I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Kent(me) 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. Everything's bad bad.
What I Am/Have Been Watching is the admitted state of typically Toast, but in this case, Kent, spending too much time in front of the TV. But what else has the pandemic been about if not toobin? Sure, we got a few breaks from being confined at home, and might have actually gone outside (gasp!) and socialized with (double-gasp!) human beings (faint-dead-away) but we always ended up back on the sofa, flicker in hand, trying to find something to watch amidst the many streaming services pillaging our credit cards every month...and yeah, Kent still has cable.
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Like last time, since these are all subsequent seasons or spinoffs of things I've already watched/reviewed, I'm going to reread (and link to) my review(s) of previous seasons and see what, if anything, different I have to say about them in comparison.
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Stranger Things Season 4 pt.1 - Netflix
Season 1 | Season 3
I called Season 1 of Stranger Things a masterpiece, and it remains so. It's one of those first seasons that's basically so perfect, it was almost futile to continue on because it could only be downhill from there. Season 2 was certainly a drop, with a few detours along rocky roads along the way. Season three, for it's part, started climbing that hill, trying, but not quite making it back to the top. With season 4, three years later, it's Running Up That Hill, but with the realization it's not going to reach that perfect peak. Instead, it finding the closest plateau and just going to circle.
I've run this analogy into the ground, all for the sake of a tremendously on-point Kate Bush joke, but the truth is still there: Season 4 is not quite the equal of Season 1, but it's pretty damn fantastic, at least so far. There have been gripes and complaints bandied about regarding both the split Parts 1 & 2 of the season (a roughly 6 week gap between) and the length of the episodes this season (all running over an hour, most at 75 minutes or more), a lot of the complaints levied in advance of the show's airing. Frankly, the show, almost every episode, earns its runtime. The only episode I found was maybe a little drawn out was the 90-minute 7th episode where it perhaps teased too much rather than got on with things. As for the splitting of the season, I can only say it's likely to give everyone time to binge before all the shit starts going down, and it's a way for Netflix to keep subscribers from cancelling for two more months. I really think Netflix should have released these as weekly appointment episodes, really let the fans savour them. As much as we wanted to binge it all, we only really had time for one episode a night with some gapping between nights. It was kind of exciting and really gave us something specific to look forward to on the same level as the Marvel or Star Wars shows on Disney+.
As for the content of the season, it breaks the cast up into at least four, if not more, bands, and it really, really works. What Stranger Things has done quite amazingly well over its four seasons is cast well and then develop their characters. While the first season had an amazing cast, I imagine the show would feel pretty tired if it we were mostly just following Mike, Lucas, Will, Dustin and Eleven. Steve, Hopper, Joyce, Max, Robin all have become utterly great focal characters for the show, and this season, by separating Jonathan and Nancy, both of those characters have managed to come into their own in a much more natural way than what the show was trying to force feed before. But we also get this season a bigger spotlight for Brett Gelman's Murray, and wonderful newer additions in Jonathan's stoner friend Argyle (Eduardo Franco), dungeon master/anarchist Eddie (Joseph Quinn), and a pair of entertaining mock-Russians in Dmitri (Tom Wlaschiha) and Yuri (Nikola Djuricko). The show's even given Officer Reynolds more of a spotlight this season, having finally gotten around to realizing Search Party's John Reynolds hapless schtick is so much fun.
This season has hopper in a Siberian prison, with little hope of escape, it has some of the kids in Hawkins facing another incursion from the Upside Down - a very specific Freddie Kreuger-meets-Pinhead inspired nemesis this time - but having to sleuth out a mystery. Eleven is on a journey back to the labs to rediscover her powers but also learn some horrible truths, while some of the other kids are on a mission to rescue her. Plus there's a secret war going on between the government and the labs, and the Russians are still experimenting with the Upside Down, and the bad guy is seriously something else the kids just aren't prepared to face. And it's not all plot, it's really digging deep into these characters (the characters getting the shortest shrift, however are Matthew Modine and Paul Riser, neither one getting any real growth or revelations). By the end of the 90-minute 7th episode, it's set the dominoes up for a pretty spectacular display as they fall. The Duffers could muff it, but this season is so strong, I think they've got it.
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Atlanta Season 3 - FX
Season 1
I haven't written about Atlanta since early in the first season, way back in 2016. As long a break as we've had from Stranger Things, we've had an even longer break for Atlanta. In between, a lot has happened, both on the show, and in the world that the show is a reflection on.
Donald Glover has gone on from being the "wunderkind" multi-hyphenate that he was as the first season launched to being a true auteur but also one of America's finest cultural critics. He's been very concerned about the status of the Black community, and has a lot to say about it in an exceptionally contemplative fashion, both on a micro and macro scale.
Glover has also been really concerned with both celebrity and status, and it shows in Atlanta through both the character he plays, Earn, and Al, aka Paper Boi, Earn's cousin who he manages, and has taken him from local mixtape celeb to an international superstar. Earn has capitalized on Al's success, but he also is a big part of Al's success. But as Al's status rises so too does the potential for Earn to be overshadowed, or underappreciated. Al, tries to keep it real, but realizes that both his recognizability and his money no longer keep him at the street level from which he came. The situations he finds himself in are not those of the first season, the awkward encounters of being cash strapped and hungry, but of the upper eschelon that act pretty much as a warning to desiring celebrity.
Season 1 of Atlanta, although full of detours into specific moments. was still mostly a cohesive narrative. Season 2 really started to lean into the detours as a focus, with occasional episodes that are completely removed and just pull you aside on a mini-movie journey. Season 3 is mostly interested in detours, its interested in singular stories, rather than ongoing narrative, and its interesting in pushing boundaries of storytelling and the reality of its setting.
Many of Season 3's episodes are fully detached from its main cast, with nary a Glover, Brian Tyree Henry, Zazie Beetz or Lakeith Stanfield to be seen. The first episode of the season was a fable about a boy put into foster care only to become basically an indentured servant along with his foster siblings, and plot his escape. It's a commentary both on Black children (boys specifically) and Black family dynamics are misunderstood by the systems that supposed to support them. But it's also a ripped-from-the-headlines horror story, but with a pleasantly twisty ending, where the "troubled youth" gets to be the hero.
A couple episodes later, were taken into a alternate reality where reparations litigation becomes the norm, but as told as a supposed "horror story" from the perspective of the normal middle-aged white guy being pursued. But it's a dark comedy with a kind fantasy resolution where society kind of has finally embraced equality, at least in the limited sense of black-and-white. A few episodes still we get another stand-alone that, well, I'm still parsing out what it was trying to say. It involves a white family whose young child has been primarily raised by his Trinidadian nanny, as mostly told from the parent's point of view, the child definitely showing the influences of who raised him. And a couple episodes later a deep exploration of Blackness, from the perspective of a bi-racial teen who primarily identifies with white preppy culture, but then, when an offer of free college tuition for all black students, he gets judged on his blackness and suffers a crisis of identity. It comes to a head in a real gut-punch action-horror fashion.
So 4 of the 10 episodes do not feature the series main cast (all of whom are now superstars since even before Season 2 aired). What we do get is a spotlight episode for each character, with Al getting a really trippy insider tour of Amsterdam, Dairus learning that even his just-go-with-it attitude won't spare him from the disappointments of the world (like the co-opting of food culture) and the season ends with Van's really surreal new life in Paris through the eyes of a friend from back home that exposes the breakdown she's going through.
Glover has used Atlanta as a playground in the past, but here it's its most assured, and, despite not having a cohesive narrative to the season, its most focused. With each episode Glover knows what he wants to say, but never delivers his message in a conventional way. There's still a comedian in Glover, and this season is frequently outrageous and conceptually audacious. There's sort of a Black Mirror or Jordan Peele vibe throughout, playing with horrific concepts but with a bit of a wink and a bit of archness that doesn't cut the severity but relieves the tension.
I don't use brilliant easily, but Atlanta is brilliant, and most of these episodes have kept me thinking long after watching.
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Barry Season 3 - HBO
Season 1 & 2
Speaking of shows that haven't been around for a while, it's been 3 years since season 2 of Barry and I wasn't really sure I wanted to continue. When last I left Barry, I wasn't keen of the story of a bad man who's trying to be good but can't escape his nature, and is dragging other people down with him. Well, Season 3 starts up, and I've changed by tune. He's not dragging other people down with him...cynically, they were already down there, but are now in the position to reveal their wolve's teeth. Two episodes in, and I said "I don't really like any of these people and I'm not sure I care." But the season, if it has a purpose, it's to show all these characters that their behaviour, their actions, they have consequences, and in the world of Barry, those consequences are, well, unexpected, and ridiculously entertaining.
And then we get Episode 7, "Forgiving Jeff", which like Season 2: Episode 5 ("ronny/lily"), is one of the greatest action sequences ever on a television show. The build is only a small part of what makes the sequence so good, I think even as a standalone piece, it's pretty exceptional. It's not doing anything particularly flashy, but it's so well crafted, brilliantly shot, and full of wonderfully unexpected moments that make it unforgettable. Just like "ronny/lily" this one is going to live beyond whatever else the series is about. Hader, as a writer and director, really needs to get his hands on a big budget to make his own motion picture action/comedy. It might possibly be a huge success, but more likely would be a slow burn cult hit for years to come.
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Wellington Paranormal Season 4 - Crave
Seasons 1-3
I was not expecting another season of Wellington Paranormal but was tremendously excited when it turned up. It's another 6 episodes of incredibly entertaining paranormal Kiwi silliness.
This season we get a bird woman terrorizing the city (and a temporary love interest for Sarge), the WP take on small-town cults, Sarge getting possessed by an old white ghost, and some time-travel shenanigans resulting from a literal worm-hole.
The season's best episode, "The Coolening", involves a haunted 80's leather jacket that makes its wearer a tremendously confident and stereotypically 1980's cool person. Of course each of the main cast get a turn in the coat, but its power is addictive.
WP is such an of-the-week type comedy that there's very little in the way of character development or growth, but we do get a B-story that follows Parker - not a member of the Paranormal team - on his normal rounds, to find that he's a surprisingly capable supercop, but only has thoughts of being part of the Paranormal team. It's a great joke that gets increasingly funny as his situation (and apathy towards it) escalates.
While maybe not the sharpest comedy, it's such an easily digestible series, and immensely fun.
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A Black Lady Sketch Show Season 3 - HBO
Season 1 | Season 2
Another season of A Black Lady Sketch Show and another bit of casting shaking, mainly in Laci Mosley's departure. At this point it's evident that Robin Thede as creator and showrunner is the driving force of the series, but it needs the talents of its other cast members, and it seems that Thede has found her most stable cast with Ashley Nicole Black, Gabrielle Dennis, and Skye Townsend. These are talented comedic actors who craft fun and funny characters for every piece. There's comedy in specificity, and with ABLSS every sketch comes from a specific premise, and then plays that premise to sometimes ridiculous extremes, other times very subtle ones.
Like prior seasons the opening sequence is similar but not the same, each episode changing just a little from before, enough to make you pay attention or even keep the finger on the pause button to read the increasingly lengthy text that pops up on screen. Structurally ABLSS has its framing formulae, and each season plays with it to keep it fresh, intriguing and entertaining. Framing sequences are often a weak spot for sketch comedy series, just a basic device to introduce sketches, but here it's an ongoing narrative that give the performers, playing themselves, to show who they are as a comedic personality.
I've been learning about how Black women have been tremendously underserved, harmfully represented, tokenized and all manner of disrespected in comedy throughout history. In some respects A Black Lady Sketch Show needs to exist regardless of its quality. HBO has certainly put money behind it -- the sketches are all very well produced -- but it doesn't matter unless it delivers the funny, and it does at that. While I can easily say I'm not the target market for this show, and a lot of the show's humour frequently goes over my head as beyond my frame of reference (sometimes culturally, sometimes gender-ly, sometimes both) but even then the performances are where it stands out and it's open enough for anyone to come in.
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Human Resources Season 1 - Netflix
[Big Mouth Season 1 | Season 4]
Over 5 seasons the raunchy, heartfelt Netflix animated coming-of-age comedy Big Mouth introduced a whole other fantastical realm of creatures that influence our lives. Hormone Monsters, Shame Wizards, Love Bugs-turned-Hate Worms, and Depression Kitties each season an escalation of what came before, used as parable for the emotional development of teenagers as they develop through puberty. They are effective metaphors that took on a life of their own as the show's creators obviously really enjoyed playing in that realm, and the performers (including notables like Maya Rudolph, David Thewlis, and Thandiwe Newton) really chewed up their lines, and spit out gold.
I was dubious about a spin-off, as what works so well with Big Mouth is the balance of the human world with a smattering of this fantastical realm. I thought, maybe, that spending more time there would dilute its impact. I was most definitely wrong. Big Mouth is as potent as it is funny but it still is constrained by its "human" cast of characters and their being pre-teens. I mean, for as constrained as they are, they still get up to some huge flights of fancy...but I digress.
Human Resources allows the Big Mouth creators to move to a whole other level. I mean, yes, it could have just been a weird workplace sitcom, but it has bigger ambitions. Like Big Mouth it still has things to say amidst all its weirdness.
Like a perverted Monsters, Inc. crossed with a horny Inside Out, Human Resources really gets to play in the sandbox of human emotions by way of a reality of creatures who exist to manipulate said emotions. Our lead character is Love Bug Emmy (Aidy Bryant) who is completely out of her depth in her role having accidentally gotten her mentor (voiced by Pamela Adlon) fired and is now tasked with taking the lead with a complicated "client" Becca (Ali Wong) who is pregnant and maybe unhappy in her marriage. Across Emmy's journey is her own self doubt showing that despite the fact that these creatures are tailored to a specific emotion, they're not always inherently good at dealing with their emotions. It can get a bit trippy thinking to much about it, but the creatures within this sphere also have a bit of influence on each other.
Maurice, Connie, Rick, Lionel and every other creature seen in Big Mouth appear in the show, but Maurice and Connie, who are spotlight creatures in Big Mouth take supporting roles here so as not to overplay them. New creatures are introduced, Logic Rocks like Pete (Randall Park), Petra the Ambition Gremlin (Rosie Perez), Dante the Addiction Angel (Hugh Jackman), and Tito the Anxiety Mosquito (Maria Bamford). There's more and more in the background teasing an even richer world to explore, but they definitely do a thoroughly satisfying job in the first season of proving just how worthy this world is to exist in.
Getting away from the hormonal, primarily white middle-school kids of Big Mouth (and also the pseudo-autobiographical nature derived from creators Nick Kroll and Andrew Goldberg) allows Human Resources to branch out culturally to delve deeper into stories involving queer and non-binary tales as well as cultural stories and stories about adults who are still slaves to their emotions (as we all still kind of are). One story, a love story between a human and a love bug that has a lot to say about the tragedy of relationships that burn bright but are unhealthy long turn, is, as is Big Mouth's style, counter-punched by an incredibly silly story of Maruice's underground cock-fighting ring, and his little Rocky-esque champion. Thankfully they don't counter-punch the next episode which very specifically focuses on loss and grief and is an absolutely beautiful, affecting piece of television.
Much like Big Mouth, it feels like Human Resources is getting away with something, but I think unlike Big Mouth it's not trying as hard to. It strangely seems more focused than Big Mouth, and I guess more mature...there's a lot less talking genitalia at least. A worthy expansion.
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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1 - CTV Scifi
I loved Star Trek: Discovery's first season for daring to do something different with Star Trek but the fan reaction demanded a shift, and that came in Season 2 which introduced some of the new crew of the Enterprise - Captain Pike (Anson Mount), Number One (Rebecca Romijn), and Spock (Ethan Peck). Discovery, early in its second season really acted like it wanted to be old episodic Trek but it was still really stuck in building to something bigger. Mount and Peck, however, proved themselves capable of taking on the legacy roles and bringing something new without dishonouring the past. That they were to get their own spinoff was welcome news. But what would this new series be? This new age of Trek has been a challenging one, so would going back ten years before TOS really be wise, or welcome?
The answer is a resounding yes. Part-way into Strange New Worlds' first season and the sense is that they're finally doing Trek like Trek... episodically. Rather than building a big over-arching plot, they seem to instead just be threading in small character journies. Rather than propulsive binge television they're reverting to a-mission-a-week format that just...feels...right. It feels like proper Trek. Yes, it does take place before TOS, and the sets and effects and costumes and make-up are all shinier and much more impressive, but at its heart it's telling the same type of story, so it fits. Discovery, in telling a very different, darker, more character-driven story its first season, couldn't properly resolve its technological differences between itself and TOS, but here, with sympatico storytelling, it doesn't matter.
Casting hasn't been Trek's problem. Most of the cast of Discovery and Picard have been uniformly great, and the same can be said here. Obviously Mount, Peck and Romijn came pre-cast, but the rest of the crew are quickly revealing themselves as likeable new additions to the fan culture. There's once again some re-casting of old roles with new faces. Most immediately is Celia Rose Gooding as Uhura. She's got such big shoes to fill, but she gets the spotlight role of the second episode and nails it completely (one of my favourite Trek episodes in a very long time). Nurse Chapel is now played by Jess Bush, who, somehow, always has a little twinkle in her eye. She's sexy without being sexualized, and bisexual, which in the narrow reaches of representation in Star Trek still feels rather novel.
Helmsman Erica Ortegas has a certain pilot's swagger but without being unlikeably douchey. The new doctor, M'Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) has a wonderful bedside disposition so as to be immediately endearing, while the new security officer, La'an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) quickly surpasses the need to tie her into the Khan mythos. Bruce Horek is under piles of prostetics as Hemmer, the chief engineer, and resident curmudgeon. As a blind character (but with enhanced other senses) there's an opportunity for a certain other type of differently abled representation (beyond Geordi LaForge) but, as yet, I haven't seen it in this character without delving into the superpowered solution. There's no understanding or inference of how anything works differently on the ship for a blind person/alien.
It's a great looking show, and so far the episodes have been fun and stereotypical in the best way possible. I hope they don't try, at all, to introduce an over-arching story, they've kind of nailed it right out the gate. It doesn't make for essential watching, but it does make for delicious comfort watching.
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Pacific Rim: The Black Season 2 - Netflix
Season 1
Despite my aversion to Anime and my disappointment with PR: Uprising, I quite enjoyed season one of PR: The Black. It didn't necessarily explore the parts of the PR reality that I maybe wanted them to with Uprising but they did explore a part of the PR reality and that was enough to hook me back in. Plus, it wasn't really Anime. Sure the visual style of the show is tres Anime but the story was created and written by American writers (the showrunners are creators Greg Johnson and veteran Marvel comics and cartoon writer Craig Kyle) so its story sensibilites are far more Western.
Season two picks up where season one left off, with the motley band of orphaned youths making their way in their appropriated Jaeger to Sydney base, and encountering all the strange things The Black (this abandoned section of Australia) has to offer. They meet early on a Kaiju-wrangler (voiced by Rhys Darby) who seems to have tamed the great beasts, but anyone who has seen Grizzly Man should have an inkling about how this will turn out. There's also a coven of Kaiju-worshipping witches who seem to be at least partially inspired by the twin fairy priestesses from Mothra, except of a much more malevolent nature. They seem to, through their majicks, have developed the ability to influence Kaiju with their chanting, and seem completely fixated on Boy, the human-Kaiju hybrid as their central figure of worship, their savior.
I was worried with the second season, much as I was with the first, that it would be dragged down by spinning wheels plot and story. But, the second, much as with the first, doesn't ever get comfortable nor settle into anything remotely resembling a status quo. Whenever the story seems to be veering into a predictable story pattern, something unpredictable happens, yet it's always something that makes sense in-character or in-world, not just a jag for jagging's sake.
It's evident by where the series went and how quickly it went there that the show needed a wrapping up point. There was probably a trajectory towards a season 3 but instead became a wrapping up point. I was into where the possibilities for a season 3 could take the characters, but a slightly hasty finale did kind of work for me, again, jagging to a conclusion when it should be settling in on a cliffhanger.
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