Samus & The Mandalorian

[Mild spoilers for Metroid & the first 6 episodes of The Mandalorian]

Okay so I really like The Mandalorian. And it's impossible to not notice certain similarities to Metroid games. Of course, Boba Fett came before Samus, so some of those similarities originated with Star Wars. But not all of them. Let's take a look at how much of them started where:

Who did it first?

	Mandalorians	Samus
Tri-directional visor	X
Bounty hunting	X
Boosted jumping	X
Flame weapon	X
Reluctance to remove helmet in public	X
Grapple (hook/beam)	X
Thermal visor		X
Parents killed in attack on peaceful colony		X
Traumatic reaction to the being that killed parents (droids/Ridley)		X
Rescued as a child by aliens who gave them armor and taught them to fight		X
Upgrading armor using items found on adventures		X
Rescuing/sparing a baby alien that had been flagged as a target		X
Getting rescued by the baby alien they saved		X
Dealing with evil organizations who want to exploit the baby’s powers		X
Betrayed employer by letting morality override job requirements		X
Attacked by monsters that are pretty much just two feet and a head with sharp teeth		X
Cool theme song		X
Total	6	11

Let's hope Samus isn't the suing type.

The Force Awakens

[Major spoiler alert on the movie and also on the Plasma Master books.]

I saw Star Wars episode 7 yesterday. It was pretty entertaining - it's amazing how the music an yellow text can get you more excited and engaged in 60 seconds than pretty much any other movie. There were some head-scratching science moments, but I suppose that can be forgiven in Star Wars. And of course the parallels to A New Hope made a lot of the events fairly predictable, but that's understandable too, since they had to prove to the audience that they understand why Star Wars is cool. I guess. It was a little wonky how casually they got rid of a government that only folks who read the now un-canonized books would know anything about. It was a actually a little odd ignoring the stuff I've read; I guess that's now an alternate timeline, analogous to the new Star Trek movies. But the light sabers and X-wings and stuff made me very happy.

One thought I kept having was that I'm super glad I've already published the Plasma Master books. That's because they kept using ideas that I used in those books, and this way it's clear that I didn't copy them. (And to be completely honest, the new movie parallels the first movie way more than my book does.)

So in case you're wondering, here's what they used. I might add to this list later : )

1. Going to warp inside a ship. Han did this to escape quickly, whereas Mirana did it to avoid enemies outside, but the concept was the same.
2. Using warp drive to bypass a shield. Han breaks into the enemy base by using normal hyperspace, whereas in my books I specifically make this impossible by saying that it's standard procedure to set up a static warp shell that resonates at each warp phase at the shield's position, but Mirana manages to bypass Venom's shield at a negative warp phase.
3. The hyperspace planet-destroying weapon - I didn't actually depict this, but I hint that the ancient Plasma Masters may have had such a weapon.

Said weapon was the most confusing bit of science. It seems that all of the New Republic planets were in the same star system, and since they didn't specify that the weapon fired through hyperspace (and since you can see it in a line instead of having it disappear and reappear), it looks like the bad guys' base is also in that star system. (Even so, the weapon would have to be faster than light speed, since it doesn't take hours to cross planets.) Not to mention how you store the mass of a star inside a planet. But like I said, you already have to have suspended scientific rigor if you're watching Star Wars movies. So I'm moving on.

Laser Rooms and Password Screens

I’m a big fan of lasers. They look cool, they do cool stuff, and the word even sounds cool. (Did you know it’s an acronym?) Maybe that’s why it kind of bugs me when they are misused in supposedly-realistic fiction. Like in movies and TV shows, where there’s a room full of lasers protecting a room or a vault or something. Here are my complaints about that:

1. Lasers are light beams, so you can’t see them unless they hit something. If you could, you’d see sunlight coming out of the air, and you couldn’t see anything at all because of the glare. So unless there’s dust in the room, if you can see the lasers in one of those laser rooms, you already know that the movie or TV show has screwed up. (And if you can see dust without the intruders putting it there, that’s fake too – why would you want the lasers to be visible if you’re the one they’re protecting?)
2. There’s always a path through them, for someone athletic enough. Why? Given the number of lasers in these rooms, you could easily just make a dense grid, instead of spreading them out across a wide area, creating person-sized gaps.
3. When they move, that looks like added security, but it’s also totally fake. Laser sensors work because a sensor in the wall is continuously picking up the laser light. When you step in the way, the signal stops, and the alarm goes off. If the laser is moving around the room, you’d have to have the sensor moving around the room too, which you couldn’t do (and which is clearly not happening in shows that do this).
4. When the lasers cut stuff, that also feels a little off. Of course lasers can cut things, but it would take a lot of power to have them on, and of course the “sensor” on the other end would have to be absorbing the laser energy somehow. It would be a lot more efficient to have the lasers just be sensors, and then have guns mounted in the wall that fire when the sensor goes off.
5. In movies and TV, these elaborate security devices never, ever work. Have you ever seen a laser room in a show that the person trying to break in didn’t get past? I didn’t think so.

Speaking of things that never work, I just remembered something else that always happens in fiction that bugs me so much that I added it to the title: People logging on to other people’s computers. I’m not talking about someone’s house, where there’s no password at all. I’m talking about folks guessing a one-word password, or just glancing over at the screen of some employee who has been lured away from his or her desk. No self-respecting corporation lets its employees leave computers unlocked or pick passwords that are a single word from a dictionary. Sure, you could probably crack most people’s passwords with brute force software (that is, guessing thousands of times in quick succession). But a human guessing words? Not a chance. But it happens all the time in even the most “serious” tech-fiction.

There. I’ve said it. I feel better now.

Movies with Disproportionately Good Music

It’s kind of interesting how some movies have music that’s way more memorable than the movie itself is. In some cases, I think people have this visceral notion that the movie was good, when really it just had a stirring theme song. Here are a few movies I think aren’t nearly as good as the music in them.

• Back to the Future
• Superman – none of the movies had very catchy plots, but the music pretty much defines superheroness
• Star Wars – not that I don’t like Star Wars, but in some ways it wins because it’s classic rather than because it’s flawless. And of course this goes double for the newer movies.
• Pirates of the Caribbean – it’s impressive enough that a movie about undead pirates could be good. But I really think the music is a big part of what makes you want to keep watching it. 
• Jurassic Park – revolutionary animatronic dinosaurs notwithstanding, this was not that great a movie. The music does more justice to the dinosaurs than the plot does.
• Mission: Impossible

Bad Extended Scenes in The Return of the King

[spoiler alert on the movies and the books]
I love the Lord of the Rings movies. The books are amazing because the author poured his whole life into them, and the movies are amazing because they’re based on the books, and because the people who made them were similarly obsessive about making them awesome. As the movies came out, I couldn’t wait for the extended editions – and yes, I’m pretty sure I’ve watched all of the bonus content, which is longer than the movies.
However, there are a couple of scenes in the extended version that drive me nuts, mainly in the last movie:
1. The part where the Witch King breaks Gandalf’s staff and almost kills him, but then gets distracted by the arrival of the Rohirrim. Come on. Gandalf could easily beat the Witch King. Here are a few reasons we know this:

1. Gandalf is one of the Maiar. For those (trillions) who haven’t read the Silmarillion, the Maiar are minor (semi-)immortal beings who helped the Valar to create the world. Sauron, Saruman, and the Balrog are also Maiar. In contrast, the Witch King is just a mortal man with one of the Seven Rings, which brings us to the next point:
2. Whereas the Witch king holds one Ring of seven, Gandalf holds one of the Three Rings originally given to the Elves – specifically Narya, the Ring of Fire. So the Witch King’s ring would not have given him an advantage over Gandalf.
3. In the book, Gandalf had already defeated multiple Nazgul on Weathertop. (Maybe in the movie too; I can’t remember.) And remember that Aragorn was able to drive them off, even in the movie. Gandalf was definitely more powerful than Aragorn.
4. In the book, the Witch king steps through the broken gate of Minas Tirith, sees Gandalf facing him, and retreats.
5. Gandalf tells Gimli that he (Gandalf) is the most dangerous person he will ever meet unless he comes before the dark throne (referring to Sauron).

So that was just bunk.
2. The part where the Mouth of Sauron comes out of the Black Gate. Specifically, the fact that (in the movie) Aragorn comes to talk to him under a truce, then beheads him after he claims that Frodo is dead. Aragorn would totally not behead a defenseless guy, no matter who he worked for or what he said.
3. This wasn’t in the last movie, but it also bugged me that Sam wasn’t jazzed about his gift from Galadriel. In the movie it was Elven rope, which in the book they just got as part of their supplies, and Sam thought it was awesome. In the book, Galadriel gives Sam some dirt or dust or something that he later uses to heal the Shire from the damage done by Saruman’s invasion. Understandably, they left that out of the movie, but it doesn’t go with Sam’s character for him to think little of something made by the Elves or given him by Galadriel.