Blast from the past: Episode 136

 In this episode Kip and Morph discuss...

• Oregon Trail tabletop game
• Pre Gen Con
• Morph play Pokemon Go
• Sharknado: The 4th Awakens
• Stranger Things

You can catch us on Twitter @geekvice @kipkillagin

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Fate of the Furious

Fate of the Furious
aka Fuck Physics

@NormFromCheers



The movie opens in Havana, Cuba, with a red Chevy Impala crushing down the coast. We then segue to a car meetup that appears to be exclusively made up of every Nomad & Bel Air that's in running condition. We then cut to Dominic Toretto, sauntering around the meetup with Letty, appreciating the machinery and scenery.

We then see a young man having his old junker being towed against his will at the behest of what appears to be the local bigshot racer. The young kid apparently owes Bigshot some money, and Bigshot is taking his car as payment.

Dom steps in and tries to smooth things over. Bigshot elects to mouth off to Dom and disparage Letty In response, Dom calls him out and offers to race for pinks - his car against Bigshot's Ford Fairlane, but racing his cousin's hoopty. Bigshot tells him that they'll race the Cuban Mile, a street road race.

Before the race, Dom strips down his cousin's car, removing most of the body paneling and rigging the vacuum line. They begin the race, and it's surprisingly even, despite the performance difference in the vehicles. It's so even that Bigshot calls one of his buddies to crash his motorcycle in to Dom's car. This causes Dom's car to catch fire, but not blow up. Dom's windshield cracks and shatters from the heat of the flames, so he flips a 180 and wins the race in reverse, but ends up driving the car in to the ocean, blowing it up in the process.

As Bigshot prepares to hand Dom his keys, Dom refuses them, stating that the respect he's earned from Bigshot is payment enough. As Dom walks away, he throws his cousin the keys to his Impala as a replacement for his car. Later, as Dom has some celebration sex with Letty, she asks him how he feels about starting a family. He seems receptive to the idea.

The next morning, on his way home from the market, Dom gets honeypotted in to looking at Charlize Theron's 'broken down' Jeep. As he looks at it, he realizes that she's removed the delay for the fuel pump. She tells him that she wants Dom to work for her. He politely tells her to fuck off, so she hands him an iPhone with some sort of photo on it. He reluctantly agrees to work for her, and she walks away, telling him that he'll betray everyone and shatter his family for her.

Smash cut to The Rock giving a pep talk about crushing one's enemies. The shot pulls out to reveal that he's giving this pep talk to his 8-year-old daughter's soccer team. He then leads the team in a Haka, a traditional New Zealand war dance, which scares the shit out of the other team. His daughter's team, the Dragons win handily while Rocky talks shop with his boss, agreeing to assemble a team to go after a stolen EMP device. Rocky calls Dom to assemble his team.

The EMP is being held by the German government in a hardened military bunker in Berlin. At this point in the franchise, this type of heist is so old-hat that we don't even get to see them planning or executing it. We smash cut to them literally busting out of the bunker in their cars, with German military police in tow. The team, which consists of Ramsay (the hacker from the last movie), Ludacris, Tyrese, Letty, Dom and Rocky. They lead them on a merry chase, until they cross a bridge next to a construction site. Then Luda drops in like a wrecking ball (literally), smashing the shit out of all of the German chasers, and allowing the team to get away scot-free. They then split up, with Dom and Rocky going one way, and the rest of the team going a different way. After a bit, Dom bumps Rocky in to a roadside utility box, crashing and rolling his truck. Dom gets out, jacks the EMP from Rocky's truck, and drives off, leaving Rocky for the German authorities to find. Rocky radios the rest of the team and informs them of the recent development in interpersonal dynamics, and waves them off of picking him up. Elsewhere, Dom is then picked up via airplane, which skims a runway for him to drive in to the cargo bay. It ends up that it's Charlize's plane. Back at the team's base, everyone's trying to suss out just what the fuck happened.

Back in Germany, Rocky's getting transferred to a maximum security prison. While he's walking in, Kurt Russell walks up, big as Billy-Be-Damned, with Clint Eastwood's kid, Scott, in tow. They offer Rocky a deal: Confess, plead guilty, and work in the black ops field with him, or don't confess, be found guilty, and rot in prison. Rocky says he's choosing a third option, being found not guilty. Eastwood, whom Rocky dubs Training Wheels, then tries to be a hardass with Rocky, invoking his daughter. This proves to be a tremendous mistake, and Rocky tunes him up, much to Kurt's amusement.

Inside the jail, Rocky has a lot of 'fans,' getting several death threats and catcalls on his way in. Eventually, he's led to a cell, which happens to be across from Jason Statham, and boy does he have something to say about that.

Back on Charlize's plane, Tormund Giantsbane from Game of Thrones is apparently her head of security. Also, Charlize has blonde cornrows for some reason, which seems like a tragic mistake. Moving on, Charlize tells Dom that the best thing in his life is the 10 seconds when he's racing. He seems to silently agree.

Smash cut back to Rocky's prison cell, and he's boxing the concrete walls and jawing with The Transporter. After Transporter glibly asks if Rocky intends to punch his way out, Rocky rips a cement table from the wall and begins curling it, which sure is mighty impressive. Shortly after that, Rocky's cell door opens, and so does Transporter's. They dare each other to leave, until guards in riot gear show up and start angrily Germaning at them. Statham pulls conduit from the wall and shorts out his electronic cell lock, opening all the cell doors. A prison riot ensues, meaning bean bags, tasers and shivs for all. They're the gifts that keep on giving.

Transporter makes a run for it, and Rocky gives chase. They basically fight their way through the whole prison floor, with Rocky no-selling bean bags and tasers the whole way out. Eventually, they end up outside of the prison, and just as they're about to go at it, Kurt Russell swoops in with a bunch of guys with guns, putting a stop to it and getting them out of prison.

Kurt brings them back to his base (colorfully titled Nowhere), where the rest of the team is already at, in handcuffs. Apparently that's Training Wheels' idea of 'bringing the team in.' Kurt orders the handcuffs to be removed, and Rocky and the team get down to getting to know just what is happening. Midway through the briefing, Kurt brings Transporter in, much to the consternation of everyone in the room. It turns out that Transporter and his brother, Gaston from the live-action Beauty and the Beast, were both victims in a way, of Charlize (here known as Cipher, a spooky Ghost Hacker) in the past, who ends up being the Big Evil behind the conflicts in the last two movies. She apparently tried to get Transporter to work for her in the same fashion she got Dom to work for her, but he rejected her. So, she went after his brother, Gaston, whom she was successful with.

Tyrese suggests they use God's Eye, the global geolocator Macguffin from the previous film, to locate Dom, who should lead them to Charlize. Kurt tells him that's a good idea, let's go for it. Ramsey, the creator of God's Eye, plugs Dom's name in, and we're off to the races. They get a hit, and then another hit, and another and another and so on. Apparently Charlize wrote a program to spoof God's Eye, giving false results around the world. However Luda and Ramsay immediately figure out how she did it, and proceed to reverse it. Just as they finish their coding, they get a hit on Dom's location: the exact building they're in.

BOOM! Explosions and concussion grenades for all! Dom and Charlize bust in, taunt the team, and steal the hard drive housing God's Eye. On their way out, Letty questions Dom as to his motives, and Charlize necks with him to fuck with her. Dom and Charlize, sittin' in a tree...

Back on the plane, it turns out that Charlize has Elena, Dom's Brazilian cop girlfriend from Fast 4 and Fast 5, and her baby. They've both been missing since Dom went to Cuba with Letty. Charlize then offers Dom a loaded gun and dismisses her security., basically daring him to kill her. He declines because he noticed that the lock on Elena's cell door takes two people to open, meaning that he wouldn't be able to open the door even if he killed every man of Charlize's on the plane. He does, however, hang his cross necklace from the previous movies outside her cell as a form of comfort.

Back in the remains of Nowhere, Transporter gets an idea to track something called ghost lanes. Ghost lanes are apparently holes in satellite coverage that would allow an airplane to traverse the globe without being tracked. The most recent ghost lane would take Dom to NYC, so the team decides he went there, pack up shop, and head out. They land in a building that houses every vehicle seized by the US Government on the East Coast, affectionately referred to as The Toy Shop.

Cut to Dom cruising around NYC in a Plymouth GTX. He's on comms with Charlize, and she's watching him through traffic cameras, directing his movements through the city in a rehearsal for whatever they're pulling off next. During the route, Dom's car starts misfiring, popping and farting down the road, so he pulls in to an alley to check the car out. Charlize's unhappy about this because it's a deviation from schedule, but Dom insists. While he's checking the engine out, a delivery van pulls in next to him to unload produce, which blocks the only camera Charlize has  access to. During this time, Dom ducks in to a nearby bar for a meeting with Dame Helen Mirren, who's in a Fast and Furious movie for some goddamn reason. This ups the count of Oscar-winners in this movie to two: her and Charlize. Anyway, he gives Helen an Apple Watch and asks for her help with something, then ducks back out just as the van leaves. Charlize sees him finishing up replacing a spark plug, and he's on his merry way again.

Back at The Toy Shop, Rocky and Transporter are busy modding cars and jawing back and forth. Rocky mentions that Transporter was a decorated war hero (which was touched upon in previous films), and asks what the fuck happened. Jason tells him he was disavowed after a failed mission, just like Rocky was in the beginning of this movie. They come to a mutual understanding of respect, and maybe even a little bit of friendship.

The next day, Dom's mission is a go. Charlize uses God's Eye to track and locate the Russian Defense Minister. Dom tracks him and his motorcade through the streets of the Big Apple, and once he locates him, Charlize has one of her minions activate every vehicle within a ten-block radius capable of remote control, which ends up being over 1000. She then somehow takes control of all 1000 at once, and pilots them to the motorcade, smashing the shit out of it. Setting aside the feasibility of hacking 1000 separate systems at the exact same time, the sheer logistics of piloting said 1000 separate systems is mind-numbing. Also, one of the trucks in the motorcade has an M134a mini gun mounted to it, which seems a bit excessive.

Once they're boxed in, she drives cars off the upper stories of a multi-story car park, and more or less buries most of the Russian Defense Minister's limo. Dom then approaches the limo with a bulletproof shield and a Ripsaw, which is a bigass chain-driven saw. He stands fast with the shield as the last remaining bodyguard empties his mag at him. After that futile gesture, he Ripsaws a hole in the limo, exposing the fuel tank. He pops a road flare, and threatens to drop it in the fuel tank unless the Defense Minister hand over a briefcase handcuffed to him arm, which ends up being a nuclear football. The Minister gives in, and gives Dom the case.

The team hears the chaos on the police scanner, and rolls out to confront Dom. As he's driving away from the dogpile of cars on the motorcade, the team finds him, and they give merry chase. Training Wheels, or Little Nobody,  as he's now being called (Scott Eastwood), charges after Dom, and gets suckered in to a trap that buries his car under scaffolding. The rest of the team eventually surrounds Dom and deploys a series of harpoons on steel wire tethered to their cars. As they try to keep Dom harpooned in place, he begins rocking his car back and forth, dragging the team's cars along with him. As the team exclaims that his car has over 5000 horsepower, i realize that that is a) a preposterous number for them to throw out, as a truly uncontrollable street car would have around 2000 horsepower, and b) none of this is how physics works. Anyway, eventually, Dom creates enough slack in the lines to flip all the cars, including his.

Dom pulls himself out of the wreckage, takes the nuclear football and makes a run for it on foot. Transporter and Letty gives chase. Transporter and Dom get in to a standoff, and Dom apparently shoots Transporter (spoiler: he doesn't). Dom keeps running, but then gets in to a standoff with Letty. She grabs the case, and Dom can't bring himself to shoot her. She runs around the corner straight in to Tormund. He friends to grab the case from her, but she doesn't let go. He puts a gun to her head, but she still doesn't let go, so Dom steps in and puts a gun to Tormund's head. He doesn't budge, so Letty lets go, and Tormund runs off with Dom.

In the team's post-mission debriefing, Little Nobody keeps saying 'nucular', which is eternally frustrating to me.

Back on the plane, Charlize is displeased that Dom didn't immediately shoot Letty. She shows this displeasure by shooting Elena in the head. She also tells Dom that Tormund knew Shaw and his little brother, Owen (Gaston from the most recent incarnation of Beauty and the Beast). Cipher apparently ran both of them at one point, whether they knew it or not. That's why she targeted Dom - partly because he was good enough to fuck up her plans twice, and partly because h3e inconvenienced her by fucking up her plans twice. She wanted Russia's nuclear football in order to threaten world superpowers when they 'stepped out of line.'

The team tracks Tormund to a Russian submarine base that's been overtaken by a different separatist group. Apparently Russia just hasn't cared enough to retake the base, so Tormund and Dom and supposed to go in, take the base, and then take a sub that's been nuclearized to go along with the nuclear football Charlize already has. They decide, 'fuck it,' all bets are off, and load out to go save the world.

Dom charges the gates in a souped-up, all-terrain Dodge Charger with an insane body and ground effects kit. Side question: Where do these guys come up with the time to craft and install these custom body kits? Anyway, Dom charges the base gate, and dives around raising merry hell, setting off the stolen EMP twice in the process. It also allows Charlize to 'carjack' the submarine somehow.

At the same time, the team rides in as well, making for the submarine dock controls and for the submarine missile launch room. They try to counter-jack the sub from Charlize, who is trying to launch one of the nukes. Tyrese and Scott Eastwood get locked in the launch control room on the sub, and Ramsay and Letty are trying to keep control of the dock controls to prevent the launch of the sub in to the water. Ramsay fails to sever Charlize''s control of the sub, but Tyrese manages to pull enough computer chip boards to disable the missile launch.  Charlize freaks out and tells her minion to drop the sub in the water and get it out of there.

As the sub prepares for launch, the team disembarks from the sub and load up in their various vehicles, which includes a mini tank, a RAM truck modified in to kind of an MRAP, a Lamborghini and a dune buggy kind of truck. They decide to go for the sea gate at the mouth of the bay to disable it in an effort to block the sub from reaching open water and disappearing forever. Dom heads for high ground to meet Tormund. The team is chased by the remaining separatists that held the submarine base. 

During the chase, Tyrese, in the Lambo (which is a dumbass car to choose for a mission in the frozen North of Russia), attracts the most attention and fire from the pursuers, mostly because he's in a blaze orange Lambo. Eventually, he gets bogged down in a fractured ice shelf. Ludacris harpoons Tyrese's door from the mini tank in an effort to pull him back on to solid ice, but it don't work. Tyrese grabs on to his door as it pulls free, and his car sinks. Unfortunately, all this moving around makes the harpoon line snap (which probably ought to have snapped back and hurt Tyrese something fierce). As the door comes skidding to a halt, Tyrese is surrounded by several men on snowmobiles, all of whom he handily dispatches in a surprising show of skill and marksmanship. He's then picked up by Rocky in his MRAP. Meanwhile, Dom and Tormund are watching all the festivities from the high ground (how the hell did Dom get his Charger up that fucking hill?).

We then smash cut to Charlize's plane, which has been boarded mid-air by Transporter (See, told you he wasn't dead!) and his brother Gaston. We flash back to a meeting between Transporter and Helen Mirren, who is evidently his and Gaston's mom. We also see the delivery van that was blocking his meeting was piloted by the Cuban Bigmouth from the opening race. Anyway, Transporter broke Gaston out of jail, and they somehow flew in to the cargo hold of Charlize's airplane (I can't stress this enough) mid-air. Charlize sees them on a security camera as they effortlessly carve their way through her men, and she freaks out that Dom didn't actually kill Transporter. Transporter's in radio contact with Dom, and he calls him when he's got Dom''s baby son safely in his possession,  placing him in a bassinet. After Dom hears this,  he kills the shit out of Tormund, who dies very badly.  That bassinet is apparently bulletproof, because Transporter uses it as a shield a few times on his way out, which seems pretty ballsy.

Back on the ice, Charlize angrily launches a torpedo from the submarine in the general direction of the team and its pursuers, and it ends up shooting out of the ice. Rocky pulls alongside the torpedo as it somehow glides along the ice, and pushes the torpedo away from the team and toward the pursuers with his bare hands while skating in the ice in his boots. It's just a ridiculous as it sounds. Afterward, Dom Dukes of Hazzard's his way back to the team.

After most of the pursuers are killed by that torpedo, Charlize breaches the sub out of the ice, and keeps motoring ahead, trying to hit those cars, i guess? She fires a heatseeker missile at the team, and Dom activates an afterburner that he has mounted to his car for some reason. This attracts the heatseeker, so Dom breaks off from the team and drives around, eventually. Dukes of Hazzarding through the sub, which causes the missile to hit and destroy the sub. Dom''s car is also on fire, so he bails out and rolls. As the fireball from the sub makes its way toward him, he's surrounded by the team's cars, which shield him.

Backon the plane, Transporter finally find Charlize. As he monologues before shooting her, she throws a grenade at the plane hull, blowing a hole in it. She grabs a parachute before diving out the hole, leaving Transporter empty-handed except for the baby.

Cut to an unspecified time later, and the team is having a family dinner on a New York rooftop. Kurt Russell shows up with all kinds of good news and Transporter in tow. He offers Rocky his old job back, but Rocky declines, stating he's retired from the DSS. Dom and Transporter have a good moment, and he stays for dinner. Apparently he's part of the family now? As they sit down to dinner, Dom introduces his kid to everyone else as 'Brian', named after his old friend from the previous movie,  ending the movie.

4.5/5 Unreasonalbe Stunts That Defy the Laws of Physics

Episode 172 - Battleship Galaxies

In this episode Kip and Morph discuss...

• Scythe session number 3
• Battleship Galaxies

 

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Ghost In The Shell

Ghost in the Shell
Or
The Disappointing Dangers of an Asimovian Future

@NormFromCheers



In the future, cyborgs are things. The Hanka Corporation is at the forefront of that technology, partnering with the government, and, more specifically, the military. They outfit, repair and improve wounded soldiers, upgrading and augmenting various body parts and functions. We know all of this because of the opening crawl.

We then cut to a dying Scarlett Johansson, the last survivor of an apparent terrorist attack, or so she's told. As she enters the final boarding process, a team of red-suited doctors rush her down a hallway, the backshot revealing Hanka logos on their backs.

They wheel her in to a room, and harvest her brain. The brain is then inserted in to a 'Shell," a synthetic body. This body then goes through several 3D printers, which fashion, muscle, skin and hair on to the shell. There is then a very literal birthing scene, where the shell passes through a placenta-looking chamber, emerging out the other side.

ScarJo then needs to learn to breathe, so Dr. Ouelet, played by Juliette Binoche (Steve Carrell's love interest from Dan In Real Life), coaches her through it. After she gets the whole breathing thing down, Ouelet introduces herself, and tells ScarJo that they built her a new body, and that she's the first of her kind. After that intro, a fella called Cutter tells Ouelet that ScarJo's been designated for Section 9, whatever that is. Ouelet protests that Cutter's reducing ScarJo from a complex human to a machine, and Cutter responds that she's not a machine, she's a weapon.

One year later, ScarJo's called The Major, and she's part of the federal counterterrorism unit called Section 9. She runs a team consisting of an Asian gal, a Japanese fella and Euron Greyjoy from Game of Thrones, shown here with a blonde buzzcut that makes him look like the poor man's Kieffer Sutherland.

The landscape of Tokyo is dominated by obnoxiously large holographic ads. I'm talking building-size bastards, which must be hell at night for city residents. I can't imagine the amount of light pollution this shit generates.

Michael Wincott, the bad guy from The Crow, is a high-ranking Hanka executive holding a dinner meeting with the King of an unnamed African nation. King is reticent to institute a national  program for cyborg enhancements, in that it would detract from humanity's individuality, but Wincott is adamant that it can only benefit his country.

As they're chatting, a bunch of geisha-bots enter the room and make at serving for a bit. Major's staking out this meeting on a tip that it'll be attacked. She scans the meeting and sees the geisha-bots, but is forbidden from engaging by her boss, Aramaki. The geisha-bots then pull a few of the dinner party away from the table, transforming in to fuckin' spider-like creatures whilst doing so. A bunch of poorly-augmented guys in suits then enter the room and begin spraying the rest of the table with gunfire.

Major ignores Aramaki's directive and dives off the building to engage. Whilst diving, she engages a camouflage suit she's wearing, rendering her invisible to the visible light spectrum. At some point she also apparently hooks up to a rope line, and she beings shooting the gunthugs through the windows. After she's pick off a fair number of them, she swings through the window and dispatches the rest. While she's Cowgirl Pearl-ing her way through the room, one of the geisha-bots hooks in to Wincott's neckport and more or less hacks his brain, which kills him. As she dispatches that Geisha-bot, the last surviving gunthug raises his pistol to shoot her in the back, only to be dispatched himself by Euron Greyjoy.

Apparently Major was hit at some point his this encounter, so she storms out, and returns to Hanka headquarters for repairs. As Ouelet is repairing her, she chastises her for being so cavalier, pointing out that while her shell is tough, it is not invincible. This prompts Major to quip, "Maybe next time you can design me better." She then mentions that she's been experiencing 'glitches' in her vision - she keeps seeing a burning house once in at apparently random times, with no apparent trigger or reason. Ouelet dismisses these as coding errors, and tells Major not to worry about them.

After she's repaired, she heads back to Section 9 headquarters, where Aramaki has just finished being dressed down by Cutter for letting Major sustain damage. He goes so far as to threaten to shut down Section 9, whilst Aramaki points out that he answers to the Japanese Prime Minister, not Cutter. Aramaki debriefs the team, and pairs the team off in twos, assigning each pair a task in the ensuing investigation. The team learns that four Hanka scientists, including Wincott, were attacked and hacked, meaning there's a larger plot afoot. Major and Euron are assigned to return to Hanka headquarters, where the Gehsia-bots are being dismantled and examined. On their way, they stop at a meat market to pick up discarded bones, because Euron feeds them to a pack of strays that are his de facto pets.

They arrive at Hanka, and the lobby is shown to have a shit ton of ED-209-looking motherfuckers that really look like they could fuck some shit up. When they get to the lab, they meet a Hanka scientist who says that she would need weeks to properly decode the Geisha-bots, but can tell that they hacked and transmitted the data from Wincott, and sent them to someone called Kuze. Since she can't tell where this Kuze is located right the fuck now, Major impulsively decides to to a 'Deep Dive,' jacking in to the Geisha-bot via hardwire, which is an unsecured and unencrypted connection that could result in her data corruption or hijacking. Before anyone can stop her, she jacks on and dives in to the code, which of course has a visually physical representation, like a goddamn early-90's hacker movie. Major navigates the literal hallways of the Geisha-bot's memory, ending up in a digital basement facing an apparent digital representation of Kuze. He attacks he, trying to hack her code.

Euron sees her physical reaction to this digital assault, and shouts at the scientist to "GET HER OUT OF THERE! SHE'S BEING HACKED!" in case we hadn't figured that out. The scientist vainly struggles to comply, until Euron gives up waiting and just physically pulls the plug. If that was an option all along, why wait? Anyway, after Major recovers her faculties, she says she knows where Kuze is: a Yakuza club.

The team elects to go in covertly, with backup in the wings if they need to come heavy. Major disguises herself by donning a trench coat (a lazy goddamn disguise, but whatever), and initiates Mind Comms with the team (a prom of telepathy). She orders a drink, but is then whisked in to a private room with a stripper pole. At gunpoint, she's chained to the stripper pole, and tazed repeatedly with a cattle prod. Apparently this room she's been ushered in to blocks her comms with the team, prompting Euron to go in to the club and get a drink.

All the while, Major's being tazed and interrogated as to her nature, because the Yakuza folks can see that she's not quite human. Euron is immediately sussed out by the Yakuza folk, and a shootout ensues. Euron kills the shit out of all present, freeing Major in the process. They explore the basement levels of the club, encountering the area that was digitally shown during Major's Deep Dive. They see what they think is Kuzo, and try to take him down, only for him to be revealed to be a hologram concealing enough explosives to orbit Arnold Schwarzenegger, rigged to a timer. The time goes off, and Major does her best to shield Euron from the ensuing explosion.

In the aftermath, it is shown that Major's body has been severely damaged, making for an almost frame-off restoration. This takes a while, and Major asks after Euron during her repairs. All the technician will tell her is that he's mostly fine. Major again brings up her visual glitches, and asserts they're getting worse, and impairing her efficiency. Ouelet again dismisses her concerns, and then her.

After her repairs are completed, she seeks out Euron, and finds him undergoing ocular augmentation. Evidently he was entirely unharmed in the blast, except for his eyes, which doesn't make any goddamn sense, but fuck it. So he's getting super eyes, giving him several different options for his fields of vision, from infrared to x-ray. We leave him while he's still calibrating his new peepers.

Meanwhile, Aramaki is again dressed down by Cutter, this time for allowing Major to Deep Dive and potentially corrupt her coding. He's clearly getting tired of these motherfucking reprimands on this motherufking plane, but he emotes like Kristen Stewart.

Meanwhile again, Major trolls the Hooker District, and picks out a hooker by asking if she's fully human. She assets that she is, and Major takes her home. What ensues can only be described as wholly unerotic and weird.

Elsewhere, the Hanka scientist that helped with the Deep Dive is putting in a late night at the lab. Kuze breaks in (which leads me to question the efficacy of having an army of ED-209's guarding your door if any old asshole can waltz in), and confronts the scientist for her involvement in something called Project 2571. At first she claims ignorance, but eventually resignedly confess sorrow and regret at her involvement, before Kuze kills her by pulling apart her augmented eyes and hacking her until she dies.

Major investigates the crime scene, finding a data cube and folder denoting Project 2571. From it, she gleans that all the Hanka scientist recently murdered worked on this Project, which was the construction of an all-synthetic shell powered by a human brain. It's exactly like Major, only this project failed. The only remaining scientist living is Dr. Ouelet.

As Major is piecing this together, Kuze is tracking Ouelet's movements. He hijacks two garbage men in a garbage truck parked along Ouelet's route while she's out and about, and uses the men and the truck to attack her. The truck rams Ouelet's car, overturning it and trapping her security detail. The garbage me get out with automatic weapons, and begin spraying the vehicle  with a hail of bullets. Major and her team pull up mid-attack, and save the doctor, who steals away amidst all the mayhem.

One of the garbage men is taken alive, and her team interrogates him in a two-way mirror cube, using a hologram projected in to interact with said garbage man. Unfortunately, he doesn't remember a damn thing, and to top it off, he's had a series of false memories concerning a non-existent family implanted to confuse the shit out of everyone.

Mid-interrogation, Kuze hacks in to the supposedly secure and isolated interrogation system, solely to taunt Major's team. Since he can't hear anything outside the cube, the team decides to try to track Kuze, but need to keep him on the line (nonsense) for the trace to complete. Major defies her orders and jacks in to the box to keep Kuze on the line (fucking nonsense). They banter back and forth for a while until the trace is complete (goddamn fucking nonsense), and then the call, for lack of a better term, is terminated.

Major and Euron lead an attack on Kuze's location, a disused warehouse. Inside, they find rows and rows of bodies hanging in bags, hooked up to data cables and ostensibly still alive. They trek further in, and find rooms full of monks, gathered in circles and also jacked in to data cables. Major deduces that Kuze is setting up his own VPN, using people's data ports as nodes on said network.

Major and Euron are then separated, and Major is captured by Kuze. He strings her up, but does not harm her. Instead, he palavers with her, revealing that he knows all about her true nature. He then reveals that he is like her, a brain in a shell (defined as a cerebral salvage), only he's slowly breaking down and falling in to disrepair. His face is shown for the first time all movie, and he's played by Michael Pitt (the good actor on Boardwalk Empire killed in Season 2). He reveals that he is Project 2571, and that he remembers the process by which he was created, having been vivisected and dismembered while still alive to make said cerebral salvage.As Euron is about to find them, Kuze sets her free, instructs her to question her memories of her death, and runs off. As Euron shows up, Major ditches him and runs off on her own.

Major finds her way to Ouelet, and questions her about her existence. Ouelet reveals that she is the 99th iteration of the Shell program, and that sacrifices were made in the name of science. She pleads with Major to see that she is the future of the human condition, a way to cheat death, and so what if that death was prematurely induced? Ouelet and her team kept getting fresh bodies ('test subjects'), and didn't ask too many questions about where they came from. However, she DOES. Recall that Major's body was brought in personally by Cutter, though she doesn't know the circumstances surrounding her death. She does know that her past that she remembers is bullshit, made up by Cutter to try to ease the transition. This was necessary because all 98 before her failed to take, and Ouelet's theory was because of a knowledge of their condition.

Armed with all of this new info regarding her existence, Major turns off her built-in tracker as she leaves Ouelet's to go off the grid on her own to contemplate shit. This involves literal diving in Tokyo Bay, motionlessly floating at the bottom. She does this uninterrupted until a fishing lure trolls by her head, rousing her from her contemplative state. Evidently this is a common thing for her, because Euron's found her pretty easily and parked a boat above her head. Euron volunteers to take her back to Hanka for some more diagnostics, but upon docking, a cadre of Hanka security tazes and subdues Major.

Cutter has figured out that Ouelet told Major some of the truth of her existence, and decides that Major is now too much of a liability. So as she's being examined under the pretense of finally fixing her glitches, Cutter orders Ouelet to inject Major in the back of the brain with a fatal does of red stuff that'll kill her. As Ouelet mimes at compliance, she switches syringes, and injects Major with a stimulant of some fashion and slips her an apartment key with an address on it. Major has figured out that Cutter wants her dead, so she escapes post-haste. Cutter then shoots Ouelet, but calls it in as Major having killed her and going rogue. Nobody in Section 9 believes this, but they all play along to assuage Cutter and avoid raising his suspicions.

Major tracks down the apartment address on the key, and a little middle-aged woman lives there alone. She's attention-starved, so as Major walks by she invites her in for tea. Bewildered, Major accepts. The woman walks Major through her apartment and her life, explains that she's been lost since her teenage daughter ran away a year ago to join an anti-technology movement based in an area called the Lawless Zone. The government said she committed suicide in said Lawless Zone shortly thereafter, which has always seemed off to her. She's perfectly preserved her daughter's room under sheets of plastic for no apparent reason/. All of this feel very familiar to Major, and she feels sorry for the woman. Major begins to think that this woman may be her mother, and that she may be her daughter. She leaves for the Lawless Zone to investigate further.

On her way there, she reactivates her Mind Comms with Aramaki and explains her innocence, position and intentions. Aramaki concurs, and tells her to be careful. Aramaki then gets in to his car with a briefcase, but is ambushed by a group of Hanka security, who try to gun him down. They fail spectacurly, because his briefcase is bulletproof, and he's carrying a revolver than evidently hold infinity rounds. Aramaki kills the shit out of them, and Mind Comm contacts the rest of the team to inform them of Hanka's treachery. Consequently, the whole team is ready for Hanka's attempted ambushes, and they fail spectacularly in their assassination attempts.

Major arrives in the Lawless Zone, and finds the building she keeps seeing in her glitchier moments. It actually exists, kind of, in that it's mostly destroyed. Kuze then walks in, and tells her that they used to live in this building, when it was whole. He shows her several pictures and trinkets that have survived the destruction of the building, which Major then remembers was perpetrated at the hands of Cutter personally, as he led an incursion in to the Lawless Zone to destroy the anti-technology faction they were both a part of.

As they're reminiscing, Cuttter commandeers a Spider Tank, which is a tank whose primary means of locomotion is a set of spider legs, like goddamn Wild Wild West (I wonder if Jon Peters was involved in this film (Google Jon Peters Kevin Smith. Smith's story about this is fucking hilarious)). Cutter blows the shit out of the rubble of said building, fucking up Kuze something fierce, and knocking Major senseless. As he chases her (slowly, I might add, since the Spider Tank looks cool but whose means of locomotion seems slow as fuck), he monologues about his evil plan and how Major and Kuze are wrong and didn't make a difference in the world until Cutter killed him. He tries to kill Kuze, but Major regains her bearings and attacks the tank, pulling the tank apart with her bare hands so hard she dismembers herself.

However, Cutter apparently didn't trust his arachnid engine of destruction, as he has a sniper team in a helicopter circling the area as insurance. The team snipes Kuze's head, destroying his brain. As they're about to do the same to Major, her team arrives and shoots down the helicopter, killing the sniper team. After the sniper team goes down, Aramaki finds Cutter, and kills the shit out of him, per the instruction of the Prime Minister.

Major gets a rebuild, and reunites with her team. At the end of the movie, they're still running Ops, with Major still taking point. In the final shot, she's wearing a black duster, as per usual, and she discards it before she activates her camo and dives down a building again, like in the first scene. Side note: if she discards her leather duster evert time she activates her camo, she's gotta be spending a fortune on those.

Overall, I give this a 2 Broken Robots out of 5. As much as I wanted to like this, there were just too many holes, inconsistencies and omissions to really ever get onboard. This feels like a missed opportunity.

Episode 171 - Proving Ourselves

In this episode Kip and Morph give an update in their DnD campaign. Morph wants to know why certain networks don't offer streaming without a cable subscription.

 

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Episode 170 - Iron Blah

In this episode Kip and Morph discuss Iron Fist and there total hatred of it.

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