Friday, August 16, 2013

"Just add aliens" isn't the worst plotting advice ever, I guess...

My girlfriend and I watch Falling Skies together--in fact, it's one of the few shows we do watch together. But as of yet, we haven't watched the third season finale that aired a week or two back, for reasons that are somewhat unclear to me. "Once we watch it, it's over!" was one answer. The other being, she may be worried that Falling Skies season finales have traditionally been a little weak. The first year ends with the new alien overlords revealed, and Noah Wyle's character surrenders to them...the why of the latter I don't recall, except that they needed a cliffhanger to go out on. Year two, new aliens show up, and they turn out to be fighting the earlier alien overlords. Her money seems to be on more aliens showing up, quite possibly out of nowhere in particular. Just like in today's book!

From 1992, Excalibur #47, "Come One and All to the Ugly Bug-Eyed Monster Ball" Story and art by Alan Davis, inks by Mark Farmer. Davis is more well known as an artist, but is not too shabby a writer, either: his first eight issues writing and drawing Excalibur wrapped a ton of loose ends and red herrings (his own and other writers) from the entire run of the book to date.

More and more mysterious occurrences and alien arrivals keep piling up in the basement of the team's lighthouse, opening this issue with the newly arrived Cerise fighting Nightcrawler's N-Men. (The N-Men are the aliens formerly known as the Technet, an amusingly slapstick batch of mercenaries currently exiled on earth and trained by Nightcrawler to keep them out of trouble.) After their Marvel-misunderstanding rumble wraps up, yet another team of aliens arrive, to offer the N-Men a contract, and after some negotiation they accept. A selling point in that negotiation may have been that the aliens' psychic member has an alarming prediction:

Also this issue: on Otherworld, Captain Britain gets a recap of most of the series to date, along with the Excalibur special that didn't really add up in continuity. Love this run: just read the first eight again the other day, and wish I'd the time for the rest.

2 comments:

Mr. Morbid's House Of Fun said...

Alan Davis'run, especially in conjuncture with Claremont was just fucking brilliant!

Plus it allowed the characters to be silly instead of becoming caricatures of themselves.

SallyP said...

Oh that Alan Davis artwork. I love his version of Kurt...so...much.