I Saw This!! What I Have Been Watching: A Long Look Back: B (Or Not Two Bees)

 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.  2020 bad.

What I Have Been (or Am) Watching is the admitted state of me spending too much time in front of the TV. But what else was 2020, and 2020-Extended (2021 on the calendar) about? Well, beyond baking bread and not cutting hair. Didn't do much on the former, and only one cut in one year, on the latter.

A is here.

Speaking of Nathan Fillion, I needed something familiar and satisfying as 2020 wound down and was showing no real sign of changing. Thus, Castle.

It is very odd to look back on a series and quickly watch (a couple of episodes a week) an actor slip into his comfort zone, and put on weight, after watching him so entirely slimmed down in his current role. As people age, they either let themselves evolve into a softer version of themselves, or they take the greying bull by the horns and change it. 

*looks down*  Go away bull.

The show still holds me, light and as much about the camaraderie between the mains as about the Murder of the Week. Nathan's goofiness still makes me chuckle, especially considering how the series ended with such tension between Stana Katic and Nathan Fillion, in that sometimes our heroes fall (go Google Joss Whedon these days) but sometimes their older body of work remains. If anything, that Fillion still retains his relationships with many of the actors from this show, says volume.

A year or so later, I am still slowly moving through the show, almost to the later seasons where I personally think it devolved into tension (between main characters, not actors) creating conspiracy plots, that lost me. I know a popular format show has to find new ways to do things, to keep interest, but I am one of those that enjoys the formula for what it is.

On a similar note, I started rewatching iZombie (for the 3rd time?) purely because of this tweet from star Rahul Kohli. There is so much joy in that dance training montage. And despite being a show about a weekly murder, a woman (as well as increasingly more characters) who is mostly dead, the show was pretty light hearted. Most of the characters have a great sense of comic timing, but especially Ravi, the guy who runs the morgue, Liv Moore's boss and the character with the most heart. By this rewatch, we mainly watch it for him. OK, also for Clive the detective (Malcom Goodwin, Breakout Kings), Major (Robert Buckley, The Christmas House) and the delightfully charismatic bastard Bad Guy, Blaine (David Anders, Once Upon a Time). OK, and maybe Peyton (Aly Michalka, Two & a Half Men) -- rawr. 

But strangely enough, not for Liv. Oh, Rose McIver does a great job as lead zombie, but for the most part, I don't like the character, not the way she treats her family and loved ones, not the choices she makes, and not the way she always gives into the brain she has eaten. Its the gimmick of the show, in that she eats brains to survive (supplied by the murder victims), she gets pseudo-memories from them, and pretends to be a psychic for Clive, using the "visions" to help him solve crime.

And, of course, plugged into every year are broken up rewatching of sun & sand & murder on Death in Paradise. This is your classic British murder-mystery of the week, but with one small difference -- it takes places entirely on the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Marie, an offshore British protectorate, but which also has a significant French population. The formula is that a British Detective Inspector is forced to stay on the island, due to odd circumstances, and ends up becoming the Chief Inspector there. Eventually, one way or another, one DI leaves making room for another to come from the UK and replace him.

First, the aspects of the show that irk me -- the bloody White Saviour aspect of it. They don't even try to pretend that there is someone competent enough on the island to become the next senior inspector, and always find some obtuse way to bring in another familiar British face to be the white man to an entirely black police force. The other trope is that his direct support is always of French origin, but has ties on the island. Marmy and I have been head-canon-ing a re-write for a new season in which we turn the tables on the tropes letting a local become the lead detective, supported by a local white guy who has made it into the force.

But beyond the annoying tropes, I do love the formula. British formula procedurals are a bit American crime drama, a bit Agatha Christie, a bit Sherlock Holmes. But really what I love about the show is its location, the quaint little island that is westernized enough that everyone speaks English, Brits are everywhere and it would soothe my nervousness about unfamiliar locales. Also, the island pretty much matches location for location, to those that appeared in my recurring dreams from the later 2000s, in which I was portrayed as being a caretaker on some tropical island. I no longer have the dreams, but they did come with a grand sense of calm and escape I wish I could find now.

And finally, as expected, I just needed a dose of GREAT, and gravitated back to my finally very-good-quality downloads of Fringe.

OK, now I am really convinced that posts on this blog are disappearing. How can I have NOT written about Fringe before this?

Rest assured, despite having not written about this show before, it is easily one of the my most favourite things to watch. It is scifi, it is procedural investigation, and it is so fucking heart-felt, you can expect me to utter out loud, an audible, "Ahhh..." as I crinkle my eyes at some emotional scene I love. 

The premise simple to begin -- an collective task force is setup, some FBI, some Dept of Homeland Security, etc. along with a brilliant but insane scientist, being chaperoned by his estranged son, and they are asked to deal with events best described as Weird Science. Eventually the show outlines that the "fringe events" have a pattern, something they have been connecting the dots on for quite some time. But not until Walter Bishop leaves the asylum, escorted by his son Peter, does the fringe force begin seeing results. But it only leads to even more questions, and when answers finally DO appear, their world will never be the same.

So, beyond the weird science events, some mystical, some utterly horrific, the show is so fucking heart-felt. Emotionally damaged Walter Bishop is kept in check by a barely supportive son, while emotionally subdued Olivia Dunham leads the charge. And when they are in the field, Special Agent Astrid Farnsworth (or Astro, or Aspirin, or whatever permutation of her name Walter chooses that day) watches over Walter, and provides him ample assistance. The lead characters all end up being some of my most favourite fictional people of all time.

We are just ending up season 2, for about the fourth time, and the show has revealed an alternate reality, damaged by an incursion Walter did when Peter was a boy. This alternate reality is leading its own war against our world, and it was their own incursions, and the science they developed to lead the battles, that led to all the "soft spots" and episodes of spontaneous weird science happening in our own. As the show moves forward, it does lose some of its own continuity, but instead, expands into entirely new ones, that in later seasons are utterly mind blowing. Only Fringe and Person of Interest carry such reverence in my mind, as shows that made me think and feel as much simultaneously.