Quarantine Control #199: Reach for the Infinite Shadows
We have nearly arrived at our 200th Quarantine Control entry, in what’s set to be a remarkable and slightly depressing milestone considering what led to this ongoing feature’s start nearly four years ago. Though it’s considerably more the “remarkable” part rather than the “depressing” part, because of everything the Damage Control staffers have contributed to it over the years. It’s worth acknowledging everything that’s changed since then, and everything that’s stayed the same. In one case, the United States is set to have a rematch between the same two presidential candidates we had in 2020, unless there’s some kind of twist. It’s nice that we’ve done nothing about the threat to fascism in one of the biggest and most important countries in the world.
Let’s save anything else until next week. No need to blow something here.
Geoffrey Barnes
I’m still poking away at Hollow Knight in the video game world, so I’ll talk about something else this week.
Reacher — Season 2 (2023-2024)
Source: Amazon Prime Video
Episodes: 8
The first season of Reacher immediately clarified what kind of show it would be at its start, if the posters and advertisements didn’t already do the job. Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson) knows his way around the block when it comes to investigating corruption matters, and how to fight his way out whenever things get rough. He’s a character made for a certain watcher to live vicariously through, with the narrative showing how he does little wrong despite well-meaning folks he meets trying to stop him initially before seeing situations his way. It very much nails the feel of a USA Network show from the late 2000s in terms of its themes and color palette in R-rated form, one equally a guilty pleasure and genuine fun.
The second season sought to continue that, albeit with a whole crew for Reacher to rely on that’s familiar to him. It sees him reunite with his old elite group of Army Special Investigators at the 110th (who you don’t mess with, by the way). Some members turn up dead, while others appear to have been taken in by nefarious influences. The remaining crew seeks to find out what happened.
Reacher season 2 remains a fun-enough season. The story this time centrally occurs around the New York area, with sections of New Jersey visited, with the crew investigating and taking out a band of villains into all sorts of misdeeds, their worst act involving selling military-grade weapons on the black market. The series does a good job introducing all the members of the 110th. Reliable partner Frances Neagley (Maria Sten) was already introduced during the last, but this one also introduces Karla Dixon (Serinda Swan) and David O’Donnell (Shaun Sipos), all very reliable allies.
The season starts off well, with Frances and the newly-introduced characters receiving solid development (especially Karla), and showing how well they know Reacher himself. It’s a good way to shift the show from being about a one-man army (despite the name) and showing how there are others like him that he can rely on, outside of allies in a state like Georgia. The characters have some fun banter amongst themselves, as they’re settling into their quest to take down Langston (Robert Patrick). Patrick himself plays the kind of deliciously hammy villain that he’s become so good at playing.
I want to note that most of the praise is being applied to around the first third of the season. As the story progresses, it starts losing focus. The writing quality drops around midway through the fourth episode, when the scenario and plans to catch the villains start becoming contrived and awfully convenient for the heroes. It doesn’t help when the action sequences aren’t well directed, especially during shootouts. It’s also a shame that Langston’s plans fall apart in an underwhelming manner, with the character, most of his henchmen, and Patrick himself in terms of acting not getting a chance to make as large of an impact as they could have.
A part of me missed having Reacher go solo. There should have been at least one more season with the title character at the forefront, with necessary assistance from some supporting cast members, before being paired with the group. Some of the most memorable aspects of the series occurred when Reacher was alone at the season’s start; these were notably scenes shown in the promotion. The first season was wish-fulfilling stuff involving a former military man running his own investigation better than the authorities, but that was a lot of fun. Having a whole crew doing the same isn’t a bad idea, but Reacher himself could have used more development before getting to this point. This season is notably based off the eleventh novel in the Jack Reacher series, and I’d have to think there’s a strategic reason why this story came so late.
Reacher has performed well enough for Amazon that a third season was green lit before the second season even premiered. Reacher himself will be back, because… well, of course, but I’m not against Neagley’s return either. I do hope, though, that the team is considering the criticism this season has received despite it already being well into filming. The season will be based off the seventh book in the series, and I have my fingers crossed that it will work towards the series’ strengths. Reacher’s second season may have been a step down from the first, but I remain interested enough to check out the third season when it arrives.
Angela Moseley
With the month of January quickly coming to a close, I’m thinking of bringing my ongoing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild run to a close just in time to join Four in February. If I complete BotW early next month, I could theoretically knock out another three vastly shorter games. It all depends on how much progress I make this week, and how much more I do next week. It’ll be tough unless I sacrifice some sleep for the next two Saturday nights, in addition to my short gaming sessions during my lunch breaks at work. As for what I’m writing about today, it’s unrelated to Zelda, but it is video game related.
This is DLC I was happy to knock off within the two weeks I gave myself to stream it on our Twitch channel. So why not continue that victory lap by talking about the game itself?
Shadows of Adam – Guild of the Artificers (2017)
Source: Steam
Episodes: 1 video game
I previously wrote about Shadows of Adam for QC #193, so I’ll leave all my thoughts on gameplay there. Let’s focus on the DLC, Guild of the Artificers for today. I was originally just going to stream the base game, but one of the game’s developers stopped by during one of my streams. He originally offered me a key for the DLC, but he was out of free keys to give away. I appreciated the gesture so much that I went ahead and purchased the DLC along with the soundtrack.
Installing Guild of the Artificers opened up new items, bosses, and areas that weren’t vital to finish the game. I was encouraged to at least check out some of the special bosses and the new artifact system. So in my last few streams of the game, I did dabble with the Artificers’ Guild. As I neared the end of the game and was about to take my streaming break, a friend suggested I check out the rest of the DLC when I came back from break. Mulling it over, I realized it wasn’t a bad idea, as it would allow me to delay starting Final Fantasy IV: The After Years.
Fresh off my break, I dove back into The Guild of the Artificers and stumbled upon the first DLC boss, King Semian. This slime king appeared in the shape of a train and was weak to crush damage. The most reliable way to inflict crush damage in Shadows of Adam is to use the move, Suplex. In case the homages to Final Fantasy VI weren’t enough, the developers at Something Classic Games had to make sure it wasn’t missed. I can’t help but love that dedication. What I didn’t love was getting my butt whipped by said train, as you only get ten turns to defeat King Semian before he inflicts an unblockable instant kill move on the entire party.
I decided I’d come back to the slime king later, and see what else there was to do in the DLC. I returned to the guild to work on my Grand Reliquary, aka a large artifact that can hold several smaller artifacts. By equipping a Grand Reliquary, you essentially gain an accessory that has three slots for regular accessories. There are four total in the game, one for each character. The first one is given to you by just starting the quest line for the Artificers’ Guild. The other three must be obtained from the special DLC bosses. In my original run, I took on the game’s final boss with just one Grand Reliquary, and it was more than enough to win. This time around, I figured I should adjust what was equipped within the super-sized accessory, and adjust everyone else’s gear.
Once the adjustments were made, I checked out the Battle Arena. I feared the enemies here would give me a hard time. Except, I had nothing to worry about. They were enemies from the regular game and the limiting factors imposed at the start of each fight weren’t really a hindrance. It didn’t take long before I completed every challenge in the arena and obtained useful items and more artifacts.
After that, I decided to check out the DLC dungeon. The enemies were scaled up to match the new higher max levels in Guild of the Artificers. Every fight ended up feeling as if I were fighting a mini-boss. At one point, I feared I’d be staring at a Game Over, but I managed to pull through the fights. The upside was the extra experience quickly boosted the levels of each party member. It wasn’t long before I stumbled upon the first puzzle of the dungeon, and it was more involved than anything in the vanilla game’s final dungeon. I ultimately needed to watch a Let’s Play of someone else figuring out the puzzle. Halfway through the dungeon it dawned on me the boss would probably be powerful, given how tough the area was.
I hurriedly did some backtracking, and decided to challenge King Semian again. The third time was literally the charm, as I finally won against the slime train. I obtained my second Grand Reliquary which went to Asrael. (Kellan had the first.) With my magic user buffed, I searched for the game’s second DLC boss. I found him in the Wind Tower. After the challenge that was the slime train, Sir Tiaves was a joke. He was barely more difficult than a mini-boss and went down quickly. His only gimmick was that his HP had a regen effect which doesn’t work when you damage him faster than he can heal. With that, I had my third Grand Reliquary was in hand. This time I used it to buff up Curtis with accessories. Poor Talon had to rely on Quick Silver (aka a guaranteed first turn all the time) as his only accessory.
The party booked it to the Mystic Cavern where I relied on the Let’s Play again to help me solve the puzzle and find hidden rooms in the dungeon. The dungeon was involved, but also contained some of the best loot in the game. The final boss was utterly unsurprising. I feared the Wraithling I met at the start of the game would have a bigger role to play. He was undoubtedly the toughest boss in the game, and I managed to defeat both of his forms on my first try. With my final Grand Reliquary in hand, I could say I successfully took on Guild of the Artificers and came out on top.
Just like with Shadows of Adam’s base game, Guild of the Artificers is worth your time. If you plan to purchase the game, spend the extra $4 on the DLC. The new content can only be tackled after your reach level 32. So the order you decide to search for Grand Reliquaries in is completely up to you. In addition to new artifacts and bosses, the game also raises the level cap to 50. Every party member also receives new abilities. The new abilities aren’t needed to face down the game’s original final boss, but make a huge difference when facing the hardest boss in the game. At the end of the day, Guild of the Artificers adds a few hours of fun to an already fantastic game.
Joseph Daniels
As we’ve seen in recent weeks, when digital goods disappear or are threatened to disappear, we can and will lose access to a lot of things we once took for granted. It’s a miracle that Warner Brothers is willing to still sell Infinity Train DVDs, for example, because it’s almost completely disappeared from digital distribution. Very few sites even still have it. In the United States, it’s available to buy on Amazon Prime and in Canada, a very select few episodes are available to buy from Google. It really feels like the promise of a digital future has already been broken and yet we’re still expected to be on board with it and give up our physical media entirely, and simply accept that we’re not going to own anything we pay for.
Over the years, I’ve noticed quite a few times when companies started releasing TV shows on physical media, only to give up part way and never finish the job. It’s very annoying for fans who want to support a show or who want to collect something from their childhood and experience it all over again and maybe pass these shows along to their children. This week I want to highlight a few of these examples of companies that failed to preserve their intellectual property in some way or another. Starting with:
Babar (1989)
Availability: Season 1, exactly one episode of season 2
A series that I grew up with, Babar ran for five seasons. A sixth was tacked on a decade later, but was such a departure from the rest of the series that I don’t think it’s right to count it. Having been made in a time before it was convenient to release television shows to home media, it was possible Babar was never going to be put on DVD, but the season 1 set suddenly showed up in 2012, released by Entertainment One. I guess it didn’t sell as well as they’d hoped, because the rest of the series has yet to be released.
Save for one episode. When Babar: The Movie was released on DVD, a season two episode called Monkey Business was included as a bonus feature, but this did not spark enough interest to warrant the release of additional seasons, I guess.
Fast forward to today. All episodes of Babar are available for free in Canada on both the Treehouse Direct channel on YouTube and a separate, official Babar channel. If YouTube decides this is no longer kosher, since YouTube is also trying to sell access to the first two seasons of the show, fans will be stuck buying the series digitally from whoever might have it at the time (currently, Apple TV has all six seasons) and accepting that they may or may not have access to it in the future, even if they do pay for it.
The Adventures of the Gummi Bears (1985)
Availability: Seasons 1-3
It really hurts when a company like Disney, who has more than enough money to throw at redoing The Lion King in modern CG, doesn’t throw any money at finishing a DVD release. I could probably go through the Disney Afternoon shows and see which ones have yet to be finished and call it a day.
So yeah, okay, that’s what I’m going to do.
What makes this especially egregious is that according to Wikipedia, Disney has released this entire series on DVD, if you piece together the releases of a couple different regions. I intend to showcase Region 1 releases only, but I feel like this is a very good example of a TV series that hasn’t been properly preserved in multiple territories. The Wikipedia article claims Disney released DVDs in Australia starting from near the end of season 2 and continuing through to the end of the series. It feels like a weird place to start and makes me wonder if someone in Australia messed up and forgot a couple volumes, but apparently “volume 1” ignores the first 18 episodes in the series and starts from episode 19. Thus, Region 4 covers seasons 3-6 and a small portion of season 2.
The lone Region 1 release came in 2006, and considering how many episodes were released, all it would take is one more set to complete the collection, but Disney has refused to finish the job they started. Unlike in Australia, where they refused to start the job they finished.
I’m tempted to talk about DuckTales since it took 11 years after the first three volumes in order to release the fourth, or Gargoyles, which got treated worse: Season One was released in 2004, then Season Two was released in two separate parts. Part one was released in 2005 and part two was released… in 2013 with as plain packaging as they could possibly get away with. It felt almost like the disc was released along with an exasperated, “Fine, here you go, now will you shut up about this damn thing?” But at least these shows are all completely available now. Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers has been treated very strangely as well. Two volumes of the show were released on DVD in 2005 and 2006 with a third volume to complete the set nowhere in sight. A Blu-ray set was released which does contain all the episodes, but it’s a mess, with the pilot episodes buried on the fourth disc and the rest distributed seemingly randomly, showing a disregard for series continuity.
Darkwing Duck (1991)
Availability: Most of Season 1 across two volumes
Another Disney Afternoon series that has yet to finish its physical releases is Darkwing Duck, a superhero show released in a similar continuity to DuckTales, considering the surprising presence of Launchpad McQuack. The release of the series itself was a little strange. The first season was aired as part of the Disney Afternoon syndicated block, and a Saturday morning version on ABC aired simultaneously and is listed as a pair of separate seasons, although continuity suggests the first Saturday morning season occurs simultaneously with the Disney Afternoon season.
Unfortunately, this leaves fans with an incomplete picture of the series, even among the episodes that they did get on DVD. The Saturday morning version has yet to appear at all, and not all of the Disney Afternoon season has been released. The two volumes that are available were released in 2006 and 2007, and seventeen years later, there’s still no third and final volume. Unlike with the previous example, no Australia release exists to complete the set, as only Region 1 DVDs exist right now.
Goof Troop (1992)
Availability: 54 episodes
Like with Darkwing Duck, this series was also released at the same time as part of the Disney Afternoon and with separate episodes on Saturday morning, and like with Darkwing Duck, two volumes exist and a third has yet to appear. The series was treated probably worse than most of the other Disney Afternoon shows, since initially, a DVD was released in 2006 which contained only three episodes. Disney thought that this was a good idea and proudly sold a three episode DVD for seven years until finally committing to actually selling the show in 2013, but they released two separate volumes at once and held back the rest of the series for a third volume that never came.
At least they showed Goof Troop some love. Quack Pack also got the three episode DVD treatment, but this time, there was no follow-up DVD release, and fans who want to see this show in its entirety are stuck with streaming it on Disney+, like with every other Disney Afternoon show mentioned here today. If these shows were to disappear from the service tomorrow, fans would be out of luck and would never be able to watch the last few episodes of several shows.
Infinity Train (2019)
Availability: Seasons 1-2
You probably thought I wasn’t going to bring this up, did you? When Infinity Train was removed from streaming, it was reported that there was a run on DVDs and that they were sold out everywhere. What I didn’t know at the time was that only the first two seasons are actually available on DVD, and the third and fourth seasons are simply not. With the show’s removal from most digital storefronts as well, it’s putting the availability of those missing two seasons in jeopardy. A DVD set of seasons three and four don’t seem to be forthcoming at all, or they would’ve been released by now. As it is, Owen Dennis is right that piracy might be the only way that anyone will get to experience his series in the future, once the DVDs finally stop being made. Right now, both seasons one and two are still available for now, but seasons three and four are just as ethereal as the elusive final volumes of the above mentioned Disney Afternoon shows.
~ ~ ~
It seems there are a lot of long time YouTube creators leaving as of this year, or drastically scaling down their output. Tom Scott is no longer going to be doing weekly videos and MatPat is stepping back as well, but probably the most surprising one to me was JoCat. It sucks to be harassed and ridiculed by far right bullies for releasing something as benign and body positive as this:
I’m tempted to make that my “short film of the week” as a middle finger to those who caused him to step away from YouTube, but I also really like his Crap Guides so I’ll leave you with some of those as well.
Short Films of the Week
A Crap Guide to Final Fantasy – Tanks (2021)
A Crap Guide to Final Fantasy – Healers (2021)
A Crap Guide to Final Fantasy – DPS (2021)
A Crap Guide to Final Fantasy – Melee DPS (2022)
A Crap Guide to Final Fantasy – Ranged DPS (2023)
A Crap Guide to Final Fantasy – Magic DPS (2023)
It’s been said plenty of times since the year started, but 2024 will truly be a year to remember. But before that, it will be time for us to reminisce and celebrate with next week’s Quarantine Control post. Or something like that. There’s no guarantee that all of us have special plans, but look forward to it.
About The Author
dcstaff
The collective will of the Damage Control staff combined into a single article.
