Distraction: What I Am Watching (Or At Least Attempting To) Pt. B - Binged!

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. Not that you care. But at least I am not telling you about my D&D character. The theme almost always comes in batches.

Pt. A is here.

Binged !!

P.S. Does that title read as "Bing-ed" to you too?

I generally do not binge -- TV shows that is; chips and cookies, yes. I like to spread it out, give myself some time to savour and not just jump from episode to episode. And to be quite frank, very little captures my attention enough that I just want the next and next and next until they are done. And yet sometimes something comes along that does hold my gaze, not always in a good way, but enough that, yeah, let's do another. And before I know, it's the end of the weekend and we are done with that season.

Upload, 2020, Amazon

Upload caught my attention on the idea of the trope of exploring a digital afterlife with micro-payments. Yup, pretty low bar, but I thought the joke worked ("It's not even real food !!") and I wanted to see what else they did with the premise.

Nathan (Robbie Amell, Arq), doesn't quite survive a car accident and is offered (Real) Death or Upload. His vacuous, but wealthy, fiance chooses for him, as she cannot imagine being without him. The death bed scene is rather odd, as he doesn't seem that injured but everyone is convincing him he hasn't long, so she Makes the Choice and ziiiiiiiip, his head is digitized, which comes with the bonus trauma of being disintegrated.

This 20 Minutes Into the Future world is of the classic opinion that the world is so inundated with social media, so The Future will just be turned up to 11. Why does scifi no longer explore "what can happen next" but is more interested in what we have now will be presented down the road. For the sake of comedy, gimicky things are always worth a chuckle, like rating people IRL, dating apps, delivery drones zipping around like nouveau mosquitos.

At its heart this show is a romcom, a little shaky on where it really wants to go, but close enough to its centre to carry through to the end. I was a little annoyed that they seemed to dump some plot points they were initially setting up (GF evil or not?) for a more milquetoast bad guy version, but really, in the long run, I didn't care as the "why did he die" plot was secondary to the romance between him and his handler Nora (Andy Allo, Chicago Fire). And along with the lovely romance between lovely people, they also had enough exploration of the world and its foibles (e.g. the different tiers of paid "worlds" the Uploaded dead lived in, the lower end being B&W with only ratty sweatshirts to wear) to keep my attention.

Dorohedoro, 2020, Netflix

My interest in anime has diminished over the years. Yeah yeah, what hasn't? Half of this blog is me going on about how I am not doing _____ as much as used to or as much as I want to. But at least with anime, I realized that the effort it takes to find a series that is going to keep my interest and not out-weigh that with the annoying tropes inherent to anime is so great, I stopped really bothering. Oh, there are plenty of seinen style anime out there (the genre I found myself mostly gravitating towards), plenty of giant robots and post-apocalypse scifi. But the amount of big-boobs defying gravity, gratuitous panty shots or inappropriately sexualized adolescents sours my taste for the style. It takes a lot of creativity to see me beyond the standards stuff.

Dorohedoro had one primary thing going for it that immediately attracted me -- a lizard-headed protagonist addicted to gyoza (japanese style fried dumplings), who doesn't remember why he has a lizard head. Gyoza, not lizard heads. It's set in a seemingly post-apocalyptic city called The Hole which is plagued by magic-users who are attacking the residents with their smoke-like magic for unknown experimental reasons. The magic-users are from their own realm called The Sorceror's World (I know, original!) which is accessed through magic doors. The former is a massive city falling apart, the latter is a virtual paradise, both entirely urban. No explanations are supplied.

Unknown is the immediate nature of this show, and it just keeps on jumping from one weird concept to the next, which honestly, was the reason I kept with it. Its humourous, violent and doesn't take itself at all seriously. And it has Gyoza. We are trying to understand how and why Caiman got his lizard head, and who he was before he got that head. Also, why when he puts people's heads into his mouth, do they see the image of someone else down his gullet? He wants to know as much as we do. So, Caiman and friends get mixed up investigating this mystery and we get giant walking/talking cockroaches, a villain whose magic causes mushrooms to emerge uncontrollably from everyone and everything, Caiman's original head on its own mission, meat pies food trucks generated by magic, and more gyoza. I would hearten to say this was like Twin Peaks for anime fans, but only in so much as there is so much weirdness and so little reason.

Space Force, 2020, Netflix

So, despite the mockery, the Space Force was a thing before Trump got his Cheeto coloured mitts on it. A division of the Air Force, it was tasked with the protection of the US and its interests when it comes to SPACE (yelled in a cartoon like voice) !! Yeah, its a real thing which is easily mocked and that mockery is the premise of the show.

General Naird (Steve Carrell Despicable Me) is given Space Force instead of the promotion he was expecting, but being a good soldier, he does his best with it, and tries to come up with a way he can raise its impact as a military force, without pissing off the head of research (John Malkovich, RED) too much. Along side his job, he has to deal with moving his teenage daughter to a Top Secret Base in the middle of nowhere, and the fact his wife (Lisa Kudrow, Easy A) is in jail, for a crime that we never learn about. Naird is the underdog in a Frat Boy cadre of generals who want nothing more than to watch him fall, who loves his family dearly and really wants to do right by his mandate.

The problem is that the show doesn't seem to know whether it wants Naird to be a likeable buffoon or a naive man dealing with a difficult situation. The farcical nature of putting the military in Space is exaggerated by the fact that nobody seems to know what the fuck they are doing.  Well, nobody but Malkovich but who is entirely bent out of shape that his original research mandate has been supplanted by the MAGA mindset. Amusingly enough, despite having constant issues with each episode we wanted to see where it was going, and Carrell was just so much fun, we had to see it through to the end. And Malkovich was just fucking brilliant.