Quarantine Control #70: Money, Clowns, Food, and Patriots
The story of the world going in the wrong direction concerning curbing the seemingly-perpetual spread of COVID-19 continues into another week. It’s depressing, and that’s before you look at the threat of worse to come. The Delta Variant is already a more spreadable and perhaps more virulent variant, but there’s also the further-spreadable Delta Plus Variant, which sounds like the premium streaming service iteration. Not to mention the even-more-violent Lambda Variant that could become a threat by the end of this year, including to the vaccinated. We’ll be stuck with this forever at the rate we’re going, and we have those pesky anti-vaxxers to thank for it.
Angela Moseley
As I sit here on the eve of Otakon, the biggest anime convention on the East Coast, I’m slightly nervous. I made the decision to attend Otakon 2021 in May when things looked like they were drastically turning around for the United States. The Delta variant wasn’t a problem in this country and it seemed like President Biden might reach his goal of having 70% of Americans vaccinated by July 4. Since then vaccination efforts have stalled and the Delta variant has surged in many communities. Even though I was fully vaccinated in April (being an essential worker), I’ve not stopped wearing my mask in public places. Fingers crossed that people actually adhere to Otakon’s mask requirements and that enforcing these rules aren’t problematic.
Anyway, let’s talk anime!
Moriarty the Patriot, Season 1
Source: Funimation
Episodes: 11
Moriarty the Patriot is one of those shows that caught my eye based on key art alone. The name was familiar, the characters looked cool, and the blood red sky framed everything nicely. For a while I had forgotten this show existed because it was relegated to streaming on Funimation opposed to Crunchyroll or Hulu. When I finally decided to subscribe to Funimation Premium, Moriarty was one the first shows I watched. (On a side note, the Funimation app runs like garbage on everything except mobile and Xbox.)
I went into this anime adaption of this anime completely blind. All I knew was that the series was adapted from a manga of the same name. Even though this series takes place in Victorian England, the class issues it addresses are fitting for today. Class stratification has stifled the working class while the nobility has become drunk with corruption and power. Albert Moriarty is the eldest son in a noble family, but he’s disgusted with his family and fellow nobles. One day his father decides to adopt two orphan boys named William James and Louis, not out of the kindness of his heart, but to curry favor with a higher ranking noblewoman. Albert realizes how truly depraved his own family is when they not only mistreat their own servants, but new his orphan siblings as well.
However, William has an incredibly gifted mind. His intellect is so high that as a child he often gives advice to adults. In order to survive, he’s not above giving advice on how to better commit crimes and accepting monetary compensation in return. Albert sees this and decides to ask William to help him not only get rid of his family, but to purge England of the corrupt noble classes. He offers up his own wealth and status to help. William agrees, and the three boys murder the entire Moriarty estate and keep the inheritance. Years pass and as adults, William Moriarty is a highly regarded math professor. His side job continues to be a crime consultant. He devises ways to perfectly execute crimes so people can exact revenge against the nobles who’ve wrong them.
Moriarty is a fascinating show where most of life’s problems can be solved by murder committed by beautiful Englishmen. The characters aren’t evil; they just do evil things for the long-term betterment of society. For example, the first episode opens with a nobleman who enjoys torturing and killing young to adolescent boys. Since the children who were murdered had a low status in society no one could be bothered to investigate their deaths. Albert uses his connections to get into high society club where William is able to deduce who the culprit is. Knowing that he was powerful and outside the law, the Moriarty brothers arranged a kidnapping and had one murdered boy’s father take his revenge. The crime was then covered up so no one was caught.
The first six episodes of season one are filled with stories of commoners being wronged by nobles and the professor arranging elaborate revenge murder plots. The series then takes a turn with the introduction of a young and haughty Sherlock Holmes. You can’t have Moriarty without Holmes. The math professor commits several murders under Holmes’ nose and though England’s greatest detective is able to solve the murders, he’s unable to discover the mastermind. Despite this, Moriarty recognizes Holmes as a needed force to change England and see the detective as his greatest rival.
I honestly don’t like Sherlock as a character because of his brash and arrogant nature. I suppose the point was to contrast sharply with the quiet and thoughtful William. As far as other side characters go, we have Albert and Louis who round out the quiet and thoughtful Moriarty siblings– though Louis strikes me as the overly uptight and protective type. On Holmes’ side we have a young Dr. John Watson, a mild-mannered and brilliant surgeon who has just returned from the Afghan War. He balances out Sherlock’s worst tendencies in addition to providing medical knowledge.
I found the first half of season one to be a lot stronger than the second half. The story momentum was lost when the show’s narrative switched from Moriarty to Holmes, as the villains had a more interesting point of view. It looks like the narrative will expand with season two which is already out—but I haven’t sat down to watch it as of this writing.
If you’re a fan of Sherlock Holmes or England’s Victorian period, Moriarty the Patriot might be worth checking out.
Geoffrey Barnes
I wanted to provide impressions on something a little special for the 69th Quarantine Control entry last week, but couldn’t decide on precisely what that could be in time. Providing a review for Space Jam: A New Legacy wasn’t part of the original plan, despite the fun picture of a CG Bugs Bunny from the movie looking up at the title and corresponding entry number. Of course I found the perfect thing to discuss after the post went up. I don’t want to let this go completely to waste, so here’s what I should have talked about last week, a show that even has a 69-related gag.
Harley Quinn (2019)
Source: HBO Max
Episodes: 26 (the first two seasons)
I figured I knew what I was getting into with the Harley Quinn animated series. I was well aware that this show took concepts from the DC superhero universe and put a considerably more comedic spin on them, with voice actors that fit the characters’ more comedic personalities. I’d also heard good things about it from good sources. Yet, I still wasn’t prepared for just how good it would be. It’s why I came away from the series very impressed despite my high expectations.
This is a series about the titular Harley Quinn’s exploits, which fittingly begins with her splitting away from the Joker after he makes it clear just how much he values her life (as in, he does not at all). She subsequently befriends Poison Ivy, both of whom form a crew of anti-villains that include Batman villains like King Shark and Clayface and others like Doctor Psycho, Frank the Plant, and Sy Borgman. The first season is largely about Harley Quinn’s efforts to join the Legion of Doom, though she and her cohorts never reach the sinister depths of figures like the Joker, Two-Face, the Riddler, and other Gotham City supervillains.
It’s clear a creative team watched the “Harley and Ivy” episode of Batman: The Animated Series and made a whole series around it, while playing up the potential for comedy. It remains one of the most frequently mentioned episodes of the series, and only partly because it was dripping with as many lesbian overtones as they could stuff in a cartoon that aired on a kids’ block on weekdays in the 1990s. It was a solid idea. The series is as frequently hilarious as expected, yes, but the biggest surprise is how well it can oscillate between serious and comedic tones. Just when I thought it was as good as it could have been in the first season, the second season somehow usurped that.
It also does this without veering too far into “edgy” territory despite being frequently vulgar and violent. Most of that, to be fair, is played for laughs, but it never feels out of place whenever it happens in a comparatively serious connotation. This combination of violence, vulgarity, and comedy could have only been done with Harley Quinn on the DC side. (Deadpool already fills this place on Marvel’s side, and M.O.D.O.K. to a lesser extent.) Nowhere near this level of fun could have been had with Batman and the other Justice League members (made clear with a key thrown-out plan for the third season), which is why they’re mostly tertiary characters. The creative team chose the cast well.
It was necessary for the team to largely avoid existing casting choices for the characters in the DC Animated Universe to find those who fit personalities adjusted for jokey purposes. Kaley Cuoco takes on the role of Harley Quinn here while also serving as one of the show’s producers, and uses a tone of voice that fits the character. (Cuoco is funnily enough the second Big Bang Theory star to play Harley, behind Melissa Rauch in the much-maligned Batman & Harley Quinn film.) Lake Bell takes on Poison Ivy here, who has a large personality change while still being identifiable as the Pamela Isley from several Batman works. More could be said for King Shark and Clayface, where Ron Funches and Alan Tudyk, respectively, play versions that bear no resemblance to other interpretations — to a very hilarious degree. It might be tough for me to see some characters in serious roles again, but it was worth it.
Harley Quinn, as I explained above, is a show that’s already received rave reviews. Yet it still doesn’t feel like it’s received enough relative to its quality. It has, however, obtained enough that DC and Warner were comfortable with renewing the show for a third season that’s set to premier sometime this fall. It’s just a shame that certain, let’s say, changes had to be made due to a misread of what executives and a few creative types think the audience expects from superhero fans.
Joseph Daniels
So there’s a brand of sparkling water that recently came on the market called AHA. There’s also a French Canadian pharmacy chain called Familiprix, and several years ago, they released a set of television commercials where a man in a white lab coat is standing around in everyday situations waiting for a chance to yell the catchphrase “Ah-ha! Familiprix!” whenever his services might be needed due to slapstick style accidents, maybe condoms or a pregnancy test are needed, and so on. Well, lately I’ve been wondering if the beverage brand should team up with Familiprix for a revival of the campaign. On unrelated topics…
If You Liked: Restaurant to Another World
Then You May Enjoy…
Isekai Izakaya: Japanese Food From Another World (2018)
Source: Crunchyroll
Episodes: 24
There’s something I’ve noticed about food anime. It’s very hit and miss. I feel like Restaurant to Another World at least has a bit more framing around each episode, allowing for more intricate stories to be told in between the characters’ dining sessions. Also, as far as I can recall, there’s a variety to everything served in Restaurant to Another World. Maybe that’s a difference in the skill of its chef and the chef in Isekai Izakaya.
You see, in Isekai Izakaya, I feel like it’s more like a pub instead of an actual sit down restaurant. The first thing everyone seems to do is order the “whatsontapp”, which is basically a mug of beer, and time is spent in each episode as the characters practically orgasm from the sheer joy of drinking chilled, fermented hops.
Fried food is often presented, along with a relatively heavy focus on fish in several episodes and which all feature ridiculously animated reaction shots of the characters as soon as they sample the food. It’s here that I begin to wonder if I’m being advertised to and if so, what’s the advertisement? I’m fairly certain this is a restaurant that I’ll never be able to visit, none of the alternate worlds I’ve ever been to have featured such an establishment. All of the food is native to Earth, but it’s not always telling me where to buy it, more on that in a moment. The anime mainly extols the virtues of various foods and individual ingredients in both the way the characters react when eating, to the way the screen changes to resemble the kind of visual effects you’d expect in a thirty second commercial, complete with text that both conveys factual information and attempts to associate onomatopoeia to the sensations the characters feel.
Each episode is actually only about ten minutes long, since the other five or so minutes are dedicated to live action segments, either with a Japanese chef preparing variations on dishes found in the episode, or a Japanese food critic wandering the streets of Tokyo to find restaurants serving the food found in episodes of the show. This is where I really am being advertised to, since at the end of the latter segments, the name and location of the restaurant he visits are given so that fans of the anime can go and check it out for themselves.
I find that I can’t watch this show except in small doses, since it feels like there’s not much variation in each episode. It’s kind of like OneRoom in that regard. The irony is that I honestly get bored watching shorter anime like this if there’s not a lot to offer the audience, but shows like Beastars or Toradora have so much going on in an episode, I’m always shocked when the end credits start playing. Wait, that was it? I want more!
If You Liked: Whose Vote Counts, explained
Then You May Enjoy…
Money, explained (2021)
Source: Netflix
Episodes: 5
This is more like “How Money Sucks, explained”. If you’re expecting a lecture series on the history of money itself, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
Instead, the series explores the various ways in which the economy is stacked against us. Credit card debt, student debt, get rich quick schemes and gambling are explored. The final episode talks about retirement and focuses on the economics of it. It turns out that very few of us will be able to enjoy our twilight years.
Instead of the history of money, we get the history of five aspects of money. The gambling episode was especially fascinating to me because I visited Las Vegas once and decided I would try out a video slot machine so that I could say I did. I put a small amount of money in one with a big cat motif and figured I’d either leave with triple my money or leave with nothing. I basically wanted to see how long it would take to lose my money and I can’t remember if I put $10 or $20 in, I think it was the latter, and it took about an hour to lose that much money.
I wonder if it was because it was near the end of the day and I was tired, or because I felt that the atmosphere in the casino was too loud and garish, but I was getting impatient to lose that money. I would get close to zero and then win most of my money back, then I’d get close to zero again and then win most of my money back. I finally used up all of my money that third time and got up and walked away. I think the casino tried to hook me, since one of the first pulls of the slots won me several dollars, so the psychological trick there was to establish that I can win so I should keep trying and maybe I’ll hit it big.
However, I decided I didn’t like it. Maybe it was just the knowledge that the odds were stacked against me thanks to experience trying to play casinos in the Dragon Quest games. Maybe it was the notion that I typically can expect to get nothing but entertainment from gambling, but since I wasn’t all that entertained, it meant that the casino didn’t hook me. Besides, I prefer to buy video games instead. That’s where I get my dopamine high, since I can gain power as I level and it’s power I get to keep. I can save worlds. I can make a difference for these digital characters. I can’t do that sitting at a video slot machine.
If You Liked: Episode 50 of The Bright Sessions
Then You May Enjoy…
In Strange Woods (2020)
Source: Spotify or your favourite podcast site
Episode: 5
If you think about it, musicals can be rather silly things. Characters will always need excuses to sing, and sometimes the songs aren’t of a consistent quality.
Sometimes, the medium just isn’t right for the story being told, or the songs themselves don’t fit. One of the criticisms for Mama Mia I’ve often seen, for example, is that the movie’s characters don’t match the lyrics of the songs they’re singing, and that is mainly because someone got the idea to make a movie based around ABBA’s songs, all of which were written decades before, and couldn’t really rewrite the songs to match the story they came up with. Then the sequel likely came about because someone listened to the title song and realized that “Mama Mia, here we go again” was the perfect title for a second movie, regardless of whether it was a good idea to make another one.
Sometimes, it feels like someone gets the idea to try to make a musical in an entirely different medium and it doesn’t quite work out. When Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure was made, it was like they had one idea for a good song, were able to make it a kind of leitmotif for the game, then were stumped for ideas for other songs. There’s no excuse for why “Let’s Go On” is such a good song (although the quality of the singing is debatable) and literally every other song, with the possible exception of the end credits song, “Thank You”, is garbage.
This brings me to In Strange Woods. After turning an episode of The Bright Sessions into a musical (and making it a dream sequence so that it made sense within context… sort of like how characters on Buffy the Vampire Slayer were made to sing thanks to a demon), several members of the cast and crew went on to write an entire musical in podcast form.
This had both the potential to be really good or really awful. Television musicals seem to thrive when the series is based around existing songs, like Glee or Zoe’s Extraordinary Playlist, but it’s pretty telling that the first series to come to mind when thinking about shows with original music is the absolute bomb that was Cop Rock.
With the above examples, plus the Rhapsody video game in mind, it was probably a very good idea to make In Strange Woods a self-contained story and limit it to five episodes. This allowed for songs to call back to one another in later episodes, and for each of them to stand well on their own. Development didn’t need to rush through from one episode to the next, as I imagine was the problem with shows like Cop Rock, and each episode could be treated with the care and attention they deserved. Songs like “A Man Who Cannot Be Saved” have exactly as much gravity as you’d expect from the subject matter, and its main vocalist, played by Patrick Page, is just about the most perfect casting choice you could make. Then there’s “Irene After Dentist”, which is incredibly fun to listen to, since there’s a lot of manic energy behind it.
With all that in mind, aren’t I going to divulge any details about the story? Nah. I went into it blind, and I think you should, too. Give the first episode a try and if it’s not your cup of tea, that’s okay. Musicals aren’t for everyone.
This post shouldn’t end on as morbid a note given how depressing the lede is, but it’s difficult to think of a way not to do that. But here’s some slightly encouraging info: The US’ vaccination rate has increased in recent weeks, with people who were hesitant about getting vaccinated now going for it. We live in a morbid time, so it’s good to distract yourself with local happiness and hobbies whenever you have the chance. Good luck out there.
About The Author
dcstaff
The collective will of the Damage Control staff combined into a single article.
