TV news and views

[Polident]

Loki season 2

Granted, I watched it in bed on my iPad before sleeping. But I had no clue what was happening or why or what the marvel world is about anymore or how anything matters. The main storyline seems to be about multiverses dying, represented by glowing strings. So each string is everything and everyone in the entire universe.

The ending is 

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

Loki grabbing multiple universes and sewing them with his bare hands. Same guy getting knocked on his ass with an exploding arrow, can control an infinite number of universes.

[Potato]

Yeah, it was just dumb. I watched a few episodes, then just skipped to the end and that was pretty much the MCU over for me.

[DavidCroquet]

What did you think of episode 4 of Knight of the Seven Kingdoms @DavidCroquet?

I loved it. I love the slow boil and knowing where it leads the forboding is just thick. As frustrating as the 30 minutes episodes are and the show progression, they are certainly good at building tension. In some ways I wish they just dropped the whole season so I could binge it, but the wait between episodes is helping with the buildup.

I just caught up on it and I'm really liking it. The pacing for these past couple episodes are taking much better advantage of the shorter episode length. I'd almost describe it as satisfyingly predictable, in the nicest way possible (I'm thinking mostly of the "last of the 7" showing up).

[Potato]

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms just keeps getting better and better. 

Episode 5 (the penultimate) is just pure cinema.

[benji]

I really liked Sneaky Pete even if it's kind of not believable that the entire series takes place over like one month. Also the I. AM. ACTING. scenes are goofier than dramatic.

Life is odd and they never really figure it out. Which isn't entirely their fault as the writer's strike killed the first season and then Sarah Shahi gets pregnant in the second so has to randomly disappear suddenly like she does in the one season of Person of Interest. The main mystery is pretty stupid. Donal Logue's character is a nice addition for the second season though it's a little hard to believe that a goddess like Sarah Shahi would be interested in him. Adam Arkin's character is my favorite. The whole zen crap is pretty dumb and they never seem to think to do anything with any knowledge's he's gained from twelve years in prison aside from a single episode, only the zen crap. It's not like it's a bad show it just feels like when you get to the end of the second season (!) it still hasn't really started yet and the series finale is basically only wrapping up the pilot's plot.

[HeavenIsAPlaceOnEarth]

Life is odd and they never really figure it out. Which isn't entirely their fault as the writer's strike killed the first season and then Sarah Shahi gets pregnant in the second so has to randomly disappear suddenly like she does in the one season of Person of Interest. The main mystery is pretty stupid. Donal Logue's character is a nice addition for the second season though it's a little hard to believe that a goddess like Sarah Shahi would be interested in him. Adam Arkin's character is my favorite. The whole zen crap is pretty dumb and they never seem to think to do anything with any knowledge's he's gained from twelve years in prison aside from a single episode, only the zen crap. It's not like it's a bad show it just feels like when you get to the end of the second season (!) it still hasn't really started yet and the series finale is basically only wrapping up the pilot's plot.

I liked Life, but I really wanted more unleashed violent Charlie. Though I can really only recall the throat punch from the finale.

[benji]

In one of the episodes I think one of the conspiracy dudes suggests Charlie murdered people in prison and Charlie himself seems to also suggest this. (The "Russian" also does some "we're not any different" kind of talk.) He was in solitary apparently for almost the entire time. But nobody seems to care about this or it was dropped. Maybe they realized this would be reason not to release him (and certainly not give him $50 million) even if he was innocent for the original crime. 

[Potato]

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was amazing. Great finish. Excellent series. Restored my faith in GoT.

[benji]

This might be more for the Trek thread but I'm watching Babylon 5 on Roku, which uBlockOriginLite also seems to block the ads on. It's the "remasters" which aren't to be thought of like Star Trek or other actual remasters. It's just the original masters re-transferred to digital instead of downgraded to 480i/p like it was on DVD or whatever. So it looks slightly more crisp than it did before 2020 when they did this but not as good as real film transfers generally do. They did however scale the CGI up, which in the space scenes does look better but in any composited green screen looks far worse because there's a resolution contrast now. Ironically, this is why there's no DS9 remasters, the Trek people aren't willing to scale the CGI up compared to re-rendering it at a higher resolution. In B5's case, the CGI was never as good and there's probably no way they could ever find the original models to do that so just scaling it up is fine. They probably should have only scaled up the space scenes though, a lot of the green screen stuff was just expanding sets and putting backgrounds that were already out of focus, scaling up changed none of that except now it contrasts against the rest.

Apparently there's some significant confusion about rights to all this, which explains why it's only on Roku of all places. They were trying to post the show to YouTube but if you go to the account only the pilot movie is on there but you can see lots of comments about how all the episodes are gone because they did a big announcement about them being posted free to YouTube. They got yanked since then for some reason.

The pilot movie there and on Roku is the "special edition" which is better edited and uses music from the guy who did the series instead of Stewart Copeland. I looked into the original and Copeland's music on there, much like on Dead Like Me, sounds exactly like Spyro The Dragon's music. That amuses me, the guy apparently writes a single kind of soundtrack.

The fighting between this and DS9 is funny retrospectively to me, especially because people took such hard lines over it for years on the internet. I don't think B5 is obviously better than DS9, not any more clever or "gritty" or whatever else you always heard about these. In fact, I'm more amazed by just how the same they are in terms of where the plot goes in the broad sense. I'm nowhere near done with B5 so I'll hold off on deciding which ultimately is better until then. I'm not saying it's not good and I'm not enjoying it, just that from the years of internet fights I'm so used to people taking hard line stances of how B5 is so obviously objectively better or DS9 is.

My biggest complaint is that I'm not exactly understanding why anyone takes the Earth Alliance seriously as the show suggests their technology is significantly worse than everyone else's in the galaxy. Yet everybody is like "oh yeah they're so important" at the same time they're talking about how backwards Earth is. They're an "important" member of the anti-Shadow alliance yet they couldn't take out more than a handful of Minbari ships during that war and lost it in every single way possible. The Narn similarly have a unclear place in the galaxy, at the start of the show it seems like they're the Centauri's equal and superior to Earth, but by the start of the third season the entire civilization gets curbstomped inbetween a couple episodes.

One of the things I appreciated about the Dominion War plot was how futile much of it was with the major operations being legit major operations on a unheard of Trek scale. The Breen attack on Earth matters because they were daring enough to do it, a purely punitive attack nobody would expect for no reason but to hurt the enemy. Something the Klingons or Romulans for all their centuries of being enemies with each other and with Earth had never even attempted despite having cloaking technology. DS9 ends not with an actual victory but the barely holding it together Allies taking advantage of the sudden Cardassian situation. Everything else about the war was them delaying, blocking the wormhole, trying to stop the Dominion from establishing in the Alpha Quadrant, etc. They basically weren't ever really winning, the Dominion was and remained a superior foe. And they probably wouldn't have even won at Cardassia if they hadn't poisoned the Founders. That's fucking bleak when you actually think about it instead of the fact that they're our heroes and so are always depicted that way on the show.

One of my premature concerns about B5 then is that it won't be as effective because DS9 was doing that against the entire Trek canon which had been so perfect and pristine forever. B5 is pretty shitty from the start. I appreciated that they eventually actually did start talking about the fact that there's a whole part of the station that seems to consist of homeless people and criminals. Yet nobody seems to really give a shit, that at Earth's BEACON TO THE GALAXY they have all this crap going on. It's all handwaved with "Earth's problems travel with us" and like no, they don't really have to, there's only 250K people of all races on B5, with thousands of that being military. It could be a little bit nicer than Earth, especially since it's only five miles long. 

Don't get me wrong with any of this, even to this point in where I've watched I'd still recommend it to anybody who liked DS9. Even if it comes out worse than DS9 in the end, that's still really good. And it's definitely not bad by any means. Though having read a lot of his comics I will also see I can see some of JMS writing in it, especially these grandiose things he thinks are mindblowing but hasn't thought out at all. (There's probably an associated reason he doesn't finish most of his comic runs and almost didn't finish B5.)

Anyway I wrote all of this so I can link this LinkedIn profile someone made from something in an episode: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abrahamo-lincolni-1217741ab/

[benji]

[Lonewulfeus]

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was amazing. Great finish. Excellent series. Restored my faith in GoT.

I haven’t watched yet, but I did reread the GoT books recently which restored my faith in GoT so I’ll have to give this series a shot after bowing out completely after HoTD season 1

[Potato]

Yeah, I didn't bother with season 2 of HotD either. S1 was slow and boring. Remarkable for a show with fucking dragons.

[Snoopy]

So Knight turned out to be good. I didn't bother with that other one. It looked like a shit rip off, and season 8 destroyed any interest I had in more Thrones at the time. I'd ignored this one too but the good reviews got me to give it a shot. The best thing is it wasn't what I was expecting. A small story about a nobody. Great. No special effects. No monsters. No fucking dragons. No endless treks over mountains. No boss bitches running in to save the day. Just likeable characters, decent villains and tightly scripted episodes. It's all you need really

[Rendle]

No bare breasts

[benji]

I'm watching Babylon 5 

[nachobro]

need to get back to B5, stopped watching it in season 2. the whole thing just sorta felt like a long c&c cutscene

[benji]

On Usenet back in the day, a lot of which you still read on this ancient yet still being updated fansite, JMS said the cost of the Star Trek: Voyager pilot would pay for an entire Babylon 5 season. So... yeah it's probably pretty close to a C&C cutscene especially since those used bigger name actors.

[simiansmarts]

The Ted show is so much better than the movies that it actually bums me out the main kid grows up into Marky Mark because he's not nearly as funny as an adult. I mean this as a compliment when I say that Seth Macfarlane isn't the funniest character, it's actually Alanna Ubach as the mom.   
 
It's a shame there's no plans for a season 3 due to how expensive the show is. The production team should just make Ted a puppet to save money since the show is just Seth Macfarlane's take on Alf.

[simiansmarts]

I really, really enjoyed season 2 of One Piece, total upgrade from a good but flawed first season. The set design in this show is top notch, it's really refreshing to see tangible locales they actually built instead of the Volume that plagues so many other shows. 

Netflix has something good going here, they better not squander it. If that dogshit Witcher show can limp to five seasons, an actual good fantasy show with plenty of story material like this should get the red carpet treatment.

[Potato]

Didn't even realise season 2 was out. Cool, something to watch with my daughter.

[benji]

The Librarians is pretty dumb, it's from the people who did Leverage and is basically the same thing but magic. Christian Kane sort of plays the same character. It's just kind of less interesting and the characters are more annoying. It was still fine enough to have on while working I guess, there's a few good episodes though. With Noah Wyle, Rebecca Romijn and John Larroquette it has way bigger "names" that most basic cable shows before the recent streaming era. John Larroquette is the best one easily, but it is kind of funny when his stuntman is in a scene because he's clearly 50+ pounds less. The "movies" are TV movies, so only 90 minutes and only one seems to have any actual location shooting, so they're more like a first season of two-parters. They're not really essential to the show other than to see that Noah Wyle can actually play the character in a non-annoying way.

Con Man is way better than I expected. The premise is obvious, it's Curb more or less but with two guys from Firefly. And while it totally is this it's funnier than I expected, it's got some good and dumb jokes. I got more interested in Nathan Fillion's character than Alan Tudyk's, but he's largely absent except by phone in the first season. It probably helps that most of its episodes are less than 15 minutes so it doesn't stay beyond its welcome. Many of those episodes combine in sets of two or three, so there's really "half" the episodes by a normal show length. Also, it's got better CGI for the faux-show scenes than all of The Librarians and many other legit shows do.

[benji]

My favorite part of Goliath so far, and I hope they get more and more ridiculous with this, is how every other attractive woman Billy Bob Thorton's alcoholic disgraced lawyer (naturally named Billy) meets immediately wants to sleep with him at the rundown cheap motel he lives/works out of. And how his seduction technique mostly consists of saying something mostly incoherent about being a failure while staring into the near space, usually while drinking out of a bottle.

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

he just like me fr  

[benji]

 

[Potato]

Almost through season 1 of The White Lotus. 

Man I hope the payoff is worth it because the buildup has been sweet.

[Snoopy]

1st season was the best one. Mostly because of Murray Bartlett's outstanding Basil Fawlty impression

[Alpacx]

Almost through season 1 of The White Lotus. 

Man I hope the payoff is worth it because the buildup has been sweet.

Loved all three seasons of that.

First season was the funniest by far but my fave was the 2nd. Aubrey Plaza  


Season 3 has the best scene of the series.

[benji]

Goliath was pretty good. The main thing I learned is that imdb's reviews are as bad as Goodreads and I swear people are watching a completely different show and inventing things that weren't in the material. One review from the final season invented a sexual abuse plotline off of an uncle giving a crying niece candy, a well known trait of solely pedophiles. Most of the reviews had constant bitching about nothing making sense even as it all made sense, the series just only revealed things shortly before the investigating characters uncovered it. The funniest part is lots of these people wished it would return to the first season when it did the same exact thing. And then they complained about the latter seasons being less realistic or whatever when the first season was completely absurd and had the dumbest ending of any of the seasons. Where I would agree is that the later seasons are less about lawyering and Billy Bob Thornton becomes more of a private investigator who happens to be a lawyer, based on the final season this seems to be what Thornton may have actually wanted the series to be. Also the reviews had a bunch of whining about what were the show doing references to much more famous media because the reviewers didn't understand they were homages.

My main complaint with the show would be it spends some time depicting useless information so certain actors can do a bunch of ACTING, it only piqued my interest in the third season when it, perhaps unintentionally, suggested something truly sinister about one of the villains but it never followed up on it or tried any kind of explanation. I think it's real intent was to demonstrate why the other villain is in control of their operation but for me it made him almost sympathetic because it hinted that he's dealing with a complete psychopath rather than someone with mere problems.

Patriot is pretty awesome. I'm even favorable to it ending where it does versus had it gotten another season and felt it had to resolve more things. People who couldn't follow Goliath would definitely be lost with this. It maybe gets a little too self-wankery with some of the scenes but enough were great that I'll allow it. The framing of even the bad ones are usually incredible. It's a shame nobody will ever watch this because I'd like more people to rip off some of the action scenes instead of continuing the Bourne shit into a third decade. The second season shows a bunch of hogs btw.

Spoiler: and this is one of the wildest scenes I've ever seen in a show  (click to show)(click to hide)

Another good one:

[Polident]

Invincible is a strange watch if you’ve read the comics. It’s largely accurate and following the same beats. But every change is explicitly apologizing for the problematic aspects of a comic from the before times. And it’s always jarring when it snaps back to the faithful parts.

[Snoopy]

Re-watching Game Of Thrones. I think I've spotted when the rot started to set in. It's at the end of season 3 when Daenerys "captures" her 2nd city. It took almost an entire season for her to become Khalessi. Then almost an entire season before she freed the Unsullied and got her army. So there was a lot of build up to those moments. Meanwhile capturing the city took 2 episodes. She rolled up to the gates. Had a bit of an argument with some random dude. Her dad and new boyfriend have a 30 second fight with some guards. City captured. Girl boss status achieved.

[benji]

Damages is kind of strange in that the central plot of the series makes no sense and is never explained. I also have no clue why people think Glenn Close is acting well and displaying "raw intensity" when it looks like she's going through the motions in every scene. Maybe it's the fifteen times she throws a glass against the wall that gets jaws dropping. Another series with awful music that's too loud to let you know what emotions you should be feeling. The flash forward (and later flashback lmao) stuff is just stupid, I'd argue the series would be more suspenseful without it. Especially because none of the flashforwards ever have any relevance to the season plot until the final episode, so it's mostly about setting up red herrings every other episode that go nowhere. Ted Danson's character is really more interesting than any of the main ones, and they sort of realize this before having to write him out. They also have to suddenly write out Timothy Olyphant because he became Raylan.

The show got cancelled and then picked up by a different channel so they cut down the episode order and replace all the side characters with cheaper ones. I think this actually somewhat improves the show, even though the season plots are worse because it gives the show way more focus. The first three seasons are like stretching eight episodes of plot to 13, whereas the last two are like stretching seven episodes to 10.

Jack of All Trades is simply amazing. It's from the people who made Hercules/Xena/Cleopatra 2525 except it's explicitly a comedy, only half an hour and Bruce Campbell is way better than Sorbo or whoever at actually playing such material. All the historical stuff in the series is clearly deliberately wrong (not that people on imdb realize this) with characters showing up decades after they were dead in the real world, people who would have been very old being young and vice versa, etc. Almost all the historical characters are based off of like a one sentence summary of them and nothing else, Ben Franklin talks about kites for example. Napoleon is played by Verne Troyer so he can be even shorter. Marquis de Sade has a BDSM resort island. The characters make references to commercials/shows and say slogans/slang from the 20th century. The technology is completely nonsense for 1801, the one character builds a submarine in a secret lab, etc. It's all just wonderfully stupid.

It's on Roku and there's only like 20 total episodes: https://therokuchannel.roku.com/details/74f33508a61555a3a59316c757173761/jack-of-all-trades
It can look like pixelated crap though because it seems to have been clearly ripped off an early 2000s DVD release. Woke Hollywood would rather waste time remastering the same woke films over and over again instead of giving Jack of All Trades an 8K release smh.