TV Series On The Television

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zaratustra
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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby zaratustra » Sat Apr 21, 2018 5:20 pm

zaratustra wrote:Money Heist is pretty good but then it has a second season and I'm not sure it can keep the bang without being repetitive.


ok i must admit I hadn't considered "dressing as a clown"

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Grath
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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Grath » Sun Apr 22, 2018 9:36 pm

Finally watched The Good Place. I think I found a continuity error in S2: When Eleanor shows up originally in S1, Chidi is stated to be speaking French. But he speaks English when she meets him in life.

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Blossom » Sun Apr 22, 2018 10:20 pm

He's a native French speaker so he speaks his native language, French, in the Good Place. But he can't really be a lecturer at a university in Australia without also being a fluent English speaker.
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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Mongrel » Sun Apr 22, 2018 10:26 pm

And of course there's the fan theory that they're all still dead and it's all just another simulation.
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Thad
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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Thad » Mon Apr 23, 2018 10:13 am

I'm a little behind on Flash; I just watched the episode where the A story is that Barry is mad at Ralph for making jokes all the time.

And it's like, wow, they've distilled everything that's gone horribly wrong with the show into an actual plotline, to the point that the main character is actually berating the only person on the show who is ever any fun anymore for not being grim and dour all the time like everybody else.

Of course, the end of the episode is that Flash learns a Valuable Lesson that Ralph is still a valuable member of the team, so maybe this is the writers' way of admitting the error of their ways? That'd be nice to see. But that's what I thought was happening the other week when they set up Ralph and Barry going into the PI business together, and we got this instead. How much fun could Ralph and Barry as PIs have been? It should have been amazing.

But man, Flash has really lost the plot at this point. It used to be fun. Giant gorillas and shark-men and villains with names like Weather Wizard and Captain Cold and shit. But every season is less of that shit and more frantically and ineffectually fighting some all-powerful supervillain who spends the whole season taunting them by always being several steps ahead, until they ass-pull a way to stop him in the season finale.

Basically, Legends of Tomorrow turned into the kind of show Flash used to be back in season 1 -- a fun, colorful series that embraces the sillier aspects of the superhero genre and where it feels like anything can happen --, and Flash turned into the kind of show Legends used to be back in season 1 -- a show with a good cast wasted on a dour season arc, a weak villain, and a leading man who whines all the time and never smiles.

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Mothra
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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Mothra » Mon Apr 23, 2018 11:10 am

Aw, that sucks to hear. I fell off the show after the conclusion of the Savatar plot, because good god was I sick of Flash being cosmically punished week after week for one thing.

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Thad » Mon Apr 23, 2018 9:46 pm

Season 4 is a lot like season 3. It's got occasional bright spots, mostly from Ralph Dibny, so it hasn't entirely forgotten how to be fun...but it mostly has.

Legends is great now, though.

Also, I thought Black Lightning had a fantastic debut season. It's like if The Incredibles were a drama, set against a Black Lives Matter backdrop.

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Thad » Wed Apr 25, 2018 11:43 am

...so, uh, I think I must have fallen asleep in the middle of HBO's Sunday night programming block and had a fever dream where all the shows ran together, because I could have sworn I just saw an episode of Silicon Valley about a robot being sexually abused.

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Thad » Mon May 07, 2018 11:53 am

I just watched the Timeless with JFK.

And, okay, here's the thing. This is what JFK looked like in 1934:

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(source)

I don't have to tell you which one he is; you can tell by looking. Which is my point.

Agent Christopher's line (something along the lines of "Who's that?") when he gets off the ship makes no fucking sense. Guy gets out of a time machine that just came back from 1934 and looks like that, you know exactly who he is, at a quick glance; you don't need a historian to tell you. The only reason you wouldn't recognize him is, well, he's not actually JFK and he doesn't actually look like that, because he's Grant Jordan, an actor playing JFK in a television show.

People not seeing him step out of a time machine from 1934 would not, of course, assume that he was JFK from looking at him. But about the time he introduced himself as "John Kennedy", in a Boston accent, most people would assume he was either a relative or a professional impersonator. (And we don't know how many people he tells his last name, but he definitely checks into the hospital as John Kennedy.)

But nobody notes this John Kennedy's resemblance to one of the most recognizable presidents in history until the last few minutes of the damn episode. Nobody else makes any sort of connection.

(Also, I suppose this is nitpicky of me, but the big dramatic moment where he reads his brother Joe's Wikipedia entry and finds out when he died at the end of the first paragraph...encyclopedias don't work that way. They're not written to maximize dramatic effect. The years of a person's birth and death appear immediately after their name, at the very beginning of the entry.

I did love the bit where he reacts to seeing the phrase "World War II", though. Sure, Doctor Who did that exact same thing back in December, but I guess it's one of those things that gets me every time.)

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby beatbandito » Mon May 07, 2018 12:24 pm

I do not know this show, or that this is true 100%, but from what I understand of JFK (which is probably more than any other president before W. Bush, because growing up in an irish catholic family, even in the 90s he was the only president it was worth knowing anything about) he basically only went by 'Jack', especially before becoming a politician. Which feels like it would have been a very easy way to accurately obscure the reveal.

Also, like, is it only ever famous people that come out of this machine? And How? Is this like clone high or some kind of weird reverse bill & ted? I'm intrigued.
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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Mothra » Mon May 07, 2018 4:45 pm

The JFK-gets-brought-to-modern-times episode is, without a doubt, the worst ep of Timeless to date. Truly shook my diehard love of this show to the core.

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Thad » Mon May 07, 2018 6:59 pm

beatbandito wrote:I do not know this show, or that this is true 100%, but from what I understand of JFK (which is probably more than any other president before W. Bush, because growing up in an irish catholic family, even in the 90s he was the only president it was worth knowing anything about) he basically only went by 'Jack', especially before becoming a politician. Which feels like it would have been a very easy way to accurately obscure the reveal.

Also, like, is it only ever famous people that come out of this machine? And How? Is this like clone high or some kind of weird reverse bill & ted? I'm intrigued.


The people at his school in 1934 call him Jack, but once he comes to the present everybody refers to him as John. I don't think we see him actually tell anyone his name, but the people he's met call him John, and when he has to go to the hospital he's checked in as John Kennedy. (So he introduces himself to people, but not onscreen.)

Given that he initially believes he's been kidnapped and, before long, realizes he's traveled 84 years into the future, his reverting to something a little more formal than nicknames is understandable.

The Timeless crew have never brought somebody back from the past before, so it's perfectly reasonable for Agent Christopher to let out an exclamation of surprise when she sees him. But "What the hell?" or "You brought back JFK?" would have made more sense than "Who's that?"

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Blossom » Mon May 07, 2018 11:23 pm

Was the intonation "Who's that?" as in "I don't know who this person is" or "Who's that?" as in "Why is there a person here who's not supposed to be here?" I don't know the show.
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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Mothra » Tue May 08, 2018 5:01 am

One of the many things that was wrong with that ep was the fact that they all still knew who JFK was, even after he was plucked from time and had thus never existed up until that moment.

The way they handwaved it in the ep was to have them say, "well, we all still know who JFK is, so we must succeed in the mission! No need to fret."

You'll forgive the pun when I say this ep was the biggest waste of time in the entire run of the show. If this wasn't just a budget-saving filler episode, then what the hell were they thinking doing one where they fucking wander around present day Miami, looking for a missing kid? Who gives a shit? Get back into your time machine and travel through time in your time travel show please!

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zaratustra
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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby zaratustra » Wed May 09, 2018 9:13 am

the thing with remaking Lost In Space in a more serious tone is that any right-minded person in a survival situation would take a sabotaging, self-serving coward like Dr. Smith and toss him/her off a cliff first chance they got.

On the other hand, Dr. Smith consistently evading being called out on her evilness merely by repeating over and over that she's not evil is very 2018.

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Thad » Wed May 09, 2018 10:32 am

TA wrote:Was the intonation "Who's that?" as in "I don't know who this person is" or "Who's that?" as in "Why is there a person here who's not supposed to be here?" I don't know the show.

That could have been the intent, but it's immediately followed by Lucy coming in and recognizing him, in the show's usual "we need a historian to explain history to us" formula.

(Also it was right after the first commercial break, so I suspect the usual "we need to spend the next two minutes reminding the audience what happened before the commercial" motivation for recapping what we'd just seen.)

Mothra wrote:One of the many things that was wrong with that ep was the fact that they all still knew who JFK was, even after he was plucked from time and had thus never existed up until that moment.

The way they handwaved it in the ep was to have them say, "well, we all still know who JFK is, so we must succeed in the mission! No need to fret."


Eh, time travel rules are always kinda bullshit. I didn't mind that so much, especially since the payoff where the face on the 50-cent piece turned into Nixon was one of the best parts of the episode.

But yeah, I generally do really like the hook that when they change history and then get back to the present, only the people on the time ship remember what the timeline was like before; the people in the present don't realize anything has changed, for them the Salem Witch Trials always ended in the witches revolting and escaping, and JFK was always assassinated in Austin.

I guess that episode kinda bent those rules, but it's also really the only time they've brought a historical figure back to the present, so handwaving it with "the timeline doesn't start to change until he's in danger of being killed" didn't bother me so much. Having nobody recognize him except Rufus, Wyatt, and Emma (and I guess Lucy, as a Historian who knows things about History, would have recognized Bobby and Ted's brother who mysteriously disappeared in 1934) would have removed a lot of my objections about the episode, but it also would have removed the best parts (JFK reading his own Wikipedia entry and the aforementioned bit with the coin).

Actually, the more I think about it the more I think that that's probably exactly what happened in the first draft. It would explain a lot if the episode was originally written with JFK erased from the timeline and that's why Agent Christopher needs Lucy to tell her who he is and nobody recognizes him, but then they rewrote it to work in that climactic scene.

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Mothra » Wed May 09, 2018 11:03 am

Well, whatever way you come at it, every time this show sets a storyline in the present it always sucks. Basically just turns this show into a crappy CSI episode.

I took a break for a while, then watched the one with Robert Johnson, and man, that was a fun one. Relieved to see this show back in its groove. Double love that Conner Mason is becoming a regular, well-used character.

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Thad » Thu May 10, 2018 10:30 am

Mothra wrote:Well, whatever way you come at it, every time this show sets a storyline in the present it always sucks. Basically just turns this show into a crappy CSI episode.


I think "JFK in the present" is a legit good hook (which explains why they didn't just scrap the whole thing in my hypothetical where they rewrote the last act because it wasn't working). It's just...they didn't know what to do with it. Having to go to the hospital was a great example of the show sprinkling in little-known historical details, but aside from that, he goes to a gas station and a high school party. They didn't know what to do with him. I think if they'd decided to have him pulled out of the timestream when he was a few years older, they would have had more to work with. (I can totally see Wyatt alternately bonding and butting heads with WWII-era sailor JFK.)

I took a break for a while, then watched the one with Robert Johnson, and man, that was a fun one. Relieved to see this show back in its groove. Double love that Conner Mason is becoming a regular, well-used character.


Haven't watched any since the JFK one yet, but yeah, I've been a fan of Paterson Joseph for years. (At least since Jekyll.) I still think he'd have made a great Doctor, though we got Matt Smith instead and he was great too.

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby beatbandito » Wed May 16, 2018 9:48 am

Up to date on Silicon Valley thanks to my sister's hbo trial.

This is an exciting season. I can't wait to see if they can swallow Tesla's dick enough that it actually comes out the other side.
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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Mothra » Fri May 18, 2018 11:48 am

The Expanse has been fucking phenominal this season. Same as the last season, and the one before it. This, of course, means that Syfy has decided to cancel it:

The series seemingly got the axe because of a complicated rights deal that put an inordinate amount of pressure on the show’s live-TV ratings to make it worth it for Syfy. Deadline reported:

"The cancellation decision by Syfy is said to be linked to the nature of its agreement for the series, which only gives the cable network first-run linear rights in the U.S. That puts an extraordinary amount of emphasis on live, linear viewing, which is inherently challenging for sci-fi/genre series that tend to draw the lion’s share of their audiences from digital/streaming."


More in this QZ article. It's a good read.

Pretty good chance Amazon will pick it up, since they're already the ones doing the digital distribution of the show. Fingers crossed.

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