Month: September 2018

Enlarge / Back to basics: Danny Rand (Finn Jones) trains with Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick) after losing the Iron Fist. (credit: Netflix)

Warning: Major spoilers for Season 2 are below.

We expressed guarded hope for the second season of Marvel's Iron Fist when the trailer dropped last month. And we're happy to report that the series, which returned to Netflix last Friday, mostly lives up to the trailer's promise. The writing is better, the fight scenes are better, and the characters and relationships are more fully developed. Thematically, it's all about power: who deserves to wield it, what it means to lose it, and, ultimately, learning how to share it.

When we last saw Danny Rand (Finn Jones, Game of Thrones) in Luke Cage S2, he seemed more centered, less bratty, and suitably chastened by the apparent death of one of his fellow Defenders. He's now living with former martial-arts instructor Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick, Game of Thrones) in her now-closed and remodeled Chinatown dojo and making nightly patrols to keep his promise to protect the city. But there is tension: Danny still struggles with impulse control when wielding the Iron Fist, while Colleen has hung up her katana altogether to pursue a path of peace. "If I carry it, I'll use it," she confesses to Misty Knight (Simone Missick, Luke Cage).

Enlarge / Hurricane Florence on NOAA's GOES satellite early Monday morning. (credit: NOAA)

Typically, around this time of year, sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic reach their warmest levels for the summer. At the same time, wind shear across much of the tropical Atlantic ebbs, leading to an outbreak of tropical activity.

Rarely is the outbreak so furious as the current explosion of three hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean with the possibility of a fourth tropical storm developing in the Gulf of Mexico this week. Of most immediate concern is Hurricane Florence, which has rapidly strengthened overnight and now presents a rare and substantial threat to the Carolinas and beyond due to high winds, storm surge and, for much of the US East Coast, the potential for extremely heavy rainfall.

In the Atlantic hurricane record, which goes back about 150 years and has limited reliability before 1950, there have just been 11 years (including this one) in which there have been three hurricanes active in the Atlantic basin, which includes the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. Just twice, in 1893 and 1998, have four hurricanes been active at once, according to Colorado State University hurricane scientist Phil Klotzbach.

Enlarge / Follow the light, Lara.

The most recent story arc for Lara Croft has dipped into how she came to be the rough-and-tumble Indiana Jones-inspired adventurer we all met fully formed decades ago. Along the way, though, there have been a fair few examinations of her violent tendencies, creating what is essentially a post-modern meditation on the state of gaming culture in the ‘90s (when Croft's first iteration hit the original PlayStation).

The modern incarnations of the series have stuttered a bit in their character construction, though. The inability to marry the sometimes ruthless actions of this intrepid woman with the cerebral consideration of the ancient and the lost has left her adventures feeling a little stilted.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is, for better and worse, the most extreme iteration of this phenomenon that we've yet seen. Now, the oil and water can't be blended at all, but each is so rich that it can be easy to gloss over the lack of cohesion.

Self-inflicted wounds

Croft’s latest adventure is harrowing, to say the least. Due to some run-ins with an Illuminati-like organization bent on triggering a worldwide divine renewal, Croft and her kind companion Jonah look towards the jungles of Peru. There, they expect to unearth a McGuffin that will stop a potential apocalypse. Those campy, over-the-top madcap adventure stakes are standard fare for these kinds of games, but here they bump against the grimmer, more intense focus on serious gore and intimate evisceration in a way that doesn't quite gel.

Enlarge / Follow the light, Lara.

The most recent story arc for Lara Croft has dipped into how she came to be the rough-and-tumble Indiana Jones-inspired adventurer we all met fully formed decades ago. Along the way, though, there have been a fair few examinations of her violent tendencies, creating what is essentially a post-modern meditation on the state of gaming culture in the ‘90s (when Croft's first iteration hit the original PlayStation).

The modern incarnations of the series have stuttered a bit in their character construction, though. The inability to marry the sometimes ruthless actions of this intrepid woman with the cerebral consideration of the ancient and the lost has left her adventures feeling a little stilted.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is, for better and worse, the most extreme iteration of this phenomenon that we've yet seen. Now, the oil and water can't be blended at all, but each is so rich that it can be easy to gloss over the lack of cohesion.

Self-inflicted wounds

Croft’s latest adventure is harrowing, to say the least. Due to some run-ins with an Illuminati-like organization bent on triggering a worldwide divine renewal, Croft and her kind companion Jonah look towards the jungles of Peru. There, they expect to unearth a McGuffin that will stop a potential apocalypse. Those campy, over-the-top madcap adventure stakes are standard fare for these kinds of games, but here they bump against the grimmer, more intense focus on serious gore and intimate evisceration in a way that doesn't quite gel.