TV Series On The Television

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Mothra
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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Mothra » Fri Feb 18, 2022 5:30 pm

Finished watching Foundation, and it’s like… I do not enjoy watching this show at all, and I’m a bit stumped as to why. Great cast, amazing effects, pretty interesting story.

I think it’s the characters maybe? They all have something pretty compelling to do, but you are pulled away from each one of them any time something of interest happens, are you won’t be back for many episodes. Add to that big time skips where you are leaving behind everyone you’ve been accustomed to, and it’s hard to get invested. I just didn’t feel anything for these people.

I want to say a smaller scope would’ve helped, but I don’t really give a fat slap about Salvor or Gaal, and certainly didn’t care about any of the people on Terminus, save for maybe the dad.

A lot of this show is mystery box stuff, where they’re chasing answers to questions whose answer is always something like “Hari had a secret reason for all of this, it’s all part of the plan”. I really don’t think that’s the way this should’ve gone. We should’ve been with Hari the whole show, seeing his reasoning, seeing the leaps of faith he’d make, seeing the doubt he wrestled with in theory vs practice. To take that out of play early in the show, and instead replace it with Salvor and Gaal just hunting around for answers just isn’t very interesting. Characters are left to not make their own choices, and instead follow this vague belief in Foundation. I dunno, that kind of blind religious faith stuff is boring.

I’m a huge Lee Pace fan from Pushing Daisies, and he does an awesome job as Brother Day. But I also don’t give much of a fuck? We can plainly see the flaws with the genetic dynasty clone system, we’re told over and over how it will lead to the Empire’s collapse, and the result is that all of his scenes are just driving home this same thing, over and over. You can only watch Empire be evil and tyrannical so many times before it becomes boring. The bit with Brother Day near the end was somewhat interesting, but it resolves in such an expected way, again, I just could not get invested.

To be honest, the only character beyond Brother Day I really liked and cared about was Phara Keaen, the Anacreon working to try to destroy the Empire following the unjust decimation of her world by Brother Day. I was completely on her side! It was nice having a cool character with some mythos and a clear objective, making clear decisions to further that goal. Then, unfortunately, they just made her evil, and that whole thing resolves in as predictable a way as you can imagine. Sucks. I would’ve really liked to see her as a major character, going through a long character arc as she comes to see the bigger picture from the perspective of someone who had to pay the price.

I think a good example of this show’s problem is with the Invictus, a cool, weird, old planet-killer that’s been lost to time since its warp system malfunctioned.

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This thing is really cool to see in action, and that the Terminus crew co-operatively commandeer this ghost ship with the Anacreon terrorists was pretty dope. Then they just warp it back to Terminus and nothing really comes of it. I’m sure maybe at some future point in the story, some later book, this thing comes back into play, but as it is, it’s this fireworks factory we’re never gonna arrive at. They never use the ship for anything cool, it’s just used as a bus. From the perspective of the viewer, you’re just disappointed to see yet another element added to the mix here without any payoff. Why did we go through all that stuff about taking over the ship? Was it for the deflated drama of the Anacreon’s wanting to take it to Empire’s home world and decimate it? Would’ve been cool to see that shit! Or anything… the big climax of this drama is a shitty fight scene in a dimly-lit room, resulting in the ship not being used for anything.

It's also important to note that this ship isn't in the books, this is a thing they added, presumably for action, but that action never happens. So why is it here? This is one of a ton of changes they made to the books to make this more of an action show that would keep people's attention, but why not just make that show instead of trying to twist this book about math into something it's not?

I dunno, weird show. Very dim, dismal lighting, but also some of the most incredible sets and effects I’ve seen in a sci-fi show. All in service of a story that is so broad in scope that you’re not likely to get any payoff for a long time. As a fan of Babylon 5, that show had a huge scope, but metered it out alongside satisfying smaller arcs - you can progress the big stuff while giving the viewer some satisfaction with the smaller stuff.

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Mongrel » Fri Feb 18, 2022 6:06 pm

But were any of them smoking merrily while operating a ship entirely run by low-grade analog computers? :V

Okay, I know I make that joke too much, but I can't help but wonder if making it weirdly throwback retro-futuristic would have made it more interesting somehow. At least you can't say that "Great concept, but bad with actual human characters." isn't faithful to Asimov.

Maybe it'll get better when The Mule shows up?
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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Büge » Fri Feb 18, 2022 8:47 pm

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Thad » Mon Feb 21, 2022 1:25 am

...did John Malkovich just say "yiff" on Space Force?

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Thad » Fri Mar 11, 2022 12:31 am

Legends of Tomorrow finale: I gotta say Donald Faison as Booster Gold was a casting I never thought of before but it is fucking brilliant. I'd love for him to be regular cast. Maybe get Zach Braff to voice Skeets.

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Thad » Fri Mar 11, 2022 12:29 pm

AFAIK the show hasn't been picked up for another season as yet. I hope it is (and even if it isn't, they could always resolve it in one of the other Arrowverse shows), but I'd also kind of love it if they just left it there on the Holy Grail "everybody gets arrested" ending.

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Thad » Thu Jun 09, 2022 12:12 am

The new Kids in the Hall feels a lot like the old one, except I don't remember the Comedy Central reruns having quite this much full frontal nudity or jokes about fisting.

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Büge » Tue Jun 14, 2022 8:39 pm



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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Thad » Sun Jul 10, 2022 7:14 pm

Stranger Things still has some gas left in the tank, though I don't think the longer episodes do season 4 any favors. It's got some real pacing problems, including spending the first two episodes (cumulatively about 2.5 hours) on table-setting.

But once it gets rolling it's good! I'll skip the griping about how a lot of the period touches seem a lot sloppier this season (they had late-'90s HTML in 1986, right?) and focus on the most important one: by rooting itself firmly in the Satanic Panic, this season manages to make itself ironically timely. This is a season about an ascendant white conservative Christian population scapegoating and targeting vulnerable people for the crime of not conforming. And the climax includes a clean-cut white jock in a letterman jacket pointing a gun at a Black kid and then beating the hell out of him. Subtlety is overrated.

And meanwhile, in the Upside Down, the new villain this season is Vecna, and he's a lot more interesting than the villains we've seen in the past; rather than an ineffable eldritch horror, he's sentient and intelligent and can carry on a conversation. It's pretty well-worn stuff -- he's got a tragic origin story, a history with the protagonist, and functions as a dark mirror to her -- and involves probably too many retcons and some distracting CG, but on balance I think it works more than it doesn't.

On the whole, a pretty solid season. One more to go, and if this season was any indication I think they'll be able to make one more work.

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Mothra » Sun Jul 10, 2022 8:25 pm

I watched the first season of From, starring Harold Perrineau (Michael from Lost), in which they just do Lost again. A generic guy and his generic family get stuck in a purgatory, where they can never leave the tiny 4-building town, just as with everyone there. At night, creepy, put-together people show up, and if allowed or invited inside, they horribly murder everyone inside.

Overall, I enjoyed it, it's good background noise. Certainly not a great show, but it is entertaining.

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby beatbandito » Mon Jul 11, 2022 1:39 am

Mothra wrote:I watched the first season of From

Gods the writing is so terrible it's amazing. This is like an accidental Twin Peaks.
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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Friday » Mon Jul 11, 2022 1:49 am

Thad wrote:Stranger Things still has some gas left in the tank, though I don't think the longer episodes do season 4 any favors. It's got some real pacing problems, including spending the first two episodes (cumulatively about 2.5 hours) on table-setting.

But once it gets rolling it's good! I'll skip the griping about how a lot of the period touches seem a lot sloppier this season (they had late-'90s HTML in 1986, right?) and focus on the most important one: by rooting itself firmly in the Satanic Panic, this season manages to make itself ironically timely. This is a season about an ascendant white conservative Christian population scapegoating and targeting vulnerable people for the crime of not conforming. And the climax includes a clean-cut white jock in a letterman jacket pointing a gun at a Black kid and then beating the hell out of him. Subtlety is overrated.

And meanwhile, in the Upside Down, the new villain this season is Vecna, and he's a lot more interesting than the villains we've seen in the past; rather than an ineffable eldritch horror, he's sentient and intelligent and can carry on a conversation. It's pretty well-worn stuff -- he's got a tragic origin story, a history with the protagonist, and functions as a dark mirror to her -- and involves probably too many retcons and some distracting CG, but on balance I think it works more than it doesn't.

On the whole, a pretty solid season. One more to go, and if this season was any indication I think they'll be able to make one more work.


Yeah, I actually ended up enjoying this season despite the flaws. I think a big part was the inclusion of Vecna, yeah. He's a nice switch in terms of villains compared to what we had before.

The Russian/Prison arc was the weakest for me. Pacing problems were everywhere but they really spend a tremendous amount of time spinning their wheels in Russia and the climax, when they finally get there, is pretty weak.

The Satanic Panic stuff was timely, yeah. It's amazing to me, to this day, that Mazes and Monsters exists and stars Tom Hanks in his first leading role.
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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Mothra » Mon Jul 11, 2022 2:02 am

beatbandito wrote:
Mothra wrote:I watched the first season of From

Gods the writing is so terrible it's amazing. This is like an accidental Twin Peaks.

Yeah, this is kind of what made me like it. It's bad enough that it makes weird-ass, head-scratching choices, and it's pretty funny.

There's this part where the wife notices that, while they have electricity, none of the cords have any wiring. So she follows the cords into the basement, where it goes straight into the ground. She then spends like two episodes digging a hole straight down in their basement, a hole that is like 6 feet in diameter and 20 feet deep, and she's always completely put-together, no having broken a sweat. There is one scene where she is shown bringing a bucket of soil outside and dumping it in the woods, implying that she's been shoveling everything into a single bucket, climbing a ladder, going upstairs, and throwing the contents of the bucket outside, for every shovel of this massive hole. Stuff like that I just love, it's like storybook logic.

Anyways, I also like the monsters, they're pretty weird and unsettling. I'd forgotten how much I like having some weird, creepy monster in a show.

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Mothra » Fri Aug 05, 2022 11:08 am

For All Mankind has been pretty weak this season.

It sounds insane to say but I do not give a fuck about Mars, it's just the desert, but red. There's nothing interesting to do there.

With the moon, everything in zero G was absolutely gripping and the very limited resources made for some real genuine tension. On Mars, I dunno, they have tons of resources, they find water pretty quickly, and there's almost nothing dangerous about being outside.

The character drama is also getting very soapey, with people cheating on other people and acting irrationally... it just kind of starts to highlight how this isn't how the crew of a big important space mission would act.

The good stuff is still the big space disasters and the big engineering projects:




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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Niku » Sun Aug 07, 2022 8:35 pm

paper girls on amazon is real damn good. i never read the comic it's based on, but gonna rectify that asap.
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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Thad » Wed Aug 10, 2022 12:58 am

I've only watched the first episode of Sandman but I thought it was pretty damn good.

Hard to judge Sandman by the early stuff, though. It's not really Sandman until it stops being a horror comic and starts feeling more like mythology. That's, what, volume 3? Which will be season 2, if there is one.

(Also, I've only read through the run once, and finished it in 2005, and would have started with vol 1 years before that, so while I remember the broad arc and a favorite issue here or there, I'm probably hazy on most of the details. I probably should give it a reread, but I might want to buy different editions than the ones I have, which are that nasty combination of coloring designed for newsprint but printed on glossy paper. Aside from vol 3, which I do have in an earlier newsprint edition.)

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Destynova » Sun Aug 14, 2022 8:18 pm

Last episode of Better Call Saul on monday

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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby beatbandito » Tue Aug 30, 2022 9:37 am

The Rehearsal is absolutely insane. I was kind of mislead by the first episode, which is basically just an episode of Nathan for You, but seemingly with a much higher budget. But starting with the second episode it develops in ways that would be impossible to convey here, and would ruin the experience to try.

It's still a show about putting people in weird/anxious situations and recording their reactions, so there is that to deal with. But I think it's more worth it than a lot of similar types of shows.
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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby KingRoyal » Tue Aug 30, 2022 10:11 am

Watched the first episode of The Rehearsal and loved it, though everyone's reactions to the rest of the series definitely mean I need to push this higher in the stack

Other shows I done seen lately

House of the Dragon - This is surprisingly good. Decided to check it out even though I ditched on Game of Thrones because my longstanding Matt Smith support. Loved him as The Doctor but every movie he's in bombs so he needs the help. But the show is delivering, with some fine cinematography, a killer cast and it brings the gritty fantasy that hasn't quite been worn into the ground yet. The only thing that might be a misstep is that the ending of the first episode directly ties the series to the end of Game of Thrones, which is a bit of a gamble considering everyone knows how that goes


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Re: TV Series On The Television

Postby Friday » Wed Aug 31, 2022 6:34 pm

Last episode of Better Call Saul on monday


Hey, haven't been talking about this show here, but I've been a BCS lover for quite some time.

It is of my opinion that Better Call Saul is a superior show to Breaking Bad, and I rate Breaking Bad as one of the best shows ever made.

I have an awful lot to say about both shows, but most of it is shit other people have already said (at length, over and over and over, in 1.5 hour youtube reviews that could have easily been 20 minutes) so I'll just say a few things:

(Spoilers for Breaking Bad below, but no BCS spoilers.)

1. Walter White didn't "transform" over the course of the show as every single 1.5 hour video essay would have you believe. He was a prideful, arrogant jackass from the very start, it was just buried under his meek, domesticated exterior. He's also a massive, massive, massive piece of shit. Anyone who thinks of him as hero is literally insane. I cannot stress enough how horrible this man is. As a character, he's interesting and Cranston gives perhaps one of the best acting jobs of all time.

2. Saul actually does transform! Breaking Bad is about how a man's inner shitfuck demon asshole murderer also child murderer also wife raper and child kidnapper was brought to the surface (this is commonly shortened to "beast" by most people) but Better Call Saul is about a man who slowly but surely loses his way. Note that Saul does become a worse person but never stoops even remotely as low as Walter and actually has a good finale to his arc, unlike Walt, who just finally admits he did everything for his own enjoyment and then dies.

3. Kim Wexler and Ignacio Varga are absolutely amazing characters who bring so much to BCS that I consider the show better than BB basically because of them. I consider them both the best characters in the BB Universe, with Jesse and Mike in close second place.

4. Mike rules. He rules harder in BCS so if you liked him in BB but haven't seen BCS yet, then know that Mike rules even harder there. I can't list him as a reason BCS stands above BB though because he's awesome in both.

5. oh my god Lalo Salamanca is like the best villain ever
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