1-1-1-KsMIRT: odds on endings

KsMIRT=Kent's month in reviewing television. This month, the definite end of one series, the probable end of another, the first seasons of two others, and one show I've been waiting some time to get eyes on.

This Month:
The Bear Season 5 - 2026, disney+ [8/8 episodes watched]
Deli Boys Season 2 - 2026, disney+[6/6 episodes watched]
Spider-Noir Season 1 - 2026, amazonprime [ /8 episodes watched] 
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed Season 1 - 2026, appletv [10 /10 episodes watched]
Year of the Rabbit Series 1 - 2019, tubi [6/6 episodes watched]

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The Bear Season 5
[created by Christopher Storer]
Seasons 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

The What 100: Carmy has told Sid he's quitting The Bear, she's now head chef, so it's time for a change. But uncle Jimmy's made some bad investments and has no money left to prop the Bear up, and is looking to sell the property. The credit cards are cut off, the cupboards are practically empty, and a heavy duty storm is wreaking havoc in Chicago. This could be the Bear's last night, but nobody wants it to end, and they're all going to fight for it's survival.

[1 Great] There is a moment in the penultimate episode that had both Lady Kent and I sit up and say "holy shit!" A literal magic trick that blew our minds.  I don't know if this particular feat is something that's famous in the fine dining world, or if it's an invention of Storer (or someone on staff), but wow. If you're not immediately aware of what I'm talking about, well, Marcus (Lionel Boyce) totally big-times his estranged father, whom he invited to the Bear (as he said, because he couldn't invite his mom, who passed away last season), but also to show off his talent, to show up his father, and possibly even reconnect (but that seems far down the list) and with the Bear's impending doom hovering overhead, he doesn't have much opportunity. A pretty great arc for Marcus this season.

[1 Good] Last season had a literal ticking clock over its head, a countdown to profitability issue by Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), though his reasons weren't as clear as they are within moments of this season's start. In this season of eight episodes, seven of the eight episodes take place on the same day as the staff need to battle their own insecurities, their anger and disappointments, the weather, other failures in the building, and fight not just to make it through the day but to hold their family together. While Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) quitting was supposed to remain a secret through to the end of the day, it gets blurted out in the heat of the moment, and it just raises awareness to the fact that Carmen wouldn't be a bonding agent, but one of division. He's immensely creative, and assuredly talented, but the job brings out the worst in him too, and he recognizes that his heart isn't in it, not like the rest of them. "I can't stay", he says to Sugar (Abby Elliott). "Nobody's asking you to," she replies in the way only a sibling can. It's not to injure him, but it's a double edged sword that is both supporting his decision, and cutting down his egocentricness. This season is propulsive (as many of the seasons have been) but the "all in one day" motif really, really makes it feel like a necessary binge. It could have been a four hour movie, but I think it works well with chapter breaks, as each episode still has a distinct and defined segment of the day.

[1 Bad] There's a lot of great things happening in this final season of The Bear. Every main character gets their spotlight, but the secondary characters don't quite get the same spotlight. Uncle Jimmy becomes the comic relief as he and his investment manager/best friend Computer (Brian Koppelman) and Computer's business savvy niece Cheese (Elsie Fisher) try to sort out how Jimmy can get some money, any money, out of the only asset he has left (the Bear). Last season Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson) had a subplot working with a mentor (the late Rob Reiner unable to return this season) to develop a plan to franchise out The Original Beef of Chicagoland, and this season Ebra spends his time fretting over presenting his pitch to Carmy and looking for a spoon thief. The scenes of him practising his pitch are great (the running gag about him being bewitched by Carmy's blue eyes was fantastic), and the resolution to this plot is satisfying, but it's Cheese who finds Ebra's proposal and then it cuts past what should have been a great scene of Ebra and Cheese talking, leading to Ebra and Jimmy and Computer meeting. Ebra gets so shortchanged, the only bad thing about this otherwise terrific season.

META: Finales are hard, but this one nails it. I don't usually like it when a series spends the whole final season acting as if each episode is a finale, giving each character a specific spotlight to go out on. I much prefer it to be business as usual with a big final episode, but season 5 of The Bear has it both ways, and it works. It mostly works because it's not trying to close out individual character plots one by one, it's teeing up each character arc in the first episode or two, working through it through the single day, and winding it down by the end of the day. It's all about pacing and it is so very well paced.  The finale then give us moments that follow. We know that pretty much everyone in the cast is still working at the restaurant, making it work, but it's Carmen's story that we need resolution on and we see what's next for him. But we also see hints at where everyone else is going, and showing them still progressing, and reinforcing the found-family dynamic of the Bear.  It's an uplifting, hopeful, and celebratory ending that actually satisfies. I wish I had written this out as a fine dining metaphor.

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Deli Boys Season 2
created by Abdullah Saeed
(Season 1)

The What 100: Brothers Mir and Raj Dar have successfully taken over their deceased father's business and are now the cocaine kingpins of Philadelphia. District Attorney and mayoral hopeful Andrew Chadwater seems all too aware that the impact the Dar family is having and, more than for the social good, just wants the good press of taking them down. The only problem the Dars have is they are making too much money and can't launder it fast enough. They approach mobster/casino owner Max Sugar, who hits it off with Lucky. And then Uncle Ahmad - who the boys discovered was responsible for their father's murder - winds up dead and Raj is arrested, and becomes the internet viral sensation, the "Fuck Me Felon". Mir wants to buy a golf course for some semblance of legitimacy.

[1 Great] Deli Boys is a farce. It's not taking the world of drug dealing, money laundering, corruption and murder seriously in the slightest. In fact it's perception is that it's all very silly. The trick is to have the characters take it seriously, even if some of them are buffoons, or hyper-serious to the point of ridiculousness. Mir (Asif Ali) and Raj (Saagar Shaikh) are incredibly entertaining characters, with Mir being the more nebbish but also educated but also still out of his element, while Raj is very of-the-moment and, well, often high...and charming, but usually not charming enough. The show is not a joke machine like 30 Rock and its ilk, but instead is a character and situational based comedy, and the characters, pretty universally are wildly entertaining, and the situations are constantly surprising. It's an incredibly funny show which many might be put off simply by the premise (which requires us two root for two outsiders succeeding in doing everything illegal, including murder).

[1 Good]  I don't know that this write-up is much different than the season 1 write-up, just saying the same things in a different way. Of course Poorna Jagannathan is the show's superpower. She's a commanding screen presence, a gifted actress, and an absolutely stunning woman. It's almost unfair to put her in a relationship with Fred Armisen (playing Max Silver) because, at least in attractiveness, she's so far above him (she was paired up briefly with Common in Never Have I Ever and that felt more appropriate), but Armisen is a wizard of comedic characters and so she has to go toe to toe with him in these comedic situations and holds her own. I'm excited to see she's appearing in Lanterns this month.

[1 Bad] This second season of Deli Boys had a reduced episode count...and a significant one at that. Whereas season 1 had 10 episodes, this season only had a 6-episode order. Yeah, that's not good, but the real bad is that the first three episodes of the season feel like they're condensing five or six episodes worth of plot into three episodes and so the events of the show move so incredibly quickly. Raj is barely in jail for a full episode and so they don't get a lot of time to really build upon the scenarios that presents (plus we could have had more of Kumail Nanjiani guest starring as Raj's lawyer and Lucky's ex).  There feels like there was more story, more comedy to be had this season, but whatever plotlines were constructed between seasons weren't reworked but just compressed.

META: The reduced episode count in itself felt like a token gesture from Hulu, and less that they had any faith in the show growing their audience. Unless the series suddenly multiplied its viewership, I don't think it'll be back, which is a bummer because it's a super-talented cast and crew and a hilarious show which could really do with more room to breath and expand (there's so many wild characters they haven't had the time to build out or explore).

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Spider-Noir

[created by Oren Uziel] 

The What 100: In an alternate reality 1930's, Ben Reilly used to be a superhero called the Spider but is now a washed-up private dick who scrambles to make ends meet. The trauma of losing his fiancee Ruby still weighs heavy and he finds it hard to care about the world anymore. In the Spider's absence, mob boss Fin "Silvermane" Byrne has taken control of New York City, but the once meek mayor, seeking re-election, is now fighting back, and things are getting ugly. It only gets worse when new super-powered beings emerge. Reilly somehow winds up in the mix of it all after taking a case from lounge singer Cat Hardy.

[1 Great] Without resorting to heavy-handed exposition, the creatives involved in this series manage to build a world of the 1930s NYC that is recognizable from history but distinctly its own vibe. It doesn't shy away from the ugly nature of segregation and racism of the era, but also never makes it "a very special episode" material. It is just part of the underpinning of the world that these people live in. The sets, costuming, hair, and special effects are all constructed and displayed in a manner to evoke classic noir, all aided by the decision to let the audience choose their own viewing adventure: colour, or black and white. (The series was shot with b&w in mind, so this was the option I went with, and it looks fabulous.)  The aesthetics extend to the sometimes ham-fisted or melodramatic acting which feel very much of the classic noir genre, and the injection of superpowers into the whole thing may be much more advanced than what had been done in the serials of the '30's and '40's but at the same time, there's a baked-in bit of clunkiness to the make-up, the fights, the digital powers to give it a tangible charm even when it might not be so real (the b&w really helps to cover its tracks).

[1 Good] Spider-Noir is not a show meant for kids. It's got a bit of swearing, drinking and smoking, and some violence that goes just beyond the typical MCU cartoonishness. It feels very much like the superhero shows of the 2000s, where a character is either divorced from the greater universe he or she would normally exist in, or is made up from whole cloth. In this case, Spider-Noir has always been an alt-universe character who exists outside the normal "616" and the Spider also has a very minimal history in publication so there's really not much for the series to be beholden to. They pretty much had a blank slate to start with.  We basically know what a spider-man is, what his powers are, so we get a series that begins without necessitating an origin story (but we get that eventually anyway). That frees up exposition for world building. And like the superhero shows of the 2000s, it's able to employ the names and/or power sets of other characters onto pretty much wholly new figures, while still capturing the essence and giving the audience the charge of seeing an "Electro" or "Sandman" or "Black Cat" on screen without requiring fealty to source material. This felt both fresh and retro at the same time.

[1 Bad] Without Nic Cage, I don't think this show was getting made, and given that the actor voiced the character in Into the Spider-Verse and is a lifelong comics nerd (he named his son Kal-El) who really wants to be in comic book properties (eg. Ghost Rider, his ill-fated turn as Superman) it's clear he was putting everything his 60-something-year-old body could into this. It wouldn't be the same without him, and it's a role, once again, without much lore or history to it, that he can own outright and make it his. He sure does. In all honesty, he does a really great job 90% of the time.  He gets to be a smartass with a bit of a mouth, he gets to be a drunk, he gets to have trauma, he gets to act aloof or detached from repercussions (until they hit home)... and he delivers on everything...almost. There is a romantic sub-plot between himself and Cat Hardy that flows in and out of amenable chemistry. Sometimes there's a real flame cooking, and other times Cage seems in his own goofy world of amour. But the hardest part to accept in the series is that Ben Reilly seems like he should be in his late-'40's, not early '60's so no matter how good Cage is, there's always a bit of a disconnect when watching him in the role.  The show does do an excellent job, however, of making Ben Reilly a bit of a broken down veteran. He takes his damn lumps, over and over.

META: I really wasn't expecting to like this show, but honestly I was pretty hooked from the first episode. I watched it in two concentrated viewings, the first four episodes over a two day span and then all the remaining episodes in one sitting a few weeks later. It's a show that seems like it has very little fat on it, but that's just how good it is at hiding it. The flashbacks, and some of the side-quests aren't altogether essential to the story so much as understanding the Spider and where he came from, and yet, the way the show bakes in the origin story is as much about the supervillains the Spider is facing this season as it is about him. There's not much backtracking in this show, it maintains forward momentum excellently and it winds up in the end right where it should. It's quite satisfying in a way that, say, Daredevil was not. The pastiche really helps.  I hear a second season has been ordered. It doesn't need it, but it's not unwelcome.

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Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed
[created by David J. Rosen]

The What 100: Paula Saunders is an ace fact checker at a New York-based magazine. She's a divorced, friendless mother who puts all her energies into her job and her daughter, Hazel. With what little time she has left, she finds relief with a cam boy, Trevor, with whom she's intimate with both visually and emotionally. And then Trevor is assaulted on camera and Paula is called for Trevor's ransom. The police say it's a scam. Paula puts her researching skills to the test and tracks down Trevor, only to find him dead. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

[1 Great] Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is a very modern series, both in subject matter and in storytelling style. It's an exceptionally taut thriller, bristling with intensity, but also it has a wicked comedic streak that helps balance out its heavier impulses. And it's very well balanced. It's obviously a product of the streaming era where episode lengths can be whatever, but most of MPG clock in at around a half-hour. These shorter episode lengths make for a propulsive series that, more often than not, feature an final shot or sequence at each episode's end that just kind of slaps you in the face and makes you want to know what happens next. I honestly can't think of anyone other than Tatiana Maslany who can negotiate the tonal shifts of this show so effortlessly, and manage the many, many demands on her character to be an isolationist, to be snarky, to be an emotionally devoted mother, to convey the stress of the situations thrust upon her, but also find the resolve to quite literally work her way through them. Maslany doesn't make a single false step in the entire series. She's riveting, and the show, while, excellent, is twice as good because of her.

[1 Good] The end of episode 6. I jumped out of my seat and applauded.

[1 Bad] The series spends 9 episodes putting Paula deeper and deeper into trouble and in the end she manages to work her way out of it, and never manages to feel like cheating (well, save for that one cliched moment in the penultimate episode). In the process she uncovers a whole other world of trouble that it seems like she manages to side step, but in the closing moment of the season, Paula receives an alarming text that indicates she's falling right back into the intensity. Hey, it makes sense for Paula to have found her way out of the hole she dug for herself, but not completely escaped it. The layers are many and we've only seen a few without full context. I don't have any issue with this. Really what bothers me is the video Paula was sent. It is confounding in its origin. Where did it come from? Why was it not unveiled before? We know exactly what trouble it spells for Paula and I'm keen for her to once again use her research skills and tenacity to keep her head above water and eventually find the shore.

META: I've watched a bunch of giallo films recently, and some commentary on the subgenre of Italian cinema. Giallos are horror-tinged murder-mysteries where there's a killer on the loose and a non-professional everyman (or woman) either gets thrust into the position of figuring out what's happening or thrusts themselves into the position of investigating. In some respects, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is a sort of Giallo, only the killer is a professional cleaner and not a crazed murderer. MPG has much in common with The Flight Attendant, a show with a magnificent season one and a middling season two, but had its title character launched into a Hitchcockian murder mystery but with a heavy side of humour. I genuinely hope MPG is able to avoid the second season curse and find its way into a stellar second chapter.

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Year of the Rabbit series 1
created by Kevin Cecil and Andy Riley

The What 100: In 1887 London, Rabbit is a police detective whose violent and self destructive impulses get in the way of his sometimes astute sleuthing skills. He's saddled with a new partner, the keen and upbeat new recruit Wilbur Strauss, as well as receiving the unsolicited aide of the Chief Inspector's adopted daughter Mabel, who wants to be a copper (but, you know, 1887+sexism+racism). Rabbit has a nemesis on the force in Tanner, makes enemies with public officials, and is only starting to see the signs of a secret society of puppet masters pulling strings around London.

[1 Great] It's always going to be Matt Berry. The man just has an incredibly distinctive way of delivering lines and the characters he inhabits are always a very Matt Berry type. Here Rabbit is boorish and dismissing and self-aggrandizing and hyper-sexual but also on the right side of gender and social issues (well, kinda) and ignorant of the advancements in technology and politics and the social contract around him. His ability to sleuth and deduce are sometimes very Get Smart/Inspector Gadget where he gets it so wrong based on assumption but the people around him direct him the right way. He's a delight to watch, even in the fithy surrounding of grimy 19th-century London.

[1 Good] For a sub-30-minute comedy series, the production values are pretty great at making a particular corner of Londing circa the 1880s look like an absolute shit hole (not to mention the amount of times over six episodes they drop into the sewers or meet filth merchants). But it's the setting that makes everything turn in this show. Playing with the realities of the era in juxtaposition against modern sensibilities is a great source of humour (there's a particularly incisive takedown of the anti-immigrants, the Brexiters and Nigel Farage joke throughout the series). 

[1 Bad] I don't know if making the "big bad" of the series a secret society of women seeking equality with violence and manipulation is really the message that we need today. But hey, Keeley Hawes makes for a great nefarious master manipulator and we get Sally Phillips adopting a deliciously ridiculous accent as a Bulgarian Princess.  Plus this main storyline gives Susan Wokoma's Mabel her narrative thrust and Wokoma is an excellent second lead, and Mabel the show's most interesting and well developed character ...in other words, not all bad.

META: I'm not sure why Year of the Rabbit didn't get a subsequent series. Perhaps it was scheduling with Barry in Canada working on What We Do In The Shadows for years. Maybe it was budget, as period pieces always cost more. Or maybe it was COVID related given the timing of the series 1 release. The show works, though, and it could do with another two or three. I've been wanting to watch the show since its initial release but as far as I know Tubi's the first North American streamer to pick it up. Happy to have finally seen it.

1-1-1-KsMIRT: not enough and too much

K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month(ish) I step through the TV series I completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format.  It's back(!), because I'm feeling too scatterbrain to think unfettered.

This Month:

Fallout Season 2 - AmazonPrime [8/8 episodes watched]
Daredevil: Born Again season 2 - Disney+ [8/10 episodes watched]
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2 - AppleTV [10/10 episodes watched]
Scrubs Season 9 - Crave [13/13 episodes watched]
Widow's Bay Season 1 - Apple TV [10/10 episodes watched]
Dark Winds Season 2 - Crave [6/6 episodes watched]

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Fallout Season 2
season 1
[created by Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet]

The Plot/What 100: Lucy travels the wastelands with the Ghoul, looking for her father who has run off to Las Vegas to enact the next phase of the plan. Whatever that is. Maximus tries to prevent a war, and in the process, probably starts a war. Stephanie, now overseer of Vault 32, seems to have her own machinations in play, while Betty in Vault 33 finds resources dwindling and an inbred uprising fermenting. Lucy's brother Norm has awakened the management, and finds his leadership skills wanting. Something big is about to start, and it probably can't be stopped.

[1 Great] Often flashbacks in a TV show serve as information dump or as a means of exploring a character's backstory a little more thoroughly. It's often aside from the main plot, maybe thematically connected, but having little bearing on the progression of the in-world story of today. The flashbacks in Fallout have served to show us the world before the wasteland, and the life of The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) back when he was a famous movie star, war veteran and pitch man for Valut-Tec. This season, though, Cooper Howard is brought in through the back door of the conspiracy to blow-up the world...you know, for profit! And he has to navigate not only the twists of the shady people involved in the conspiracy and those trying to prevent it, but also his wife's part in all of it. It's actually pretty gripping, and since it's largely all from Coop's perspective, we only really know what he knows and so the rug gets pulled out from us both multiple times. It's pretty awesome and Goggins is fantastic.

[1 Good] Since I don't play the games, all of the world of Fallout is new to me. So I never knew that there was a war between USA and Canada, as the U.S. tried to annex my country. Toasty filled me in that this has long been a part of the lore of the games, so it's not just a reactionary bit to the Trumpian whim of terrain expansion. It's not explored too deeply in the season, but we learn that Stephanie's nefarious machinations are all in the service of Canadian resistance, and while the show tries to play her off as the bad guy, I'm firmly on her side. "Don't think of them as human beings, think of them as Americans...." That line gave me chills and really speaks more to how the teaching of American Exceptionalism others everyone else to Americans, rather than any desire for Canadian aggression towards our neighbours to the south (many of whom are really good human beings).

[1 Bad] There's nothing really bad about this show. I found myself pretty enthralled by this entire season. I was maybe a little frustrated at nebbish Norm and his inability to level up, not at all like Lucy did. But that's Norm's character flaw, he's just not very good at stuff. Lucy on the other hand wants to remain an optimist but boy does the world grind her down. It's a little tough to watch, but her confrontations with Hank (and the Ghoul) when she's finally had enough, well, pretty great.

Meta: It had been over two years since I watched Season 1 and I had forgotten how richly constructed the world of this show was, all the different threats it weaves together in a way that may feel loose but is surprisingly cohesive.  The addition of Justin Theroux as Robert Edwin House, the billionaire Coop is told is going to blow up the world is an excellent addition, and the character's impacts both in the past and future are deeply felt. Funny, gross, and richly satirical about both capitalism and totalitarianism, it's a surprisingly deep show for how ludicrously fun it is.

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Daredevil: Born Again Season 2
Season 1
(created by Dario Scardapane and Matt Corman & Chris Ord)

The Plot/What 100: Daredevil attacks a secret shipment of weapons through New York's harbour, a deal Mayor Wilson Fisk had made with the CIA (?), and now it's causing headaches. Anti-vigilante laws are enforced with brutality, anyone suspected of allying with a vigilante (or anyone Fisk just doesn't like) is rounded up and caged. Bullseye has turned "friend" to Daredevil, but his violence is too extreme for his liking (and people get caught in the crossfire). BB Urich manipulates Fisk's protege, Daniel Blake, in to revealing classified information, which she then uses as anti-Fisk propeganda. It's not going to go well for either of them.

[1 Great] I still think Charlie Cox is the perfect Daredevil, even if he's not written so perfectly.

[1 Good] Jessica Jones is back. Loved seeing Kristin Ritter back, if only for a minute.

[1 Bad] It's all just so goddamn tedious. It's a show that just keeps hitting the same points over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. It's so damn exhausing. Matt doesn't want to kill anyone, but he's always debating with people whether he should. And debating with people whether he should let them kill. His conflict is now not even a religious one but one of a guy who has to decide whether he believes in the law and legal institutions of the country in the role he performs, or, you know, puts on a costume and doles out concussions on a nightly basis. We've seen it all before. And it's a show that just teases and teases and teases out it stories and threads as if it had 25 episodes to fill. It doesn't and there's so many of these characters we don't really care that much about (sorry BB, sorry Daniel, sorry Heather, sorry Karen, sorry to the rest of you...) mostly because  they're so boring. The sombre, sober tone of the series, the smug self-satisfaction over even attempting to comment on modern times and governmental descent into fascism, it's all so off-putting.  Fisk needs to be put aside for a good long while. He's not Daredevil's only villain, but outside of the Hand in season 2, it's been nothing but Fisk, and it's gotten stale. Nothing new is said about their relationship this season. And they totally mishandle Jessica, severely underusing her and ...depowering her in fits and starts? Why? Ugh.

Meta: I really gave Season 1 a pass. I decided I liked it because I was happy it was back. I really, really like Cox in the role and was just so plussed to see him again. But, in hindsight, Season 2 only highlight that Season 1 was just as much of a drag. I recall Lady Kent and I taking a day off work, ordering enough pizza for two meals and just binging 16 episodes of a season of Daredevil. It was exciting to us. By the third episode of this season, watching Daredevil felt like a chore, like something we had to do, and it was definitely not something we were enjoying. We were counting down the minutes until Jessica Jones' arrival and that little baloon of hope deflated almost instantly.  Cox's best appearances as Matt and Daredevil were not in the 17 episodes of his own series but in an episode of She-Hulk and a cameo in Spider-Man:No Way Home. 

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Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2
Season 1
(created by Chris Black and Matt Fraction)

The Plot/What 100: Keiko Mura has been rescued from Axis Mundi, 60 years after she disappeared into a wormhole, and she's only 60 days older than when Shaw last saw her. Her world is rocked to be reunited with her son and meet her granddaughter and grandson having missed most of their lives, but Monarch, the organization she founded with her husband Bill Randa, is not what it once was, and faces some stiff private sector competition.  Not just competition, but organizations looking to control the kaiju for their own agendas, and developing the technology to do so. But the immediate crisis is the reappearance of Titan X, last seen by Keiko, Bill and Shaw a lifetime ago.

[1 Great] It's never not awesome watching giant monsters fight, and the show does a pretty decent job of showing scale when it's happening.  Obviously the show doesn't have the budget of a Godzilla x Kong feature, or even the budget that Season 1 had, so the fights are few and far between, but pretty great when they happen. 

[1 Good] There is an episode where Shaw, in trying to figure out how to lure Godzilla out of Axis Mundi, winds up receiving an S.O.S. from himself decades before when he was briefly trapped in there. Since Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell are playing the same character, there's no reasonable way that they could share the screen together, but this is the next best thing. A novelty episode but still kind of great that has some real emotional elements for both performers to work through in completely different times in their characters' life. The show does a pretty good job throughout this season finding consistency between the Russels' performance of the character. 

[1 Bad] Much like Daredevil: Born Again this show frustratingly treads water because it needs to bide its time between its big budget setpieces. This results in some incredibly stupid (and sometimes very confusing) character threads where certain characters go off and do their own thing for reasons that never truly feel justified, and then return to Monarch for reasons that never truly feel justified, only to get into arguements that never truly feel justified, and then to do really stupid things that never truly feel justified. Most of this shit is our young cast of Kentaro, Cate and May. They make my eyes roll involuntarily far too often.

Meta: Monarch is not a good show. It's wildly inconsistent and seems to lack purpose other than to be an in-world flourish to the Legendary series of Kong and Godzilla features. The characters amble so much one has to often ask what they're actually contributing to the story.  The scenes set in the 1950s and 60's are far more interesting, as the setting gives a pastiche for the series to play into and often it seems like it would be a better program had it firmly set itself in that time and explore the Kaiju with their technological limitations.  I honestly don't know if I would watch a third season should it return (maybe if they get Bill and Lewis Pullman to play, like, an adversary to Shaw...that would be enough to get me back in).

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Scrubs Season 9 (aka Scrubs: Med School Season 1)
(created by Bill Lawrence)

The Plot/What 100: Sacred Heart teaching hospital now has a whole campus, where we see J.D., Turk, and Cox all hold classes, and Elliott is pregnant so she's on light duty. The new batch of recruits includes Lucy Bennett, a midwestern, daydreamy "horse girl" who's naive and optimistic, which Cox wants to drum right out of her, lest he wind up with another John Dorian. Drew dropped out of med school a half decade ago, had a rough bit of life experience, and is back with reinvigored focus, only Cox has taken an unsettlingly deep interest in him. Cole is a SoCal-bro all the way, a prototypical rich kid whose parents funded half the wings in the hospital, so despite how annoying he is, he's teflon (he finds a friend in retired and sexually rambunctious [to the point of sexpest-ery] Dr. Kelso), and Dr. Denise Mahoney, the sarcastic, and jaded T.A. It's Scrubs but with new people, and some of the old people.

[1 Great] I was honestly surprised at how quickly the Scrubs formulae worked being reworked like this with a nearly whole new cast. I think having some of the old guard around some of the time works quite well (especially John C. McGinley whose Perry Cox is maybe the most critical ingredient to the show, though Eliza Coupe as Denise certainly could have filled the void in the eventuality of McGinley's departure). Dave Franco nails perfectly the irritatingly entitled dirtbag Cole but never fully as the villain, and the writing staff find ways to round down his sharpest edges to make him pretty much a likeable character. Kerry Bishé as Lucy is and isn't just a female J.D. And putting them side by side for a few episodes early in the season (before Braff departed) was the perfect way to highlight both. The new cast, gels pretty quickly, and it helps that they're all pretty talented performers (Coupe and Franco, obviously, go on to bigger and brighter things) who settle into their roles quickly and the writers find a voice for really fast. It's basically Scrubs-by-way-of-Community just maybe a year too early. 

[1 Good] My favourite part of the season was the blossoming relationship between Denise and Drew. Denise is a Tough.Nut and is such an Eliza Coupe role that's perfectly suited for her. Drew has a hardened past and his own embarrassing secrets, but can almost go toe to to with Denise in the cynicism department. They find very quickly that they have similar world views, and yet they're two quite different people that have a real challenge with compromise or, you know, emotional vulnerability. Watching them actually negotiate being together is the biggest joy of the season.

[1 Bad] I haven't watch original flavour Scrubs in a very long while, but did it have so much gender-based "comedy" as well. There's so much name calling and put-downs, mostly to the point of calling someone (usually a male character) a "girl" or a "bitch" or something more clever insinuating that the guy is soft and/or feminine. There's also one episode that has a B-plot rotating around Turk and Cox dealing with a lesbian couple (both played by very attractive actresses of course) and being total children around the idea. It's pretty embarrassing for the show and the characters.

Meta: Having just watched the reboot of Scrubs earlier this year, I was curious about the ill-fated season 9 that was intended to be an independent spin-off but ABC chickened out in letting it be its own thing. I don't know if it was ever going to be successful, as people had a certain idea of what Scrubs was and that centered around Zach Braff-related silliness, of which this is in shorter supply. Maybe it is just having watched the reboot, which, quite frankly, feels more like a reboot of this season of Scrubs: Med School than it does of Scrubs proper, but this went down pretty smooth (dated jokes aside). I had a really great time with this and would have liked another couple seasons with this crew.  Maybe it's because I knew half of this cast already from elsewhere or maybe it's because this season of television the writers pointedly made a decision to focus on the new crew (as opposed to the reboot, where it's more than half about the old crew, and less than  half about the new crew) but I think I like this season better than the reboot. A little bit more at least.

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Widow's Bay Season 1
(created by Katie Dippold)

The Plot/What 100: Tom Loftis is mayor of the remote New England island town of Widow's Bay. Unlike most people who live there, Tom wasn't born there but married into island life, his wife having died during childbirth 17 years ago. Tom has lofty ambitions of being the new Martha's Vinyard, and rallies the town behind his new tourism push. The only real objector is Wyck Crawford, a grizzled fisherman who vociferously insists that the island is cursed and that outsiders should definitely not come. He is correct on both counts. 

[1 Great] It's so very hard to choose one single thing that is great about Widow's Bay since it is uniformly terrific. Merging horror, comedy, and emotional drama the show very ably builds a small island community where it makes sense whenever any two or three cast members share the screen and the personalities are so well defined without being too trope-y that we kind of know exactly who these people are, until we get to know them more. Any character can be given a spotlight and ably hold it, the performers on the show all very keenly get the assignment, while the directors (including Atlanta's Hiro Murai and horror director Ti West), writers (including comedic performers Colton Dunn and Neil Casey) and crew all seem to be completely enthused to be  working on the show that lets them toe so many lines, and step over them, and step back. By the show's third episode there was already a stand-out episode, and then they deliver another, and another.  It's still very much a genre show, but it's doing it as if it were Parks and Recreation crossed with Midnight Mass, and it's even been told that creator/showrunner Katie Dippold originally gestated this idea as a script for Parks & Rec, but just couldn't make it work).

[1 Good] The music by David Fleming is incredible, absolutely nailing the assignment. He's able to strike a tone that is ominously lighthearted when it needs to be but can go strange, mysterious or intense when necessary. His score leans into the conventions of scores from the more mass-audience friendly horror of the past like Poltergeist, Jaws, the Omen, or the Exorcist without ever directly referencing any of them. He's found the vibe, the tone of those scores perfectly, and using their most cliched aspects as much for terror as for punctuating the humorous or absurd. It's a very deftly conceived soundtrack, one that makes me take notice without pulling me out of the moment. 

[1 Bad] The premise of the series is sort of a Jaws scenario, where there's danger lurking but the mayor won't sacrifice the town's economic prosperity for the possibility of danger. There's also an X-Files set-up where certain people in the town are aware of its curse, and are pretty comfortable with it, in fact, but Tom wants to just shrug it off. Within three episodes, though, Tom can no longer shrug it off. As we get deeper into the season Tom may be in denial at points, but it's clear he knows deep down what's true about this island. And then it's staring him plainly in the face...

I don't generally agree that TV was better when it was 25 episode seasons, as that type of American TV show created a lot of bloat. What we lose in going down to 10 or 8 or 6 episode seasons is the ability to focus more intently on secondary characters, or sometimes, as with Widow's Bay things move a little bit faster than you had expected. Tom's journey from disbeliever to skeptic to true believer happens in about 7 episodes and while I wouldn't want this season to be split into two to slow the pace of his progression, if the season were longer, with more time to expand its focus to the town at large it could really have benefitted from such a scope increase, even just three to five more episodes. The "bad" is, basically, I want more.

Meta: Widow's Bay is probably the best season of television this year. Just a lightning bolt of a show that comes out episode one firing on all cylinders and then injects the nitrous oxide into the tank in the second episode. Matthew Rhys has had a trio of prominent dramatic series over the past 15 years, but this show lets him step out of being miserable and deadpan and instead into a funnier misery, and he absolutely excels at it, both physically and verbally... he has great comedic timing...who knew? While he's been a revered dramatic actor for years, Kate O'Flynn, playing Tom's assistant Patricia, steps out of small-time character actor shadows and into the limelight, and completely destroys. Patricia can be weird and off-putting to start, but O'Flynn is able to elicit deep compassion and sympathy for Patricia, eventually turning from loser to unlikely hero (though Patricia is still incapable of going full badass).

Episodes 4 and 5 jockey for best episode of the season, with episode 4, "Beach Reads" putting Patricia and her high-stakes party planning front and centre, while episode 5 , "What to Expect on Your Trip" finds Tom accidentally getting dosed with mushrooms and blinking in and out of consciousness (I don't think I've ever seen an episode of tv told from a POV like this, where it just keeps jumping ahead in time, the viewer as disoriented as the character). It's like season two of The Bear all over again ... "Fishes" or "Forks"?

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Dark Winds Season 2
(created by Graham Roland)

The Plot/What 100: Jim Chee has left the feds to be a private investigator, and gets called to look in on a robbery at a wealthy landowner's home by his wife. Jim's case dovetails into a truck bomb investigation Joe Leaphorn is investigating, the clues to which lead him to believe Jim's client is somehow tied into the murder of his son. Joe's deputy, Bernadette, looks elsewhere for growth opportunities, while Emma and Sally ward off a white reporter from L.A. looking for a story around the heinous eugenics practices at medical clinics and murdered and missing indigenous women.

[1 Great] Each season is adapted from one of Tony Hillerman's series of Tribal Police books. Much like Slow Horses six episodes seems to be the perfect length to fluidly adapt the story without any padding. It does lead to the feeling that time has passed between seasons/stories, and I really enjoy how the first episode works as both catch up on what's happened to the characters in the interim as we as the place-setter for what the thrust of the season will be. The only one who doesn't seem like they're on a different path this season is Joe Leaphorn, who seems all to settled in his ways. But a pretty serious blow-up with Emma as well as confronting the man who may have killed his son sets him on a new path by the season's end, and his relationship with everyone in the show is different by the end (or at least our understanding of those relationships is).

[1 Good] People take their bloody lumps this season. It's a pretty taxing and brutal affair that Leaphorn and Chee get caught up in, and they pay the price. But determination, resiliency, stubbornness, and, in Joe's case, pure blind rage, get them through. It's a little harrowing to be honest, but the fifth episode trek through the desert is an epic 40 minutes of TV.

[1 Bad] I do not begrudge the series at all for attempting to tackle some of the horrific and disgusting practices that indigenous women have been subjected to, past and present, in America (and most of the colonized lands of the world, frankly), it's pretty necessary to put a spotlight on it. It's only "bad" in that it's unfortunate how tertiary this story line is to the show. Despite having not read the books, it's still evident that this plot doesn't come from the source, as it just doesn't fit with the rest of the events of the show and is of a different tone entirely. It gives something for Emma (Deanna Allison) and Sally (Elva Guerra) to do this season, but it almost feels more like that (needing to provide a story for the characters) than to hit hard on raising the awareness of these atrocities. Such a thing deserves its own central spotlight

Meta: Such an easily consumable, enriching and entertaining show. The three leads, Zahn McClarnan, Kiowa Gordon and Jessica Matten, are all incredible performers and have such a great rapport.  McClarnan's face is one of the most captivating on TV, while Gordon and Matten are just so damn good looking, and ridiculously charming together you just want to see more of them as a romcom (although the show's just looking for reasons to keep them apart). This season features Jeri Ryan in a guest-starring role and she's superb as a middle-aged femme fatale who may or may not be playing games with Chee. Veteran character actor A Martinez also turns up as Sherriff Gordo, Joe's friend and mentor. We also meet Joe's father (Joseph Runningfox) this season, an ex-cop and a hard man who Joe's still trying to live up to. Joe tries to fight his father's influence while also actively emulating him. It's a fascinating dynamic which we need to see more of. 

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Rebel Ridge

2024, Jeremy Saulnier (Green Room) -- Netflix

It would be an interesting study (to only you) to look back on all my posts where I ponder the type of movies I watch -- the guilty pleasures, the ones I feel I Should Watch, the ones I basically hate watch (shit I know will be shit and yet, there I go), the really good stuff that I never get around to watching (Parasite I [still don't] see you) and the transitions from a That Guy who started a blog stating he "was into movies and had something to say" to whatever This Guy is. And more likely, of late, the movies that will just sit square in the middle... genres I like but I don't expect much more than a familiar tune from, big old "meh" movies.

I am not sure where this movie lies. It is very very much the typical Straight To kind of movie with few Named Faces and a director with only one lauded title that I am aware of -- the absolutely emotionally chilling Green Room. But, almost immediately, I saw this was rather a passion project, crafted with such care as to not only present the formula as expected, but also fly in the face of it all.

The formula? First Blood -- a discharged military man is abused by local authorities and fights back. The difference? He doesn't kill a single fucking person. I was about half-way through the movie when I realized this was how it was going to play.

I also have to admit, I was somewhat triggered by the premise as it started -- another movie about black men in America at the mercy of an authority that sees them as fodder. It was just after Nov 6 that I started watching this movie, and while its not just black America that will be abused by the coming regime, its not going to get any better. Its that I tire of seeing it, but it makes me despondent, especially after the movie lays it out so well that the abuse heaped upon him is entirely legal. But after turning it off for a bit, I returned.

Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre, Old), Marine vet, rides his bike into a small town in Louisiana when the cops literally knock him from his bike. He had his headphones in and didn't notice them tailing him. In his backpack is $36k in cash, which he is going to use to bail out his cousin and buy a truck to start a business. His cousin was caught on a misdemeanour but is in real danger, in prison, because he was a witness to a greater crime. The cops take the money on suspicion of... whatever. When Terry talks to a court clerk about the matter, she tells him quite frankly it would be over a year before he could legally get the money back, if he even could.

Rather than taking it lying down, he goes to the police station to report the money as stolen. Not sure why but for the fact he is a man used to standing up for himself. That leads him to confront police chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson, Doctor Odyssey), which is ... not a good move. Despite the police chief appearing to act reasonable, and even telling Terry he will give him back the $10k to bail out his cousin, on Monday morning they transfer his cousin early. Terry's cousin is killed in holding.

I won't go through every plot detail but following the formula, the movie has the Bad Guys push Terry too far and he has to "take the law into his own hands". But he does so... without lethal force. Terry was not the cliche skilled killer who came back from overseas with a chip on his shoulder. In fact, he was never deployed. He was a close quarters combat expert who was seen more valuable on American soil training other soldiers. The corrupt police have a conspiracy in play manipulating the system so as to hide any transgressions they may perform, as they were already under the state's eye after getting caught in such behaviour years ago -- the movie assumes they have always been abusing suspects, and continue to do so. They now do everything in their ability to keep the police force running "legally" by hiding their own crimes in technicalities, no matter who it hurts.

The movie is thoughtful, in that it thinks on each situation it is dealing with and replaces spectacle with measure response. Terry doesn't come in guns blazing shooting every cop he sees until he has his revenge. He actually takes their "deal", which is disheartening in its own right, until they violate it by hurting the clerk who helped him. When he does fight back, it is just to guilt/force one of the force into helping him turn over evidence on all the dealings. Of course, it is a thriller and not a crime procedural or law potboiler, so there have to be stand-offs and action filled scenes. But they all have reasons for being instead of just blowing shit up for the sake of fireballs.

It was a surprisingly solid movie, definitely still in my genre-filler category, but thankfully, a bit risen above the usual fare.

KsMIRT: ice and fire

 K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month(ish) I step through the TV series I completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format. Behold, finished in February.

This month:
True Detective season 4 - HBO/Max 6 episodes
Mr. & Mrs. Smith season 1 - Amazon Prime 10 episodes

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I had watched Season 1 of True Detective way back in 2014, but I honestly cannot tell you what I thought of it. The reason I write this blog is to record my thoughts on some of the pop culture I consume because otherwise those thoughts will be lost to the ether. My little peanut brain can only hold so much information... like a peanut-sized amount. I treat this blog like Guy Peirce's skin in Memento. If it's not tattooed here, I'm not really going to remember it.

What I know is I didn't watch Season 2, nor Season 3.  I don't know if that reflected as much on a dislike of Season 1 or if it was just the critical drubbing Season 2 received prior or early in its release was enough to put me off the subsequent seasons.  

What I recall of season 1 is thinking Alexandra Daddario was far too young to be having sex with Woody Harrelson, and also something about Lovecraft's King in Yellow being mixed up in all of it. Again, I don't know if those little impressions were good or bad.  Show creator Nic Pizzolatto did not become "a name to look out for", one way or the other.

But this new season of True Detective, subtitled Night Country, starring Jodie Foster and MMA fighter Kali Reis, hooked me from the first commercial. First, it's set in the depths of winter in the far north (Alaska), and desolate, wintery settings are my favourite. Second, it's set in the 30 days of night scenario, where, because of the location on the Earth's axis, there's no sunlight for a month every year. It's a conceit that hasn't been used nearly enough (the opposite setting, of days of no darkness has been used I think more often). Third, well, it's not Pizzolatto in charge, so, maybe the critical disappointment from Season 2  that probably tainted the reception of Season 3 would be scrubbed clean. And fourth, I mean, Jodie Foster, incapable of delivering a bad performance.

Issa Lopez acts as showrunner, writer (or co-writer) and director on every episode of the season and that creative consistency is everything. This is rock-solid storytelling from start to finish, with everything, and I mean everything, feeling entirely consistent and unified for the whole run. While six episodes, it really does feel like it could be a 5-hour movie because of the visual uniformity.  There's also no downtime, no filler, no stalling for time.

The first episode wastes no time in introducing its more metaphysical elements, and it definitely isn't being cagey or shy about it. But it's also very sharp in how it incorporates into the story. The setting is a Native American community that has expanded because of mining operations, but the mine's environmental impact on the town has been having increasingly severe repercussions. The ancestral community and the new community clash over protests around the mine.  With a large indigenous cast of characters, it would have been easy enough to lean into just Native spirituality, but it's clear that there's more going on beyond that, and the bleed between them makes it hard to distinguish, intentionally.

 It's a murder mystery, it's a horror story, it's a political statement, it's a police procedural, and, by nature of a largely female cast and writing crew, it's a complex feminist story as well. 

The story starts with a singular mystery, the disappearance of all members of a remote research station, only to be found naked, frozen together in the ice, looking like a mutated mass of flesh. But as Foster's Chief Danvers investigates this crew, it dredges up a cold case from years earlier that wound up severing her partnership with Reis' Navarro, who moved on becoming a State Trooper. 

The reunion of Danvers and Navarro is enough of a story on its own, but this True Detective tale encompasses the whole town, and there is a pretty broad cast of characters that we meet, and have some role to play in everything involved. It feels like we've met half the town by the time the series is finished, and we certainly have a clear idea of the politics at play, and the conflicts that persist.  

We get deep into Danvers and Navarro's family life, as well as Danvers' new protege, Officer Pete Prior (a breakout performance from Finn Bennett), whose dad (John Hawkes) was originally slated to be Chief before Danvers was assigned, and the contention is palpable.

Night Country is an incredibly deep and thoughtful series, presenting hard edged, flawed characters with a richness that allows you to dislike them, but understand them, and root for them to not just figure out what's going down, but also figure out their own lives as well.

This was an incredible series from start to finish, and watching week to week was somehow both frustrating and satisfying. Each episode is so densely structured that they're filling on their own, but that still doesn't stop them from just seeming like a course of the overall meal.

The finale could have went many different directions. It had the potential to go full blown action or horror spectacular, but it instead goes the detective route without forgetting that the metaphysical still is woven completely throughout the story. It does wind up being satisfying in its resolution without demystifying its paranormal aspect. 

I may not remember Season 1, but this one will stick with me for a long time. Foster does not disappoint in the slightest, playing an exceptionally traumatized character (and hurt people hurt people) while Reis is just an incredible presence who should be allowed to do whatever she wants after this. An immediate favourite performer. I'm very likely buying this one on Blu-ray, because it's worth revisiting.

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Speaking of not remembering things... the 2005 Doug Liman-directed, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie-starring film Mr. & Mrs. Smith holds absolutely no space in my brain. I recall seeing it in theatre when it came out, but I've never revisited it. What I recall is the conceit of the film, two mercenaries, married to each other, are advised they need to kill one another. Watching a film where Brad Pitt physically fights his wife has not aged well as a concept. 

There was a Mr. & Mrs. Smith Hitchcock film in the 1940's but that was a screwball comedy about a warring couple. Then there was a short-lived Mr. & Mrs. Smith action/espionage series in the 90's starring Scott Bakula and Maria Bello that finds two special agents having to pretend they're married and do missions. 

Strangely, this latest Mr. & Mrs. Smith, created and developed by Donald Glover with Francesca Sloane, is deemed to be based off the 2005 film, which gave no credit to the 90's series, even though there's direct parallels there.

This series seemed to come out of nowhere. It's a problem with AmazonPrime where they seemed to have put all their promotional money into a failed Lord of the Rings series and nothing else in the year since. I never seem to know when anything is debuting or returning to Prime. It was actually a TV reviewer I follow that tipped me off to Mr. & Mrs. Smith's premiere two days before it dropped.

I'm always up for more Glover. The love for the Community cast runs fairly deep. But Glover's Atlanta was one of the most creative and experimental series in the past decade that fanned that flame of fandom. Mr. and Mrs. Smith doesn't take a lot of creative risks certainly not as many as Atlanta, but enough to feel elevated from, say, a network action-oriented series.

Glover is the known quantity, the draw, but his co-star, Maya Erskine, is the kaboom, the mind-blowing explosive stick of dynamite that makes the show feel revelatory.  It is a two-hander of a series, where both performers receive top billing, but it does feel like Erskine's show. She seems to be doing the heavier lifting acting and character-wise.

Jane and John Smith are each, independently recruited to a non-descript organization to run high-risk operations. They are selected and partnered and given their new identities as well as a gorgeously renovated brownstone in New York that seems well outside almost everyone's affordability rating.  They are given their missions by an unknown contact they call "HiHi". The first mission is a literal cake walk, but not what it seems and gives them a sense of what they're in for, as well as the tidbit of 3 fails remaining.

Across 10 episodes, the Smiths actually develop feelings for each other, and a genuine partnership is formed, but the missions start exposing their weaknesses as a couple and threaten to tear them apart in the end. Ultimately, if you're aware of the "source" film, they're going to start trying to kill one another, but when it happens it's still pretty shocking, because they do such a good job of wanting these crazy assassins to work it out.

I loved this show. It's full of wonderful action, comedy, romance and intrigue bits, plus it sets up the stakes from the get-go that play out delightfully. Glover leans into his charm, wearing it as a mask with just cracks of vulnerability beneath. He's playing at being a cool agent, but once we really come to realize what a mamma's boy John is, it really spells out his personality. Erskine is, as noted, an explosive performer... she sells everything she needs to sell, including her diagnosed psychopathy, yet it's the way she plays her detached coldness that makes Jane so completely likeable. We're going to be flooded with Erskine as a result of this.

There's some wonderful guest stars in this, including Parker Posey, John Turturro, Michaela Coel, Sarah Paulson, and more, but my favourite was Ron Perlman who is the Smith's escort mission in Italy. As they're young in their "marriage" the conversation of kids comes up, and, hilariously, Perlman basically acts like a toddler throughout the episode, testing both of their parenting mettle. It's a freaking delight, and Perlman kills the assignment without being too cartoony about it.

It's a great looking show, handing the romance and the action with equal style and verve. The globetrotting aspect must have made it an expensive shoot, but all the different locations are shot beautifully. Each episode has a mini-movie feel, but they also all chain with each other so that consuming them is all too easy.

The first season leaves a second season teased up and a full possibility. Hell, we still know absolutely nothing about the organization they work for by the end of the final episode.  With Amazon dropping the whole season in one shot, it just means the wait for another season is going to feel that much longer.  Lady Kent and I wanted more immediately upon completion.

Thunder Bay

2023, 4 episodes - Crave
created by Ryan McMahon

I grew up in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. It's "home" to me, but I've never loved it there. I've always said it's "8 hours from nowhere" (because in the North, we measure distance in time, not kilometers): 8 hours west to Winnepeg, 8 hours east to Sault Ste. Marie, 8 hours south to Minneapolis.  The city has around 110,000 people, so it's not huge (for a weird contextualization, the largest football stadium in Korea can hold 150,000 people), but it's still the hub of Northwestern Ontario, what all the smaller towns to the northeast and west call "the city".  

Around the time I was born there, Thunder Bay was largely blue collar - pulp and paper and as the last port stop of the great lakes, transferring shipping from boat to train and truck, and vice versa.  That all started to die in the late 80s, and it took just shy of two decades for the city to reinvent itself, now more of a medical and educational hub. It's gone through a lot of changes in my lifetime. 

One thing seems to be a constant though, and that's the tension between the Indigenous peoples of the area and everyone else.

Thunder Bay started life as a podcast, in which host Ryan McMahan examines closely and critically a city he has fond affection for, and tries to understand the dark heart beating under the Canadian shield. It's focused on primarily the topic of the city's systemic and institutional... and societal... and cultural racism towards its Indigenous people, but it also looked at other stories of political corruption, media debacles and legal failures to paint a picture of what sort of horror show the place is when you look past its environmental beauty.

This new Crave mini-series is more laser-focused on Thunder Bay's treatment of Indigenous youth, and exposing more broadly a police department that has been formally diagnosed as systemically racist.  There have been a string of deaths of teenagers being found in the city's rivers (the seven fallen feathers and, sadly, beyond) and a completely inept handling of the deaths by the police and the coroner's office, and even when the TB Police Department was being investigated, additional deaths occurred, and were handled with similar irresponsibility.  Inept is an understatement. There is a complete dismissal of Indigenous people as people, the police not deeming these victims of whatever circumstance as worthy of their time.

The police dismiss the deaths, pretty much without any investigation, as accidental death by misadventure and substance abuse.  McMahon talks with people who have survived or witnessed the aftermath of assaults of groups of men forcing teens into the frigid waters.  McMahon examines the theories of serial killer or gang violence as the cause, but there's a societal dehumanization of Indigenous peoples in the rural and metropolitan settlers that is more likely to blame.

As a child, I was aware that there were Indigenous cultures around Thunder Bay, and that there was an influence upon the city as a result. But, I can't remember having any childhood friends, though, who were Indigenous (or at least made their Indigenous heritage part of their outward identity). As a teen I was more keenly aware of the Indigenous population, as I drove around the streets, watched/listened/read the news, went shopping...but I didn't have any knowledge of the people or their culture or their struggles.  I also was more aware of the conflict, hearing adults talk about "the native problem", hearing friends with Indigenous heritage disparage that part of their cultural background, and hearing hate speech about Canada's Indigenous populations from people who I otherwise considered decent, empathetic human beings.  I can say I've never held hate in my heart, but I also cannot say that I was an ally confronting these statements. I grew up in the 90's where the idea of entering a "post-racism" society was being shoved down our throats, wilful obliviousness was the path forward, and identifying anyone by their ethnicity or culture, or discussing it with them was kind of taboo.  I still struggle to talk about race or ethnicity openly because I was taught not to. 

I was visiting a friend's family while visiting Thunder Bay a couple years ago, and neighbours of theirs came by.  The conversation started into the wildfire problems in Northwestern Ontario, which caused the evacuation of many reservations, bringing a large number of remote Indigenous peoples into the city for shelter. These neighbours started talking about "the problems", relating stories from their police officer daughter, and there any attempt to steer the conversation into thoughts of compassion were not met, if not outright challenged.  They did not seem like bad people, these neighbours who came by to lend a helping hand to their neighbours, but at the same time, they represent an all-too-common cultural sensibility around the city of Thunder Bay.  There's tension, there's distrust, and there's so much trauma.  For the settler population of the city, it seems what they want, more than anything, is to not think about it. That is how racism and racist structures perpetuate, by not addressing the past and present, by not being open and honest, and by feeling threatened with change. Systemic racism is about there being parties who benefit and parties that not only don't benefit but are actively harmed by those systems.

McMahon had done two seasons of the podcast, which I have to say, were more journalistic in their presentation. This TV mini-series is more emotionally guided. I think after two seasons in Thunder Bay, McMahon is disappointed, frustrated and angry.  That love and sentimentality McMahon expresses for the city in the first season of the podcast (reiterated at the start of the TV series) seems to have given way to powerful emotions, and those emotions fuels the series.  It's been said (and was shown) that many attempts were made to talk with the people in charge of both police and city institutions and they were rebuffed in almost every attempt. They don't show enough of the city not wanting to talk about it, because in showing the reluctance to address its own issues, well no more a potent message can be said. 

After the release of the Broken Trust report from the Office of the Independent Police Review Director, one of the recommendations was to appoint an Indigenous person to sit on its board, to whom the chief of police is answerable to. Georjann Morriseau, is appointed and actually chaired the board, only to find herself butting heads with the chief, and subjected to unlawful investigations and harassment for doing the job she's asked to do. Her time as board chair is harrowing and led to a filing of a human rights complaint against the chief, members of the service, and the board. (My two cents, Morriseau is a fucking hero).

There's a "bombshell" in the show's final episode, a leaked confidential report to the media about an internal investigation shows the police are aware of their mishandling of Indigenous "sudden death" cases. The report identifies 16 cases that require reinvestigation, but McMahon misrepresents this in the show, highlighting the 1700+ cases of "sudden death" in a 7 year period, as if most of them equate to the same level of scrutiny of deaths that have been discussed on the show.  

It's manipulative in the edit, and McMahon is guilty of misrepresentation in this way a few times in the series.  For example, he calls Thunder Bay the "murder capital of Canada", which is not an inaccurate statement, but he equates this title to the deaths of Indigenous teens whose deaths are officially noted as "accidental", therefore not officially on record as murders. McMahon never really touches upon what are the actual murders that give Thunder Bay this shameful title (it was 15 murders in 2022, which when measured means more murders per capita than anywhere else in Canada). There is a substance abuse crisis in Thunder Bay, and gang issues. These aren't subjects that tie into McMahon's narrative for the series, and so they're barely scratched, and the fact that we don't get this kind of contextualization is a reminder that McMahon isn't an investigative reporter, so there's limits to where his production is going to go.

But the purpose of the show isn't to report all the facts. It's raising awareness, and it's a necessary narrative to say that the Thunder Bay Police Department have failed the Indigenous population on a spectacularly unprecedented and embarrassing level.  Yeah, they're not out shooting Indigenous teens on the streets, but that doesn't give them permission to so spectacularly fail or abuse a people, and then both try and hide from accountability and avoid acknowledging their part in upholding racist institutions. 

Recommended viewing for all Canadians with McMahon's podcast required supplementary listening. Throw off the shackles of wilful obliviousness and confront some of our most uncomfortable truths. 

As for me and Thunder Bay, we still see each other from time to time. Still not a lot of love (it's a town for lovers of the outdoors, which is definitely not me), but there's familiarity and that's okay.

Top of the Heap

 1972, d. Christopher St. John - Criterion Channel

Part of Criterion's Beyond Blacksploitation programming.

A Youtube Black culture critic/essayist I follow, F.D. Signifier, said recently "There's no such thing as a 'conversation' about the Black experience between a Black person and a non-Black person...what that is is a lecture. What that is is me telling you about the Black experience...." which isn't to say that there can't or shouldn't be engagement, asking questions, receiving answers, but that's not a coversation, or a back-and-forth about the Black experience. He noted that just as he can't speak on certain experiences of white or queer or trans people, a non-Black person cannot speak to the Black experience.

What this all is to say is that Top of the Heap is most definitely a film about a Black experience (saying 'the Black experience' assumes it's a singular experience which doesn't seem right) and while I picked up on much of what the character George (writer/director Christopher St. John) is going through emotionally and culturally, I'm certain I'm missing much of the subtext (I'm still parsing out what the astronaut fantasy sequences are exactly conveying).

George is a police officer, but he's struggling with his position. His common refrain is "I can do whatever the hell I want" but it's a defense mechanism, both daring someone to tell him otherwise and also to convince himself that he's not as stuck or trapped as he feels.

George's mother has just passed away, and George can't face it. He's also just been passed over for a promotion to captain, which has almost completely disengaged him from his job, but he still can't help but be so straight-laced. He and his partner bust a couple of low level drug dealers who are just having a roast chicken dinner with some cocaine and counting their money. They infer a bribe to let them go invoking brotherhood but George goes into a deep sweat internally deliberating the choice between an inherently racist system and the job he's sworn to do to uphold it. The men completely disregard any authority he thinks he has and things come to a head until his partner turns up.

He's cheating on his wife with a young, broke lounge singer, and it's clear his wife is still looking for some semblance of love or affection from him, but finding little. His daughter, now thirteen, was busted making out with a boy by her mom, and George doesn't see the big deal (until he comes across an arrested 13-year-old prostitute which causes him to reconsider his almost feminist stance on female sexuality and discovery, and is a real unfortunate backtrack the film makes), and then he finds her high on pills. Between his job and his philandering he doesn't have time for his daughter (this is the only scene we see her in) but his guilt sends him out to perform vigilante justice beating the ever living shit out a drug dealer (not even necessarily the one who sold his daughter the pills).

There are multiple instances where George is disrespected by white people (including a tense encounter with another police officer) until they learn he's a cop and then he receives instant respect. Conversely, Black people treat him like a brother until they find out he's a cop, and then he's an other... working for The Man.

The film here is largely the stress George faces in his duality, hating his job despite being praised for how good he is at it, and that he doesn't seem to fit in with his community. In his waking dreams, he's an astronaut, a captain (the rank that passed him by), untethered to his daily existence, and yet, still unable to escape the Earth, his mission shot for the cameras in a studio warehouse. In the end, he's warned both in his real life and in his waking dream to get out, but where he was successful in his dream, he fails in life. The weight of his badge and gun, family, his choices, gravity all holding him down.

The film opens with George wading into a small scale riot between protesters and construction workers, he gets the cool close-up-from-below and a spunky "bullshit" line reading with a horn sting behind him as introduction. This is a fake-out of badassery that betrays the pensive, thoughtful film that's to follow, and is quickly subverted as he is tossed into the mud and a piss-filled balloon explodes on his face.

The music of the film is not great, and the dubbing is out of sync most of the time (and maybe even trying to correct the dialogue in post), so there are a lot of weaknesses in the production, but the story breaks through boldly and makes for compelling viewing. The narrative structure, as a tour of George's psyche, is practically flawless.

As engaged as I was, I still couldn't help but feel there's a part of this that I'm missing, aspects of the narrative that pass me by. But, if that's the case, it's because they're not meant for me to understand or relate to, and that's more than ok. This isn't a conversation for me to take part in, and it's not even a lesson. This movie isn't trying to approach or explain itself to a white audience. It shouldn't have to, and it doesn't care to. And it wouldn't work nearly as well if it did.

Watchmen (2009) / Watchmen (2019)

Watchmen (2009 - Ultimate Cut), d. Zack Snyder - bluray [Rewatch]
Watchmen (2019), cr. Damon Lindelof

The Watchmen comic book/graphic novel is a masterpiece in the medium.  Writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons crafted a story that could only be told via the comic book form.  It 's a self-contained epic that presents a richly detailed world somewhat askew from our own, where costumed adventurers emerged in the 1930's, won the Viet Nam war for America in the 1960's and were outlawed in the 1970's, following which is where the story picks up.  But the superheroics are ancillary to the people under the costume, the politics of the world in which they live (this was written at the height of Reaganism/Thatcherism and the last scary gasp of the cold war), and weight of what the future might bring.  It's not dystopian, but it does cast a pretty bleak eye towards the nature of the "western world".

It's a sprawling tale that was originally told over 12 issues (at that point in the 1980's most single issue comics would use 26-28 pages for story, as opposed to modern comics which only contain 20 pages on average per issue).  Also at that time most comics featured a letters' page, for fans to write in and interact with the creators.  Since Watchmen was a mini-series, a proper letters' page wasn't established and Moore instead used the extra pages for prosaic backmatter, often in the form of in-world magazine articles or book excerpts that would flesh out the history of this self-contained superhero universe.

That dense backmatter is so integral to the Watchmen experience that it makes even the idea of adapting the comic to screen a real challenge.  Not only that, Watchmen didn't just tell an immersive superhero story that doubled as a critique of the times (and human nature) but Moore and Gibbons also were deconstructing the medium in which they presented their story (there is a comic-within-the-comic even, with the Tales of the Black Freighter read by an ancillary character in the story), they deconstructed the superhero down from childhood idols and icons to flawed people under masks, dispensing with melodrama and forming more psychological profiles.  It was revelatory and changed the medium of comics and the way superheroes were styled for decades to come.  There's no way to adapt that to screen and have the same effect.

For almost 25 years in the world of comic book fandom (and certainly before the world became engrossed in comic-book and superhero-based media) Watchmen was an untouchable property.  It lived a very pure form with no ancillary outreach save for a role-playing game handbook produced around the same time as the comic.  It was put on a pedestal, and there are a LOT of people who thing it should have remained there.  It was (and remains) a highly revered work, and DC didn't deign to touch it or alter it in any shape for so long, people forgot that it's just another corporate licensed property.  It's a comic book derived from other sources using analogs of more famous heroes to tell a very specific story.  It would be nice if Alan Moore didn't sign a crappy deal and still held rights to the property and had some say into it and made money from it, but that's not the case.  It's a DC/Warner Brothers/whomever-their-parent-company-is-today product, and since 2009 they've been steadily churning out action figures, video games, new prequels (and sequels), and media containing the characters and its stark iconography

Even in the height of Watchmen idolatry, adaptations had been tried a few times, most notably Terry Gilliam made a concerted effort to get a Watchmen movie made in the 90's, but ultimately determined that it was better served on television as a miniseries to allow the story to breathe.  But Hollywood has a hard time letting go of any idea, and certainly can't let go of any property that's steadily making money and garnering attention elsewhere.  Until recently, the Hollywood movie studio system was the ultimate destination for any story, the ultimate validation, the ultimate point of exposure.  It still sometimes just doesn't understand that some stories aren't meant for its medium.

While reports of previous attempts at Watchmen seemed like shady adaptations with ill-advised alterations, director Zach Snyder -- fresh off a very financially successful adaptation of Frank Miller's 300 comic -- promised to stick true to the source, effectively using the comic as storyboards for the feature with only a few tweaks (longer action sequences, wardrobe adjustments and very minor story changes).  It was still relatively nascent time in supehero cinema.  The Marvel Cinematic Universe was just starting, Christopher Nolan had just released The Dark Knight, and people were gleaning the real potential of big blockbuster superhero cinema that wasn't cartoons for kids, but deeply engaging, huge productions that offered up superheroes and their struggles as something legitimately worth investing into.  If there was a time for Zack Snyder's Watchmen, 2009 was it.

The cinematic experience of Snyder's Watchmen was a bit of a mixed bag.  He certainly captured the visuals of the comic book with striking, brought-to-life, slow-motion, moving panels that inspired familiarity and even a little awe in many fans (but by no means all).  The dialogue had ringing familiarity to those who had read the graphic novel, and the story presented itself, for better or worse, almost exactly as Dave Gibbon's panels broke it down.  It was far from a failure, but something was definitely off.

In the painstaking effort to lovingly recreate the panels of the comic, Snyder forgot to invest real time in the characters.  There's a roteness, a going-through-the-motions to almost every performance in the film.  There's little sense that the performers (most of whom have gone on to become quite familiar faces) had a real understanding of their character, and their emotional connection to each other (the unfortunate result of which was I thought for some time that Malin Akerman, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Goode and others weren't that good at acting).  They're exceptionally attractive people, in amazing costumes, perfectly lit, directed it seems more to recreate a scene that worked on paper rather than create something that works for the screen.

The 163-minute cinematic experience was beautiful but hollow.  It was certainly the story of Watchmen but it didn't do what it should have.  Where was the "wow" that reading the comic delivered.  I recall seeing (or reading) an interview with Snyder where he pointed out that the film was going to deconstruct the superhero movie the same way the graphic novel deconstructed the comic book superhero.  Aside from a few visual winks -- like Adrian Veidt's (Goode) costume, complete with Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin-inspired nipples -- there seemed to be no other thought put into this sense of deconstruction.  There would have been real opportunity to take apart the "origin story" sensibility that guided most superhero films until the MCU era, and likewise Snyder could have really worked through visual aesthetics from various superhero films of the 70's/80's/90's in a pointed way.  It would have taken real vision to do that and (as we've seen from Snyder subsequently) that's not really his style.  Instead, what Snyder added to the Watchmen was just more fight sequences, and they're probably the least likeable aspect of the film, even more distracting than Dr. Manhattan's big blue penis.


There was a direct-to-DVD animated adaptation of Tales of the Black Freighter which seems like such an odd thing to do.  In the comic, the Black Freighter story is told in small, brief sections throughout the 12 issues, so presenting it as a whole seems incongruous to its origins.  A director's cut of the film emerged on DVD, adding an additional 20 minutes, but it's the Ultimate Cut of Watchmen, released around Christmas in 2009, that makes for a more definitive Watchmen experience.  This Ultimate Cut, clocking in at 215 minutes, takes the director's cut and seams in the Black Freighter in pieces throughout (as was originally intended).  The film does feel more whole with the Black Freighter and director's cut footage included, but it also feels like it should be more episodic rather than a barely-unified whole.  Gilliam was right.

In rewatching this ultimate cut, I found the first hour the most engrossing.  This is Snyder (and by proxy Moore and Gibbons) in world-building mode, and if anything the world of Watchmen is fascinating.  It's sense of alt-history, how things differed because of the presence of costumed vigilantes and, moreover, Dr. Manhattan, is riveting.  It was smart of Snyder to revert the production back to its mid 1980's setting if he was going to so literally translate it.  It wouldn't have worked otherwise.  And yet, there's a sense of anachronism between the costumes and the era its set in. 

Snyder's opening title montage -- the slow-motion retrospective through the history of the Minutemen in the 1940s all the way through to the Keene act barring masked vigilates in the 1970s, all set to Bob Dylan's "Times They Are A-Changin'" -- is easily his greatest contribution to the Watchmen legacy.  Snyder's seems to have more of a gift for music video storytelling than actual cinematic storytelling.



But after the first hour, once the world is well established, Snyder has to live with the characters, and the message of Watchmen and he couldn't seem less interested in them.  I have to say that the most vital parts of the film are the Black Freighter sequences.  They snap the viewer out of the lull that Snyder can't otherwise escape.  In Snyder's live-action, the characters say all the right words, the actors move with notable intent, they are framed as if posed, the shots all look right out of the comics, but it doesn't flow like a movie should.  It's only in the Black Freighter animation that the film escapes this need to "panelize" its shots.  What works best is it takes the conceit of a comic-within-a-comic and instead makes it an animated-film-within-a-film, which is the kind of thing an adaptation is supposed to do, adapt to the medium, and use it to its full advantage.

I honestly don't know anyone personally who loves this movie, and I know only a few who like it.  I do like it, but it's only effective as a "Cliff's Notes" version of Watchmen.  It doesn't even come close to replacing the graphic novel, but at the same time it does absolutely nothing to harm it.  Even the overblown sex scene and the unfortunate, overly elaborate, "bone-breaking" fight sequences aren't all that egregious.  I do have to say that Dr. Manhattan's glowing blue genitalia are utterly distracting every time they're on screen.  Whether prosthetic or CGI, it was someone's job to work with those things, either gluing them to Billy Crudup's suit or animating the movement of the phallus and testes as Dr. Manhattan moves around the scene.  It's just a bizarre thought to me.

This may be a controversial opinion, but I think the ending of this Watchmen is even tighter. more realistic to the reality of Watchmen than Moore's original ending.  Framing Dr. Manhattan as the bad guy for the world to rally around seems like a far more elegant solution than dropping a giant space squid on New York. 

The big box set the Ultimate Cut came with also includes a great 40-minute in-story "news programme" that investigates the former heroes of this world.  It covers some of the backmatter material that Moore had in the comics, and one could see how, were this an episodic TV series instead of a film, the post credits of every episode could feature a shorter 5-minute news segment akin to this.

Well, it's 10 years later, and we have a new Watchmen TV series.  I was initially worried when I heard about it because I was afraid of another adaptation of the graphic novel.  I think it was already proven that it can't be easily translated to any sort of screen, nor should it really be.  So it was to my relief to hear that Damon Lindelof, a year or two separated from the excellent The Leftovers (and still-beloved Lost) was spearheading this as a sequel, and a sequel to the graphic novel, not the film.  The Leftovers was such a richly envisioned world that I could only imagine what it is Lindelof wanted to do with the world of Watchmen 30 years later.

Halfway through the first episode of Watchmen I leaned over to my wife and said "I don't know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't this...and I'm so thankful for it".

Let's state it blutly, Watchmen is amazing.  It's uncomfortable, shocking, upsetting, striking, funny, exciting and invigorating.  It's definitely got that "Prestige HBO" vibe,  and it once again reiterates (like Game of Thrones and Westworld before it) that television is now capable of producing cinema-quality stories in a serialized format.  The times they are a-changin' indeed (callback).

The pilot opens brilliantly showing a silent film, fans of the comic will recognize instantly what the film is referencing, but the story pulls out of the film and into the reality of 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, when the prosperous black community of Greenwood was massacred by white supremacists.  I didn't even know this was a thing, and apparently it's a part of American history that's been forcefully swept under the rug.  I think it's bold that its been given such a high profile awakening, and that it serves as the primary backdrop for this show in many different ways.  It's a brutal historical reality which deserves to be remembered and addressed.  Just one of many mortally deep wounds in America's long history with racism.

This show could be its own thing, just dealing with the legacy of the Tulsa massacre, but those sorts of stories don't quite get the same eyes on it, the same response.  Lindelof, co-writer Nick Cuse, and director Nicole Kassell have taken this buried shame and displayed it boldly in front of their new "prestige superhero drama".  They're doing what Snyder and team didn't do with the film, which was adapt it for the medium, and for the times.  It's perhaps thanks to Snyder's film, though, that the pressure is off for Lindelof and co. to redo Moore and Gibbons' story.  Instead he gets to use Watchmen as a brand, and as a surreality to set his story in.  It's doing the same thing Watchmen did for Reagan/Thatcher-era and holding a reflective surface up to it to stare back upon it.  It may look different and distorted, but things are all too recognizable to the world of today.

The craft of Lindelof's Watchmen is in using its comic book history sparingly, nuggets that readers familiar with the graphic novel will catch and have greater meaning, but serve as curiosities for the inexperienced.  These tidbits, like the note that Viet Nam is an American state, or that the presidents can serve more than 2 terms now, or that whole raining squid thing, or even the "American Hero Story" segments...they all nod back to the comics and mean quite a bit more with the background knowledge, but they don't detract from the main story and they serve as intriguing world building on their own merits even without further elaboration.  This isn't our reality, it's warped and different, but not unrecognizable.

Another brutal massacre, this time a fictional one in the show's history, saw all of Tulsa's police department murdered by a racist terrorist group that sport Rorschach masks as their main iconography.  This has led to the police being masked and unidentified, and by the show's second episode, tensions have escalated into a war between the Seventh Kavalry and the police.

When I saw the commercials for this series, with the police in masks, it struck a note of "this is wrong", as in "what would the police get up to if they were anonymous, not held responsible"?  There's a credible threat in a masked police force for sure, but the show weaves that narrative trickily into understanding the necessity, but it never sits comfortably with that decision.

There will be "purists" (ugh) who don't want any other Watchmen other than what Moore and Gibbons created.  That's fine, nobody is asking them to read, watch, or play anything else, but this is vital TV right now, and Lindelof, Cuse and Kassell negotiate this unexpected superhero playground deftly, investing in all the right aspects, teasing all the right components and creating immensely engaging and thought provoking television in the guise of a comic book adaptation.

This feels like a comic book series properly adapted.  One which uses what came before as a launching pad, not a bible, not a story to tell over and over.  Its greatest success is with Regina King's Angela Abar as the show's focal point.  It teases out her family life, her professional life, her trauma and her competency.  She's a badass, in costume and out.  Louis Gossett Jr. is a 105-year-old wheelchair bound stranger who imposes himself upon Angela's life in the most shocking of ways and the revelations he has to bring to her are personal in so many ways (and likely bigger than what she already imagines).  There are cutaway scenes to Jeremy Irons' Adrian Veidt, living in isolation with only his genetic anomalies to keep him company.  What his deal is 30 years later is still anyone's guess.

I'm already excited for Watchmen week-to-week.  It's the first show in a while I'm making appointment television, not wanting to wait to watch it on demand or from the digital recording.  Netflix and binge watching has trained me to be restless when there's something this good that I have to wait for.  So I sit with anxious anticipation for episode 3.