Noiseless Chatter

The Lost Worlds of Power: Thanks, Announcements, and Physical Copies!

Don’t know what The Lost Worlds of Power is? Click here to find out everything you need to know about the upcoming one-off fiction anthology. And remember to submit!

Well, this has been an interesting couple of weeks! The Lost Worlds of Power has garnered some awesome attention. In addition to being tweeted, shared and plussed on the various social networks, there’s been some fantastic coverage on various sites.

I’m going to take a moment to thank them, but make sure you read ahead even if you’re not interested in that. Some announcements follow!

– The crown jewel is this excellent post on The Gameological Society…probably my favorite general gaming site on the internet. Due to this alone, I’ve received more emails than I can count from interested contributors. The comments section itself is worth a read (I really hope I get even a fraction of what was pitched there), and later in the week the project got mentioned in their Keyboard Geniuses roundup as well. Thanks!

– Nintendo Life was good enough to let me pimp it there as well. I wrote the post myself, to avoid any suggestions of a conflict of interest, but I appreciate them giving The Lost Worlds of Power some great visibility!

– Nintendo Okie also took the time to funnel interested folks this way, as did 100% Indie. Just yesterday, Digitally Downloaded joined the party as well, with a great (and hugely appreciated) call for submissions!

– Then there’s the great feeling that comes with stumbling across somebody’s blog or forum thread to see even more people spreading the word. Sarapen posted about being interested, and even provided an intriguing start to a novelization of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!. I sincerely hope to read that one in full. There’s also this thread on Talking Time, which was started in 2011 with a similar idea. Hopefully some of those adaptations will be submitted to the anthology. And, finally, there’s this brief writeup on the brilliantly named Glorious Trainwrecks.

So…wow. Thank you for all of the interest and attention!

I never imagined this idea would gain so much traction, and we still have a long way to go before the submission deadline of January 31, 2014.

Anyway…some announcements!

For starters, we’ve found our illustrator. All-around awesome guy Ron DelVillano will be providing an illustration for every story selected for inclusion in the anthology. Ron is both the brains and brawn behind Duane, Average High School Werewolf, and we’re very excited to have him on board.

Also, many of you have been asking me about the potential for physical copies of The Lost Worlds of Power. Here’s the thing: as great as it would be to have physical copies, the fear was that charging for the collection would transform this from harmless fan-fiction to full-on legal nightmare. Of course we could just pay for all of the associated fees ourselves and hand out the copies for no charge, but then we’d be homeless forever and probably pretty sad.

However, Ron (I told you he was awesome) figured out a potential work-around. We could set up a Kickstarter or otherwise collect donations from anyone interested in having a copy. We’d have to figure out an absolute, final cost for the printing of however many books, and use that as our goal. Should we exceed our goal, we’ll just donate the difference to charity. Which one? Maybe we’ll open it up to a vote or something.

That way anyone who wants a copy would be able to pay for one, we wouldn’t need to worry about funding some large print order out of pocket, and no “profit” would be made from selling it. So, hey, let us know if you’d be interested! (Personally, I know I would be. I can’t promise anything right now, but we still have time to figure out how viable this would be.) Your feedback will be very helpful in deciding what to do here!

And, finally, I’d just like to remind folks that The Lost Worlds of Power was actually the brainchild of co-editor James Lawless. It was his idea to write “new” Worlds of Power books, and while I might have taken the initiative to turn that into the larger anthology, open to submissions, I do feel a little bad that he hasn’t gotten much of the attention. Of course, if you read the posts linked above I’ve been referred to as everything from a “possibly deranged writer” to “some guy,” so it’s not like I’m getting all that much direct attention myself.

Either way, thanks James!

How are your submissions coming? I’m looking forward to reading them, collecting them, and foisting a wealth of ropey new video game adaptations on an unsuspecting readership!

Why I Hate This “Homeless Veteran Makeover” Video, and Why You Should Too

There’s been a video circulating over the past few days of a homeless veteran getting a makeover. I…am kind of surprised that I could type that sentence and then still need to follow it up with an explanation of why that’s absurd, manipulative and outright demeaning, but with 5.1 million views on YouTube and counting — and a constant presence in my social media streams — it seems that it really does need to be discussed.

So, please, if you haven’t already, add one more view to the video, and we’ll continue. Because as many times as I’ve seen this referred to as “inspiring” and “magical,” it’s really just offensive. And exploitative. And we should be embarrassed by it.

When I first came across the above video, it was spotlighted in this post. The title of that post assured me that the video would give me chills. That was kind of interesting since the thumbnail and description pretty much suggested they were just giving this guy a haircut, but I figured it was worth watching. After all, why would that give me chills?

Maybe at the end his little daughter that he hasn’t seen in years would come out and hug him, or something. That would still be manipulative, but it might also successfully provide “chills” so…okay.

But, nope. It’s a haircut. Oh, and they trim his beard and give him a tie.

Wow, chills. Except for the fact that I grew up in southern New Jersey, and “hairy guy trims his beard and puts on a tie” isn’t uncommon to anyone familiar with the concept of prom night.

So, fine. Chills or no chills, that’s not the point.

This is the point: as a culture — as a society…as a civilization — we’re already doing our damnedest to give every man, woman and child body image issues. All this video succeeds in doing is extending that particular neurosis to the homeless as well.

It’s sickening. And I realize that this requires further unpacking. So, hey, I’ve got some time. Do you?

Then let’s proceed.

The balance of content in the video is the giveaway. Or, rather, the clear imbalance. In a video that’s about two minutes and fifty seconds long, two minutes and twenty seconds are spent on the makeover. The assurance that the veteran Jim Wolf has turned his life around is relegated to two vague slides of text.

Ask yourself what’s more important, as far as the video is concerned. Is it the way he looks? Or is it the more positive direction his life has now taken? It’s not a matter of opinion; there’s a clear answer here. It comes down to the fact that he looked like a hobo, but has now been groomed and dressed up.

To me, it’s more important to know whether or not Jim Wolf left the studio to sleep in a gutter again that night. To the makers of the video, it’s more important to know whether or not he was wearing a tie when he did so. And that’s disgusting.

It comes down to more than just the amount of time the video spends on each, though: the execution is also telling, and more important when interpreting what’s happening here.

We start with an image of our subject, alongside a caption that reads “Jim Wolf, United States Army Veteran.”

That’s a name, and that’s a fact. That’s not a description.

Who is Jim? What’s his history? “Army Veteran” says precisely nothing. Did he serve overseas? Was he involved in any wars or conflicts? Where was he stationed? With whom did he serve? What years was he active? What was his role? What was his specialty?

Does any of that matter when determining whether or not to thank him for his service? Of course not. But it’s meant to illustrate just how vague a descriptor “United States Army Veteran” is. One veteran could have served in Vietnam and been the lone survivor of an ill-fated recon mission. One veteran could have served in Texas during a time of no conflict and filed paperwork all day.

I’m not suggesting that one is inherently better or worse than the other, but I am suggesting that the two human beings would have very different experience from each other. They’re both veterans. Fine. But that means nothing. As human beings, they’re worlds apart.

Of course, the video isn’t interested in treating Jim Wolf as a human being. When we aren’t even made privy to his years of service, there’s your giveaway that this isn’t about helping an individual; this is about the manipulation of the audience.

It’s also telling that Wolf doesn’t get any chance to speak. We don’t get to hear his story. I’m sure he has one, but the video is more interested in the fact that a disheveled man gets a haircut. What, exactly, is meant to be inspiring about this again?

Well, I’ll tell you: the music and the editing. That’s what’s meant to inspire. Not the substance (because there is none), not Wolf’s story (because it actively prevents us from hearing it), and not the assurance that Wolf is going to be any better off (because…well, we’ll get to that).

The score builds and layers and rollicks toward triumph, and the time-lapse nature of the editing hurtles toward a grand reveal. It’s a bait and switch, and one borrowed from the most deliberately misleading film trailers. It wants to generate a certain feeling in us, but it’s a feeling that the material itself cannot provide. It’s the hollowest possible kind of “inspiration,” and it’s one that only works because it withholds the humanity.

What if Wolf spoke? Well, he probably wouldn’t sound like Ryan Gosling or Alec Baldwin so it’s not worth hearing him. After all, he might sound human. Or, worse, he might sound like the actual homeless guy that he is. You know…raspy and sick and probably a little upset that the country he served is now content to let him sleep outside on frigid nights. We can’t let that come across, otherwise the haircut might seem…oh…a little silly.

Wolf has a problem. That problem is the country he lives in. That problem is that country’s approach to dealing with the sick and the poor and the unemployed and the homeless.

That problem is emphatically not going to be solved by a haircut, a shave, and a necktie. And yet this makeover video wants you to come away feeling that it is solved that way. Because that’s easy. That’s visual. And, what’s more, it’s easy on the eye.

This constant whitewashing of our problems is the problem.

You don’t fix what’s wrong with your society through makeovers, through songs, or through speeches. You stand up and you say, “This is wrong. This is a problem. And we are going roll up our sleeves and we are going to fix this because if we see something is wrong and we don’t do that, then who are we?”

And then you know what we do?

We actually do that.

We don’t make a video about it.

We don’t circulate a link on Facebook.

We don’t wear a ribbon or put a sticker on our car.

We get. The fuck. To work.

And if we don’t do that…then who are we?

Of course, all of my points above are moot in the face of the fact that this Homeless Veteran Magic Haircut (patent pending) turned Jim Wolf’s life around.

Right?

…right?

Well, let’s look at all two of the unverifiable sentences that suggest that that’s the case. The first one reads, in its entirety, “Since filming, Jim has taken control of his life.”

Huh. Well, ya don’t say.

What does that mean exactly? What can that mean? The lengths to which the video goes to keep any specific information about Wolf away from us is almost frightening.

Forget Wolf for a moment. Do you have control of your life? Do I? Of course not. How could we? Life is full of curveballs and unexpected obstacles and problems that need to be overcome. What does it mean to “take control” of one’s life?

Does it mean you find employment? Find love? Manage to scrape together enough change to buy groceries? Live through the night? Get handed a blanket by a good Samaritan?

It’s different for everybody. Which is why it’s entirely meaningless. It’s a nice thing to hear, but it says, again, precisely nothing.

Jim Wolf is not a human being. At least, not in the eyes of this video. Jim Wolf is a homeless veteran, brought into a studio to be made a spectacle of. The filmmakers don’t care about him, and they didn’t. If they did, they’d know something about him. And therefore so would we. Instead, for all we know, he’s back on the streets.

Oh, but the second slide reads (again, in its entirety), “He is now scheduled to have his own housing and is attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for the first time ever.”

Well, that’s more specific. …kinda.

What does “scheduled to have his own housing” mean? It still sounds suspiciously like “nothing” to me. And does that mean he’s still sleeping on the streets? Couldn’t Degage Ministries — who so kindly pulled a homeless man off the streets to solicit donations and then released him back onto the streets — give him a place to stay? Maybe they did, but then why wouldn’t they say that?

After all, if their objective is to inspire me with this magical video, I can say conclusively that I’d be far more inspired by hearing that some ministry gave a homeless man food, clothing and shelter than I am by hearing that some ministry gave him a haircut and a pat on the back. And I’d hope to God that you would be, too.

There’s also a grammatical issue with the AA claim, as you can’t keep “attending” something “for the first time ever.” Due to that I’m not even sure what the truth is. Did he go once? Does he keep going? I think it’s the latter, but how would they know that? He can stop at any time. And even if he doesn’t, should this really be his priority when he still doesn’t have a place to live?

The video isn’t inspiring. The video is sickening. By taking a homeless man and framing a shave and a haircut as the solution to his problem, they’re robbing the problem of its bite. They’re making it something we need to worry less about. And, what’s more, it makes all those dirty, bearded homeless people look like they just don’t care. After all, if they really wanted to turn their lives around, they’d put on a tie. Just look what it did for old Jim Wolf!

Don’t circulate the video. Please. And if somebody you respect does, send them here. Or talk to them about it.

You’re not stupid if you looked at this and felt inspired. That’s what it was designed to make you feel.

But you shouldn’t feel inspired by anything that takes a serious, profound problem with the very core of the society in which you live, and presents it as trivial and easily overcome.

You’re better than that. And Jim Wolf, whoever he is, wherever he is, deserves better than that. The truly respectful thing to do for Wolf would be to treat him as a human being. This video decidedly does not.

Thank you for your service, Jim. And I’m sorry this happened to you.

ALF Reviews: “Pennsylvania 6-5000” (Season 1, Episode 4)

Quick recap. Episode 1: An alien crashes to Earth and a family decides to harbor him illegally. Episode 2: ALF orders a pizza. Episode 3: The cat runs away. Following on from that pattern of wasted potential I half expected episode 4 to be about Willie getting a haircut. Or maybe Lynn breaking a nail.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me, but if I were creating a show about an alien, I’d probably make use of the fact that he’s an alien. I guess that’s why I’m not writing any sitcoms, and I’m just a lowly technical writer with a fantastic body and a hot tub full of super models. :(

It’s just so strange to me that every episode of ALF so far plays like a minor rewrite to another hypothetical show about a family who adopts a hobo. ALF is a little uncouth, and not totally respectful of other people’s privacy, but that just makes him a dick. It doesn’t make him an alien. If you were to tell me that this was originally supposed to be a show about somebody’s asshole uncle who moved into the house, I’m not sure I’d be able to find much evidence to the contrary in the show itself.

Case in point, this episode is about the family needing a second phone line because ALF is always calling political talk shows. For Christ’s sake, why can’t they write an episode about some space germs ALF introduces into the house? Maybe that’s the series finale.

So, yes, the episode begins with ALF and Brian watching a live panel debate about nuclear arms, and it does a great job of reminding us that Brian’s just your average, run of the mill 6-year-old kid. He hops out of bed on a Saturday morning to watch Meet the Press in his jim-jams, just like all toddlers who grew up in the 80s.

Seriously, I can buy that ALF would watch this, but why doesn’t Brian want to watch Pee-Wee’s Playhouse or something instead? What kind of kid is invested in foreign affairs?

Lynn comes in complaining that ALF is always hogging the phone, and then Willie comes home complaining that ALF is always hogging the phone. Nobody seems to have any problem with the fact that he’s hogging the phone in order to broadcast his alien voice and viewpoints live on a national news broadcast.

In fairness, Kate does handwave this somewhat: she says she doesn’t mind him calling the show because it keeps him out of the kitchen. Of course, I prefer to think that this is just an excuse, and Kate’s really hoping that ALF will accidentally out himself as an alien on live television and the Alien Task Force will come to the house and shoot him to death. Kate, if this is what you’re hoping for, leave Willie. You and I would be so happy together.

This conflict of the monopolized phone line is just riveting. I’ll probably say this in every review, but it boggles my mind that the writing staff doesn’t think it’s worth having ALF do anything alien. Why do they believe that it’s funnier if he’s just a bad roommate? I honestly don’t get it.

ALF tells the unseen political panel that he has a solution to the problem of nuclear weapons: “Get rid of them.”

It’s not hilarious or anything, but I actually kind of like that. It’s nice that he’s naive about this. As the panel tells him, he’s oversimplifying the problem. And he is. But he’s an alien, so that’s good. It’s good that his alien mind sees complicated and dangerous concepts as simple things that we should just “get rid of.” It’s insightful (accidentally so, I’m sure, but still) and it goes a short way back toward turning ALF into a creature that doesn’t quite “get” Earth.

Then I remember that he knows how call-in political talk shows work and I realize it’s meaningless to try to give this shit any credit.

We get our normal credits sequence, including the little scene of Lynn talking on the phone in her closet. I draw attention to this because the very last thing before the credits is Lynn telling Willie that she needs her own phone. So she doesn’t have one? How long is this cord that she can take the living room phone upstairs and into her closet?

Whatever. Willie offers Lynn the possibility of call waiting instead. Wow, call waiting! Remember that? That was such a big thing when I was growing up. There were ads on television about it and it seemed so incredible that somebody could call you while you were on the phone. Then everyone got the internet and realized that call waiting would fuck up your connection and you’d have to start downloading the naked woman all over again. Man…wild times.

ALF is in the shed doing something that is emphatically not related to getting his fucking space ship off the roof. Willie walks in with some Chinese food for him* and sees him dicking around with the ham radio. He doesn’t say that this is what he sees, but since he’s a human being with two eyes and I’m a human being with two eyes I can pretty safely deduce that he sees this happening. Bear that in mind as we move forward, because the show certainly doesn’t.

In giving ALF his twice cooked pork, Willie reveals that he took elocution lessons from Borat by calling it “twaayce cooked poo-ohrk.” Max Wright’s line readings are something I will never get used to. Christopher Walken can take oddly emphasized speech and elevate it to a form of art. Max Wright just sounds like he’s constantly trying to clear mashed potatoes out of his throat.

I hated it as a kid, and it doesn’t play any better now than it did then. I remember when Friends premiered and he played a barista or something. Even though I had been a young’un who loved this stupid show, when I recognized him I didn’t think, “Oh, hey! It’s the dad from ALF!” I thought, “Come on. This fuckin’ guy again?”

Anyway, Willie babbles to ALF for a while about family and ALF keeps asking him to pass tools his way. Something magical happens here, because that leads to a legitimately funny moment. Willie, in the middle of his speech, says, “You see, a family is like…”

Then ALF says, “Pliers.”

And Willie says, “Yes. Or a crescent wrench.”

It’s not hilarious or anything, and it’s nothing we haven’t seen a thousand times before, but this is competent comedy. By ALF standards, that’s impressive. Instead of just throwing a handful of shit into the air and letting it fall onto some blank pages, the writers actually made an effort here to have two different things going on in the same room, and then intertwined them in service of a punchline.

That may sound like faint praise, but I am actually kind of impressed by this. Then again, the rest of the episode does seem to have been generated by writers who threw a handful of shit into the air and let it fall onto some blank pages so I guess I shouldn’t be so quick to enjoy this show.

ALF tells Willie to hold onto some exposed wiring while ALF switches the machine on, and Willie does it.

Um.

Fucking what.

What the fucking what.

WHAT?

Why would Willie have done this? What purpose would it have served for him to do this? I buy that ALF would do this shitty ass thing to the people who love him, because he’s always doing shitty ass things to the people who love him, but why in crap’s name would Willie grab a fistful of naked wires and watch ALF turn the machine on?

It doesn’t make any sense. It’s like that League of Gentlemen “Put your hand in!” sketch, in which the owner of a joke shop coerces someone into sticking his hand into an ominous tube, and then electrocutes him with a car battery. However that sketch had a thousand times more characterization than this entire show. The shop owner was quite clearly deranged, the customer was terrified, and the owner locked the door and refused to let the man leave until he did as he was told. It was dark, as it should have been, and it was at least somewhat terrifying as well.

ALF shocking Willie is the same thing, but “one guy shocks another guy” isn’t a joke on its own. You have to do something with it. The League of Gentlement used a predictable outcome to spin a nightmare in miniature. ALF just says “Yo Willie Imma shock you” and Willie says “cool ALF ok thx.”

That isn’t a joke, any more than it would be a joke for me to give you a hammer and tell you to smack yourself in the nuts.

And what the hell does Willie have in his front pocket during this scene? It looks like he’s carrying his letters of transit so he can leave Casablanca. Why would you stuff a character’s shirt pocket with thick, obtrusive documents unless he’s going to read them or refer to them at some point? This is so weird. Maybe it was just Max Wright’s suicide note for when the scene was finished, and he chickened out.

Willie notices that ALF was screwing around with his ham radio, and gets upset. This is a bit strange since he watched ALF screw around with the ham radio, then handed him tools so that he could more effectively screw around with the ham radio, then reached his own hand into the ham radio that ALF screwed with so that ALF could continue to screw with the ham radio and shock him with his own ham radio. Needless to say, Willie is surprised to learn at this point that ALF was SCREWING AROUND WITH HIS FUCKING HAM RADIO.

The radio is destroyed (temporarily, because this is a sitcom) and Willie complains that it took him ten years to build it.

No.

No. It did not take you ten years to build a ham radio, Willie. That’s inconceivable.

I remember seeing those kits at Radio Shack. I’m sure they weren’t easy to build, but it’s nothing that required a decade’s worth of work. Even if you didn’t have much time to work on it, I can’t imagine any reasonably intelligent human being wouldn’t have it done in a couple of months, at the most. If it took you much longer than that, you’d probably just give up and concede that you don’t know how to build a ham radio. You don’t keep working on it for longer than your fucking son has been alive.

The only way building this radio would have taken ten years is if Willie first had to teach himself fluent English so he could read the manual.

It’s just so ridiculous. If he’d said it took him one year, I wouldn’t complain. That’s still a long time, but it’s understandable. And it’s still a large enough investment of time that Willie could rightfully be upset. But for crying out loud the thing is the size of a toaster oven. He’s not restoring a classic car; he’s plugging things into other things.

Ugh this fuckin’ radio.

Anyway, Willie forgets about being mad that ALF destroyed something important to him, which is sort of this guy’s only character trait I guess, and ALF explains that he was doing something to the radio so that he could call Air Force One and talk to the president.

Again…mother effing what? Why wouldn’t he call the White House? It’s still a bad idea, but at least that’s where the president is. I don’t understand this.

He confides to Willie, though, that the reason he’s calling is that he wants to talk about nuclear weapons. He’s concerned about them, because that’s how Melmac was destroyed.

Now this is interesting. And it’s effectively dark. That’s…kind of sad. The planet didn’t just blow up on its own…there was some kind of accident or war, a weapon of mass destruction detonated, and an entire intelligent civilization was destroyed. This was an unexpected reveal, and I like it.

Of course it sort of undercuts what I perceived as ALF’s naivete earlier in the episode, when he called the show. ALF no longer has a well-meaning but uneducated alien’s perspective…he’s a dude who comes from a planet that had the same problem we have, and he still has the oversimplified “get rid of them” attitude. I don’t know…this doesn’t bother me or anything — outside of the fact that, once again, ALF understands everything on Earth — but it seems strange to me that ALF is so passionate about this obviously impossible advice.

Willie informs ALF that it’s illegal to descramble the president’s secret radio frequency. Uh, okay Willie. I’ll take your word for that.

ALF counters that it’s also illegal to steal HBO, which the Tanner family does. Willie understands that these two things are absolutely equal and leaves ALF to hack into the government. I know the episode needs ALF to place the call, but what kind of rationalization was this for letting ALF do it? It would have been better writing to just have Willie spontaneously combust.

In the next scene ALF successfully calls Air Force One, and we get a look at the set. I’m not sure if it’s a joke on the part of ALF‘s writers that it looks like an office right out of a Monty Python skit, or if they actually believe that Air Force One is just a flying White House. The set is also perfectly still and we don’t see any stars or lights through the windows, so maybe these assholes are just sitting in some dark hangar somewhere playing house. Who fuckin’ knows.

The guy who played Les Nessman answers the phone, and he thanks the caller for dialing Air Force One and asks how he can help. So, wait. Again. WAIT AGAIN. I thought this was some super secret scrambled presidential frequency? Why is this guy answering the phone like strangers call it all the time? Why would the frequency be scrambled unless only massively important people should be getting through? If that secret phone rings you’d better answer it “Yes, Mr. Vice President” or something. Not “Thank you for calling the totally impenetrable Air Force One help line, how may I direct your call?”

Les asks the other airborne clerical assistant if he should patch the caller through to the president. Sure! Why the fuck not!?

What kind of question is this? Who are these idiots? What is their role in the government even meant to be?

The other guy looks kind of like an off-brand Chevy Chase, and he worries that it might be a call from a communist. Uh, okay. He takes the call and tells ALF that he can’t put Mr. Reagan on the line because the president is taking a shit. I’m not joking. But I guess this explains that ALF called Air Force One because the president wasn’t at home. How the hell did he know that?

Chevy Lite asks him what he’s calling about, and ALF says that he’s calling about “the bombs.” Ominous music plays, and I’m not sure why. These guys can’t hear it…only we can, in the audience, and we know ALF isn’t a terrorist. What kind of tension was the show trying to create?

The guy ends his call with ALF and pulls a red telephone out of his desk drawer. It’s a corded phone so I don’t know how or why it would be stashed in a desk drawer, but then again I’ve never been on Air Force One and I’m positive the ALF team did their research.

Willie presents a telephone usage chart that he made to his family. Man, this episode is really bringing me back. Remember the days before PowerPoint? That was when all presentations were done in the media of glitter paint and elbow macaroni.

Lynn is wearing a bolo.

I don’t have anything to say about that. I just really wanted to make sure you noticed that Lynn was wearing a bolo.

Kate points out a problem with the chart: Brian’s telephone time is at 11 o’clock, which is past his bed time. I’m not sure who a six-year-old boy needs to be calling at any time of day, but Kate’s pretty adamant that he gets to do it.

Willie proposes that he switch that time with Lynn’s, so that she can call her boyfriend at 11 o’clock instead. Lynn replies that that’s past her boyfriend’s bedtime as well, and the audience laughs, so I guess the joke is that Lynn is fucking a six-year-old kid.

The FBI shows up, but it’s not because Lynn just confessed to the ongoing sexual violation of a child. They’re here to arrest Willie, as they traced ALF’s call and they conclude that the guy with a different name and a different voice is their man.

I actually looked up one of the FBI guys because I could have sworn he played Waldo Faldo or someone else I recognized from another show. It turns out he was a regular character on Designing Women, and I’m kind of amazed I’d remember anyone from that show. Did I really watch that much Designing Women as a kid? Man, I had some embarrassing taste in television shows.

Anyway, yes, this sucks, but Willie really has no room to complain since he walked out of the shed and let ALF call the president. This one’s kind of on him.

The next act opens with Willie in jail, while Kate just kind of hangs around, leaning on the bars. Federal prison sure was lax in the late 80s! Kate loudly wonders why the alien who secretly lives in their house would call the president, but it’s totally okay because the guard is almost a whole sixteen inches away from her so there’s no way he heard that.

Willie, to his credit, tells Kate to hush. To his much greater discredit, however, he then starts talking even more loudly and more directly about the alien that secretly lives in their house. Why did the writers bother having this guard here? This scene would make so much more sense if they weren’t paying some extra $15 to dress like a policeman and stand there, somehow not hearing this obviously crucial information.

Officer Designingwomen shows up and wants to talk to Willie about the chart he made. He asks whose names are written on it, which makes it pretty clear that the FBI hasn’t even done cursory research on Willie, since those are the members of his immediate family, one of whom was literally standing right there when he arrived, and all of whom were in the same room when he got arrested.

This guy is a suspected terrorist, but they don’t bother to research him at all? They just politely ask him questions? Why does every arm of the government operate on the honor system in this show?

ALF and Brian watch footage of Willie’s arrest. Where did this footage come from? There weren’t any cameras. AGH I DON’T CARE.

Lynn walks in and gets upset that they’re jacking off to video of the only Tanner who works getting arrested, so, hey, good on her.

ALF tells her not to worry, though, because he has a plan: he’ll just call the president again and tell him to pardon Willie. Everyone agrees this is a solid plan because Willie fed them paint chips instead of letting them breast feed.

ALF calls Les Nessman again and it’s daylight through the windows. Why is Air Force One still in the sky? I don’t get it. Do ALF‘s writers believe its purpose is just to orbit the Earth continuously?

Not only is Air Force One still flying around the world, but Reagan is still taking a crap. Or maybe it’s a totally separate crap. I don’t know. I’m just mad that the show is even making me wonder about things like this.

They patch ALF through to Reagan’s shitterphone — seriously, what kind of show is this? — and then we cut back to the shed where ALF has a conversation with someone doing a bad impression of our 40th president.

While this happens, Brian sits behind him glancing intermittently into the camera and scratching his armpit.

I actually feel a little bad for this kid. If he had been cast on almost any other show, he just would have been some cute little tyke that got to say silly things that made the audience go “Awwwww.” Instead he’s on ALF, and his job is to shut up and sit next to a puppet.

ALF launches into his disarmament spiel — which is why ALF is remembered to this day for its brilliant social commentary — and then Reagan agrees to send some folks around to ALF’s place to talk about it. ALF celebrates by hugging Brian at crotch level and stroking his hips.

Jesus Christ this show.

Anyway, the FBI guys show up again, but Brian pretends he was the one who made the calls. The FBI wonders for about 20 seconds whether or not they should take any kind of action, and I have to admit…it’s a tough call. On the one hand, some little kid keeps hacking into the United States government’s private telecommunications network, making prank calls about nuclear war, and wasting the time of federal agents that could instead be investigating actual threats to national security. But on the other hand, the episode’s almost over.

Willie gets to go free for the same reason, and everyone gathers around to look at the plaque President Reagan sent to Brian.

It’s some kind of official commendation, I guess for repeatedly causing undue panic with vague threats of domestic terrorism.

Willie is proud, though it’s unclear why, especially since he’s been waterboarded for the past 24 hours and his entire family will be on the no-fly list for the rest of their natural lives.

The episode ends with ALF calling the same talk show again, but nobody cares about that, because Willie agrees to get a second phone line.

And so ends the most obviously pre-9/11 episode of anything I’ve ever seen.

MELMAC FACTS: Melmac was destroyed in some kind of nuclear mishap. I know we meet some other refugees from the planet later on, so I wonder if this is ever elaborated upon. I hope so…which pretty conclusively means it won’t be.

—–
* I doubt this is an “eating cats” joke. But…if you want it to be, there ya go.

Steve Zissou Saturdays #8: Let’s Have Some Teamsmanship

Well, this is supposed to post in a couple of hours, so let’s not dawdle. We’re just over a quarter of the way through the film and things are really happening now, so sit back and enjoy my analysis of the next seventeen seconds of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.

The next day begins with Steve using a Polaroid to take a picture of Ned, explaining that they’re used for continuity. Part of me would like to see the Polaroid camera as some more humorously outdated Team Zissou tech, but that’s only true in a photographic sense. Until very recently Polaroids were used for continuity purposes in film and television production. The reason was that picture quality didn’t matter as much as convenience; the photos would not be distributed to the press or used for promotional materials…they were instead retained so that hair and makeup artists could reconstruct a certain look days or weeks later.

It sounds a little silly, but if you have a film in which your character gets into a fight and comes out of it with a black eye and a bandage — not to mention mussed hair — you’d want a Polaroid of him in that condition, and you’d want to keep it handy. After all, films are not shot in sequence, and it might be another month before you shoot the scene that comes next in the film, in which you’ll want the hair, black eye and bandage all in the same places. You might even have to come back later on to remount a scene because it was discovered too late that the footage, for whatever reason, was unusable. That’s where continuity comes in; you need to make sure your scenes flow, and if bandages and hair styles keep jumping around, it’ll shake your audience out of the experience. In fact, it’s fully possible that in 2004, Anderson himself was using Polaroids for continuity reasons while filming The Life Aquatic.

So as long as we see the Polaroid camera as part of Steve’s production equipment rather than oceanographic equipment, it’s at least relatively current.

But, then, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves the question of why Steve is concerned with continuity? Remember, he’s a documentary filmmaker. Or, at least, he’s supposed to be. He’s not staging scenes, he’s not shooting out of sequence (how could he?), and he’s not constructing an ongoing drama. Shortly we will hear Steve explain that “Nobody knows what’s going to happen. And then we film it. That’s the whole concept.”

Yet we’ve already seen (and heard) that this is not true. Steve does demand a certain editorial control over what gets into the film. Whether it’s a looped line, a staged reconstruction, or even just a demand for the largest amount of footage possible, so that he can better shape it to his ends.

There’s something at least slightly dishonest about this, but we’d be fooling ourselves if we believed that documentaries aren’t usually given shape by their directors. Of course they are; that’s what film-making is. What’s strange here, though, is the notion of continuity.

What’s the suggestion there? The suggestion is that Ned is something right now…and he may not be that thing later. This is a photograph…a frozen moment in time. A man in one very specific state. We need the photograph now for continuity, because he may never be that person again.

It would be pretty Andersonian for the whole continuity thing to be an excuse on Steve’s part to get a picture of his son, but knowing what we know about both Steve (who isn’t sentimental about it) and Ned (who would willingly pose for one), that’s not what’s happening here. It’s just Steve Zissou, once again, controlling and giving shape to the world around him through the medium of film.

Steve offers Ned a handgun, which is hilarious to me in at least three ways. First, because Steve Zissou is the kind of guy who won’t even preface the fact that he’s about to hand you a firearm; he simply holds it out and says, “Here.” Second, Steve Zissou is the kid of guy who lets the gun point up while handing it off, instead of safely down and away from anybody. And third, in a moment that’s almost heartbreakingly adorable, Ned reaches for it out of sheer politeness before he even realizes what it is. Bless his heart.

Of course, Steve’s cavalier attitude toward deadly weapons is emblematic of the general Team Zissou approach to firearms: they don’t know what they’re doing. Nobody seems to have been trained in proper handling or safety procedures. They simply wear their guns against their legs, and while we see them use their weapons later, at no point do we get any suggestion that they’re doing anything other than firing and hoping for the best.

These things are played for laughs, but, as we know, it’s this shrugging attitude toward safety that will end up taking the life of the man politely refusing a gun.

Reinforcing this idea of lax gun safety (and safety for himself, and safety for his crew, and safety in general) while further playing it for laughs, Steve calls down to Anne-Marie, his script girl, asking if the interns get glocks. Not only does he not know if his unpaid interns are carrying firearms, but she replies that they all actually share one. Wowsers.

The image we get of Anne-Marie — in addition to being, let’s face it, pretty lovely — is once again evocative of a mermaid. We discussed this during the scene set at Loquasto’s after party, and we see it again now. I understand that this is more of a vague visual suggestion than anything hard and fast, so of course feel free to disagree. I, personally, find it hard to gaze down at Anne-Marie lying down, her hair splayed out behind her, topless, with a green dress, and not see a mermaid sunbathing.

Ned does as he’s told (was there any doubt?) and takes the gun, which causes Steve to smile. Yes, Steve Zissou smiles! I even captured the evidence above.

Ned smiles, too. He’s dressed in the clothes and he’s in possession of correspondence stock that bears the name, but now Ned really is becoming a Zissou, what with him taking the gun and therefore willingly putting himself in danger just because Steve told him to. It’s such a tiny moment, but it’s an impressively dark twist on the paternal bonding experience.

Wolodarsky appears and tells Steve to get on the echo box. He has to slap it to get it working, and the unit swings loosely from its mount. More outdated tech, and another reminder that even the most basic repairs — such as loose mounting screws — go unaddressed.

He learns that he has a call from Oseary Drakoulias, which causes him to break into an immediate sprint. It’s interesting to me just how overtly Anderson reminds us of the importance of film in Steve’s life, yet it only stands out to me when I break down scenes detail for detail. When you just watch the film, so much of this passes by unnoticed. That’s always been the thing about Anderson’s approach to detail and characterization, though: he hides everything in plain sight. It’s why you can watch just about any of his films and laugh the entire time, then rewatch them and be a sobbing mess. The film doesn’t change…we just know what to look for the second time through.

It’s not good news. Oseary is Steve’s producer, and the deal with Larry Amin for financing has fallen through. Steve’s understandably upset, but his response to Oseary throws wide open another suggestion of a past that we won’t get to explore deeply: “In other words, you fucked us.”

Oseary’s implied homosexuality is what informs the earlier scene in which we met Larry. Oseary may have been angling for funds, but he was also flirting. The suggestion now is that Oseary and Larry have not come to a financial arrangement, whether or not they came to any other kind of arrangement. Oseary could have frightened him off with his advances. Or he could have enjoyed his company and decided not to press the issue. It’s unclear. Steve’s choice of verb, however, is not. He throws it at Oseary because he knows, at least vaguely, what happened. It’s probably happened before. And he know it will hurt the man, which it does, and the conversation immediately becomes a shouting match.

What’s also worth noting is that it was Steve himself who was rude to Larry earlier on, refusing to see him as worth his time unless he had the kind of money needed to mount the next film. Oseary may have erred on the other side, looking past the money to see too much of Larry Amin.

Either way, regardless of who fucked whom, the money isn’t coming.

I also like the placement of the Belafonte model here…sitting in the window, overlooking the water, so that it could just about be mistaken for the actual ship out at sea. There’s also another set of The Life Aquatic Companion Series on the shelves, and words cannot express how much I wish those were real. If I could own any prop from the film, it would probably be one of those books.*

Ned interrupts — of course politely — and says that he just inherited $275,000. He’s not sure that that amount would make any difference, but when you’re flat broke (as Steve seems to be, though we later find out this is not true) it makes a massive difference. Oseary seems unable to decide whether or not Ned is being sarcastic, and that’s another instance of something tragic being played for a laugh. After all, we know how this story ends: Ned is bankrolling his untimely death.

He believes he’s helping his father. All he’s really doing is investing $275,000 in his own funeral service.

Steve and Ned take off for Oseary Drakoulias Productions. There’s more looming tragedy here being played as comedy; the foreshadowing is really being layered on thick…and yet, once again, if you don’t know what to look for it just glides on by. In this case it’s Steve asking Ned if he can fly a helicopter. Ned replies that he has, in a way that makes it clear he really shouldn’t, and he’s “certainly not licensed in any way, shape or form.”

Steve responds by handing him the keys and saying, “Great. Let’s go.”

Think about that. Not even within the context of what happens later in the film (though that by no means can be far from your mind). Just think about what’s happening here. Handing the keys to an aircraft to somebody who isn’t licensed to operate it. Telling him to take you up into the sky and fly somewhere he’s never been.

Can you imagine anything more dangerous than that? It’s a joke here, as was Steve’s handling of the gun. In each case, the joke is on Ned. There’s only one possible punchline, and it’s a tough one to swallow.

Later in the film, Anne-Marie (in what, if I remember correctly, is her final line) sums up her views on Steve thusly: “We’re being led on an illegal suicide mission by a selfish maniac.” And you know what? You could look up any word in that sentence, and you’d find that she’s not exaggerating. The script girl chose her words carefully, and she’s absolutely correct. Here, on a smaller scale, Steve is doing the same thing by forcing a gun and a helicopter on a man who isn’t trained to use them, and then demanding that he does.

Steve’s pretty clearly a terrible father, and a lousy captain. He’s (at least currently) an inept and destitute filmmaker. He’s a cheating husband, a demanding employer, and a bad friend. And you know what? We haven’t seen anything yet.

Some perfect, gentle foreshadowing in this screen grab, as Klaus watches Ned and Steve depart. He’s shielding his eyes from the sun, but the gesture mirrors his final salute to Ned, when the helicopter takes off for a second and final time in the film.

Yet another thing I’ve never noticed before writing this series. I cannot express how much I love this movie.

Enough foreshadowing yet? I hope not, because Steve and Ned hear some nasty grinding as the helicopter soars, and Steve reveals that he has no idea when it was last serviced. Klaus is supposed to check it every six months…then again, Klaus was supposed to pick Jane up at the airport. He’s not the most reliable crewman, and this specific lack of attention to his duties will ultimately result in Ned’s death.

As much as Steve might believe his “pack of strays” mentality to staffing his ship is a good thing — as might we; it’s a Wes Anderson film, after all — we’re surrounded by evidence that it’s not. Machines are failing, equipment stays broken, and job duties remain unfulfilled. Steve’s legacy is falling apart around him both because of his own lack carelessness, and the inherent carelessness that he finds and fosters in others.

Ned is Steve’s legacy personified. We’re reminded now of how that turns out.

In Oseary’s office, we get another nice look at the difference between Steve and Ned. While Ned stands with his hands behind his back, refusing to even approach the desk until he’s invited to sit down, Steve is behind the desk leafing through one of Oseary’s files. (Possibly one on himself.) So much in this movie just happens, and Anderson trusts us to find it eventually. He draws undue attention to literally nothing, which is almost ironic since The Life Aquatic is easily the film of his with the most visual spectacle.

The wire transfer came through successfully from Kentucky, and Ned is finally invited to sit down. There are a few “hooks on it,” however (another nice aquatic choice of words), and Oseary outlines them. While he does, we get a good view of Noah Baumbach as Philip. Baumbach co-wrote The Life Aquatic with Anderson, as well as Fantastic Mr. Fox, which means he bookends the quality spectrum for Anderson’s films as far as I’m concerned. He’s also a great director in his own right**, though I probably wouldn’t put him on quite the same plane.

The bank apparently wants a drug test for everyone on the crew. Steve looks a bit shifty, but isn’t particularly concerned about this. His ire is quietly raised, however, when Oseary also mentions that “a stooge from the bond company” will be coming along to keep them on budget. Oseary wisely cuts off any protest from Steve by telling him outright that “there’s not a damn thing you can do about that.”

The major revelation here, however, is that Steve must legally swear not to kill the Jaguar Shark. As he already announced to an assembly at Loquasto, this mission is purely one of revenge, so forbidding Steve to kill it goes clearly against his intentions. Ever the gentleman, however, Steve meets Oseary halfway: “I’m going to fight it, but I’ll let it live.” He then immediately inquires about the dynamite he requested, just in case you were willing to believe that Ahab just wants to smack Moby-Dick around a little bit.

Another interesting point comes up here: Oseary tells him he can’t kill the Jaguar Shark, “or whatever it is, if it actually exists.” Granted, Steve is already dreaming up a response that will get him off the hook, but this isn’t the first time that somebody’s questioned the existence of the Jaguar Shark. And, as before, Steve doesn’t pursue the issue.

I find this incredibly fascinating. Put yourself in Steve’s shoes. You go out diving with a friend, a very close friend, and you see that friend get devoured by some monstrous sea creature. When you come to shore and tell everyone what happened, they make comments to the passive effect that you made it up. That there was no creature.

What would your response be? Your friend is dead. You didn’t kill him. Some unknown beast did. You’d make that very clear. You might not be able to tell them what it was, but you saw it happen. You’d plead with them to believe you.

Steve, however, doesn’t do this. People question the existence of the shark, and he shrugs. That’s incredible to me, and I’m not quite sure how to interpret it. Is it because Steve sees the world through a lens, and because he dropped the camera and there’s no footage he can’t be sure that it ever did happen? He saw it happening, but he didn’t capture it happening; that’s a significant difference for Steve Zissou. That’s the difference between fantasy and reality.

Or is it more like what Jane suggested in our last segment? Does this also seem fake? This would square very nicely with the answer Steve gave Captain Hennessey when the topic was breached at Loquasto: “I don’t want to give away the ending.”

Either way, however, Esteban is dead. There was blood in the water. Steve surfaced with hydrogen psychosis.

Did the shark kill Esteban? We learn later that it at least exists, but for now the possibility that that’s not what happened is an intriguing one. Especially since it’s not the shark that kills Ned…it’s Steve, in pursuit of the shark. Another important distinction.

Oseary is off to Zurich, but before he leaves he introduces Steve to the bond company stooge, Bill Ubell. There’s one of those tiny cuts for time that Anderson employs with such tantalizing infrequency: Oseary steps out of his office and into the hallway, then we cut to him stepping out of the hallway and into the lobby area. We lose maybe five steps, and the camera comes along with us so that it feels like a continuous shot, without actually being one. I love this.

Bill Ubell stands, and there’s another lovely, understated moment when Bill glances down at Steve’s hand as though he expects he’ll be able to shake it. Steve’s hand just hangs there. We’re far enough back that we might not notice it. Anderson’s trusting us a lot with this film.

Steve’s distrust of Bill (played by Bud Cort, of Harold and Maude fame) is palpable, and Anderson does a great job of making us complicit in it. He dresses Bill in muted earth-tones, at clear odds with the bright blues and reds of the Team Zissou uniforms. He’s made to look like an interloper not only aboard the ship, but within the film. We even see the three of them squeezed into a tiny elevator, illustrating physically Steve’s inner discomfort at having to share space with the man.

Zissou outright says to Bill that he hopes he’s not going to bust their chops. Bill asks him why he would do that, and Steve responds that he’s a bond company stooge.

Bill replies, “Well, I’m also a human being.” Steve’s uniformly judgmental outlook softens, as should ours. We saw him through Zissou’s eyes, and as funny as the line is, we should also feel at least a little bit ashamed for drawing certain conclusions from Bill’s appearance. His glasses, his bald spot, his cleanly pressed wardrobe. We thought we knew what was stepping into the elevator with Steve, and we were wrong. Anderson took movie wardrobe shorthand and used it against us. We’ve been trained to see one thing, and he reveals to us another. It’s one of the more obvious slights of hand that he pulls in this film, but by no means is it the only one.

That Steve apologizes for feeling exactly what we felt is probably due to his riding high. He’s in a good mood. He has money again. He’s going to do his movie. Philip is getting him dynamite. He’s feeling good, and Devo’s rollicking “Gut Feeling” wells up on the soundtrack…but we’ll talk about that next time.

We end this recap on Steve inviting Ned and Bill to share a cheer with him, in the name of teamsmanship. What a fantastic invented word, by the way. It’s Steve expressing something that he doesn’t otherwise have a word for. It’s not friendship, it’s not companionship, and it’s not even a relationship. It’s teamsmanship. The state of being a teamsman.

That speaks volumes to me about Team Zissou. It’s not about bringing any expertise to the mission, it’s not about being a capable leader, and it’s not even about doing your job. It’s about being part of a team. That, in itself, is its own reward…at least in Steve’s mind. It’s why his interns are unpaid. (That, and the fact that he doesn’t have any money.) Being aboard the Belafonte is a privilege, and one that should be celebrated.

And so we celebrate, because the Belafonte has just found the final major addition to its crew, and everything is going to be just fine for everyone.

Next: Ned drinks a little too much water.

—–
* Christmas is coming, guys…

** His films The Squid and the Whale and Greenberg are the ones I’d recommend. But be warned: both of them will probably make you ashamed to be alive.

ALF Reviews: “Looking for Lucky” (Season 1, Episode 3)

After “Strangers in the Night” I was really, really worried that every episode of ALF would be that bad or worse. “Looking for Lucky” represents a Pyrrhic victory then, I guess, because it’s unquestionably better than that one while still being fucking terrible.

The episode’s title refers to Lucky the cat, which means we’re three episodes in and while we still don’t know anything about the family, we’re going to spend a half hour developing the character of their pet. Great. And Mrs. Ochmonek, with whom we spent a half hour last week, doesn’t even appear. It’s like the writers are doing everything in their power to procrastinate the moment that they will have to make a decision about who the people in this family are.

Anyway the episode opens with ALF attempting to hypnotize Lucky. He tells the cat he’s getting sleepy, and then he tells him he’s a bagel. We learn soon that this is because ALF wants to eat Lucky, but I don’t understand why he needs to precede this with hypnosis. Either eat the cat or don’t…there’s no reason to try to give it hypnotic suggestions. When you eat an actual bagel you don’t need the bagel to be aware that it’s a bagel. I don’t even know what ALF is trying to accomplish here. Seriously, does anybody know? What’s the point of this?

And, once again, why does ALF understand all of these Earth concepts? I know I’ve said this before, but I can’t get over the fact that the writers think it’s a good idea for ALF to have complete working knowledge of human culture. Wouldn’t it be funnier if we saw him discover hypnosis for the first time? Misunderstand its practice and purpose? Make some jokes? Because ALF swinging a pocket watch back and forth in front of a cat isn’t a joke, and “You are a bagel” isn’t a punchline.

Maybe it’s the writers who are aliens. They certainly don’t seem to grasp the concept of comedy.

Willie comes in and tells ALF not to play with priceless family heirlooms, referring to the pocket watch. He takes the watch back, notices it’s broken, and that’s that. Willie goes to work and doesn’t seem to care about the destruction of the thing that he was seconds ago so worried about. There’s another in the long line of ALF situations that are set up and resolved in the course of two lines.

Oh, and Willie: ALF breaks shit. Like, all the time. Stop leaving this asshole unsupervised.

Same credits sequence again, but it’s really starting to reveal to me how limited our understanding of these characters are. They’re ostensibly main characters, especially since every episode introduces them, but they barely appeared in the last episode and only Willie and Kate had any kind of real part in the events of the pilot. Every time I see Brian and Lynn, the Tanner children, I’m reminded that I have genuinely no clue what they’re like.

I couldn’t tell you anything about them. Lynn is on the phone in the credits sequence and Brian hugs ALF, but in the actual episodes so far they’ve probably had five lines between them. Do they go to school? Is Lynn seeing anybody? Does Brian have any friends? Do they give a shit that an alien lives in their house now? Can the writers really think of nothing for them to do? Why are they even there, then?

And what about Willie and Kate? I know Willie works…does Kate? Where does Willie work? What was their life like before ALF arrived? I have no clue, because all anyone in the family ever seems to do is stand around quietly while ALF does prop comedy.

It feels like the writing staff created these characters, but then didn’t want to do anything with them. They’d rather focus on the cat and Mrs. Ochmonek, which says a lot about how little they care about the family that was supposed to be at the center of this show.

ALF does the Risky Business thing by lip synching into a cucumber and wobbling vaguely along to an absolutely awful cover of “Old Time Rock and Roll,” which wasn’t that great a song to begin with. While he does this the audience (“audience”) laughs, which makes me feel worse than the homeless people I pass on the way home from work.

While he bops around from the chest up we see that the house is completely wrecked. Furniture is flipped over, trash is all over the place, stuff is smashed. Oh, and he also ate every bit of food in the house. ALF is dancing and doing silent karaoke while I take a moment to wonder, yet again, why in the world the Tanners let him live here.

Just kick him out. I know the first episode ended with ALF cracking wise and three quarters of the family yuking it up, but what benefit do they get out of keeping him around? They certainly haven’t been laughing lately. All he does is break stuff and put the family in danger of being caught. Shouldn’t he be contributing in some way instead of just going ape-shit when they leave and busting up their stuff?

The family comes home and stand around quietly while ALF does prop comedy. They’re obviously pissed that he wrecked up the place, but they’re content to let him finish his routine before they make too much of a fuss about it.

I’m going to spoil something for you here. Are you ready? If you really plan on watching “Looking for Lucky” yourself and being surprised, then stop reading now.

The spoiler: There is no consequence for ALF’s actions.

Put yourself in Willie’s shoes. You come home from work and all of your food is gone and everything in your house, everything you own, has been smashed to pieces.

It doesn’t matter if an alien did it. Whether it was a roommate, a pet, a kid, a criminal…whoever the heck destroyed the home in which you live, you’d flip out. If you could get your hands on the person responsible, you’d make sure there was some consequence.

Yet Willie doesn’t care. Not after this scene anyway. He shrugs it off, presumably writes a check for $12,000 to American Furniture Warehouse to replace everything overnight, and sends his wife off to buy groceries. ALF is not punished. ALF isn’t even lectured. When this situation is referred to again later in the episode, it’s referred to fondly. Everyone involved with ALF behaves like an alien except for fuckin’ ALF.

Brian announces his continued existence by observing that Lucky is missing. Everyone assumes that ALF ate him, which is a conclusion they reach based unfairly upon the fact that ALF is constantly saying he will eat him.

Willie asks ALF where the cat is, and ALF burps.

Ready? I’m going to spoil something else for you here: ALF didn’t eat the cat.

Okay. Fine. I’m alright with this.

But then why is ALF behaving this way? They ask where the cat is, and he burps. He then jokes about chasing Lucky around with a fork. When he’s asked point-blank if he ate the cat, he says he needs to speak to his attorney before he can answer.

None of this makes any sense. If ALF didn’t actually eat Lucky, then why can’t he just stop dicking around and state clearly that he did not? He’s not helping his case here, he’s not helping his family, he’s not being constructive about the problem, and he’s not even lightening the mood. All he’s doing is infuriating people who are already concerned about the safety of their other pet…you know, the one that doesn’t tear up the carpets and break all the furniture while they’re away.

ALF’s behavior only makes sense if he did eat Lucky and was trying to cover for it. If someone killed your cat and you thought it was me, the last thing I would do is make jokes about chasing the thing around with knives and wanting to eat it. And if you asked me if I had anything to do with it and I said I wanted a lawyer, you’d think I was definitely hiding something. Why in the world would I say that otherwise?

I honestly have no idea what ALF or the writers were trying to accomplish here. No. Fucking. Clue.

ALF coughs up a hairball and puts it in Willie’s hand while the man is trying to comfort his weeping son. It’s like dicks were invented just so ALF could be called one.

Willie then gives the camera his best Flintstones-style “It’s a living!!!!” stare, and I think I’ve managed to screengrab the precise moment that Max Wright turned to crack.

We’re eight minutes into a 21-minute show and all we’ve seen is ALF dancing and refusing to admit that he didn’t eat a cat. So what’s the next logical scene?

You guessed it! A heartbreaking sequence in which ALF writes a note of farewell to the Tanners and sets off to find Lucky. :(

Poor ALF! All he did was thoroughly vandalize the home in which he was allowed to live for free, and now people are mad at him because he behaved like a raving cock-biscuit while their kids were crying.

He writes a note to the family and we hear what he’s writing…somehow. It’s worth refuting the points he makes, because nowhere does the episode attempt to do the same. It would be fine if the point of “Looking for Lucky” was that ALF thought and acted one way, but then realized that he was out of line and came to understand the Tanners’ perspective. That would make some kind of narrative sense and it would remind us that the writers are aware of ALF’s personality flaws. Instead, though, the Tanners actually come around to ALF’s perspective, which reminds us that the writers got paid a lot of money to not give a shit about their own show.

ALF writes, “I’ve been accused of a crime I did not commit.” That’s fine. I believe you, ALF. But why didn’t you say so when you were asked? Why did you burp and joke and put your disgusting hairballs into peoples’ hands? Yes, it sucks to be accused of a crime you didn’t commit. But when you’re given a completely fair and open forum in which to express the fact that you didn’t commit it, and you decide not to say anything in your own defense, then that’s kind of on you.

ALF writes then that he’s been “accused by people I thought were my friends.” If you thought they were your friends, why did you joke around and belittle them when they were obviously hurt and concerned by the disappearance of their pet? Again, I’d like to remind you that by the end of the episode it’s the family that feels bad for the way they treated ALF, not vice versa. So what, with all due respect, the fuck?

Anyway ALF then makes some references to The Fugitive and sets off to find Lucky and clear his name. Well, okay, finding Lucky would indeed prove that you didn’t eat him, but what about the huge mess you made? All of the groceries that you ate and didn’t replace? The fact that you left the window open so that Lucky could escape in the first place?

Locating Lucky can’t “clear his name” because he actually is guilty of a whole load of things that the family should still be upset about. Yes, okay, he might not have eaten the cat, but that’s just one item on a long list of things that ALF should desperately need to atone for.

The next morning Kate and the kids joke around in the kitchen about how they’re all starving because ALF ate everything and didn’t leave a scrap of food for anyone else. Again, why are they letting him live here? What benefit, exactly, are they getting from it? They sure seem chipper for people who didn’t have dinner and had to wait for a trip to the grocery store before they could have any breakfast.

Lynn gets a few lines here and had a couple in the Risky Business aftermath, and I almost feel bad about pointing this out but her delivery is really strange. It’s like the actress is making a conscious effort to pronounce each word correctly and clearly, which makes all of her sentences sound like they’ve been strung together by a robot. This in conjunction with the fact that many of Brian’s lines are clumsy overdubs probably goes a long way toward revealing why we haven’t heard much from them.

As if he knew that we were talking about terrible line readings, Willie comes into the kitchen with a microscope, forgets his line halfway through, and then just starts over because he knows nobody working on this show is paying enough attention to ask for a second take.

It turns out that he analyzed the furball ALF coughed up, and it’s not Lucky’s hair; it’s ALF’s own!!!!

He therefore concludes that ALF is innocent.

NO. NO.

NONONONONONONONONONONONO.

NO.

ALF is not innocent. ALF destroyed your home. ALF is the reason you haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday. ALF is still responsible for the fact that your cat is missing.

This proves nothing, but Willie is convinced that he’s solved the crime and owes ALF an apology. Even with this in mind, that’s still not the strangest thing about Willie’s revelation: When a furry animal coughs up a furball, isn’t it usually composed of its own fur? I don’t understand why this is such a shocking development. The Tanners live with a cat. Do they think that every time Lucky’s coughed up a furball it’s because he hunted, killed and consumed another cat? Of course not. It’s because he’s covered in fur and that’s going to happen. Ditto ALF.

This doesn’t make sense, and in no way does it suggest that ALF is innocent of anything. I guess I still don’t know what Willie does for a living, but I think I can safely conclude that he’s not a lawyer.

Also, this is what Willie does all night? Sit in the shed with a microscope, staring at ALF’s magnified pubes? Who put all the furniture back together? Kate? They also made her do the shopping. No wonder she’s so miserable.

They find ALF’s note and decide to go after him. We get a montage of ALF showing Lucky’s picture to other cats, and then we see the family asking strangers if they’ve seen ALF, complete with descriptions of and gestures meant to indicate his alien features.

…um, WHAT?

Again, in the first episode the family was concerned about ALF so much as going near the windows, lest a neighbor see him and call the government. Now, two episodes later, the family is wandering around town openly asking people if they’ve seen the space alien that they illegally harbor in their home.

What kind of sense does this make? What kind of sense could this ever possibly make? Every episode of ALF I’ve watched so far has seemed like an ingenious, scathing parody of the stupidity of the concept. And yet…it’s not. This is just the way the show works. And it reaches its pinnacle, perhaps, at the end of the montage:

ALF is spotted! By another human being! Not just that, but he’s lassoed around the neck, and if the animal control guy just pulled the noose a little tighter I’d never have to write another one of these reviews again.

This is it, guys! ALF has been captured!

These are the end times! This is precisely the sort of thing everyone was afraid of from day one! So I’m sure that was follows will be tense and exciting and…

…oh. The animal control guy just thought ALF was a dog.

For the fiftieth time this episode: fucking WHAT?

ALF looks nothing like a dog. And it’s this guy’s job to catch dogs. I have no clue what’s going on here. Maybe if the animal catcher was blind or something. Or if ALF was in a dog costume. But no, the animal catcher just thinks ALF is a dog, what with his walking on hind legs, speaking English, and having full, articulate use of his hands and fingers.

This is so disappointing. You know those news stories you see every so often? The ones where somebody caught a really creepy looking fish? Or when some bizarre animal corpse was found on the side of the road? The media goes nuts playing with the idea that it could be some mythical creature instead of a half-decomposed and bloated coyote. People love making a spectacle of that stuff. And this guy just caught one that’s still alive!

But he sticks it in a cage next to some dogs and that’s that. The lack of imagination in this show is almost admirable. God knows I couldn’t write shit this dumb for this long and still be able to face myself in the mirror.

Lucky is placed into the cage across the room from ALF, because of course he is, and a few seconds later a little girl enters the room with the gigolo she pimps out to lonely old ladies.

I was all set to make fun of this girl’s acting, but then she immediately becomes my favorite character when she sees ALF in the cage and instructs the animal catcher to “Gas it. Nobody’s going to want it.”

Woman who played this little girl however many years ago: if you’re reading this, get in touch. I owe you a high five.

To nobody’s surprise, the girl chooses to take Lucky home. This continues the ALF tradition of set-up and payoff occurring so closely to each other that there’s actually no distinction.

ALF — concerned that Lucky is going home to a new family that’s smart enough not to leave it home alone with a creature that constantly tries to kill it — picks up his water bowl in both hands and runs it noisily back and forth against the front of his cage, which is so totally what a dog would do.

The animal catcher then opens the cage, as the best way to deal with an openly aggressive animal is to release it into a room full of people.

Unfortunately ALF doesn’t get to save Lucky, because just as he’s released a midget in an ALF suit swoops in and makes off with the cat instead.

The creature that everyone still seems to believe is a dog then waddles out of the room on two feet with a cat slung over its shoulder, and we cut back to the Tanner house because nobody sees anything strange about this.

ALF reveals to the family that he brought Lucky home, but the family is just glad ALF is safe. Of course they are; if he weren’t around, who would starve them, break their heirlooms, and touch their son’s sleeping butthole? Willie then returns home with Lucky, because the cat ALF saved was just some look-alike.

I don’t even know why this development occurs since it doesn’t lead to a joke and the episode just ends. Well, ALF does joke about eating the cat he rescued, but this time nobody gets upset because they all finally realized how wonderful it is to live with a creature that fucks up your life at every turn. The Tanners are glad to return to their state of normalcy, in which none of them can ever leave the house again if they’d like to have a house to come back to.

I really don’t understand this show. I’m not a proponent of every episode having a moral or anything, but I am a proponent of television that at least understands what it’s doing. For a straight-faced show like ALF to have its titular character engaging in all manner of destructive shenanigans, it’s very odd that the big conclusion is that the family loves him for who he is…rather than that he needs to start trying to reign in his sociopathic behavior.

“Be yourself” is a fine takeaway for kids, but “Continue to be yourself even while you’re hurting the people who care about you” probably isn’t.

It’s just strange to me…as though ALF was the fore-runner of these “unlikeable hero” comedies we see all over the place now, only it didn’t realize that he was unlikeable. That almost qualifies as a compliment, and it would scare me that I’m ending an episode review on a high note…but then they re-play the Risky Business bullshit under the end credits and all is right with the world again.

MELMAC FACTS: Lynn says that on Melmac they eat cats the way we on Earth eat cows. Only, y’know, they hypnotize them into believing they’re bagels first.