I recently saw Happy Death Day. Be warned, spoilers are included in this post.

I thought it was an interesting premise. A college student (Theresa) is murdered and forced to relive the day of her murder repeatedly until she figures out who killed her. The movie managed to pull off a clever plot twist. At the beginning, Theresa’s roommate presents her with a cupcake and gets upset that Theresa won’t eat it. I didn’t pay the scene full attention each time Theresa relived it because it became clear that a deranged serial killer murdered her later in the movie.

Finally, she managed to kill him. But later that night she still died, poisoned in her sleep. Turns out that she ate the cupcake in the latest iteration of the day she died. And that cupcake was poisoned. The movie ended with Theresa killing her roommate by shoving the poisoned cupcake in her mouth.

While the plot was clever, I didn’t find the characters as fully developed as they could have been. This was truest for Theresa. I think the writers gave her too many sub-plots: her relationship with her dad, her illicit relationship with her professor, and of course her relationship to Carter. I think it would have been more effective if it had picked one of these and focused. For example, I was fascinated with how her relationship deteriorated with her dad. I would have been emotionally invested in seeing periodic flashbacks to their father-daughter relationship.

Overall, while Happy Death Day wasn’t the greatest movie ever, it was certainly entertaining.

I’m continuing season five of Arrow. Oliver is assembling a new team to protect Starling city. While they are working to track down a new vigilante, the team finds a list of people he killed in season one. I thought one of them posed an interesting question: how do you tell the difference between a murderer and a hero, and who gets to decide?

The answer may seem obvious at first. Heroes fight for a just cause, even at personal risk. Murderers kill people for no good reason. The whole series has challenged this dichotomy. Oliver undoubtedly fights for a good cause—saving Starling City—but a question hanging over the show is whether he has done so honorably. He has killed in cold blood before and I have the distinct impression he will again. So we then have to ask whether you can be a hero if you pursue honorable objectives dishonorably.

Everybody will probably answer that question differently. I really appreciate how Arrow has allowed us to grapple with the question throughout the series. We see Felicity leaving Oliver because she couldn’t deal with his continued dishonesty even though she understood why he lied to her about having a son. And it was portrayed as a reasonable decision. Most effectively, we have the new team Oliver has gathered feeling palpably blindsided by the revelation that he had a kill list.

On the other hand, it’s clear that Oliver has repeatedly saved the city from destruction. It’s also strongly suggested at different points that a person who refused to bend his moral principles would not have been able to save the city. In other words, the only way to do the truly heroic thing—save Starling—is to act in ways unbecoming of a hero as we usually understand it.

I can’t wait to see how the series resolves the question of whether Oliver is really a hero.

I’m trying to get through season five of Arrow as quickly as possible before the new season starts up. One thing that got me thinking early on was when John Diggle was set up and put into military prison. At first, he tells his wife to stop fighting for him and resists when Oliver comes to break him out. The reason is fascinating to me: he thinks he deserves to be punished for killing his brother Andy last season. That is, he’ll accept punishment for a crime he didn’t commit to atone for one he did.

Part of me had a lot of trouble with this decision. Diggle has a daughter and a wife he’ll leave behind if he stays in prison. And he’s a crucial part of the team that keeps Starling City from being completely overrun by various villains. What a selfish way to live, I thought. Putting his need for moral balance ahead of the needs of everyone else in his life. Before I could judge too harshly, though, I began to realize that so many of us act the same way every day in less extreme cases. Like Diggle, we refuse to accept love from others because we’ve done something in the past that makes us unworthy of it. So as much as I disliked Diggle’s decision, I understood it.

In fact, it was so obvious that Diggle deserved punishment that Oliver told him that, yes, you need to make up for what you did, but the way to do it is to come back to Starling and protect the city. And I think there’s some good food for thought. All of us make mistakes, sometimes even horrible ones. The way to make up for them is not to stop living, but to live our lives for a high calling.

That got me thinking about how we punish as a society. Many of us think about criminal punishment as ensuring that the criminal repays their debt to society. And sure enough, every person we put in prison who has committed a crime might deserve to be there on some level. But by separating them from their loved ones and communities, we may inflict the same consequences on bystanders that Diggle was ready to inflict on his family. What about their families, and their friends, and their jobs? By keeping them locked up because they owe society a debt, we may end up stopping them from living lives to pay it.

Of course, some people are too dangerous to be left free. Is that true of Diggle? He’s a murderer after all. And yet I think the screenwriters mean for us to see him as a hero. A fallen hero, yes, but a hero all the same at the end of the day. The question this poses is never stated directly on the show, but I think it’s there all the same. If a man who killed his own brother is capable of redemption, what about the many other criminals locked up for lesser crimes?

I thought season one of Gotham was great. It was an interesting premise, seeing Bruce Wayne before he becomes Batman, and Penguin, the Riddler, and Mr. Freeze before they became his nemeses. But lately, I’ve thought the storylines have become rushed to the point they’re unbelievable.

Case in point:  Jim Gordon’s killing Galavan and going to prison. Don’t get me wrong, I like that the writers allowed Gordon to go to dark places and made him a complicated character. He’s a man of high ideals who can’t always bring himself to act in line with them, and who has as much to atone for as he does to be proud of.

But some of his storyline happened too quickly. Gordon was caught, put on trial, and sent to Blackgate, all in one episode. To make things harder to believe, he also got out in only an episode or two. That’s why it was tough to believe his relationship with Lee would really be over so quick. If gets out so soon after going in, he would have made more of an effort than placing a phone call to reach her. They were engaged and she had lost his child, after all.

Now, it would have been more believable to me if Gordon had spent most of a season in Blackgate. By that point it would be realistic that he’d believe he’s never getting out, and that Lee’s life would be better without her engaged to him. It would also make his vigilante routine more believable. If he’d spent a big chunk of time in prison, I’d have an easier time seeing him give up on working for law enforcement.

I still think Gotham’s a fun show to watch. But where I used to be really invested in Gordon’s development as a character, I now find him a distraction from the storyline that does have me engaged: Bruce Wayne’s development into the man who will ultimately become Batman.

I promised a post about Wonder Woman and the way it portrayed love, so here it is! The idea of unconditional love has a hold on our imaginations, and most of us would say it’s a wonderful ideal to strive for. Practically, most of us love conditionally most of the time. There are lines people in our lives can cross that might make us stop loving them.

This is an issue Wonder Woman confronts when Ares tries to convince her to destroy humankind. She’s worked so hard to stop Ludendorff from killing millions of people. But to her surprise, that doesn’t stop the war. The real reason for war and violence, at least according to Ares, is that people are inherently corrupted. They kill because that’s their nature. Wonder Woman wants to save humanity because she loves all of them in theory, but finds many aren’t lovable in practice. This is truest of Maru, who’s been helping Ludendorff develop the gas Wonder Woman has worked so hard to stop. Maru arguably doesn’t deserve to live, and she certainly doesn’t seem to deserve love.

But at the end, Wonder Woman spares her. Maru and many people might not deserve love, but Wonder Woman chooses to love anyway. One of the reasons most of us want so badly to be loved, I think, is what it says about us. It means someone has looked into our soul and liked what they saw. What makes Wonder Woman’s act so meaningful to me is that she looked into Maru’s soul, saw everything there was to dislike, and chose love anyway. That may be the highest form of love there is—choosing to act sacrificially for someone who doesn’t deserve it.

Perhaps Wonder Woman’s greatest superpower is her ability to love.

Wonder Woman is one of my favorite movies this year. The action was great, and there were some hilarious lines. But probably the biggest reason I enjoyed it was that it was deceptively deep. It explored interesting ideas about love (which I’ll talk about in my next post), and why there’s evil, which I’ll talk about here.

One idea developed is that Ares (the god of war) uses his spiritual influence to corrupt people’s hearts, leading to evil. We see this when he talks about giving ideas to prolong wars over the years, including to Doctor Poison. Though Wonder Woman took its characters from Greco-Roman mythology, it reminded me of the story of man’s fall in the Bible. Satan, using a snake, sneaks into the Garden of Eden and helps convince Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge, leading God to exile man from Eden. The beginning of evil has spiritual beginnings that predate man’s existence. Same thing in Wonder Woman. The gods are involved in a struggle of their own that leads Ares, the one who fell out of favor with Zeus, to be sent away from Mount Olympus. His spiritual evil later infects mankind.

But the movie develops another idea. Ares says, yes I’ve given people ideas, but in the end it’s their choice to fight and kill each other. He hints that people don’t really need his influence to become embroiled in wars. There’s something inherently corrupt in their nature. That suggests they were created with the instinct to commit evil, and that all Ares did was tap into it.

We never get an answer as to what the true cause of evil is. That’s probably because there is no obvious answer. Neither the first nor second idea about why evil exists is comforting. If there are supernatural forces at work doing their utmost to get us to wrong each other, that suggests that we are powerless to resist. If instead there’s something evil at humanity’s core, the outcome might be the same: we are powerless to resist our impulse to do evil. I liked that Wonder Woman presented this tension without feeling a need to resolve it.

And it gave us reason to take heart. Steve chose to willingly sacrifice himself to destroy the gas that would have taken millions of lives. There are some people who will fight against their worst instincts to do good, even at great cost to themselves. Can humanity really be corrupt if there are people like that?