I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our [retired?] 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.
What I Have Been (or Am) Watching is the admitted state of me (usually Toast, but Kent this time) spending too much time in front of the TV and not writing about it. Bad Kent! Bad! But it's in part because Kent is tired and busy can't review everything.
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Murderbot Season 1 - 2025, AppleTV (10/10 episodes watched)
created by Paul and Chris Weitz
We went most of the year without AppleTV this year and so Murderbot sat on an idle list of *maybe* titles titles to watch.
A friend of mine was very, very highly anticipating Murderbot's debut on AppleTV. She had read the book(s?) and absolutely loved them. I didn't have the heart then to tell her that loving a book is all but guaranteed to lead do disappointment with the adaptation. Sure enough, after it started airing (???what do we call it when a show is released week to week on a streaming service...it's not going over airwaves anymore...) I didn't hear anything more from her about it.
It was a show that certainly in my regular TV reviewing circle of reading didn't come up a heck of a lot, so my excitement for it was low... also I knew nothing about it, and based on title alone I conjured up all sorts of '90's Image Comics-style "extreme" sci-fi for manchildren ideas of what it could be about. I was not excited in the least.
When we finally reacquired AppleTV, I added Murderbot to my "to watch" list, but there were other shows (The Studio, Slow Horses, Down Cemetary Road, Stick, Platonic) that I intended to watch first... and then I noticed that Murderbot was not a drama, but a sci-fi comedy, with only half hour episodes, and suddenly it shot to the top of my list. It was like my expectations of having wade through 10 hours of meathead sci-fi suddenly came at a limited-time-only discount of 4 1/2 hours of mid-budget science fiction comedy. I was all in on a binge.
The show is set in a distant future in a galaxy where the government is primarily run by mega-corporations (if it were licensed by Disney/Fox they could have set this in the Weyland-Yutani of the Alien universe). An independent socialist commune has petitioned the people in charge to do research work on a remote planet, and in being granted access, they've been given a Security Unit (SecUnit) to protect them against their objections (these future hippies see SecUnits as a form of slavery). What they don't know is their SecUnit has overridden its security protocols and has achieved full sentience and named itself Murderbot (not because it has murdered so many, but it just kind of fantasizes about it).
Murderbot is our point of view character in the series. Played by Alexander Skarsgård, Murderbot is our narrator in this real. He is often narrating directly to the audience, and sometimes we as the audience are just privy to his inner thoughts. Murderbot is familiar enough with the nature of humans to know to disguise his sentience from them, so he plays the role of SecUnit to his new charges, but with spite and insolence in his fluid-pumping veins. He would rather just be watching his favourite sci-fi soap opera (which is what he's often doing when he's supposed to be on task). He's always spying on what they're up to and he's, well, disgusted by every ounce of them.
And yet he can't help but protect them as danger arises (for if he doesn't, he's bound to be seen as defective and turned to scrap). In his efforts to serve this absurd group of characters he invariably performs too far afield from the norms of his standard functions, and they pick up on it. But instead of finding vicious humans ready to turn on him, he finds a group of people mostly willing to accept him as one of them. Except he's not one of them, and he doesn't particularly desire to be one of them. He just desires to be free, to be himself, to do as he pleases in the confines of the society he exists in.
Murderbot is quite a funny show, largely centred around Murderbot's distaste for the people he's with, but also the absurdity of the people he's with (which includes a newly formed throuple that is never not awkward, and the senior member of the crew who treats Murderbot kindly even before he's revealed as a sentient). But Murderbot's greatest strength is in its representation of neurodivergence. Murderbot is almost entirely autism-coded (outside of the origins of and physiology as a SecUnit of course), and the level of which his autism is explored, how he engaged and disengages with others, how he can't make eye contact and disassociates when conversations get boring, and how he masks himself...presenting in a way that is expected of him rather than how he actually desires to be. I can't recall ever seeing an autistic character presented with this level of detail and care, certainly not as the protagonist of a series, not without making their autism a superpower, anyway. Here, Murderbot's neurodivergence is in no way a superpower, despite Murderbot being superpowerful.
David Dastmalchian's member of the crew has cybernetic enhancements, and he clashes with Murderbot a lot. His character is also spectrum-coded, and it's the genius of the story (not sure if it's something the Weitz brothers have crafted or if it is in the source material) but it really shows that being on the spectrum is not the same for everyone. There are varying ways that neurodivergence presents itself in this series, and it's amazing how adeptly it presents it in the form of a sci-fi comedy. I definitely was not expecting that.
I was talking with my friend again recently about the show, the one who had anticipated its debut. She found it disappointing, and relayed how fan reaction to the show was pretty muted because it wasn't like the book exactly (which I'm told is fully first person narrative). But she also hadn't picked up on the autism coding of the character, and that really made me wonder whether that was in the source material, and how many people just didn't pick up on that. To me it's the center of the show, the story is about a neurodivergent character being able to come out, to stop masking, to be who they are and find acceptance and life outside of expectations. Perhaps my being a member of a neurodivergent household has me hyperaware of this aspect but it's something the show should be lauded for.
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Stranger Things 5 - 2025, Netflix (7/8 episodes watched)
created by the Duffer Brother
ST 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
I was tremendously excited for the drop of each preceding series on Netflix, anticipating the start of a binge watch day and date of its release. Even as series four came under criticism for bloated, overlong episodes, I found myself mostly entertained, mostly excited, mostly happy to be within the realm of Stranger Things again.
This time has felt very, very different. After the end of series four I felt mostly satiated, even as there were cliffhangers and dangling threads, it was the first time I felt done and not in immediate want of more (perhaps it was the bloated runtimes, it was too big of a meal?). Rather than set an alarm for the drop of series five, I let the show just linger in my Netflix queue. The streamer would loudly proclaim to me every time I would open it up that STRANGER THINGS 5 IS HERE! Yeah Netflix, I know... I'll get to it.
Seriously, where's the apathy coming from? This I don't know.
But upon entering the world of Hawkins and the Upside Down again, I was hoping to be whisked away like I had been four times before, just fully transported into an 80's-inspired horror-scifi-fantasy realm, but I wasn't, at least not to the same effect.
When that still exceptional open theme kicks in and the "camera" tracks around the font of the Stranger Things logo, I remember the tingling sensation I got the first time I saw it, I remember the goosebumps and arm hairs standing on end, I remember how exhilarated I was by it. I remember it, but I don't feel it anymore.
We get into the world of Hawkins and I see Mike and Will and Lucas and Dustin and Eleven and Max and... these children are now adults. They've aged 10 years since we first saw them, and yet in story time, they've aged maybe 4 or 5 years, and there's a huge discrepancy there, huge hurdles to get over in one's mind. Not to mention the fact that we've seen some of these young performers now expand well beyond their roles in this series, and they're not quite the same kids that we'd last left. But is just it that they have physically grown, or do they not actually feel like high school seniors? Do they now seem like adults play acting as kids? Is it a Pen15 situation?
Beyond that, we're back to the big bad Vecna being the big bad once again. Our heroes defeated him already and now they have to do it again? I'm not a big D&D player, so I don't know how often one faces the same main adversary back-to-back, but it doesn't quite seem like an escalation. Vecna's plan is now world-ending, so I guess the stakes have been raised. We actually do get an escalation, but it's only in the finale that the escalation is learned by our heroes and we see the heart of the matter. It's way too late a reveal, and should have been presented in the first or second episode of the season.
If the plot is maybe not holding up its end of the bargain, the character work has stepped up to become the centerpiece of the show this season. There's tensions and unions within friendships and relationship, there's traumas to unpack and revelations to make, and these are the best moments in the series. Will Byers, who has experienced so much trauma, and felt very much like the fifth wheel of the series is given the spotlight this season, and his coming out moment, while grinding the momentum of the plot to a halt, is really a beautiful thing, as is Robin gay-mentoring him. Likewise Dustin and Steve persist at being the best duo in the show for years, acting like a bickering married couple who eventually find their love for each other again. And then there's Nancy and Jonathan who... well, lets just say the show finally gets that relationship right by the end.
Stranger Things has, each season, seen fit to expand its cast and to uplift members of its cast who maybe haven't had the time to shine before. This season digs into to the youngest member of the Wheeler clan, Nancy and Mike's younger sister Holly, and her classmates (especially Dipshit/Delightful Derek), and even giving mother Wheeler Karen some big moments. This season highlights what an ensemble the show has become, and there are whole scenes with a dozen or more cast members, and frankly that's pretty heartwarming occasion seeing all these people in a room together. The show remembers the big players and the small players, and, really, it seems the only character it hasn't done justice to is Barb... unless Barb is the deus ex machina of the final episode...[spoiler...she's not].
When I watch Stranger Things now, I feel a sense of comfort being there, but I'm not excited by it like I once was. Series five looks big and epic and expensive (Frank Darabont directing a lot of the season bringing his extensive Stephen King adaptation experience to it) and it certainly holds my interest plus it had a couple surprises up its sleeve, but watching it felt a lot like going through the motions. A lot of scenes felt overlong for the message they were trying to get across, and often the messages are repeated too many times (I exclaimed out loud "we get it" at least twice this season). As I've been waiting between mini-drops for the next episodes, I've kind of forgotten what's happened in the preceding.
If Stranger Things had run its course over the span of five or six years instead of nine or ten, it would feel very different than it does now. With the permission of time that Netflix has granted their cash cow, series four and five have gotten indulgent, glossy and it's lost the scrappy feel it had when it started (see also franchise bloat like the Mission:Impossible or Fast & Furious series). Had it plowed through like old style TV would have 2 decades ago, it would be an epic five seasons of 40-minute episodes that would be highly enticing rewatching. As it stands, after finishing the final episode, I have no immediate plans to return.
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Only Murders in the Building Season 5 (10/10 episodes watched)
created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman
It is a series that really didn't need to exist beyond its first season, and the more it goes on, the more it exists anything approximating reality, instead existing within its own pocket dimension. The joke is now, each season, somehow death comes to the Arconia, that gorgeous city block of condos that feels like its own world within New York City.
The part of the conceit of the show that has never worked continues to burden the show, with Mabel, Charles and Oliver having a true crime podcast that the show runners clearly have little to no experience with and/or don't care about the characters having a believable show. I mean, the trio effectively interfere with police investigations and illegally mess with crime scenes and in theory admit to it on their show. They should have been fined and/or arrested and/or shut down years ago (of course, the best recurring character on the show is their exasperated detective acquaintance Detective Williams played by Da'Vine Joy Randolph who seems to shield them from any scrutiny beyond her own).
This season the crew investigate the murder of their beloved concierge Lester, only to discover that this season's big guest stars (Renee Zellweger, Christoph Waltz, and Logan Lerman), a trio of billionaires, are involved somehow, and then the other guest stars (Bobby Cannavale, Tea Leone, and Dianne Wiest) are perhaps involved in some sort of mafioso and a hidden casino.
The formulae remains the same, each episode the trio try to pin the deed on someone and we get their story so as to eliminate them as a suspect, wash and repeat. In the background this season is Oliver's potential moving away to be with new bride Loretta (Meryl Streep) and the billionaires buying out the building and evacuating them all. Frankly, unlike Stranger Things the character-focussed aspects of the show feel shoehorned in quite frequently and conflict between them never feels natural. It's at its best when it has a good, twisty mystery, big guest stars, and Steve Martin and Martin Short get to be goofballs and Selena Gomez gets to be sarcastic. This season's highlight was Tea Leoni's quintet of meathead sons and how they seem to operate as a single disfunctional, dimwitted unit.
It's never been a particularly sharp series, and it just gets more blunted with each season. This season's jabs at billionaires (in the impending eat the rich culture war) are total weak lil love taps, plus the plight the characters face in this season seems like problems of the privileged, and the introduction of a robot doorman never fully manifested into any meaningful contemplation of AI replacing blue collar workers, not much original comedy. The mystery of the season was all over the place, and frankly not all that engrossing, and yet, all that said, it's hard not to be charmed by all the talent and charisma on screen. I'll be back for season six.
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Some other things I watched late last year but didn't complete or don't have a whole heck of a lot to say about:
Eyes of Wakanda (Disney+, 3/4 episodes watched) is meant to expand upon the world of Wakanda from the two Black Panther movies. Each episode is set in a different time period, and there's no connective tissues between them. They're not bad, per se, but their 20-ish minute run times give them little opportunity to meaningfully develop characters, relationships, and a story necessitating a big action setpieces. The big "wow" of this all for the Marvel nerds is the third episode which brings in Iron Fist lore without needing any familiarity with the abysmal Netflix series. A hearty "it's fine, but forgettable".
Though completely unaffiliated, It's Florida, Man (Season 1 - HBO, 6/6 episodes watched) seems to be the heir apparent to the hilariously consumable Drunk History, but instead of drunk comedians trying to recount historical events which are simultaneously re-enacted by actors and comedians, here it's ripped-from-the-Florida-headlines stories, told by the people involved, re-enacted by actors and comedians. It's not quite as funny as Drunk History but it's far more absurd. It's a rubbernecker of a TV show, one that at once tries to sympathize with the participants telling their stories, but also can't help but wildly exaggerate (sometimes not so wildly) their personas for comedic effect that sometimes can feel a touch mean spirited. Because of Florida's Sunshine Laws, criminal arrests are made a matter of public record (unlike most places) and this is the reason why "Florida Man" stories are so prevalent. A show like this seems inevitable...it's a comedy show, highlighting the absurd stories of the state, but also, like, fits into true crime. It's frivolous and fun, with sometimes a weird bit of insight and/or humanizing of the weirdos it spotlights.
I read a few of the early Murderbot novellas and with my limited exposure, I would say less coded as autism and more just an exploration of AI, which of course I love. I think I mentioned this in person, but the thing that surprised me the most about the series was that it was a straight-up comedy -- the books are not. Any humour in the books comes from how ludicrous human life can be, especially when viewed through the eyes of an artificial lifeform.
ReplyDeleteWe tuned out with Stranger Things in S3 n 4, eventually getting around to them and only somewhat interested. But, maybe because of knowledge it was ending, I was keen on the new season, and to be honest, really enjoyed it. If anything, I was disappointed they pivoted from supernatural to scifi as sources of ... everything, but still liked how it was all summed up.