naturally? It would certainly cast both his relationship with his divorced wife and his wife's affair with the Smoking Man in a different light. And did he put Samantha forward for the cloning programme because, you never know, a spare favourite child might just come in handy one day - not that such a plan would have worked, of course, because presumably the aliens would have "just known". But having his own daughter cloned, before later getting in touch with the Gregor clones from Russia, could well have been an early gesture of defiance, showing faith in the cloning programme and a personal commitment to the survival of his genetic inheritance. It also seems possible, if Samantha was that important, that that was why the Smoking Man was keen to hold on to her, as we later learn he did in 'Closure'.

The question then of course is why? What was the point of making all these clones? We learn from Chris Carter's "secret track" that the "Purity Control" project began as a series of cloning operations in the 1940s, 'its original conception the brainchild of German scientists given immunity themselves for war crimes, and allowed to continue the eugenic experiments that were Hitler's dark legacy.' It's perfectly possible that Carter was thinking of The Boys from Brazil at this point, and we know from 'Eve' that the US military were initially interested in clones for their super-soldier project, so it's quite possible that that's how the conspiracy started, well before the start of the hybridisation experiments and long before the great betrayal of 1973. (Of course it's also possible that by this stage Carter is confusing 'clones' and 'hybrids' willy-nilly.) And even when said "Nazi scientists" started splicing human DNA with alien it's perfectly plausible that the "control" in 'Purity Control' meant just that - because what better control group could one ask for than one made up of clones?

We can take it for granted that the Samantha clones tell Mulder that his sister is alive because they are manipulating him. (Somewhat cruelly, it has to be said - but, then again, survival!) But why does the Bounty Hunter then confirm it? Quite honestly, that's a tough one. It is just possible that he knows about the "walk-ins" who took her in 'Closure' - though again, in The X-Files we're not really supposed to know what happens "off-world". (As it happens, Cassandra Spender confirms in 'Two Fathers' that Samantha is 'Out there, with them. The aliens' - though admittedly this was more than a year before 'Closure'.) It's also possible that there are now so many Samantha clones knocking around that no one can remember which one is the real one - except the original one presumably, which could have been a neat Twilight Zone-type story to tease out, if anyone could have been bothered. Finally, in all probability the Bounty Hunter has just got it wrong. He was privy to the original abduction (because according to 'Within', abductions is one the services the Bounty Hunters offer) but not to the decision to return her just a couple of years later. If this is the case, it casts an interesting light on the whole galactic economy. The Bounty Hunters aren't controlled by the Black Oil. They do what they do because (by definition!) they're paid to by the Colonists. But how? With what? One possibility that springs to mind is that the Bounty Hunters really love their whole sweet, sweet shape-shifting gig and basically are just junkies for the DNA of different species, so the Colonists supply them with the means to travel between planets on condition that some of their best soldiers and assassins do a few jobs for them in return. (It's not so far-fetched when you consider that one of Carter's main inspirations for the clone/hybrid episodes is the old 1960s TV-show The Invaders.) The Colonists themselves, it later transpires, are actually quite slight, gentle creatures - albeit amoral, and with little more than disdain for humanity.

We might even speculate, given that we later learn that it was not the Syndicate but the Russians who eventually managed to develop an antidote to the Black Oil, that the Gregors really are from Russia and that their operation was the true beginning of "the resistance". And if the cloning of Samantha really was part of a plan by her father then it might well explain why he's oddly quiet in the 'Colony'/'End Game' story. If he's in on the Gregors' and Samanthas' resistance plans, his sitting outside smoking when Fox arrives at the Vineyard is lest any interaction between him and the clone give the game away to his estranged wife. It's also possible that his claim that Fox's mother wanted him to come is a fib. (Actually it was he.) And it would explain his reaction - frustration and anger, and an oddly faux concern for his estranged wife's feelings rather than personal grief -  when he learns that Mulder has "lost her" again. Certainly we later learn that he's on the Syndicate's "resistance" wing. (Indeed, in 1973 he was the lone dissenter in the vote to cooperate with the Colonists.) And so of course the reason the Bounty Hunter is there to terminate the Gregors and Samanthas is because (so far) they're the most dangerous potential resistance to the project that the colonists have yet come across.

And of course all this means nothing to the military - the best reason yet to think the the Syndicate's deal with the aliens (handing over their children as hostages in return for baby aliens to do experiments on, on condition that they produce a hybridization process that will allow them and their children to survive the Black Oil's colonization process so that they can act as a "Vichy Government" for the colonists, etc. etc.) is unknown to the wider US "government".

Alas, that would change quite drastically as the whole politics of The X-Files became re-imagined at the beginning of the Season Three.

*No pun intended!
†Incidentally, there's a weird sort of superstition amongst fans either that the alien foetus in 'The Erlenmeyer Flask' cannot be a true alien (because of the first movie) or that the aliens can reproduce sexually (despite the movie). In reality, there's no reason to imagine that the aliens gestate in any way other than as we see on screen: the Syndicate's bees are intended to infect the human population with the Black Oil, who will then be impregnated with alien foetuses that will come to term as violent, heavily clawed and armoured monsters. Presumably the hybridized members of the Syndicate would then have the job of taming them and helping them to mutate into their final "Grey" forms. (Again, this isn't just from Alien(s): it's also largely inspired by The Invaders. Alas, it's an idea that was ultimately missing from Prometheus/Alien: Covenant that the human race was in fact originally engineered to act as a host race for the xenomorphs, the Engineers' plan being first to "seed" Earth with their own DNA, and then to "seed" the human race with their X Files-style black goo in order to produce a new third race of purest malevolence. Indeed, The X-Files started as a clone of Twin Peaks, but it soon became a hybrid of every science-fiction film and TV-show you can think of. A bit of reverse genetic engineering was only a matter of time.)

The St Gallen Mafia

No, sorry, I just don't believe in the "St Gallen Mafia" conspiracy theory. They failed to get Martini elected in 2005, when Martini himself told them to support Ratzinger in order to stop Bergoglio. Austen Ivereigh of course claims that they then had a change of heart, and that the three of them who were left (three out of 115!) conspired to get Bergoglio elected in 2013. But how likely is this really?

Indeed is there any real evidence for this outside of the tittle-tattle collected by Ivereigh and Bergoglio's other liberal boomer boosters? Alas, not really! Ivereigh claimed in the first edition of his silly book that just before the 2013 conclave the three of them got Bergoglio's consent to campaign for him, but he was then forced to retract this allegation for the second edition. And is there any real reason even to think it, given that no one (apart from the St Gallen group, supposedly!) even thought of Bergoglio as a "liberal" before he became Pope? Certainly he was not considered liberal by his fellow Jesuits in Argentina, with whom he was deeply unpopular. At a time when "liberation theology" was booming in South America, Bergoglio was seen as something of a "conservative" JPII sycophant.

And for what it's worth I don't believe in the "British coup" theory either. (Again, would we really do such a thing? Did some just think it would be funny to have an Argie as Pope? "Haw-haw! That'll annoy The Sun.") On the face of it, yes, one can easily imagine Pope Bergoglio being elected as Dave and Nick's puppet as much as Obama's. After all, Britain is at best Washington's poodle and at worst Mini-Me to Uncle Sam's Dr Evil, so there's a certain thematic logic to it. In one sense the ultimate success of the "liberal" proddy British Establishment would be to have a Pope elected who was a liberal protestant in all but name.

And yet! And yet! For one thing, once again, the source! This is Ma Pepinster, the elderly schoolgirl who for no readily apparent reason is still writing for Britain's most oleaginously pro-Establishment "Catholic" periodical. And secondly, once again... just think about it. These are the same British Establishment lickspittles who are diehards for the EU on the grounds that internationally Britain is now a post-imperial pipsqueak. They're the sorts of Catholics who would despise the Commonwealth of Nations as an embarrassing relic of a bygone age (even though in practice they would approve of much that it does). Surely the idea that our own James Bond helped to get Pope Francis elected is one sycophantic conspiracy fantasy too far even for them?

In fact easily the best summing up of the "political" situation in the Church I've read in some time comes courtesy of someone called Shane Schaetzel on his blog here. The Catholic Church is "split" (although not technically, and for crude financial reasons it probably isn't going to be any time soon either) between American neocons and German liberals. The former are trying to keep the JPII "conservative" vision of Vatican II alive. The latter are basically in hoc to the German secular state thanks to its "church tax". What's more, they don't really believe in anything anyway and they don't see why anyone else should either. (And more to the point they don't want them to!) The way the whole "Pope Francis" phenomenon fits into it is so straightforward there just isn't space for conspiracy theories about Jesuits, conspiracy theories about the St Gallen mafia, conspiracy theories about the British Embassy in Rome, or even conspiracy theories about Communists, Freemasons and Jews, etc.

Because the simple truth is that when Ratzinger resigned the papacy he was seen as being old and weak. He'd wanted it for himself, for his vision, for his "reform of the Reform" and his "hermeneutic of continuity". And he'd failed. The Cardinals wanted another JPII. The American neocons at any rate remembered "their" Pope as a tough guy who used to stand up to one sort of son-of-a-bitch (i.e. the "atheistic" Commies) and pal around with the other sort (i.e. Galtieri*, Tudjman, Saddam, etc.). They wanted a strong man, they thought Bergoglio would be it, and even if Ratzinger wasn't seen as an old, weak has-been (and I suspect he was), the remorseless logic of the conclave was simply that Bergoglio was next in line. Besides, he was Sodano's golden boy, Sodano had been Galtieri's golden boy, and so as far as JPII's groupies were concerned Bergoglio could do no wrong. (See George Weigel, especially!) And so once again it was the Yanks wot won it - led of course by American Establishment Cardinal par excellence (see here and here) the Archbishop of New York (where else?) Cardinal Dolan.

Buyer's remorse has of course since set in fast, but the simple and obvious truth remains. When future church historians finally start to write up the fate of the glorious new Americanised Catholic Church that emerged after Vatican II, the answer will simply be that they did it to themselves.

*We now know exactly whose side he was on.

Morning Routine - American Psycho (1/12) Movie CLIP (2000) HD

Woke Fate*

All one can really say for all the post-T2 Terminator films up until 2019 was that at least they weren't boring. Terminator: Dark Fate manages to be not only offensively boring but boringly offensive. In fact boringly offensively offensive and boring more or less sums it up.

Of course the first Terminator was genuinely scary. The body horror was genuinely horrible and horrific. Its first sequel, like Aliens, was a high-octane action thriller, complete with a cute kid and gun-toting mommabear. And all the others have been footnotes not to the original concept but to that later derogation. Because Rise of the Machines was both disappointing and toe-curlingly bad, though it was at least amusingly so. Arnie's ditching Ed Furlong and teaming up with Mel Gibson cast-off Nick Stahl certainly didn't save it. Then Salvation was head-spinningly mad, and not quite redeemed either by Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese or by a typically over-the-top Christian Bale as John Connor. And finally Genesis was just bad full-stop, marred mainly by abysmal casting choices and even more abysmal liberties with the franchise's characters and ideas - although a silly plot and ropy special effects certainly didn't help.

The Alien franchise actually waited until number 4 before going self-consciously campy and kooky. But already by Alien3 it had ditched any sense that it was building a long-running saga by using its first few minutes to undo the happy ending of the previous film. The difference between that and the termination of John Connor in the first few minutes of Dark Fate is that casually (off screen!) killing off a cute little girl, a handsome young man and a cool funky robot was in retrospect very much in keeping with the bleak soulless Godlessness of the Alien universe - where there is no fate, but also no good and evil, and there probably shouldn't really be any happy endings. And that doesn't quite work in the Terminator universe, where the moral is supposed to be that we're all supposed to be in charge of our fates, because destiny is nothing but what we make of it.

So having seen unborn baby John Connor, bratty but adorable kid John Connor, twinky teen John Connor, angry adult John Connor and finally baddy (FFS!) John Connor, in Dark Fate we see boy John Connor go the way of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, and that's before we've even got so far as the opening credits. And as with the Star Wars characters the moral apparently is simply that we don't need white men to save the world anymore. We can make do with a young Latina call Dani Gomez. Or Ami Diaz. Or... or whatever her name is.

And she doesn't need no help from no man neither, be he machine or otherwise! Because she's got her super-butch blond-haired, blue-eyed girlfriend to rescue her, and to help her to get across the Mexican border illegally (yes, really!).

And that's before we've even mentioned the return of kick-ass sexagenarian† Linda Hamilton!

Well, the biggest disappointment of Rise of the Machines was that Hamilton and Furlong weren't in it. The biggest disappointment of Dark Fate is that now they're both back, only he got no more than a computer "de-aged"†† cameo after the manner of Princess Leia in Rogue One, and she's little more than a Carrie Fisher clone from circa The Force Awakens. Her beauty has gone, as has any trace of wit or charm. All that's left is some dried-up aged sass.

Sarah Connor herself now seems to be doing little more than channeling Hillary Clinton. She's old, she's embittered, she's out for revenge, and she doesn't just hate machines anymore, because now she also hates both men generally and indeed motherhood. One can only assume therefore that Ami Gomez is supposed to be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And Arnold Schwarzenegger is presumably supposed to be... Arnold Schwarzenegger? He was a baddy, but now he's a nice liberal gun-toting Republican Texan who just wants to help.

What else? Well it's possible the writers may have tried to be wise to potential "Mary Sue"-type criticisms, because their (literally, physically) strong female characters do get bumped around a little bit. But the truth is than one never really feels for any of them. (Sarah Connor alone in one scene manages to bounce burly security guards around like babies.) And I'm normally the last person to demand more "sex" in my films, but sex is leaking out of modern films not because of some new wave of Puritanism or even because of the dreaded PG-13 rating but simply because of the Chinese market. (The Chinese don't like slow build-ups either, of course!) And I suppose in a movieverse where women don't need men to rescue them, why should they have any other sorts of "needs" either?

So fair's fair! This isn't a film the Terminator franchise needed, and it's certainly not one that anyone will want either to re-watch or to remember. Its possible fate can be termination, and with extreme prejudice.

*I thought of Snark Bait, but there's a certain sense in which this may have been the high point of Trump-era wokeness. For various reasons, Hollywood may be about to turn a corner politically.
†In one scene I think she literally kicks the arse of a muscular twenty-something security guard. (OK boomer?)
††What with this and the de-aged kids in [Sh]It, last year was perhaps the creepiest year ever for Hollywood boylovers.

Was The Big Bang Theory the most conservative TV comedy ever?

When I first watched (or perhaps I should say caught sight of) The Big Bang Theory in daily early-evening repeats on E4, my initial response was simply to write it off as a cross between Friends and Frasier - those two 1990s stalwarts of America's sitcom export market, who taught us between them that it's OK to jump into bed with anyone you feel like provided you're young and attractive, make lots of arch, quippy remarks about everything, and somehow make enough money in your dead-end job to live in a palatial high-rise apartment.* It took a while for the penny (ahem!) to drop that this was actually quite a good formula for a sitcom - tried and tested, and only eventually (i.e. after a decade or so) becoming tired and testing.

The oddest thing for me about The Big Bang Theory in retrospect though isn't even its longevity, so much as its particularly peculiar brand of conservatism. For all its obsession with making up-to-date references to geek culture and "real world" science, there was actually something strangely old-fashioned about the multi-camera/studio-audience format. In fact although the sexual mores were 21st century, The Big Bang Theory was pretty much hawking the same American Dream as its sitcom predecessors had in the heyday of comic-books and astronauts in the early 1960s. The characters all live in clean and tidy houses and apartments. Religion, it has to be said, doesn't get much of a look-in, but at the same time when married female characters get pregnant "choice" is not even mentioned. And by the end of the series it turns out that friendship and family, intelligence and hard work, and eventually marriage and children - in that order, unusually enough - are the important things that make for personal fulfillment and happiness.

What made it feel even more old-fashioned in the dying days of the Obama era (not to mention amidst the woke hysteria that greeted Trump's election) was that it was a survivor from the time of Dubya. Back in them thar days, for example, it was still acceptable to have dark-skinned comedy characters like Apu and Rajesh in mainstream TV-shows. (Once the One become President, interestingly enough, it became politically incorrect to make fun of such people: for all their talk about not punching down, it was only once they finally had an opportunity to punch up that America's comedians stopped punching at all. I suppose it's funny how nakedly political political correctness can be!)

In actual fact the sub-textual racism of the way Raj's character was treated is quite troubling, dramatically at least as much as politically. Yes, it's lamp-shaded from time to time. Raj does occasionally call out his friends' ignorance about his culture. But it never changed the fact that the show's writers' fundamentally didn't know anything about people like him or indeed know what to do with him in particular. Even Enoch Powell thought that to all extents and purposes Indian people are basically like white people, but as far as the The Big Bang Theory was concerned they may as well be from Mars. So for most of the show's run Raj says and does comparatively little, and when there's a female character in the room he doesn't say anything at all (because he has selective mutism - hilarious!) and by the show's end he's the only one of the main cast who's still single (but he still has a Felix and Oscar-style relationship with Howard - hilarious!). In short, that Rajesh Koothrappali was only ever in the show as the token ethnic was definitely "problematic", and not just in the hip modern sense of the word. (The only other non-white regular character in the series is a black lady who works in HR. I'm not quite sure what that means, but just saying.)

Even more absent than unwanted pregnancies and ethnics, oddly enough, were gays. Perhaps one underestimates how spoiled one was for gay gags when watching actual Friends and actual Frasier (not to mention Ellen, or indeed their 1990s contemporary series on this side of the pond Absolutely Fabulous), but so far as I can remember there were no gay characters in The Big Bang Theory to be laughed either at or with. Indeed, most of the "comedy" of Raj and Howard's relationship depends on the ancient gag that they're not gay but they behave as if they are. Jim Parsons, who plays Sheldon, actually came out of the closet during the show's run, but his character on screen remained fussily heterosexual. And if there was an episode when one of show's character's started questioning his or her sexuality (like Frasier did one time, as did Malcolm and Reese, etc. etc.) I certainly don't remember it.

A legitimate question then I suppose is Why? Until he started fornicating with Amy (and he'd use the word himself), Sheldon Cooper was arguably the most moral character on American television (at least since Capt Janeway returned to Earth) - hardworking, clean-living, generous to a fault and (for all his annoying quirks) utterly loyal both to his friends and to non-optional social conventions. One possibility is that an old-fashioned format leads to an old-fashioned sort of show, complete with old-fashioned characters and golden oldies-type humour. After all there's only so much in-depth character development you can do when you have a studio audience always waiting for the next gag, and so the tendency is to cleave to perennial archetypes (or, if you like, the same sorts of stock characters who have been serving comedy for literally thousands of years). And so the show's first episode started with the original straight man joined with the idiot savant with a heart of gold, who were then in turn joined by the blonde bimbo with hidden strengths (the chief of which ends up being an ability to hold her liquor), the quippy Jew-boy with hidden weaknesses (especially his mom and his blonde Catholic wife), and, of course, the token ethnic.

By the end of the series, interestingly enough, all the important story-arcs have been tied up. Having started their first episode with a single timeless male-male relationship†, the show then built outwards eventually to include suitable female partners for all its male characters (apart from Raj, of course, but even including Stuart!). Penny meanwhile has given up drink (because she's up the duff), and Raj and Howard have accepted that their friendship is special but in a non-gay way. Most importantly though, Sheldon has got a Nobel Prize and used his speech to thank and apologise to his friends and to tell them he loves them. If this is "conservatism" then it's both old-fashioned and unapologetically elitist to boot.

Wisely though, the show's writers end the final episode with a final scene that is a return to the show's beginning. Nobody gets on a 'plane to LA. No one goes off to become President. No one gets married who wasn't already. We see the same group of friends, albeit with their relationships deepened and their circle expanded, returning to the same apartment and to their same positions, eating together around the same table and implicitly (slightly Simpsons-style) in front of the same TV-screen. And so even the show's ending is comfortingly conservative: a reminder that true growth and prosperity are ultimately spiritual in nature, and that "change" is not always either necessary or desirable.

*The Simpsons at the same time could somehow afford to live in a similarly palatial suburban villa, though their show at least had the sense to hang a lampshade on that from time to time.
†Apparently the only thing that worked in the show's ill-fated pilot episode was the relationship between Parsons's Sheldon and Galecki's Leonard.

Are Vox spreading American propaganda?

I couldn't honestly watch this and think that they aren't. Indeed, at 6:44 there's a real head-spinner of (at best!) a half-truth!

The Iraq War was stage one in Saudi Arabia's undeclared project to dispose of its various unfriendly neighbours, starting with Saddam but with the Ayatollahs and/or Assad to follow. The deal with Uncle Sam - whether explicit or implicit - was obvious: you deal with Saddam Hussein and we'll deal with al-Qa'eda.

Initially my attitude to this video was wryly amused agreement. (I.e. Vox wouldn't have dared say any of this when Obama was on the throne, but now that it's Trump, well, who cares? Yes, American memories really are that short!) Now though, I'm wondering.

They do seem to be getting a lot of their info from one Mr Kenneth Pollack, a man who "used to" work at Langley as an "analyst". I suppose it's to their credit that they at least admit that. Because, duh, Iran-Contra, and America's covert support for Iran during the Iran-Iraq War = NOT MENTIONED. The Sunni Awakening, and Gen Petraeus's role in arming the "Sunni tribesmen" who would go on to form Isis's Iraqi backbone = NOT MENTIONED.

See where I'm going with this? This may have the cool hip Vox logo in the corner, but this is the CIA's version of history. And yes, Mr Pollack even uses the phrase "no one could have predicted". It's effing textbook.

And the final LOL? Describing the "rebels" in Syria (who only murder soldiers and policemen, so that's alright then!!!) as Saudi proxies! I mean, really? Yes, the Saudis are in it up to their necks. And FFS we (the British) are in it up to our elbows. But the Qataris are in it up to the hairs on their heads.

My standing thesis is that the ongoing Saudi-Qatari stand-off (aka "the Second Arab Cold War"*) is down to the Saudis' getting cold feet about the Syria project and trying to get the Qataris (who own Harrods, and half of London, and are friends with the Prince of Wales, and who in a couple of years' time are going to host the World Cup - and no one knows how that happened) to JUST DROP IT! Yes, Trump and the Israelis are supporting the House of Saud. And yes, Iran is supporting the other side (as has Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, for some reason). But the truth is clear enough.

The election of Trump heralded a blip not just in the long march through the institutions of the western world but also the end of the West's barmy "Arab Spring" project in the Middle East. For now they're sitting tight†. (And, perhaps, thinking of something else.)

So, is Sam Ellis formerly of the CSIS? Google would seem to suggest that why, yes, he is. So why, then, is he now writing for a supposedly impeccably left-leaning website like Vox, and indeed scripting their flagship current affairs vids on YouTube?

You may very well ask!

*Actually it does sort of fit. After the 1952 revolution in Egypt, the Arab world was split along a fairly straightforward left-right axis - dodgy oily monarchies with America, dodgy revolutionary tyrants with the other guy. It was only after the 1979 revolution in Iran threw the West a curveball that the Arabs started playing friendly with each other again. And now that Trump is not so sure that Iran's section of the Axis of Evil really is the Big Bad (because, duh, ISIS!) they're back to having their feuds and spats again.
†The occasional assassination notwithstanding! 

The Nazi Legacy

Not so long ago I remember there was an anti-baldness shampoo advertised on the telly which, like several other products at the time, made a positive virtue of being German. In other words it followed very much in the footsteps of car manufacturers such as Audi and of course Volkswagen (of which of course Audi has been a subsidiary since 1966) in proclaiming loud and clear that its German-ness was a mark of quality. In a country like England, which still has a passion for Holocaust movies and documentaries about the Battle of Britain, this was of course quite remarkable. But just imagine what other products could try the same trick.

Let's start with cars then. Not only was Volkswagen famously Hitler's favourite car manufacturer, but he actually named its most famous model - 'the Beetle'. And whether or not you drive a German car, you're quite likely to be insured by a German car insurance company - namely Allianz, whose director general in the early 1930s Kurt Schmitt went on to become Hitler’s Reich Economics Minister from June 1933 until January 1935*. Schmitt also became a member of both the National Socialist Party and the SS, rising to the rank of Brigadeführer, the equivalent of a one-star general. Eduard Hilgard, a member of the board of Allianz, became head of the Reich Group for Insurance in 1934. He represented the insurance industry in a conference summoned by Hermann Göring after the November Pogrom of 1938. Hilgard reported on the material damages caused during the Kristallnacht Pogrom and the estimated sums insurance companies had to cover.

Of course it was not merely German car manufacturers who invested in the Nazi war machine! Albert Speer himself acknowledged that the Blitzkrieg of 1939 would not have succeeded without the support of General Motors - or, more specifically, its German subsidiary Opel. And of course Ford too supported the Nazis - although his support was ideological and only in their early years. Time magazine though went so far as to make Hitler its Man of the Year for 1938. (The cover was an anti-Hitler cartoon by a German Catholic exile, but the magazine's founder, rather more ambiguously, referred to Hitler as the year's most influential man 'for better or worse'.)

But where better to drive your Nazi car than on a Nazi autobahn - on which, thankfully for the European economy, there is still no speed limit. At least one of Hitler's dreams lives on - even if it is the same as Jeremy Clarkson's! And if you need to refuel, there'll probably be an ExxonMobil, Chevron or BP somewhere along the way - the successor companies of Standard Oil, which was the Nazi war-machine's most important fuel manufacturer.

Not that it's just cars, of course! Various industries found much to be gained by cooperating with the Nazis. During the war years Siemens, who now make the trains I go to work on in the morning, were making switches for military use and even had their own slave labour camp actually inside Auschwitz. The most notorious beneficiary of the Nazi regime though was of course the chemical industry. Kodak and Agfa, who nowadays make cameras, and BASF, who make pesticides, as well as the pharmaceutical companies Sanofi-Aventis and Bayer - whom we have to thank for first producing aspirin - were all members of the German chemical conglomerate I G Farben, whose directors after the War eventually ended up being put on trial for war crimes at Nuremberg.

Nazi culture has in fact survived in various other ways as well. Nobody had heard of Hugo Boss before he was chosen to design those beautiful SS uniforms. Nowadays he's one of the modern fashion world's biggest brands. Ditto IBM, until they helped to compute the numbers of Jews being rounded up during the so-called "Holocaust". The Swedish founder of Ikea too was also a Nazi sympathiser. And Fanta, which is nowadays simply an orange-flavoured version of Coca-Cola, was actually invented by Coca-Cola's German distributor as a wartime alternative to the (famously/notoriously American) soft drink because at the time they couldn't get the ingredients for the Real Thing. The German film company UFA, which distributed such Nazi hits as Triumph of the Will, is still going strong today - though it is now owned (ultimately) by the Nazi publishing giant Bertelsmann, who also own Random House. The Nazi holiday camp Prora has recently been reopened.

So, you can still wear Nazi designer clothes and use a Nazi computer whilst working for a Nazi investment bank. At the end of the day you can return from the office on a Nazi train to a home furnished with Nazi furniture. When you go on holiday you can drive a Nazi car, insured by a Nazi insurance company and fuelled at a Nazi petrol-station by the side of a Nazi road, and you can then stay the night in a Nazi youth hostel. You can even take your holiday snaps using a Nazi camera. If it all gets too much for you then why not take a Nazi painkiller and relax by reading a Nazi book published by a Nazi publishing house or by watching a Nazi film distributed by a Nazi production company - whilst sipping a Nazi soft drink.

So, where's all this headed? Well, in all probability the Euro-sceptics really have been right all along. The "new" Europe will, in fact, end up looking very much like it was always going to - at least from the 1930s onwards. Even such modern and politically correct causes as "ethnic diversity" nowadays have their own Nazi heritage. Many European ethnic minorities are today represented by FUEN, which was originally founded in 1949 to support displaced Germans who had supported Hitler but found themselves on the wrong side of the new borders that had been drawn up by the Allies. A similar organisation is the YEN or Youth of European Nationalities organisation. And if you're a budding young politician who has successfully contributed to the "harmony" of Europe's different peoples and nations then you may even end up being a candidate for the Robert Schuman Prize, which is presented by the Alfred Toepfer foundation, which was itself founded by (you've guessed it!) a German entrepreneur with close ties to the Nazi regime.

UPDATE: And if you fancy some Nazi running kit and training shoes (or at least some trainers made by a company founded by and named after a man who used to make jackboots for the Wehrmacht) then there's always Adidas. That's 'Adi' as in 'Adolf', the Adolf in question being Nazi Party member Adi Dassler (after whom the company was named). His brother Rudolf or 'Rudi' Dassler, who was also a Nazi, went on to found his own footwear manufacturing company, called Ruda - later renamed Puma.

*Schmitt's successor as Economics Minister was Hjalmar Schacht, who had been deputy director of Dresdner Bank. Dresdner Bank was also complicit in the Nazi regime, although since the war it has thrived and prospered, now owning investment bank Kleinwort Benson. Another bank that was useful to the Third Reich was Chase Bank.