23rd July 19:44 GMT -5

Batman's debrief was a good deal less harrowing than it might have been. He picked up on my failure to breach the radio jamming right away, and we'll all be getting lessons on communication technology from Captain Atom in the not too distant future. He was also not happy about us pretty much abandoning the whole 'recon' aspect of the thing, and we'll each be getting a written evaluation 'detailing our many mistakes'. His conclusion was much more upbeat, congratulating us on our inventiveness and for 'capturing some extremely dangerous people'. The League will be making sure that Jeffrey Burr, Lawrence Crock and the Flinders make it to Belle Reve Federal Penitentiary in Louisiana without incident.

I'm not worried about the written report. I've already gone over the things I think I did wrong, and it may suggest ways to remedy my failings. Wonder if Batman'll have Jordan or Stewart write the part concerning my use of the ring? I've had a look at their written records as well as the recordings and I can't see anything about them using their rings for team coordination.

Robin and Wallace have headed home. Just the lifers left; M'gann, Kon, Kaldur and I are trying to find something worth watching on television. A trial at the best of times. Kaldur likes documentaries. M'gann likes sit-coms. Kon has absorbed Wallace's habit of switching channel every few minutes. They aren't bickering, but they are debating with reasoned arguments and that sort of thing only ever leads to trouble.

"How about a film?"

It gets worse. We have WebFilm -a Netflix analogue- but that just gives us thousands of films that none of us know how to choose between. I'm watching the screen trying to spot something familiar -as our token surface dwelling/Human/more than three weeks old team member I have the best chance of recognising some of them- as my team mates take advantage of any hesitation to pluck the remote from one another's hands and search for something which suits their tastes.

Kaldur tries to find a pirate film where the pirates are the bad guys and not the good guys. He is a little disturbed that he can't. M'gann tries to locate a romance film, but can't find anything with aliens in it. She nearly tries Species III, but I suggest that probably isn't the sort of thing she wants. I suppose it could be different to the version from my parallel, but I'd rather not take the chance. Kon seems to just scroll through things with no real idea what he's looking for. During a brief lull in which Kaldur delivered an impromptu lecture on the damage done to world trade networks by pirate attacks I took the opportunity to compare films I know with ones which exist here.

Castlevania directed by Chris Nolan? Wasn't making Batman, I suppose. Star Wars exists here, but it seems that George Lucas was killed in a hit and run accident before he could make episodes I to III. Unfortunately, Disney then bought his company and had Michael Bay do it. So, pro, no Jar Jar Binks. Con, Queen Amidala in a boob tube and hot pants and a thirty foot tall General Grievous. Think I'll give it a miss.

No DC means no V for Vendetta. No Marvel comics either, but I'm not sure that superhero genre is the way to go with this. We are superheroes. Nothing we watch will match the experience. My suggestion of 9 is shot down from all sides, though I don't think I did a particularly good job of selling it. In desperation I suggest having the ring select one entirely at random. Faced with the very real possibility of spending the rest of the evening arguing or -worse- learning more about non-state actors as agents of social decay, Kon and M'gann vote for that idea.

And that's why we spent the evening watching Super Giraffeman Seven.

The plot was threadbare, the sets were made of plywood, the acting was nonexistent and one guy tripped on his own wires and I don't think I've laughed that hard since a crazy woman phoned me at work and said that she'd kept her youngest child's placenta in her fridge for seven months but needed to arrange for it to be stored somewhere else because her children had mistaken it for ice cream and tried to eat it. Took our lab manager twenty minutes to convince her that it would be pointless, after I'd tried for half an hour.

When I laugh really hard, I don't make any noise, I just do a sort of choking action. Watching this abomination I was convulsing so hard that I struggled to keep my eyes focused on the screen. Even better, I think I must have been feeding back into M'gann because she ending up laughing just as hard as I was. I'm not sure that Kaldur or Kon got the joke, but our reactions set them off as well.

And, seventy two minutes later, with one last cry of 'Evil shall fall upon my horns of Justice! They are small but they are mighty!' it was over, and I could try breathing normally again.

Oh god. There might be six more of those things.

"I can't believe someone actually made that!"

Kaldur's still bemused. "Do you think it was intentional?"

"I don't know. It might have been? I mean, they can't have not noticed that you could see the reflection of the entire camera crew in the sacred… giraffe…pool…" I barely manage to get it out before I start laughing again, which causes M'gann to start as well.

Kon's got the remote control and is trying to find more information on it. "It says that it was made in nineteen seventy five by Takeshi Meeki."

I get a breath. "Is that his real name?"

"There's a list of the other movies he's made."

Kaldur leans forwards. "Are they… All..?"

"I don't know."

I risk looking at the screen. The summary screen for Super Giraffeman in Space is there waiting for me. Made in two thousand and one. Oh god. Same title actor. He must be in his seventies.

I suppose he can't have gotten any worse.

"There isn't… There doesn't… Martian cinema doesn't have anything like that." M'gann takes a little longer to recover than I do.

"It wouldn't, would it? When you can shapeshift you don't have to worry about your mane wig sliding down your head halfway through your main scene."

Kaldur blinks in recognition. "It was the way he kept leaning over to try and prevent it from falling off completely that I found the most distracting."

Kon is still going through Mister Takeshi's list of film credits. "Maybe Martian cinema does have things like that, and you just haven't watched it? If I had to introduce someone to Earth cinema, I don't think I'd start with that."

"Don't rule it out so quickly. Rowan Atkinson's character, Mister Bean, is very popular in countries that don't speak English because slapstick is so universal. And I think that was more slapstick than wuxia."

Kaldur can't take his eyes off the screen either. "I cannot say with certainty what it was."

M'gann checks her watch. "We've probably got time for another one."

"I'm not sure it would have the same effect again, now we're expecting it."

"Paul, Uncle J'onn probably felt the laughter in your mind all the way up on the Watchtower."

Kon sits up a little. "If it's a choice between watching another movie like that, or arguing about pirates again, I vote Giraffe."

The cursor is now over 'Super Giraffeman Supreme Shogun-President'. Nothing more needs to be said.