I actually, got into a conversation with
nowishere about the show at Silky's on Friday. She said that she had started watching it again after my protestations that it got better. I just want to note to anyone who might be reading this, the show is "better" not "good". Which is to say that the last few episodes have been vastly superior to the pilot which truly sucked on unfathomable levels.The biggest problem with the last few episodes has been that the show is still looking for its niche. It's like they can't decide if they want to be the new Buffy, the new Dark Angel, the new Matrix, the new Smallville or the new Charlie's Angels, and they seem to float between the choices pretty haphazardly.
The most recent episode, which I finally got around to watching on TiVo over the weekend had some definite issues to work out. I had previously praised the show for just giving up on the entire Dinah Laurel Lance/Black Canary thing by retconning the character into Dinah Redmond. "Oh, I lied about my name, I am actually Dinah Redmond, may we never speak of this again." I felt that, as big a Black Canary fan as I am, the way they were completely remaking her to where she didn't even resemble the "real" Dinah only served to infuriate me. So they get rid of her entirely, even though she's like the main character of the actual book. Ok, whatever... all forgiven. But now, they have reretconned Dinah back into being Dinah Lance. The Black Canary (renamed Carolyn Lance) was her mother. In principal, I have no real problem with this. In the comic, Dinah Laurel Lance, the current Black Canary is actually the daughter of Dinah Laurel, the original Black Canary. The name change doesn't even bother me all that much. Killing her off in the end didn't bother me too much - as
sui66iy pointed out during the episode, what better way to have an origin than by having your parents killed in front of you. (and besides, she died in a mysterious explosion, with no body ever being recoverd... she'll be back in time for May Sweeps) What did bother me a bit, was that they took what I previously went on about being a really cool superpower, screaming really loud, and gave it a stupid looking visual effect, took the basic physics out of it, and the actress made it look more like a weird whistle or something. Ok, that I just thought was stupid. What I thought really ruined the concept was the double retcon. When Dinah first showed up, she told them she was Dinah Lance. Oracle couldn't find any record of Dinah Lance, and they discovered she had lied and was actually Dinah Redmond. Now, Canary shows up and says "you're Oracle, keeper of all information in the universe, how could you not know that Dinah Lance was Carolyn Lance's daughter?" and Oracle tells her that she never knew she was Dinah Lance because Dinah had always gone by the name Redmond, her foster parent's name.
OK... a retcon is one thing... a double retcon after the story progresses in a different direction years later is another thing. But a double retcon to something that just happened 4 episodes ago!?! What the hell? And there were about a dozen ways that this could have been explained with about 2 seconds of forethought. *sigh* its things like this that make it hard for me to defend the show to people.
On a good note Sung Hi Lee has been cast as Lady Shiva. That might be good. Well.. she'll be cute anyway. I always think of Shiva as a bit older... but I guess given the demographic, they figured the they'd go with someone younger.
