I Saw This!! What I Have Been Watching: 2019 Edition: Pt C

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Kent(!) or Toasty attempt to write about a bunch of stuff they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. But we can't not write cuz that would be bad, very bad.  Smells bad, bad.

What I Have Been (or Am) Watching is the admitted state of me spending too much time in front of the TV. And despite what I said above, I have been avoiding telling you about what I have been watching. But let's try with what's on right now, and stepping backwards in time until I get entirely lost. The bad smell should help me find my way back.

Pt A is here. Pt B is here.

Another Life and Stranger Things S3 and iZombie S5.

Binge watching is for those shows you just cannot get enough of, right? Those shows that are so good you chow down on them like a bag of your favourite carbohydrates

"Just one more..."

I don't actually generally binge; I pace out over a few nights at the least, sometimes up to a week if I want to savour. But Another Life had me pretty much racing from episode to episode until we hit the end. Was it that good? Oh good gawds no!! It was so terrible I was just racing from episode to episode to see what they would do next and whether they would start making something coherent from the mess.

Hint: They never do.

Take all the current space shows on Netflix. Add in all the popular space movies from the past fifteen years. Notice that The CW has a lot of shows with young beautiful people, and they do pretty well. Grab a figurehead of current scifi TV, Katee Sackhoff and give her the lead. Now grab your creative blender and pulse on HIGH. Alas, your blender sucks and chokes halfway through giving you a pulpy, runny mess that looks bad and smells worse. But the mixture has some booze in it so might as well finish. That metaphor makes about as much sense as this series.

Alien Spaceship lands in BC, cuz all current scifi is in BC. Its big and crystally and scary, so rather than focus on studying it, the world is going to sink a ton of cash (well, into the spaceship but not the hiring process) and send a spaceship to the origin planet, far far far away. Cuz that THAT'S how you investigate something happening right here on the planet Earth.

Neko (Sackhoff) is the captain but her second in command was passed over and is all cranky about it. Also, she did something in her past that got her crew killed, or something. We never really find out, despite there pretty much being an entire episode dedicated to it. Off into space they go with all their baggage and ineptitude and inexperience and emotional immaturity. We get Alien ripoffs and dream torture and randy sex and bugs and accidents with the equipment (fixed by unplugging hoses), lethal doses of melty radiation, an AI with Pinocchio syndrome, people constantly screaming at each other, faulty sleep chambers, mutinies, creatures exploding from bodies, etc etc ad infinitum. It just goes on and on jumping from one trope to the next at a break-neck pace, which is why I couldn't stop watching. WHAT WILL THEY DO NEXT !?! I won't even bother mentioning the Arrival back on Earth bit.

And we never actually find out why it's called Another Life.

Meanwhile, Stranger Things S3 comes along and blows all my expectations out of the water. After a milquetoast second season, which I liked better in re-watching (we didn't remember ANYTHING about it), this season was just spectacular. Not as ground-breaking as S1 but just as enthralling and even more dosed with character building and age appropriate genre fun.

I liked that this season let the characters grow up, including Lucas's fucking annoying little sister and even Will, still in recovery mode from season 1. Recovery. You would think there would be more trauma amongst the kids. They fought fucking monsters, afterall. But kids are resilient and they have hormones and kissing behind mostly closed doors to focus on.

This show is always about visiting the tropes and plot touch points of 80s (and peripherally late 70s, early 90s) related pop culture. So, this season we get some bodysnatching, focus on a mall, Russian bad guys, more dark experiments and gorey elements of horror. The Mind Flayer from last season had an aspect left behind when Eleven closed the rift. It wants revenge and it wants Will. Meanwhile Russians have a secret base underneath the town where they try to recreate the experiments that brought low Hawkins Power & Light (side note: I think it should have been Hawkins Power & Water considering the prevalence of energy vs water in the series). This plot allows Steve and his new co-worker (brief love interest) to shine in a side story that collides in a Boss Battle at The Mall. Some stories tie up, some open up and there is more tragedy since Season 1. All in all, I just like the way this season came together, even if they did somewhat overdose on the pop culture notes.

And then iZombie came to an end in a bittersweet, not entirely fulfilling but still incredibly enjoyable series end. Genre TV always has issues with coming to an end. Either they spin out for far too long and have to conclude with a bang or they are cut off far too soon and we are left hanging. I think I like that they chose to come to an end before they ran out of the fuel that made the show so charming.

In case you don't watch or recall, iZombie is based loosely on a comic by Mike Allred but has very little to do with that story beyond a white haired girl zombie as the main character. In this version of the walking dead, the virus / infection / chemical alterant effects Liv More (heh) while she is at a yacht party but she is able to hide the change by dumping her family & fiance (mega alpha Major Lillywhite) and going all goth, pale skin and white hair and mopey hide at home. She works at the morgue with ultra trendy nerd Ravi Chakrabarti which gives her easy access to her one food -- brains ! And with the ingestion of brains comes flashbacks of the deceased's life, which lends to Crime Solving with Detective Clive Babineaux.

The series expands from the Crime of the Week into an epic story about the emergence of Seattle's zombie minority, eventually culminating in the knowledge of the zombie "species" being released to the world. Seattle is walled off, the government wants to nuke them into oblivion and the peace is kept tentatively by a corporation called Fillmore Graves (groan) made up entirely of zombies.

Rob Thomas previously built his fame from Veronica Mars which we are currently re-watching. Condensed single episodes with adorable characters and a mix of ensemble quirky cast members is his forte so we were on board even if not for my fondness for brain eaters.

As the series comes to an end Major (now head of Fillmore Graves) is doing his best to hold the peace against extremist humans and extremist zombies. Liv's best friend, and Ravi's main squeeze, is deposed as mayor. Main Bad Guy Blaine is back along with his sidekick Don E, easily one of the best characters in the show. A lot of plot threads from previous seasons are artfully visited and tied up. Clive had a baby and had her smuggled out of Seattle. Major is dealing with coup d'etat and Blaine and Don E are discovering exactly how much they are not best buds. I love that we cannot deny that Don E is a bad guy but really just end up rooting for the guy. After seasons of wondering whether Blaine was actually trying to redeem himself he once again proves himself a complete, evil ass. But a charming, sexy ass. Ravi gets to be the Good Guy who gets the Girl. Liv continually deals with rock & a hard place situations but comes out on the moral high ground. Nothing really extremely revealing happens here but even after discovering a cure for being a zombie (which is weird unto itself -- the body is dead; how can you CURE it ?) the metaphor for being Not Normal is accepted and the zombies we have come to love stay as zombies and live happily ever after.