12 Monkeys:
I like it, but the idea of mankind being exterminated by GMO pollen is pretty thin. They make a plant virus that also kills people? It’s like the Transformers movie where the cube can transform an ordinary Nokia phone into a tiny killing machine. I guess it’s no worse than the X-Men somehow having genes for teleportation and flying, except it’s political and contrived, like someone discovered the gene for communism Or maybe someone creates a virus that turns everyone into Austin-Healey mechanics, and the world ends. You have to be willing to buy into the premise for it to work, and there’s certainly a niche market for people that think GMO plants are an apocalyptic threat. It does raise the possibility of future plot holes.
I have a suspicion that the key scene where they try to save the world will be where the Scooby-Do gang tries to thwart the evil scientists by trashing a laboratory.
Anyway, that’s an interesting mixture, because on the one hand it’s an arbitrary end of the world action movie premise mixed with the time travel paradox genre, which has to pay a lot more attention to continuity.
See also tvtropes for the various flavors of time loops involved in traveling back to change one’s own fate:
I’m missing something. Why is Grady’s letter signed by Billy even though the writer clearly says that he is Grady?
arghghdkflgkslgsklggl’! I gotta know what happens!
You know what? This thing looks fantastic. Well written, good artist, nice concept, but no, I refuse. The TV show “Lost” burned me so badly on the “convoluted-many-character-what-the-hell-is-going-on” type of story that, even if they don’t pull the same sorts of shenanigans, all the signs are there. Wherein your attention is kept by continually screwing with you, twisting the plot around, yanking on the basic premises (i.e. “someone who is shot might not be dead,” or “time-travel means all that stuff we told you earlier was a lie but we promise this next stuff is the truth”).
This thing looks great, but if a basic device of the storyline is to keep you guessing, that means that any sort of firm resolution in any form is the enemy of the storyline, and therefore will not be employed except under dire circumstances (poor sales of course, who cares if the readers scream their heads off? That always sounds like cash registers to the creators and publishers).
I realize I’m punishing “The Bunker” for the sins of an entirely different thing, but my “you’re going to screw with me to get to my wallet” sense is tingling.
This might be my second-least favorite coloring style ever.
Why does the author work so hard at making the characters out to be completely unlikable and uninteresting? It undermines the premise when the story has scarcely begun.
It sort of implies that they were in a time loop before they even found the hatch. Because there’s basically no chance a half dozen random slackers are all going to play critical roles in the fate of the world or even continue to influence each others lives. It’s more likely their entire lives up to that point have been contrived by someone in the future and the messages from the future are probably not true. That should be part of the future story line, because the premise that they are all so important by chance isn’t plausible.
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