In a recent post on Twitter, I posted a venn diagram saying that Tal-Var should be considered one of Superman’s biggest foes alongside the likes of Lex Luthor, General Zod, and Brainiac.

The joke here is that I’d chosen an obscure villain who had appeared in a single issue of Jimmy Olsen’s comic and tried to elevate him to iconic with specious reasoning. Nothing in there actual comments on the quality of any of the villains, it just says stuff about them. If I wanted to declare a fourth-most important villain to Superman, I’d put the work into making the Ultra-Humanite the one. (It has even been pointed out by a friend that if you take the diagram I’ve made and replace Tal-Var’s name with Mr. Mxyzptlk’s almost all of it still applies, though I’d not call him a “villain” traditionally.)

So that diagram is just me being stupidly obscure for what could almost be called a joke, but just barely. But it did occur to me that over here on the ol’ Book of PDR I try to regularly put together my “Superman Thoughts” so why waste the thing on a Twitter post? I do have actual ideas for how I’d use Tal-Var.

The deal is that he is an otherdimensional baddie who likes to come to our dimension and be a jerk. Okay, working with that, I say posit that Tal-Var’s natural form might be some strange unknowable dark god kinda thing and that the Kryptonian-looking shell is merely adopted for coming to this realm and fighting the likes of Superman. Then I’d go a little more controversial: I’d keep Tal-Var as a Jimmy Olsen villain, rather than moving him directly into Superman’s gallery. That’s right, I think Jimmy Olsen should have his own villains. Superman can still fight them and stuff, but let Jimmy have some fun for a change.

Somehow, the broken remnants of capitalism and copyright laws have led to an announcement that I could not ever have anticipated. The Hypno-Hustler could become the star of a movie.

This is fascinating to me. I’m aware that Sony is limited in which Spider-Man characters they can use to make movies, but I feel like they’re scraping the bottom of a barrel when there’s still lots of other stuff in the barrel they could be using. Spider-Man has a thousand villains and fellow heroes that I would have predicted could be chosen before Antoine. Heck, realistically, I would have thought Rocket Racer had a better chance and I didn’t really think he had a chance at all. And somehow the Hypno-Hustler gets it.

Don’t get me wrong, I would have thought I was among the biggest fans in existence of Rocket Racer’s friend with the guitar, but it turns out that someone out there is clearly a bigger one (or at least they are a similarly-sized fan with more ability to do something about it). And it feels like good news to me because clearly the only way this could happen is if someone actually cares about Antoine.

A movie like this could actually turn a joke of a character into a rounded out human. I’ve always thought that making Antoine into a three-dimensional being that audiences cared about would be one of the earliest writing challenges I would tackle given the chance, and now someone is probably gonna beat me to it. I’m thrilled, but admittedly jealous.

There are multiple ways this can go wrong:

• It’s possible that the movie could fail so hard that the character is seen as unworkable. This is the one I fear the least, because the character is already considered bad and I don’t think anything they could do would make that worse. I’d actually be more worried about this for a Rocket Racer movie, where I feel like the character actually has a little bit to lose. Antoine has nothing to lose, and the fact the creators must care about him makes me think this isn’t going to happen.
• It’s possible this could only be Antoine as I like him in name only. Heck, they might call him “Hypno-Hustler” and not even keep the Antoine Delsoin identity. Just rebuild him entirely from scratch. Look at how the Prowler seen in Miles Morales stories is not the Prowler from the comics that I liked (though the other Prowler is admittedly pretty cool in Spiderverse). But even so, the article above mentions that the musical aspect of the character is important to the project, so even if you call him Buddy Thrummer or something other than Antoin Delsoin, you’re going to have a music-based hypnotist who presumably does crime, it’s going to be closer than I ever would have expected.
• It’s also possible that the movie could become too successful and that would ruin the character for me. If the Hustler becomes a hot new property, and starts showing up in every Marvel comic every month and he pals around with all the superheroes and does the same quips they all do, he would lose the characterization I like. One problem I have with the Marvel stuff is how small their universe feels these days. I remember after the success of the Guardians of the Galaxy movie I saw comics about the Guardians hanging around Earth so they could team up with all the heroes there. I hated that. The Guardians are supposed to out in their own cosmic corner of the Marvel Universe, but they had to hang out with Captain America and Deadpool, so their specialness was thrown away to make them a cog in the machine. If Antoine suddenly becomes one of the “important” characters, I’d lose interest him as one of the loser. I always choose the losers over the big important people. But this I also don’t fear too greatly, because my mind just can’t comprehend a world in which the Hypno-Hustler becomes important.
• The movie might not actually come to pass. This one seems like the most likely possibility. I do believe that they are honestly working on this thing with intent for it to come out, but many things can happen that would stop it. Another pandemic? Character rights shifting to another company? Economic collapse? Any of these options or more could stop this movie in its tracks. And even then, we’d just be back where we started with the character.

So even with the bad outcomes, there is nothing TOO bad. I have no reason but to be excited for this movie. So let’s all be excited for the Hypno-Hustler.

Well, I’ve reached the end of my watch-through of Earth 2 and I’ve got to say the show holds up pretty well.

It’s a shame the show ends on a cliffhanger, though obviously that is the risk of watching any short-lived sci-fi show. As I said in the post about the last episode, I don’t fear for Devon and her mystery illness. I have to assume the next season would have opened with Devon coming out of suspended animation and having to be caught up on whatever changes had occurred. No, the real unfinished business for the show is that the Eden Project group never made it to New Pacifica. Even if we’d never seen the other colonists arrive, getting the cast there would have felt like a victory for them.

What would I have expected to see in season 2? Well, for one thing I bet they would have been able to build another puppet, so we’d have had at least one more type of lifeform on G889. Then they would have continued the arcs for the characters: Yale would learn more about his life. Julia and Alonso would probably have had relationship turmoil. The kids would have each had at least two episodes focusing on them. Morgan and Bess, I figure, would have become even more useful to the group which would set up a situation where more colonists arrive, let’s say in season three, and Morgan is tempted back into the political high society lifestyle. It’s a shame the last episode was kind of a dud, because toward the end the show was really finding its legs. Sci-fi shows seem to either get better as they go, or drop hard, and I feel like this show would have only gotten better (unless the pseudo-mystical stuff got too out there for its own good).

I admit, in this age of shows returning after decades, it would be amusing to imagine that Earth 2 could come back. There would never be an audience for such a show, and so much time has passed for the characters that the show would have to be entirely different. For the story to pick up decades later, we’d have to lose the wagon train aspect and delve into the plot with bureaucratic human regime oppressing the Terrians that was first glimpsed in the time-travel episode. Some of the cast could return (though, obviously not the ones whose actors have died since the show), but with the planet now colonized, you could easily introduce many new humans to drive the plot. I have to admit, I’d check it out.

Anyway, to end this all I can only think of one way: Stray thoughts: 1) I never found a good place to talk about it, but I liked the little headsets that they used for communications and VR and some other purposes. They were just colloquially called “gear” which I liked as a worldbuilding conceit, in the way we call out multi-purpose devices “phones” even though that is a minor part of their function. 2) I was going to keep track of how often True screamed in the series, but I don’t think it happened once more after I last mentioned it back when she reached six times. If only I had been prepared when I began, I could have counted the Eagle Screeches and that would have resulted in an amusingly large number. I do wonder if they got mockery from the audience about True screaming so much early on, so they stopped. It also didn’t help that True never got as big a role as she had in that Gaal arc. 3) I hope that someone got to take home a Grendler face puppet.