Roswell unwatch - Missing

[seriousfic]

Alien power of the week: Pencil sharpening!

Monologue of the week: "The bigger your world gets, the bigger your problems do too."

This was an episode so boring that I can't properly comment on it, so instead I'll ask why every so often, the series has the alien characters use their powers for something mundane like getting candy out of a vending machine or sharpening a pencil. What's the point? To remind us they're aliens? It's not like in Smallville, where Clark occasionally does some cool-looking "feat" meant to awe us with its CGIness. It's just sharpening a pencil.

I could see how there would be some humor in seeing superpowers used for mundane purposes, like in The Incredibles where there are sight gags like Bob Parr lifting up a couch so that his wife can vacuum under it, but there there's a contrast between the expectation that they would use their superpowers for important things and the reality that they would screw around with them. Defiance of expectation = comedy. Here, the aliens only ever use their powers for stupid shit like that.

And I could see how there would be some charm in seeing a specific superpower used interestingly, like if Spider-Man were to use his webbing to snag a candy from inside a vending machine, or if Johnny Storm were to use his powers to heat up some microwave popcorn in his hand. But since the Roswell aliens can literally do anything with their powers, there's no cleverness in using their powers to do anything.

***

So for Father's Day I got my dad Band of Brothers on Blu-Ray (WW2, always a good choice for dads) and the family watched Taken, aka the perfect Father's Day movie. Liam Neeson has been interrogating a slaver (read: performing fist surgery on his kidneys) when the guy makes a break for it.

Mom: How can he run after taking a beating like that?

Me: He's French.

Comments

[rann.livejournal.com]

I think it worked in The Incredibles partly because it was trying to get across the idea that their powers had become second nature to them... Helen stretches to vacuum and Bob lifts the couch without thinking because they've been doing this stuff for years and years. It was also a way to take the focus off the powers, which was the intent, I think... Incredibles wanted to focus on character and story, the powers were a means to an end for that, they wanted you to become as used to the stretching and superstrength and so on as the family was.

But as I remember this series, it was all about the powers. So the thing is that rather than using the scene of powers-to-sharpen-pencil as "Look, they don't consider these powers anything special, it's no big deal, now let's take a look at what he's feeling and why he's feeling that way", it was "Isn't it AWESOME how they have these AWESOME POWERS and they're so AWESOME and POWERFUL they can use their AWESOME POWERS to do something as lame as SHARPEN A PENCIL and make that AWESOME! Please don't notice that these characters are bland cardboard cutouts intended to get the teen and pervy middle-aged demographic all hot and bothered, just watch the AWESOME POWERS!"