I Saw This!! What I Have Been Watching -- Wot? No Movies P3

 I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Kent(him) 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.  That dog in the fiery house bad.

What I Am/Have Been Watching is the self-admitted state of typically Toast (not him), spending too much time in front of the TV. Sure, the Great Pause is winding down (culturally if not virally) but habits have been formed, doors have been locked and going outside is soooo pre-2019. The weird thing of late is not committing to movies. Sure, we add them to Watch List, we Download them, we say, "Let's watch xxx instead of TV tonight," but then we just either re-watch something classic or I find something else to download. 

One Episode is a segment in which we talk about shows we have watched one episode of (and sometimes more). We would like to watch less volume and more quality Television but that involves wading through a bevvy of meh to get to the good stuff. Sometimes we find gems which, for one reason or another, we don't (or haven't yet) watched another episode of.

P1 is here. P2 there.

The Boys, S3, 2022 - Amazon

(Wot? I never wrote about S1 or 2 ?!?!)

Has The Boys run its course on the amount of shock and shock and repugnance it can deliver? Whatever you answer, they will try to overcome it.  Shows like this, that come with a very distinct premise (superheroes are actually just the biggest, most amoral celebrity assholes and someone has to put them in their place) need to complete a story and move onto another one. Alas, they will likely be stretching out this plot (Butcher needs to take down the worst superhero, the Homelander) as long as they can. I haven't finished this S3 yet, but TV being TV means they need to go on and on and on.

The enjoyment (and I say that out loud with only a twinge of embarrassment) of season one came from the "OMG they did that!" factor. I had already read the comics and knew what to expect but the choices they made in order to adapt and give something new were astonishing, but the plot also felt tighter than I expected. But season two was all plot-stretch, and seemed to be doing some of the themes over and over. The Deep was a pervy dumbass, Homelander is unstable, Starlight is troubled by the life she has to navigate, A-Train is just utterly clueless, Butcher is an abuser, Hughie is naïve, etc. Much of the season felt like it didn't know where it was going, with only one subplot of any impact, in the resurrection and downfall of literal Nazi Stormfront.

Season 3 picks up with lame attempts at closure. Butcher is off the bottle and taking care of his kid, Hughie is working for the congresswoman who runs a dept that holds supes accountable, and Annie is doing her best to navigate... yeah, a lot of again a retread. But they blow some people up, go over the top on the sex stuff, and shock and shock and gross us out even more. But at least the plot seems to be directional -- in that Butcher is using a resurrected thought-lost-greatest-american-hero Soldier Boy (Kripke's buddy Jensen Ackles, Supernatural) to build a plan to take down Homelander. And things are going awry.

The Boys does not lend itself well to being attentive to the plot. So many of the beats are the same, over and over. Character choices are repetitive, the shocks begin to become numbing, and few people learn from their mistakes. But as someone who watch many MANY seasons of Supernatural, that seems to be a Kripke thing. How many times were the Winchester lads going to die or almost die or be altered, only to come back to Save The World. I will watch to see what it is done, but I will burp a sour burp and be done with it.

The Umbrella Academy, S3, 2022 - Netflix

(Wot? I never wrote about S1 or 2 ?!?!)

Seeing a trend here. 

I recall really liking most of season 1, especially anything to do with the time agency, The Commission, and the assassins Hazel and Cha-Cha. They did a pretty good job of adapting a rather non-sensical, whacka-doodle comic book series (it's often more style than substance, which has always had a strong place in comics) into a rather whacka-doodle TV show. I also recall it running out of steam before the end of the season, which worked out as an intro to all the characters. You see, The Umbrella Academy were 7 of 43 spontaneously born children, all at the same moment, all from not-pregnant mothers, from around the world. They were adopted by the strange, proto-typical comic book father figure Reginald Hargreaves (Colm Feore, Bad Cop Bon Cop, who disappears utterly into the role). He is not a good father. He is a "scientist" raising experiments to be super-heroes. The children have more emotional connection with the sentient monkey Pogo (Adam Godley, Powers) and the robot mom (Jordan Claire Robbins, 12 Monkeys), than with Reggie. As adults, the children are very very broken.

Season 3 brings on yet another apocalypse that they are causing, yet also have to save the world from. Seeing a trend here. They have returned from the 60s (season 2) to see the impact their meddling in Time (yet saving the world from apocalypse) has caused. There is no Umbrella Academy, instead Hargreaves has raised other children, calling them The Sparrow Academy. But he was expectedly also a dick to them, and they are, as adults, very very broken.

The show excels when it embraces the whacka-doodle, being so utterly unlike other "superhero" shows, in that nobody ever really does anything heroic, except on the most grand scale, and usually only in reaction to trouble they caused themselves. Unlike other whacka-doodle (Toasty, do you need a tag?) shows, such as Dirk Gently, there is little in the way of charm here. These are not likeable characters. And yet, I find myself absolutely loving so many of them. Of course, Klaus (Robert Sheehan, Misfits) the drug addled medium is my favourite followed closely by nihilistic Five, the old man in a teen's body. And I find myself sighing in contentment at the setting and design choices -- so many other shows, The Boys for example, barely even think about their set production. But all the anachronistic, grand choices in The Umbrella Academy set it aside from other shows. When was the last time that a background character was so distinct, I naturally assumed they were going to play a part in the plot?

Alas, as the show progresses, my enjoyment of the chaos and bizarre plot choices diminishes, as the story once again seems to lose steam. They seem to suffer from a stretching of available plot, needing to fill more and more space with endless moaning & groaning about all the bad choices offered, and bad choices they make.  I live that, I don't need to watch it.

Season 3 ends with another apocalypse averted (but really, was it?) and yet another Universe/Time-Line that the kids are shunted into.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer / Angel rewatch, 1997 - 2004 - Amazon

We have series we wait weekly for, we have series returning from seasonal hiatus, we have series we spontaneously download & watch, we have series randomly discovered, we have access to so much TV, and yet we still feel compelled to rewatch some stuff. Marmy has her crime shows that she rewatches on a regular basis, I have own staples (Firefly, Band of Brothers) and yet, for some reason, since they became digitally available, it didn't include Buffy and Angel.

But of late, given the circumstances around Joss Whedon and the challenge of art vs artist, I wanted to revisit the shows, to see if the difficulty was visible, and also to see if the show withstood the test of time.

We are mid-way through season 4, when it was appropriate to watch Angel though not trying to watch time periods concurrently, just keep the threads together. This was the season, post highschool, that the show hits its groove. The literal growing pains were moved through, childish things were put away and some beats had been established. And yet, the whole Adam as BBEG is one of my least favourite antagonists. Just the whole science-meets-mysticism seemed uninspired, but they were also working through the idea that the numerous human-comingled-demon races were not all cut-and-dry Bad Guys. And even that idea, which was presented by the now questionable Watcher's Council, that all demons walking on Earth were mixed bloods, seems challenged, as plenty of demons are dimension-walking so, they could be pure blood examples of their own race, unlike the mongrels that vampires are. I wish The Initiative had been exploring that, instead of just looking for walking weapons.

Part of the fun in watching a 25 year old show is pondering how the show would have differed if set now. Willow is using the Internet in its infancy (also hacking into proprietary databases) but imagine the knowledge that would be stored in today's massive connected data source, let alone what would be now accessible from the ubiquitous cell phone. The show today would have been attacked on Twitter for being too woke, and likely tackled some of the issues we are dealing with now, while embracing the topics considered ground breaking then. And yet, probably still tainted by the whole Whedon "white knighting"; much of the show seems to suffer in retrospect from now knowing where Whedon's headspace was at the time, especially with the female characters. The creep factor is definitely there.

Angel introduces the idea of greater forces behind the Monster of the Week. Angel himself finds his own "chosen one" destiny as he begins prowling the streets of LA as a weird pseudo "private dick", led by another mongrel demon Doyle, and assisted by Cordy who has run away from Sunnydale after her father went bankrupt / went to jail. In watching so many of the characters, Cordy is the one that seems to be given the most room to grow, and yet still retain her core selfish-self-centered-vapid core personality, but not allowing that to be only what she is.

The first few times we watched, I always adored the tragic love affair that is Buffy and Angel, the pathos of an ageless man in love with a woman who will eventually grow old, the creepiness of an "old man" falling for a 16 year old girl -- even if Angel is forever stuck in the mindset of when he was turned, he was still a man in his early twenties, not the age one should be going after teens. Enter Joss Whedon creep-factor. So, now that I watch it, I am just rather tired of the whole thing. Buffy just needs to move on, and Angel, I believe, is more attracted to the Tragic Love aspect, not her in particular. And that garners some truth, as he moves on to rather different choices later on in his own series.

We have a long way to go, especially to season seven of Buffy, wherein something that was surprisingly introduced early on (The First, season 3, "Amends") becomes the end of the series. I had never thought of Whedon doing the long haul on stories and plot, but how quickly he moves Spike from being the biggest & baddest of the baddies into an almost kicked-puppy role set him up for redemption in the long run. He also minorly does it with the introduction of uber-outsider Jonathan, who comes into the background rather early and is hinted at by season 4 of going to play a greater role.

And into the darkness we go....